The next morning I woke in a delicious wooze, the way you do when you’ve fucked into the small hours with someone luscious and still have them in bed with you. I chanced my fingers down Sebastian’s tattooed arm, in part to admire him again, and also to test if he were awake yet. He turned over and smiled at me. ‘Good morning’. He reached out to cup my breast, then looked apologetic for having groped me without asking first. I giggled sleepily and rolled over so that he could hold me properly, sliding my hand up along the chiselled curvature of his chest.
We dozed for another twenty minutes or so, then suddenly, Sebastian spoke. ‘Nicola.’
I pushed myself up, hovered over him. ‘What?’
‘Your name. It’s Nicola. Or maybe Nicole.’
‘You cheated! You must have seen it written somewhere.’
‘I didn’t cheat.’
He had guessed it. It was auspicious. It had to be.
‘It’s Nichi, actually.’
I lowered my head to kiss him, and slid my small body up along his much larger one. His morning erection prickled against me, and I wrapped my fingers around it, feeling him swell in my hand. He skated his hand down along my hip and then up in between my thighs. Before long, we were masturbating one another, kissing and clawing at each other with a rampant need all over again.
As Sebastian played with me, he moved his mouth alternately from my lips to my breasts. My super-sensitive nipples hardened at once under his tongue. He dared to bite them. It made me swoon. The more he bit, the more I moaned, and soon he was nipping and sucking and biting me until I winced in pleasurable discomfort. Abruptly he pulled away. ‘More?’ he asked me.
I hesitated for a moment. He slid his hand up under the back of my neck and stroked me gently.
‘More?’ He repeated the question. Only this time it seemed as though I had less choice in the matter. He asked me still with that low, soft lilt but something in his face had changed.
He didn’t wait for my reply. He knew he had my permission to do what he had come here for, to do what I had been willing him to do since he crossed the threshold of Violet’s house, what I willed him to do every time he touched me. Without waiting another moment he grabbed my hair with his right hand as if it were a rope, wrapping it round his hand twice in quick succession, then yanked on it, forcing my head to the side, my right cheek down into the pillow. Keeping a firm hold on my hair, he then seized me roughly by the wrists with his left hand, and pulled my arms in the opposite direction to my head, pinning me to the bed in twisted submission. I couldn’t get out of this grip. My heart was racing. Was this a result of our conversation last night? Or had he been planning to do this all along?
‘This is what happens, Nichi, when you tell me what you really want,’ he said, then wedged his right knee in between my unsuspecting thighs, prising them apart. Instinctively I went to close them and he whipped his right hand down to give my right thigh the lightest of slaps, then yanked at my hair again. It shocked me. But before I could even catch my breath, he had thrust his cock into me and begun fucking me, rocking his hips against mine at a relentless pace, causing my cries of pleasure to catch in my throat.
Every so often I would test his grip, pulling away from the hand that held my hair, twisting my wrists under his fingers. But each time he tightened his hold.
‘Oh, you’re not going anywhere.’ He laughed, that dark, mesmerising laugh.
So this is what it felt like to be forced by Sebastian. He was more abrupt than I could have imagined, in the best possible way.
After a few more minutes of this, he withdrew, then pulled me up by my hair and kissed me slowly, allowing me to catch my breath. But soon he used his legs to force me onto my side, and started fucking me that way with the same pace and intensity, his groin slapping against my ass as he did it. It was a stark, raw sound and made both of us moan with arousal.
‘You’ve impressed me,’ I ventured coquettishly. For a moment, he paused, bore right into me with those brilliant blue eyes and brought his face millimetres before mine then dashed it to my ear and whispered, ‘You had such a low opinion of me, did you?’
And with that he released me. First letting go of my hair, and then my wrists.
He grinned, with just the hint of menace, patting my cheek. ‘You’ll learn.’
CHAPTER 16
This time, I had no doubt that Sebastian would text again.
