by Various
Marta hangs Jacob’s shirts carefully, almost lovingly. There’s a smell particular to them – not just the posh lavender-based washing liquid they use in the housekeeping department, but something manly, as if the machine couldn’t quite eradicate the scent of Jacob in them. She sniffs them, not for the first time feeling slightly ashamed of this guilty pleasure. Then she tells herself that it doesn’t matter: no one’s to know that she does this, or about the frisson it gives her.
Marta really doesn’t know Jacob at all, beyond his smell, and his dirty coffee cups, and the used cut-throat razor in the bathroom, still limed with luscious-smelling foam from his morning shave. Beyond the little notes he leaves, some mornings, and that she’s come to look forward to, perfunctory as they are:
Dear Maid,
Please could you leave a few extra English Breakfast teabags this morning?
Thanks, JT.
Good Morning,
Please don’t remove the Sunday papers as I haven’t finished with them yet.
Many thanks, JT.
Hello Again,
I’m terribly sorry but I broke the cafetière in a fit of clumsiness. Please could you replace it and add the cost to my bill?
Yours, Jacob T.
She doesn’t know what ‘T’ stands for, nor whether Jacob is British or something else – German, perhaps. There’s an Englishness, though, to his idiom – or so it seems to her. Something almost aristocratic even. Whoever he is, he oozes money and status.
She keeps the notes, takes them home to her bedsit, where she puts them on her dressing table. Often she sits in front of the mirror, staring at herself for a long time, trying to figure out how she got so lonely. She was popular in Poland, had successive boyfriends at university, lots of friends. But they’re still there and she’s here, in this ridiculously huge city she can’t work out how to find her way around. All those people, and none of them know her. There’s her cousin, of course, but she’s married with small kids and has no time for socialising. Sometimes Marta goes over to her flat for lunch, but then, when she comes home to her empty bedsit, she only feels worse. She’s made desultory attempts to make friends with the other girls who work at the hotel, but they don’t seem interested – they just want to get in and out, do their job, get their money and get back to their families. Short of going to bars and accosting strangers, she’s at a loss for ideas.
She knows she’s attractive, beautiful even, and she has a notion that, if Jacob could only meet her, he’d fall in love with her. But he’s never there when she arrives at his suite and, no matter how much time she spends there, inventing things to do, he’s never back by the time she leaves. He’s obviously a busy man.
It didn’t take her long to work out that, since each room or suite in this hotel was serviced by one girl alone, there was no one to say how long it should take to get through her daily round. If anyone were to ask, she’d simply exaggerate the amount of work she had to do in Jacob’s suite. After all, it was the biggest one in the hotel. She had ready in her head a list of the things she could plausibly have to do each day: scrub the bath out; mop and polish the bathroom floor; shampoo the carpet. In reality, she rarely if ever has to do any of those things. Jacob is very low maintenance, as hotel guests go.
In reality, Marta indulges herself. Marta likes pretending to be rich, that she’s the kind of woman utterly at ease with staying in a hotel like this, in a suite like this. She kicks off her shoes, mixes herself a drink from the minibar – she restocks it herself, so the odd discrepancy won’t be noticed – and sits in the big comfy leather armchair in front of the flat-screen TV, watching movies on one of the satellite channels. She loves escapist stuff and romantic weepies. If there’s nothing on she fancies, she might flick through Vogue, Tatler or one of the other magazines provided in the room. These, like the films, take her to another world.
Lately, though, she’s got a bit more daring, a bit cheekier. One day, having given the bathroom a quick once-over, she starts eyeing up the big deep bathtub and, before she can talk herself out of it, she has run it to the brim and jumped in, soaking in luxuriant sandalwood and geranium-scented bubbles. As she lies there, she starts thinking about Jacob and before she knows it her hand has crept down between her legs and she’s rubbing at the hard little bead of her clit. There’s been no sex since she’s been in London – more than six weeks now – and, while she’d thought she wasn’t missing it, she’s suddenly hot for it, in violent need of relief. And so, looping her legs over the side of the bath, she plunges the fingers of her free hand inside herself, continues the pressure on her clit and brings herself to a juddering, gasping, aquatic climax. Water slops over the edges onto the floor but she can soak it up before she goes.
