Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  She’d never do anything like that: the vacant-headed little bitch with the E cup bra who was waiting for him in his ugly little car. I bet she’d never even let him touch her without washing first, and then washing again afterwards. I glared down at her from the bay window, challenging her to have the courage to look up at me, while keeping my back to the destruction that he worked through every room and cupboard we had shared. Every door that he opened and closed I recognised. Every sound invaded my head.

  From the bedroom – no longer our bedroom – he called through that he was taking his alarm clock (‘Please do!’ I whispered back, wishing it wasn’t still waiting so cosily, so tellingly, beside my bed); then that he’d leave the sheets, so that I wondered whether those same memories had been running through his brain, but possibly not; maybe the words were meant only to underline his generosity, to mark out what had originally been his. I yelled back that he could take them, that I didn’t want them. But he said no, they’d bought new ones, fresh ones. He wanted to wound me, to distance himself from our coupled past but when I tried to answer that I would be getting new ones too, it just sounded petty so I shut up.

  And all the while she sat there, gazing down the street with scarcely a twitch: purity itself. She’d never lie there in the sweat and the stains and the glory of it all. She’d never pin him down on the bed and slap a handful of double chocolate-chip across his chest and then kneel astride him to sluice it off, drenching him in a flood of her own piss, just because she could and because it was the one thing they’d never done. She wouldn’t. Not little Miss Perfect. She was so fucking pure that she’d step out of the shower to take a piss.

  Okay, I was angry. I admit it but I think I was entitled to be. I’d introduced them for God’s sake, because Mike had left 4-Deque by the time she arrived: fresh from the agency, new to London, and not knowing anyone. I invited her to supper, cooked for her, just trying to be friendly because it wasn’t an easy place to settle into, 4-Deque: all testosterone and sports injuries, with she and me the only females.

  She managed well enough, was fine as a receptionist, could manage the phones and a bit of typing, although you wouldn’t ask too much more of her. “Eye candy”, the lads called her, but Rob from Marketing was the first one. He reported that she really was as dumb as she looked, quite a cuddly little bimbo, he said, but lips like a suction pump. So then Steve said he’d have some of that. And he did. Then someone else followed and before long they had all been there. And still she showed up the next morning in a fresh clean dress with a fresh clean smirk on her puffy red lips, those lips between which they were all dribbling their smug mark of possession. Until Mike was the only one who hadn’t.

  And then I discovered that he had too.

  We rowed, and didn’t speak and made up and I might have forgiven him that one slip, except that he went back for more. And how do I know? She told me.

  All the lads were invited to Steve’s stag-night, except it wasn’t going to be a night, it was to be a weekend in Amsterdam starting on Friday evening. So Ruth and I were left behind, and not to be outdone went to a silly Oscar-contending weepy film, where we duly cried and brought a bottle back afterwards – here, into this very room because my flat was closer than hers – and as we emptied the bottle, and then a second one, so we unloaded our consciences. Things we’d done, including her confession about Mike, when she cried and said she hadn’t meant to hurt me, and mine of what I’d done –- but she had never done but sometimes wanted to. And then we both went quiet.

  They had been right about her lips. She kissed with a power that you wouldn’t believe from so delicate a figure: long kisses with a tongue that swept round inside my mouth as if it were covering every bit of me with a caress. Wine flavoured, but milder and interspersed with tiny nips from her lips that grabbed mine and held them while a tiny pointed tip of tongue pattered against me. And hands which I longed to feel touching me so when they didn’t, I lifted them myself: laid them on my breasts where they just rested for a second before beginning a slow gentle massage that produced an effect I was unwilling even to try to ignore. A hardening here: a moistening there. Reactions that came as readily as if she had been Mike, and I couldn’t wait for more. I took over then, leading her through into our bedroom and there, with her willing help, we settled down together to start uncovering her.