After we had sex that morning, I offered Sebastian a towel and asked him if he wanted to shower. ‘Shower with me?’ he replied. His request startled me, and I hesitated for a moment before I agreed. In the shower, stripped of make-up and my layered moisturiser and perfume seduction scent, I was plain and vulnerable. Christos and I had often showered together but it was such an intimate, sensual thing to do with someone you had just met. And yet I wanted nothing more than to be intimate like that with Sebastian.
Before we could even think about getting clean though, we were both yearning to touch each other once again. It only took a few minutes of frantic mutual masturbation until we both came again, Sebastian ejaculating up the length of my body, catching my breasts with his cum.
Afterwards, he asked me what ‘feminine delights of cosmetics’ I had in here, and I playfully scrubbed his face with my exfoliant. ‘I think that’s the first time I’ve exfoliated in about ten years!’
‘Ha! Which means you did once upon a time!’ I teased him.
‘What can I say? I’m a narcissist! Anyway, shall we go get breakfast?’
In the café, we ate and joked over the turgid Sunday papers. I lounged on him and stroked the nape of his neck. For a moment I felt him stiffen under my touch. Perhaps he didn’t like public displays of affection. But then he wrapped his arm around me and kissed my head. And when we kissed at the tube station, I had no doubt that he would be back. We hadn’t arranged to meet again but it didn’t trouble me.
Later that afternoon I texted him. ‘So it’s Nichi, btw, just in case you forget!’
‘Oh I wasn’t going to, don’t you worry. But it’s good to see it spelled because in my head I saw it as Nikki.’
‘Like the Prince song ;)’ I flashed back.
Three days later, Sebastian texted again. ‘Nichi, hope you’re well. Are you free next week post-Monday? Care to meet up?’
For the next two months Sebastian and I met up every week. Usually at the weekend, occasionally during the week, but always on an evening, and always for kinky sex. One time, when our schedules had forced us to go a fortnight without meeting, I invited him to have a coffee with me in the afternoon so that we could at least get to see each other before a full three weeks had passed. His artist’s hours meant his work schedule, unlike mine, was entirely flexible and so it was easily enough done. But he declined and asked to wait until the weekend instead. For a moment I wondered anxiously if this meant he still only wanted sex with me, but the nights we spent together were as full with conspiratorial laughter and constant conversation as Sebastian pinning my hands above my head and commanding me to suck his cock. I knew this wasn’t just about sex for either of us.
That said, the sex was only getting hotter. If I’d had any misgivings about my spiral into submission, Sebastian had seduced them out of me. I was utterly intoxicated with him, and it. Already, he had trained me to take a lot more pain then I could ever have imagined being able to endure, let alone found myself actively yearning for. ‘Take it for me,’ was an expression he’d often murmur to me, in between kisses and slaps. And I did. I loved to see the titillation he got from watching me wrangle with that line between pleasure and pain. The more aroused he became, the more it turned me on.
Everything Sebastian did, he did with safe, consummate control. Sebastian was an expert restrainer. He now pinned my wrists down with his knees when we had sex, the way I had seen done in kink porn films. He had no trouble wrapping his large dexterous fingers around my upper arms and would grip me so tightly that the next morning I would often wake to find myself marked wit
h a bracelet of bruises. They usually faded quickly and were almost entirely painless.
One particularly forceful weekend, Sebastian had been very insistent that I didn’t get my hands free, first bending me over the bed and spanking me, then turning me on to my back and teasing me remorselessly with my vibrator, holding me down as he did so to prevent me from grinding myself on it and climaxing. As a consequence, I was still a little coloured in come Monday morning. Because it didn’t hurt, I forgot that there was anything to see until my boss asked me what I’d done to myself, pointing at my violet and damson arm, and I felt myself flush from the neck up and stammer out some hasty excuse. Later I stroked over the bruises. A little bit of Sebastian left on me until the next time I got to feel his unyielding grip again.
Despite the roughest sex of my life, Sebastian was one of the gentlest people I’d ever met. He was a ‘rabid snuggler’, as he put it one morning.
‘Do you know what I would love to set up if I could free up some capital from my art business? A snuggle shack.’
