by Lucy Lord
‘Owww,’ said Damian, who was the actual cunnilinguist. ‘I thought I was doing quite well.’
Awake now, Poppy said, ‘Sorry, darling. Bad dream. Please, don’t stop.’
Damian didn’t stop. He continued to lick Poppy’s waxed cunt until he could taste her arousal. She moaned, and Damian opened her up with his fingers, feasting his eyes and keeping her waiting for a couple of seconds, before sliding the first two fingers of his other hand inside her. He bent his head again and resumed sucking, licking, nibbling. Poppy bucked against him, moaning more and more loudly until, with a sharp cry, she came.
He waited a second or two, then started moving his fingers in and out again, ever so slowly, sucking again to milk the very last drops of pleasure from her. Only when he felt her throbbing finally begin to subside did he withdraw his hand, then move up the bed to kiss her on the lips. Poppy kissed him back, liking the taste of herself on him.
‘Mmmm, thank you, darling,’ she said dreamily. ‘That was soooo good.’
Damian leapt to his feet.
‘And now for the second course!’
He walked to the kitchen of their apartment, which was pretty much the interior brickwork urban cool ex-warehouse in the Meatpacking District that Andy had envisaged. He returned bearing a tray heaped with eggs, bacon and mushrooms, waffles and maple syrup, freshly squeezed orange juice, bagels and smoked salmon.
‘Blimey,’ said Poppy, laughing. ‘Are we having guests or something?’
‘Just wanted to say sorry for last night.’ Damian looked up at her from underneath his lashes and she laughed even more. ‘Am I forgiven?’
‘Oh, you totally lovable thing. Thank you – it all looks completely yummy. Yes, of course you’re forgiven – this time. But you’re bloody lucky that Lars and Eleanor go way back. It could have been a fucking disaster.’ She tried to look stern but Damian looked so contrite, and she was feeling so blissfully post-orgasmic, that it was impossible.
‘Right, let’s dig in. Hmmm, waffles or bagels to start … sooo tricky …’ When Poppy remembered to eat, she had the appetite of a horse, yet never gained a pound. It was one of the many things that Bella envied about her.
Chapter 6
Sam tried to ignore the whispering and muffled giggles as she walked into the college canteen. She had dressed as unobtrusively as she could, in jeans and an enormous black jumper that she hoped disguised her boobs. Contrary to what everybody thought, the boobs were natural, a result of her catching glandular fever when she was 14, just as she was starting to develop. Sam would no sooner have taken a knife to her young body than she’d have taken a knife to anybody else’s body, but she’d grown tired of trying to explain. Practically everybody else in the glamour-modelling world had had ‘something done’, and she’d learned quite soon that protesting her chest was natural just got her the reputation of being a stuck-up bitch.
At uni, she tried to disguise them, just as she played down the prettiness of her young face by half covering it in heavy-rimmed specs, and hiding her long dark red hair under unflattering baseball caps. She had an adorable face, peachy-skinned with enormous dark brown eyes and what Mark referred to as blowjob lips. Sam had got into glamour modelling by being discovered while walking the dog in a park near her parents’ home in Romford when she was 17, two years earlier.
She had always wanted to go to uni, but now the fees were so high, it had seemed an impossibility until the seedy photographer accosted her in the park. Her mum and dad’s small catering business was barely afloat with this horrible recession and her little brother Ryan was severely autistic. Much though Sam loved him, she realized what a nightmare (and expense) he was to look after. There was no way she could burden her parents with anything else, and if there was a way for her to fund her own education, then she’d grab it with both hands.
After the initial horror of taking her clothes off in front of men old enough to be her dad, she’d got used to it. Only a couple of them were lechy old pervs, anyway, and Sam was made of pretty stern stuff, rationalizing what she was doing in a clear-headed, logical manner. If this was what she had to do to get the proper education she craved, it wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t as if she cared what any of the people in the glamour-modelling world thought of her, after all.
But she did care what her fellow students thought of her. Sam had always been very careful to keep her assets under wraps at uni, as she wanted to be admired for her mind (although she’d come to appreciate her body, which she had thought was freakish, now that Marky seemed to love it so much). Sometimes, in seminars, the tutor would actually say, ‘Could somebody other than Sam please answer this question?’, which made her secretly proud. She was only a girl from an Essex comprehensive, after all, and more than half of her peers had been to posh schools.
