by Rose Raven
An hour later, he was ringing the bell of Alicia Durand's flat, determined to have it out. Either he would look like a crazy fool to her, a split personality who lived in a fantasy world, or she had come to his flat in the middle of the night and he had mistaken her for a burglar and hurt her. So what? He was willing to make it up to her, now, at once.
He had had to lie again to the girl on duty at Fimmrex to get Alicia's address.
He had confessed charmingly that the girl, whose name was Lisa, had been right all along, that he wanted to start something with Alicia, but that he wasn't sure of his ground and that he wanted to begin by sending flowers. He even suggested that he felt quite serious about Alicia, but all that got was a sniff and the comment that this noble feeling wouldn't last longer than it took to get Alicia on her back, followed by a grin and the comment that Alicia was a dyke without experience with men and that she, Lisa, would satisfy him much better. He had grinned back and explained that he had always wanted to make out with a dyke and that, if it didn't work out, he'd come back for Lisa and check whether her boyfriend spoke the truth and she had the skill of ten whores. After some more comments under the belt, Lisa gave him the address, somewhere in a neighborhood called Saint-Germain, which his in-flight magazine had recently told him was where all the jazz clubs used to be in the fifties.
As he stood waiting on the third-floor landing for Alicia to open the door, he emptied himself deliberately of all nerves, just as when he had made a big trade on the markets and was waiting for the payoff. Would it be a winner or cost him his job?
John was telling himself that he was only there to set things straight, but when she opened the door, he knew different. He was there because he loved her. She was barefoot, only wearing a loose pullover which barely reached to the top of her thighs and might or might not conceal a slip. She was as beautiful and as desirable as when they had first met.
Her smile crumpled when she recognized him.
"Oh. It's you," she said.
She didn't tell him to come in. She was looking at him as if he were a salesman, waiting for him to speak. Her silence made him feel ill at ease. He despised himself for his nervousness.
"I'm sorry it's me,” he said. He shrugged, unable to explain himself. "May I come in?"
"Who's the hunk?" a voice spoke behind him.
John turned around. A blonde girl of about twenty with tough good looks had come up the stairs. She walked over to Alicia, and kissed her on the lips.
"I thought we'd promised not to cheat on each other while we're together," the newcomer said aggressively. "It's only been a month, and you're already looking elsewhere."
"He's business."
"That's not the way he's looking at you."
The girl eyed John.
"Is he trying to take you away from me?"
"Oh, Annette, don't be jealous."
"So he is trying to take you away from me."
There was an awkward silence.
Suddenly the blonde girl began running her hand down Alicia's cheek and neck, her breasts, her waist, her hips, crushing the other woman to her body, chest against heaving chest, whispering urgently, "You're so pretty! I'll never find someone like you again. But I'm losing you. I can feel it. But you're so beautiful, my darling, so beautiful. Kiss me while we're still together."
The two women started kissing passionately on the landing. The girl lifted Alicia's pullover to her shoulders, kissing, licking her breasts, her belly, pushing her panties aside to lick her pubis, as innocent of hair as a doll's. Alicia squeezed the girl's face against her sex, moaning softly and bending at the knees to push her pelvis forward, heedless of the man's presence. The blonde slowly ran her tongue back up Alicia's torso. She pulled the brunette inside as their mouths met in a deep kiss, dragging her down to the floor and tearing off her panties even before the door slammed shut behind them.
John stood looking for a long time at the door, listening to the faint cries of passion on the other side. Finally, he picked up Alicia's discarded panties from the landing, holding them to his nose until the sounds of the two women had tapered off into silence.
Chapter 3
Slowly he walked down the stairs.
So that's why she had been so distant! The lady had a second life.
John knew he had been dismissed like a schoolboy. He knew he should feel upset and angry, betrayed even, but he just couldn't.
He was more convinced than ever that he wanted Alicia as he had never wanted a woman before, and he wanted her for keeps.
But she was a busy girl in her private life, and he'd better woo her very quickly before some woman caught her fancy permanently. From her passionate embrace and what the girl at the agency had told him, he knew he was facing stiff competition. Women knew how to pleasure women, and he imagined that a hot girl like Alicia could get addicted to that. But he also knew how to pleasure women, he thought. He could get them screaming just as loudly. The idea cheered him up until his erection reminded him of his persistent hunger. He wondered whether he ought to arrange a call girl, preferably with an entirely different physique so he wouldn't be reminded of Alicia all the time. An Asian girl, perhaps, or one of those exotic Brazilian babes he'd enjoyed during an assignment in South America..