‘A what? Please expand.’
‘Basically it’s like a purely platonic cuddle brothel, where all you can get is a hug.’
‘Mmm. That’s nice. But do you think it’s possible to attract the right patrons in the first place?’
‘Are you kidding me? I know loads of men – and women – who’d be up for just a snuggle!’
‘Hmm, I suppose I agree,’ I conceded. ‘You can get by without sex. But you can’t get by without snuggles!’
‘Well, I can’t get by without sex,’ he confessed, ‘but I would never confuse the two. I would be an exemplary snuggle-shacker.’
He squeezed me to him and nuzzled me in sweet, platonic demonstration. I started laughing again. It wasn’t just Sebastian’s body that made me swoon.
What I really wanted, though, was to expand the repertoire of our activities. I talked about it with Gina. ‘I know that it isn’t just about sex, Gina, else why would we go for these long brunches? We’re usually together for nearly twenty-four hours when we see each other. It’s crazy the ground we cover in conversation. But I want to do cultural things with him. We spend so much time talking about culture it seems odd that he never suggests anything.’
‘So find an exhibition or event you think he’d enjoy and ask him if he’d like to go.’
‘Argh, I can’t! What if he says no?’
‘Why the hell is he going to say no? Unless it’s an artist he doesn’t like. Just ask him.’
‘I suppose it’s that a tiny part of me resents having to do the asking. Shouldn’t he be asking me by now?’
‘Nichi, he’s not a mind reader. Maybe he’s just not too good at formal dating.’
‘I guess. I hardly am. OK. I’m going to email him.’
‘Why don’t you just phone him?’
‘Because we don’t phone each other. And I’m not about to start now! He has to make the first phone call.’
‘How feminist of you . . .’
‘It’s not about that. I just want to know that he wants me.’
I knew Gina was right. I just had to ask him, but still I agonised over my choice of exhibition. I was desperate to minimise the chances of him declining. But why the hell did I have the feeling he might? I was just being paranoid. I knew it was early days but our connection was heady, intense and very, very real. I hadn’t met anyone since Christos that I felt might be perfect partner material and I was determined to give this every possible chance.
Finally, I made my selection: a retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s work. I was sure Sebastian would appreciate it, unless he’d already been. To make it even more difficult for him to say no, I told a white lie and said that I had press tickets.
‘Yes, let’s do it!’’ he replied, within a few minutes. ‘Always good to see what the fellow obsessives are up to!’
Why had I worried so much?
The Saturday before the date I decided to go and have my hair blow-dried. It was an indulgent treat I’d only recently been able to afford, now that I finally had a decently paid job, and I’d never have felt the need to bother when I was with Christos. Yet despite his warmth and that dimple-flashing, beaming smile every time we met up, I realised that Sebastian had never actually paid me a proper compliment. I had no doubt that he found me attractive, but I still wanted to make the effort, and to entice him to remark.
Again, we met at London Bridge station, near to where the exhibition was being held at the Tate Modern. In the end I had opted for a tight black pencil skirt, stockings, black heels and a sheer, grey, leopard print shirt. And fuchsia pink underwear, nails and lips after an amusing conversation we’d had in bed one morning about how the sight of bright, feminine colour worked Sebastian up into an even more dominant state.
This was the thing about being submissive; it made me want to desperately please Sebastian in a way I’d never felt like doing for any man before. It unnerved me, but already I trusted him implicitly and yearned to explore it.
Before I left the house I reconsidered the knickers. I decided to leave them off and smiled to myself slyly as I reached for my leather jacket and bag.
When I got to the station, Sebastian was already waiting for me, dressed in his usual monochrome, accessorised with the odd splash of grey. I tried not to race to him. He reached out to hug me and kissed me lavishly. And then he did something he’d never done before. He took my hand. Who cared if he thought it didn’t matter to compliment me. This was the only kind of compliment I was really after.
The exhibition was quiet with just a handful of other visitors mooching about.