But yesterday, horribly, one of the really posh ones, a smug wanker called Josh, had walked into the Union bar brandishing a copy of Nuts.
‘Look what we have here,’ he’d said, in his loathsome, drawling voice. ‘I think that somebody in our vicinity takes their clothes off for a living! Sammi-Jo, everyone! What’s the matter, Sam, can’t make it with that enormous brain of yours, after all? You have to rely on your enormous tits instead! Hahahahahaaaa – hardly the next Nietzsche after all, more like a little two-bit whore!’
Josh was on the same course as Sam and clearly hated the fact that she was a million times cleverer than he was. He had the enormous sense of entitlement of the seriously rich and terminally stupid.
Everybody in the bar had been jostling to see the pictures, and a couple of pissed third-year students had actually tried to lift up her jumper to ‘see what you’re hiding, Sammi-Jo’. It was just horrific, worse than anything she’d ever imagined happening to her. She’d only ever worked hard and been nice to people. Her parents, while distracted, loved her unconditionally, and her schoolmates had pretty much left her to her own devices as she beavered away at her Maths and Science classes. She was completely unprepared for the humiliation of being jeered at by the community she had so wanted to join.
But she had to eat, and now she skulked into the canteen, feeling like the lowest bit of dog shit on the earth.
‘Tart,’ giggled a couple of girls who’d been at Heathfield together, as she walked past, head down. Sienna Sax-Hoffmann was sitting next to them. God, she hated Sienna, with her wafty ways and her bloody lace parasol. How fucking affected was that?
Just as she thought she’d made it unscathed to the food counter, Josh, who she’d fervently hoped wouldn’t be in the canteen today, stood up and shouted,
‘Oh, look! It’s our resident glamour model! Not looking very glam today, is she? She might look better if she got her kit off though! What d’you think, guys? Kit off, kit off, kit off!’
The entire canteen started chanting, ‘KIT OFF, KIT OFF, KIT OFF!’, and Sam dropped her tray, fleeing the canteen in tears. When she got back to her room she picked up every bit of crockery and started throwing it at the walls, sobbing so hard her heart thought it might burst. She couldn’t understand why people could be so nasty. What had she ever done to them, after all? On balance, she found the glamour-modelling world preferable to the academia that she had so longed for all her short life. Thank God she had Marky.
She picked up the card her parents had given her and looked inside.
‘Were so proud of you Sam,’ it said. ‘Your going to have the bestest time at Uni.’ She cried a bit more as she read her mother’s sweetly meant and ungrammatical message. ‘Loads of love from Mum and Dad.’ They had each signed it, with flourishes of kisses. Ryan had written on the other side, ‘luv you sam hav fun’ and drawn a surprisingly accomplished picture of her in a mortarboard.
Sam sat down on the floor and let herself cry until she thought she couldn’t cry any more. She missed them so much. It was so tempting to give up now. What was she doing here anyway? She didn’t belong with these people.
She was sobbing so hard that she didn’t hear
the tentative tapping at her door until it got louder and louder.
‘What?’ she shouted.
‘Sam, are you OK?’
‘What the fuck do you think?’ Sam managed through her tears.
‘Open the door, darling. I think they’re a bunch of cunts and you probably need a hug,’ said the voice.
Slowly, Sam got to her feet and opened the door, only to see Sienna Bitch-Hoffmann standing there, like some bloody aerial nymph or fairy in pale green lace. She was carrying a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
‘Go away.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Sienna waltzed in as if she owned Sam’s room and put the bottle of champagne on her desk. Then she turned around and put her skinny arms around Sam. It was so nice, and so unexpected, that Sam just cried and cried and cried until Sienna said, ‘OK, enough’s enough. This is Lanvin and I’ll have to get it dry-cleaned if you carry on crying on it like this. Let’s have a drink. Though I can’t see many receptacles left …’ She indicated the broken crockery on the floor and Sam opened her cupboard to produce the mug saying STUDENT BABE that her mum had bought her.