Afterwards, she dozes on Jacob’s bed, in Jacob’s bathrobe, and revels in the odour of this man she thinks she is falling in love with without ever having met. There’s something rich and woody to him, almost chocolatey. With a hint of cinnamon, maybe. Something very male and comforting. She can’t pinpoint it, but it takes her very far back, into the depths of her childhood.
From that day on, she has a routine – bath and then bed. She wanks every day, sometimes graduating from the bath or the bed to the armchair, or the thick fluffy rug in front of the hearth, for a second orgasm. She wears items of Jacob’s clothes that she finds discarded in the laundry basket – shirts, boxers, all positively reeking of him in a way that gets her so horny she could die. She might seek out his shaving brush, teasing her lips and clit with its fine badger hair, then turning it around and pushing its ridged barrel handle inside herself and thrusting ever harder, stimulated by the dangerous thought that the ivory-hued ceramic might crack or shatter, pricking her. She doesn’t want to be damaged as such. She’s not into self-harm. She just wants to feel again. She wants to be away from the numbness of her bedsit, in an intense world of sensation and emotion and pleasure and … yes, even pain would be preferable to this feeling of being as good as dead.
After a while, she even forgets about Jacob as an actual person. He is such a distant figure, always absent despite his worn clothes, his creamy razor blade, the odd sandy-coloured hair in the shower, that she comes to believe that he doesn’t really exist. This is her room, her domain, at least for the space of a morning or afternoon. Here she is queen, and no one can tell her otherwise. One day she brings her new vibrator with her and, after a couple of weeks, thinking it’s pointless to carry it about in her handbag, even starts keeping it in the suite, tucked away in the back of the safe that Jacob never seems to use.
The months go by and, if she isn’t happy, Marta isn’t miserable either. She thinks often of Poland, however, and thinks she will probably go back there if things don’t get any better. She’ll give it just one more month or two. Or maybe she’ll give it to the end of the year. She doesn’t have to decide right away. Things are OK as they are. She can bear it.
Summer arrives and Marta takes to lying out on Jacob’s balcony, beside the Thames that glitters like diamonds in the sunlight. The planes, on their flight path over the river, don’t taunt her so much any more, offering visions of what she doesn’t have. She brings her bikini and takes in some rays, letting the warmth of the sun infuse her long pale limbs. Or, if she forgets it, she sunbathes naked. She wanks with her eyes closed against the glaring light.
It has to happen, though. She’s on borrowed time. And just as she thinks that she’s over Jacob, that she’s accepted that he’s a fantasy figure and no more, one afternoon when she’s lying on his bed, legs akimbo, naked save a used pair of his boxers, the door swipe pings and she hears a voice. She’s up on the bed like a defensive cat, back arched, panicking, and then she grabs her clothes from the end of the bed and makes a dash for the walk-in wardrobe.
Inside, struggling to control the breath coming in ragged spurts out of her, she squirrels herself away right at the back, behind Jacob’s laundered shirts and suits, and listens. Her heart’s thudding so hard she’s sure he must he
ar it. But, no, he’s talking to someone else. For a minute she thinks he must be on the phone, but then she catches another voice, a female voice, and she has a horrible feeling that she’s going to be trapped in here for a while. She shifts a little from side to side, trying to get more comfortable, pulling on her clothes, inch by careful inch. Jacob’s scent reassures her with its familiarity.
A moan startles her more than it should. She stiffens, feeling traitorous to be listening in but knowing she can’t very well come out now without finding herself in serious trouble – the kind of trouble that leads to one losing one’s job. So she keeps breathing, softly, steadily, trying not to hear and yet unable to close her ears to what’s happening out there, to this insight into Jacob and who he really is.