‘Do you know much about her?’ Sebastian asked me. I shook my head. ‘So you can’t be my expert guide?’ he teased me.
‘Well, I was very much hoping you could be mine, Mr Pro-Artist!’ We looked at one another and laughed, then kissed spontaneously. Another first. Why had I left it so long to ask him if we could do something like this?
Kusama’s formative work consisted of drawings she’d done as a teenager growing up in Japan. They were full of darkly sketched organic shapes. She had suffered from hallucinations most of her life and that psychic distress seemed to manifest itself in her work.
‘It reminds me of the kind of thing I used to produce with my art therapist when I was anorexic,’ I said, and grimaced. ‘Just in terms of the obsessive, repetitive, bodily forms.’
I’d told Sebastian that I’d been anorexic during one of our late-night conversations, and he’d implicitly understood that it was little to do with vanity and far more to do with control. He nodded now.
‘Yeah, I think I have a few of these locked away in my vault. All done during my Lana period, of course.’
‘Lana?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘Oh, Juliet’s mother.’
Ah. That conversation on our first date now made a little more sense.
‘Was it a difficult relationship?’
Sebastian sighed and spluttered out an awkward laugh at the same time.
‘That’s one way of putting it. For years she used to drop in and out of my life on a whim. I used to constantly worry about the impact on Juliet. I was crazy head over heels in love with her. When she came back it was always the same. “We should be together, Sebastian, let’s get married, Sebastian, I love you Sebastian.” But then I’d wake up one morning sometimes weeks, sometimes just days later and she’d have vanished again. It went on for years. She even lived in Thailand for two of them and we resumed the relationship all over again when she returned.’
I listened solemnly. Even now Sebastian’s story percolated pain.
‘What was her reasoning?’
‘Well, I think she had a few undiagnosed mental health issues, but that’s not really for me to say. But she couldn’t empathise, and she couldn’t commit, not even to living in the same place for more than a couple of months at a time. And she could hurt me over and over with no sense of having done anything wrong.’
‘
That sounds awful. Did you have anyone reassuring you that it wasn’t your fault? What did your friends say?’
‘They would badger me repeatedly about her, urge me to end it. Until they met her of course . . .’ Sebastian trailed off and smiled ruefully.
I couldn’t be sure, but something told me that Sebastian was referring to the hypnotism of her beauty. For a moment I felt uneasy. But then I felt honoured that he found it so easy to talk to me like this. I ran my fingers down the outside of his arm in comfort. Suddenly a more sensual picture caught Sebastian’s eye. ‘Aha! A pomegranate. A particular favourite of mine. I like to think of it as my spirit fruit.’
‘You know it was a pomegranate that had Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, right, not a apple?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’ He smiled, seemingly impressed with this arcane snippet of knowledge, and then came up very close behind me as I examined the picture, and whispered flirtatiously into my ear, ‘Trust you to know that, Nichi.’ I felt his breath, that sharp smell of his, and I longed for him to touch me. But instead he moved away and gestured his head towards the next room.
The culmination of the exhibition was an installation called the Infinity Mirrored Room, a mirrored labyrinth decorated with hundreds of tiny coloured balls that hung like suspended firework spray from the ceiling, the rainbow lustre magnified in every direction. It was like floating through a sugar-hued hanging galaxy, a magical experience, and as I walked ahead of Sebastian, I couldn’t help but examine our reflections caught among the lights. He was a moving study in muscular grace, and the rosy lights picked up the colour in that sensuous mouth of his. Meanwhile, there was me, little curvy Nichi, trying so hard to offer myself up to him as an object of desire.
I noticed the matching grey and black of our garments, as if we were dressed in a lover’s uniform. Yet we stood there together, apart. I waited to see if Sebastian would catch my eye in the mirror but he didn’t. Absorbed in the lights, his face locked in on itself the way I imagined it did when he painted. It was as if he were studiously refusing to meet his own reflection, let alone mine, and it left me with a curious sense of disconnection from him. Only minutes earlier he’d been revealing details of his emotional life to me in the most intimate way.
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