‘You have that, I’m quite happy to swig from the bottle,’ said Sienna, expertly opening the Dom Pérignon with barely a pop and pouring it into the mug.
‘Why are you being nice to me?’ Sam sniffled.
‘Because I think you’ve been treated horribly and Josh is the biggest cunt on the planet. Who the fuck does he think he is? “Kit off, kit off, kit off!” indeed. Arsehole. We should try to get his kit off in public – apparently his cock’s tiny.’
Sienna wiggled her little finger and Sam laughed, despite herself.
‘That’s better,’ said Sienna. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m bloody jealous! I saw the photos and, good God, what wouldn’t I give for tits like those! I’ve been bee-stung my entire life. Where did you get them done?’
‘They’re not fake,’ Sam muttered miserably, feeling like a freak of nature again. ‘I had glandular fever when I was 14 …’
Sienna laughed. ‘Well, in that case, you really are bloody lucky! Every man’s wet dream! And if those idiotic boys out there are threatened by a woman who’s, by all accounts, highly intelligent and has great knockers, then it’s their moronic problem. Don’t you think?’
Feeling an awful lot better, Sam took a gulp of champagne out of the mug and said, ‘Thanks. I thought you were so stuck up and posh before.’
‘Oh, fuck, no, common as muck. Daddy’s in trade, darling, talks like a barrow boy. It’s only the schools that make you speak like I do.’
‘But you’re so confident. I’d feel like a complete dick wafting around in lace with a parasol …’
‘You’d look one too,’ drawled Sienna, and they both burst out laughing. Of course, Sienna could carry it off with her height and blonde otherworldliness. Buxom little Sam with her dyed-auburn hair would look as though she were auditioning for a period porn romp.
‘But where d’you get it? The confidence? I mean, I think Josh is a … cunt … too …’ Sam hesitated over the word as she’d always disliked it and her parents had been pretty heavy about the swear-box at home. ‘But wouldn’t it tear you apart if he did to you what he’s just done to me?’
‘I suppose I’ll never know the answer to that – horrible little shit wouldn’t dare – but I doubt it. The obscene amount of money Daddy’s earned over the years must have given me some kind of coat of armour.’ Sienna dismissed her birthright with a wave of her wafty hand and added, ‘Let’s have some more booze, then get tarted up and go and have some fun. I think you need cheering up.’
‘That sounds brilliant,’ said Sam, wiping away the vestiges of tears. ‘What are you going to wear?’
Sienna laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t always dress like this. It’s fun to have a certain image with these college idiots, mess with their boring heads, but when I go to Camden I like to rock it up a bit. Pints of snakebite and Lanvin are not the best bedfellows.’
‘Camden? Where?’ Sam was excited; she loved indie music, and that whole kind of grungy scene, but she’d been so focused on earning a living to study, so she could get somewhere in life, that she’d never really had time for that sort of fun.
‘The Hawley Arms.’
‘Fuckin’ ’ell, I think that’s Natalia,’ said Mark to Justin, Bella’s father. They were on their third cognacs after lunching at Club 55 on Pampelonne Beach in Saint-Tropez, where they’d just been shooting for GQ. ‘She’s not bad for an old tart.’
‘Not bad at all,’ said Justin appreciatively. ‘Apparently, she goes like the clappers too. Hey! Nat!’
Natalia, who had just swum onto the beach from her yacht, was wearing an emerald-green high-cut swimsuit with the sides cut out, which made her 44-inch legs look endless. Always aware of keeping the façade intact, she had scraped her white-blonde hair back into a tight bun. There was no way she’d put her face or hair underwater. She felt a stab of annoyance at seeing Mark and Justin. Of all the people she’d met at Poppy and Damian’s wedding, they were probably the ones she liked the least, with their wandering eyes and overt lechery. Oh, well. She sighed and approached their table.
‘Hi, hi, how wonderful to see you.’
‘You too, babe,’ said Mark, getting up to kiss her and letting his gaze roam unnecessarily over her body. She tried not to let her internal disgust become apparent.
‘Natalia!’ said Justin. ‘Not looking a day over twenty!’
If this drunken, arrogant old pig thought that she would be flattered by this, he was very much mistaken. She knew how great she looked. She spent enough time and money on it.