  First a dress which I’d seen often enough skimming through the office but whose colour – she now admitted – she wasn’t sure about; inside it, a stretch of skin so smooth and clear I was jealous of the finding. I trailed my fingertips across the neat ridges of her ribs and the soft warm dimple of her tummy button. And my lips followed where my fingers had been, across the gently rising velvet of her stomach, over all the skin that was available to me. Next her bra: a giggly and very sensible bra from the same chain that I use which lifted away to reveal pale golden nipples on a creamy white bosom that tumbled down both sides of her chest in a way mine never does. I sank straight down and first kissed but then simply licked: sweeping my tongue across her as I grinned into her face and her eyes grinned back. So round and inviting that I could not leave them alone but held them, moulded between my hands like bread dough, cradled as gently as an injured bird, supported squeezed and kissed again, just lightly round her little nipples as their paleness grew less pale and the little tips curled up ever tighter and more eager. Tights: ordinary, but leaving sweet indentations like rows of tiny teeth round her waist, and I kissed those too, before I tugged the tights out from under her bottom and down her legs. At last her knickers: big, purple and sweetly unfashionable. “Sorry. I hadn’t...” But I kissed what nestled inside them and her apology died. A neatly shaped golden bush, trimmed short, but not aggressively so, that she ruffled nervously in her fingers as soon as it came in sight.

  “Now you,” she said, although I think it was shyness more than eagerness that moved her, but her hands were very tender in unbuttoning, unzipping, un-hooking me. She stroked my nipples where they poked up through the thin bra, kissed them, and kissed them again after the bra was gone. She moved quickly to my knickers, tugged them off, threw them away and then stopped: kneeling beside me with her lip bitten in her teeth.

  “Can I...” she pushed back her hair, “can I look?”

  “Look?”

  “Only I’ve never seen another girl, you know properly.”

  She looked, as I gave myself up to her, opened myself out wide, offering myself to her inspection and her fingers, to play with my folds, work along the creases and pull at the lips.

  “You’re different.”

  “What?”

  “There’s much more of you. I’m not like that.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Wait!” and she pushed me back down, continuing to explore: separating out the lips, peeling back the hood, touching, playing, stroking.

  “Let me see!” and this time she relented, and I looked, and she was right: she was different. Whoever trimmed, and, I could now see, shaved the underneath, had done a very good job: professional, I imagine. Closed up like a bud, but a vibrant brilliant pink bud, that glistened already, whose scent was already teeming. I touched her: slid one finger down the tiny pink ridges and inside. She sighed and trembled, her legs twitched a little more open and I was welcome. She tasted different, too. Sweeter than me and, as I lapped at her, wetter. Oh, but she was responsive: almost at once she began to squirm, her golden thighs twisting and her heels dragging up either side of me before her legs shot out straight again with a low wail of contentment. I reached up for her breasts, groping for the shy little nipples that seemed so lost in the expanse of creamy white, and found her own hands already there, although she surrendered one to me and that hand came down to my head, tangling through my hair as I worked. The moans were longer now, faltering and stammering, but louder too. Her heels came up to ride onto my shoulders, beating on my back when crying was not enough, keeping me there, spurring me on, and finally lifting her hips up to push even hard
er against my face as one strangled scream finally stilled her.

  She lay there, grinning, gorgeously naked, her legs slowly relaxing back to a more demure togetherness, her soft bosom, warm and wide, rising and falling with each breath. And I reached over and planted a kiss on each nipple.

  “Well?” I asked her, and planted another, and then one on her lips too.

  “That was...” but I kissed her mouth again, enjoying the way her scent was wafted back to me on her breath.

  “Well?” I repeated and kissed her nipples again, and then again because they were so irresistibly soft: so pale and innocent.

  “...interesting.”

  “Interesting?” I sat up.

  “Yes.” She must have caught sight of my face. “I mean it was very nice and everything. I’m glad I did it, but I wouldn’t want to do it again. It’s just that, well, I guess I’m not a dyke.”