The moan was a man’s, and it’s reiterated several times over, coming longer and louder each time, until it seems it’s going to knit together in one continuous chain. The woman, she is sure of it, is going down on him. Involuntarily, Marta reaches down, parts the panels of her housekeeping dress and slips one hand into her knickers to find herself wet. She bites down on the other hand to stop herself from echoing Jacob’s moans, at the same time sliding her legs apart in the wardrobe, using the walls of the partition in which she finds herself to support herself as she gains greater purchase, weaving her fingers through her pubic fronds and into her moist hole, strumming at her clit with her thumb. Leaning her head back, she closes her eyes, and it seems to her that her climax is mounting parallel to Jacob’s, as if they really are making love together. She comes, mouth open in a rictus.
Jacob doesn’t. She keeps listening, but either he has climaxed extraordinarily quietly, or something else is going on out there. Perhaps the woman wasn’t giving him a blow job. If not, then what are they doing together?
She hopes, whatever is happening, that it will soon be done with. Sated, she wants to go now, to be home in her barren but familiar bedsit. Suddenly this place in which she spends so much time is strange to her, a little threatening. She knows she’s for it if she gets caught, and she wants out. But the silence from outside the wardrobe continues for several long minutes. Finally she can’t take it any more and inches forwards to peep through the slit of the wardrobe door.
Jacob is on his back, the woman astride him. She’s wearing a black underbust corset that leaves her magnificent breasts bare, and below it a black thong and suspenders, and patent black leather stiletto ankle boots. A blaze of raven hair unfurls down over her shoulders to the small of her back. She looks Asian – perhaps Japanese. Beside her, Marta feels utterly ordinary.
She holds her breath, waiting for the woman to mount Jacob. His cock is hard, questing for the woman swaying over him – and who can blame him? Marta is surprised that, though she does feel envious, her primary reaction is one of excitement: she would love to be the woman, so beautiful, so brazen, so charged with eroticism. But more than that – and this is what stuns her most – she would like to be involved. Part of her just wants to step out of the wardrobe and show herself, in the hope that they will let her into their strange and magical realm.
It’s a world Marta fears will always remain out of reach. Though she’s had her fair share of lovers in Poland, there was never really very much beyond conventional sex on the agenda. She lacked imagination, perhaps. She didn’t think of what there might be out there, for those who dared to reach out. Certainly, she’d never even considered a threesome, or being with a woman. But here she is, admiring this gorgeous, almost otherworldly, creature, wishing to be close to her, with her, inside her.
And Jacob? What of this man of whom she has constructed so many fantasies? Does he live up to them? In truth, she can see very little of him where he lies, in an attitude of surrender, beneath the woman – just one side of his head, the line of a jawbone, visible past the curve of the woman’s arm, ivory-pale as a statue. And then the lower half of him protruding through the arch of her thighs – his muscly upper legs, his straining cock, his pointed toes, showing him to be tense in anticipation.
She’s waiting for the woman to impale herself on Jacob when a gasp escapes from her own throat. Leaning forwards, the woman has swung back her hand and then brought it back against Jacob’s face with a loud smack. Jacob’s head turns to one side, but there’s no sound from him or any outward display of surprise, and Marta could swear to the fact that he was expecting to be hit. Given that he didn’t try to avoid it, could it be that he even invited it?
The woman speaks then, her voice rich as molten chocolate, with a hint of an accent that Marta can’t place.
‘Oh, you’ve been such a naughty boy,’ she says. ‘Such a very naughty boy.’ And with that she slaps Jacob’s head to one side again, where he’s turned it to look back up at her.
Marta swallows almost painfully, her throat constricted by fear and longing mixed together in some unholy brew. She’s afraid – afraid for Jacob, afraid for herself if she gives herself away. But she’s incredibly turned on too. More turned on than she’s ever been. And what turns her on the most is the suspicion that Jacob, despite his submissive attitude, has asked for all this.