‘Joining us for a drink then?’ asked Justin.
‘No no no. I thank you, but there are people I must see. Wonderful to see you again.’ Natalia blew them both a kiss with her long, perfectly manicured fingers and walked over to the bar. Both men watched her extraordinary bottom, atop those extraordinarily long legs, as she departed. Justin gave out a low whistle.
Club 55 was the ultimate jet-set destination in St Trop, created in 1955 when Roger Vadim was filming Brigitte Bardot frolicking on the beach in Et Dieu … créa la femme. Legend had it that when the crew mistook a local fisherman’s cottage for a bistro, the owner’s wife happily fed them all and Club 55 was born.
The restaurant, laid out behind the beach under tamarind trees, was stylishly understated, all white wooden tables and chairs with sun-faded blue tablecloths that echoed the blues of sky and sea in the dazzling sunlight. Seated at practically every table were girls, exquisite like butterflies in pink-and-turquoise kaftans, jewelled flip-flops and enormous designer shades. With few exceptions, the mahogany-tanned men footing the bills were several decades older than them.
Mark and Justin had moved to the bar area for their cognacs. The white stone bar and seats, white linen cushions and white sand emphasized the patrons’ expensive tans. Mark was surprised they hadn’t somehow managed to bleach the palm trees to match the rest of the decor.
The behaviour here was more outrageous than in the restaurant area. Even Mark and Justin cringed as they witnessed yet another gold-toothed rapper standing on a table and spurting yet another 2,000-euro bottle of Cristal over a gaggle of giggling, bikini-clad models. Wasn’t the world meant to be in some kind of financial meltdown?
‘I wonder what the poor people are doing today,’ said Justin, and Mark barked with laughter.
A man who put the sleaze into sleazy approached their table. Of indeterminate age, he was rocking a luridly patterned Roberto Cavalli open-to-the-waist silk shirt atop obscenely tight white jeans. His obviously dyed-black hair looked as if it had been washed in industrial oil and his bling out-blang everybody else on the beach.
‘Hey, Justin, my man!’ He stretched out his arms in greeting and Justin rose to his bare feet.
‘Stefan. Long time no see. Wotcha been up to, mate?’
Stefan winked.
‘Half the girls in this bar.’ His accent hovered somew
here between LA, mittel-Europe and Peckham.
All three men laughed, though Mark felt slightly uneasy. Although neither he nor Justin were by any stretch of the imagination clean-living paragons of virtue, there was something seriously unpleasant about this geezer. Though he had to admire the bastard’s taste, if what he was saying were true.
‘This is Mark,’ said Justin. ‘A friend of my daughter Bella’s.’
‘Bella,’ said Stefan with a lascivious gleam in his eye. ‘Pretty name, and I hear she’s a pretty girl too. Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure though … Is she with you?’
‘No, she’s at home in London. And don’t you go getting any ideas, you old bastard; she’s my little angel and I wouldn’t let you within a hundred yards of her with a bargepole.’ Justin took a large swig of his cognac as he mixed his metaphors, then laughed. ‘She’s way too old for you anyway.’
‘OK, OK, man, I get it. Daughter’s off-limits. But if you want to meet some hot chicks younger than your sweet little girl, come to my party tonight. The Linda Lovelace boat, moored in the vieux port, can’t miss it. Hey, babeeee!’ His attention was distracted by a very young Eurasian girl with shiny black hair that hung in a sleek curtain down to her waist. She was wearing an olive-green string-thong bikini bottom and matching tiny cropped T-shirt with HOT STUFF written across the chest. As Stefan snaked a proprietorial arm around her, he was joined by another girl who made Mark catch his breath. She had to be the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
Probably in her early twenties, the girl had a cat-like face, with large, slanting, deep turquoise eyes, framed with thick dark lashes and beautifully arched brows. Her wide, mischievous smile revealed perfect white teeth that gleamed in her smooth brown face. Long, streaky light brown hair swished around her shoulders, and a short dress made entirely of gossamer-fine white crochet teasingly revealed a lithe brown body with the exquisite muscle definition of the natural athlete. Underneath the dress, she was wearing only the briefest of white bikini bottoms; her bare, tip-tilted breasts pushed alluringly against the white lace.