  I forget the precise sequence after that. I know the scene wasn’t pretty, and that she left fairly quickly, scrabbling for her shoes which I had flung out into the hallway. And how it developed from there I don’t know either, but by Monday lunchtime all the lads at 4-Deque knew. By the evening, Mike knew. He spent that night on Steve’s couch and started moving his clothes out on the Thursday. And now this: a remembered “That’s everything. I’ll be going” still echoing in the hall as I watched him walk to the car. There had not been one night in the last six weeks that I hadn’t spent alone. Not one morning that I hadn’t woken up alone. I could barely even remember the feel of Mike’s cock in the morning. Hard? Yes, naturally, but how hard? Leather? Wood? Iron? I could no longer quite recapture the detail. Or the smell. Or the taste. All these sensations which had once been so familiar and been part of what we were but which had now been whipped away: packed up with his clutter into cardboard boxes; hustled down the steps and out of my life, leaving my memory as empty as our flat. The flat.

  GLOVE STORY

  Geoff Nicholson

  Geoff Nicholson is the author of sixteen novels, including Bleeding London, and most recently The City Under the Skin. His non-fiction titles include Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking. He lives in Los Angeles.

  I work in “women’s gloves” in a large London department store. It’s not a job that every man would be happy with, but for me it’s just about ideal. I get to meet a lot of women with very beautiful hands. I get to see these hands at close quarters, and quite often I get to touch them. I talk to the women who possess these hands, and then I sell them beautiful leather or kidskin or suede or silk or satin or velvet gloves. Then, later, in the privacy of my own mind, I start thinking about what these women could do with their hands and their gloves, and how they might use them on me.

  It’s not a dirty job unless you think about it the right way, although of course that’s precisely the way I like to think about it.

  Inevitably in this job I also get to see a lot of women with very ordinary or even downright ugly hands. This is not a pleasure in itself, obviously, but ultimately it’s not so terrible, because it’s still my business to sell these women beautiful gloves which will hide the ordinariness or ugliness of their hands. This strikes me as a valuable service.

  Now, you could argue that gloves, by definition, hide beautiful hands every bit as much as they hide ordinary or ugly ones. But that’s not a problem as far as I can see. Knowing that there’s a beautiful hand sheathed in a beautiful glove is just fine. It’s better than fine. Or if it’s problematic at all, it’s more like a Zen paradox. Is a hand still beautiful, still an object of erotic fascination, even when you can’t see it? Well, of course it is.

  I always tried not to be too obsessive about these things. I suppose I’d always have found it impossible to go out with a woman who had ugly or fat or stunted or spatulate hands, or who bit her nails or who had chipped nail varnish or who – oh God, please, no – wore false nails. But apart from that I’m not foolish enough to believe there’s any such thing as the perfect hand, or indeed the perfect glove. Nevertheless, that fateful day when Vanessa first came into the department, peeled off the black leather gloves she was wearing and revealed the gorgeous, long, slender, articulate hands beneath: well, if that wasn’t perfection it was near enough for me.

  These were hands to die for: taut, pale and lean enough that the intricate lacings of bone and vein were visible through the pure white skin. The fingers were finely jointed, the nails not too short, not too long, well seated in their symmetrical nail beds, shaped like almonds and painted a colour that I recognized as Bronze Chianti.

  I’m sure I gaped, and very possibly I gasped, but apparently it was a reaction Vanessa was accustomed to.

  “Yes, I know they’re more or less perfect,” she said, and it might have sounded arrogant or narcissistic coming from somebody else, but she said it in a matter-of-fact way, as though she was discussing a natural phenomenon, like a sunset or a cloud formation, something that had nothing to do with her. Need I say, this wasn’t literally true. Nature may have given her potentially perfect hands but she had clearly taken great care of them, nurtured them, made them realize their full potential. You had to admire that.

  “Are you a hand model or something?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I could be, obviously, but you know, I think that would be debasing my gift, like prostitution. I don’t want to show them to all and sundry. I want to save them for someone special.”