The woman continues to look down at Jacob, imperiously, haughtily. From where she’s hiding, Marta can tell that the woman in the basque has no affection for him, and with that knowledge comes another – that Jacob must be paying her to be here, paying her to humiliate him. But where Marta might have thought she’d feel revulsion, her heart opens to him, and she feels an almost maternal rush of pity and protectiveness. She wants, she thinks, to hold him to her after the woman has gone, to make it all better.
The woman leans over and reaches for something on the floor beside the bed. Marta, burning with curiosity, throat painfully dry, eases the wardrobe door open a few millimetres to get a better view. As the woman leans over, rummages around in something – a bag, Marta presumes – she gets a better view of Jacob. Still prone, he’s turned his head to one side, in her direction. His eyes are firmly closed but nobody could mistake him for a sleeper – his face is taut in expectation, rigid. Marta stares, appalled, as the woman climbs back over him and cracks the whip she now has in her hand. Jacob’s whole body spasms in response to the sound, but his face is hidden again, and Marta can’t see his expression or find out whether he has opened his eyes.
‘… so very, very naughty,’ she hears the woman mutter, and she starts as the whip slices down through the air and lashes Jacob across one shoulder. His body jerks too, puppetlike, and he cries out. Marta’s heart races. She wants so badly to go to him, but she fears the consequences. The woman is frightening. Who knows what she might do? Far from wanting to be involved, Marta now just wants out. But she’s trapped.
She’s about to retreat to the back of the wardrobe again, cover her ears until it’s all done, when the woman commands Jacob to turn over. He obeys, and Marta can’t take her eyes from his honed body, tanned and athletic, so powerful-looking and yet so utterly submissive. Buttocks presented to the woman, he hangs his head like a dog. The whip whistles as it comes down on him and, even from where she hides across the room, Marta can see the red mark it leaves across his shoulders and then, a few moments later, across one arse cheek. She bites her hand. With the other she clutches one breast, hard, so that she no longer knows where pleasure ends and pain begins, or if the two aren’t actually the same thing.
The whip comes down, over and over, and Marta carries on watching, her hands digging into her own flesh, wondering when – if – Jacob will call out for it to stop. From what she’s read about this sort of thing, which is very little, she is aware that there’s supposed to be some sort of code word, a safe word they call it, telling the dom that it’s time to call a halt. Because ‘no’ doesn’t always mean ‘no’, not in the world of sex and desire. And, though Marta has long known that in theory, it’s only now that she truly begins to understand it, within her flesh itself. Her brain is crying out ‘no’, wants her to rush to Jacob’s aid, but her body is assenting fully. In fact, she�
�s amazed how quickly she’s coming round to it all. She’s empathising so much, she can almost feel the hot sting of the whip as it flicks against Jacob’s skin.
But then the woman stops, leans over the edge of the bed again, her hair trailing down past her face like dark water. Jacob remains utterly motionless, head still pendulous. It’s as if everything has gone from him, all will, all fire. It’s almost, thinks Marta, a form of massively intensive relaxation, a release of inner tension. She wonders what his life is like, that he needs it so badly.
‘Hands behind you,’ barks the mistress, and Jacob stretches his arms behind him, across his lower back. The woman clasps them, forcing them together in the middle of his back then strapping them into leather manacles. Reaching round and under him, she does something that invokes a little mew of pain from him – Marta supposes she is pinching or twisting his nipples. She does the same to her own, her mouth open in an O of near-ecstasy. She’s worried she might come now, even without touching her clit or pussy.
And then the woman takes something from beside her on the bed, unfurls it slowly, like a snake that has lain dormant – a snake that one must awaken gently, lest it lose its temper and strike. Marta watches, fascinated, as she begins to bind Jacob with the rope. There’s a softness now, almost a tenderness to her movements, as she loops it around his legs and then his ankles. It’s an art form, Marta realises; this woman is an artist who has learnt her skills and techniques as any other artist must.