  It seemed obvious to me that I was indeed that very someone. I took a bold step. I saw that Vanessa was eyeing a pair of red, cabretta leather gloves, so I let her buy them at an enormous discount and then I asked her out. We may not have been strictly compatible, but we did have one very important thing in common. I adored Vanessa’s hands and so did she. Relationships have been based on less. The first evening went very well, and so we started dating.

  In lots of ways it was an entirely ordinary relationship. We did all the usual things that people do when they date. The only thing that was a little unusual was our sex life. Vanessa didn’t really want to have sex with me, at least not what most people would call sex, at least not conventional sex. The hand-job was her preferred form, in fact the only form she was prepared to consider with me. And you might think a hand-job from a woman with perfect hands wouldn’t be so bad. But Vanessa would only give me a hand-job if she could keep a pair of gloves on. And again, that wasn’t absolutely terrible.

  The touch of glove on penis felt pretty good, and knowing that a perfect hand was inside the glove certainly added to the pleasure. And Vanessa had skills. A few minutes, brisk manipulation and I was gushing messily, although I noticed she was as dexterous as a card shark when it came to making sure that none of my goo ever went anywhere near her precious gloves.

  Was I happy with this arrangement? Well, yes and no. A part of me felt I had no right to complain, but another part felt utterly dissatisfied. I wanted more. Not an unreasonably large amount more either, it seemed to me; I wanted the touch of her flesh on mine, her perfect hands touching my (admittedly all too imperfect) cock. Was that too much to ask?

  I tried to do the grown-up thing. I expressed my needs. Frequently. I would say to Vanessa, “How about a proper hand-job, you know, as in with the bare hand, skin on skin?”

  And she would say, and this was obviously pretty hurtful, that she couldn’t. She didn’t feel that way about me. She didn’t deny that I was a decent man, appreciative and attentive and so forth, but my penis and I weren’t sufficiently exceptional to receive the gift of contact from her exquisite bare hands. In the beginning she’d thought I might be special, but now she knew I wasn’t nearly special enough. Sometimes my self-esteem was low enough to believe she might have a point here, but that didn’t make me any happier.

  Naturally Vanessa didn’t wear gloves every single minute of the day and night. She didn’t wear them to sleep in for example, though that was something of an irrelevance since we never slept together, nor did she wear them when she was eating or in the shower
. And obviously she didn’t wear them when she gave herself a manicure; and there was a lot of manicure work that went on with Vanessa, a lot of rubbing and massaging, lots of lotions, anti-ageing creams, penetrating oils, paraffin wax and so forth. I watched as she performed these arcane and beguiling operations, and I liked what I saw, but it only made things more tantalizing and frustrating. I began to hatch a plan.

  We were at her flat one day, it was the afternoon, and I would be long gone before the night, and I was watching her paint her nails an intense shade called Rusted Cerise. After a while I said, “When you’re finished, can we have sex?” and she said sure. It wasn’t that she lacked enthusiasm for sex, just that she only had enthusiasm for one kind.

  “Which gloves?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think the red cabretta, don’t you?” I said.

  While she was finishing her manicure I did a terrible thing. I mean it wasn’t so very terrible in the greater scheme of things, but quite terrible enough in Vanessa’s scheme, I suspected. I went into the bedroom, took one of the red cabretta gloves, the right, got out my cock, slipped it inside and started to masturbate. The soft interior of the glove felt terrific, even if the stitching of the seams was a mite scratchy, and before long I ejaculated into the innermost folds and cavities of the glove. Then I zipped myself up and waited for Vanessa to join me in the bedroom.

  She came in, and without any preliminaries, slipped her freshly manicured right hand into the glove I’d been using. Instantly her face showed surprise, confusion, distrust, alarm, realization and distaste. She pulled off the glove and revealed her beautiful bare hand, now smeared with strands and globs of my semen. Her hand had never looked better, if you asked me, and in my fantasies she would have shared that opinion, and this would have been a moment of transformation. She would suddenly have understood, she’d have smiled at me lasciviously, licked the sperm off her hand with excited delight, and we’d have moved on to a brand-new and exciting phase of our relationship.