Idly he changed into a dressing gown and turned on the shower, still trying to force his mind into more constructive paths, such as work, before the hot water wore down the last of his resistance and he picked up the phone for what would probably be only a mildly satisfactory experience compared with what he really wanted.
In the event, the decision was made for him. The mechanism inside the tap broke with a clang, and cold water began gushing out in an unstoppable flow. He tried to block the jet with a piece of soap, but the pressure was simply too strong. He sighed. He didn't need another problem, but there was no way the water would stop if he didn't call in help. Annoyed, he rubbed himself dry and dialed the number on the Fimmrex visiting card. The call was taken by someone whose voice he didn't recognise, who promised to send a plumber within the hour.
When the plumber arrived, a woman in overalls with impractically long nails for a manual worker, he was surprised to see that she was accompanied by Lisa, who sent him a dazzling smile. It told him at once why the girl with the skill of ten whores had come along. She was one of those women who can't take no for an answer. She had said she wanted him and get him she would. Or so she thought. He really didn't need this, he thought, a girl with the hots for him in the middle of everything else. He smiled politely back, thinking cynically that if she managed to get through his already weakened defences, it would save the cost of a professional whore, and it would probably do his body a power of good. He showed them into the bathroom.
Once the plumber had found the mains valve, the job was quickly fixed.
"That's done." Lisa smiled, asking him to sign a piece of paper she held out. The plumber was in the bathroom packing her gear, and they were alone on the balcony overlooking the southern part of Paris. "But one thing remains. I know you're not interested in me, but you're walking around with a permanent boner. Even now you're pushing against that bathing robe. You'll come to physical harm if I don't do anything about it. I can't let that happen to one of our clients."
"Sorry, but not interested," John said, wondering if there were any way he could decently push Lisa out of the front door without causing a scandal among the neighbours. Lisa had already calmly begun to undress as if there were no one else in the apartment and no people living on the other side of the street. But John knew that a young couple in the apartment opposite could see his balcony just as well as he could see theirs.
And all the time he was aware that she was right. He had been walking around most of the day with an erection or something very like it, and, hearing her dirty words and watching her unbutton her blouse, he could feel his cock stiffening inside his dressing gown, and he knew that he must either come in the next ten minutes or die from pain.
Lisa had a melodious voice and a full mouth that contrasted interestingly with the pornographic descriptions she was giving as she stepped out of her designer pants. He groaned. In her lacy lingerie, she looked like a streamlined adolescent with budding breasts and lanky thighs instead of the mid-twenties girl she undoubtedly was.
His prick chose just this moment to force itself through the front of his dressing gown and to tell her it was there and ready for the job.
"I can see you're not interested," she said, spitting in the palm of her hand, wrapping her fingers around his shaft, and moving the foreskin deftly up and down, up and down. Her wet palm made a soft squishing sound on the fat, gorged member in her hand, and his balls contracted hard against his groin. Suddenly, nothing seemed to matter anymore. He pulled her hands from his penis, crushed her against the railing of the balcony, and, holding aside her slip, slid instantly into her wet belly, thrusting against her thrust, the rasp of her silk underwear along his cock adding to his excitement.
He barely noticed when other arms wound themselves around his waist. Lisa's hands were teasing his pubic hair. It seemed the most normal thing in the world when other fingers joined hers around the root of his shaft.
Lisa said in a breathy voice, "Elodie is not just a plumber. She's a jack of all trades. Show him, Elodie."
The girl behind him never spoke, but slammed his body against Lisa, who grunted. Instantly, a big object was shoved up his anus and deep inside. It felt like a dick. It was a dick, he realised.
"Relax," Lisa gasped. "It's just a toy. Elodie loves toys."
It felt strangely exciting to be taken by a woman in this way. John could feel the big trunk of plastic flesh moving inside.
"Makes you wonder what it is like to feel a real penis inside, doesn't it?" Lisa groaned.
Every time John thrust forward into the depth of Lisa's vagina, he could feel Elodie's massive plastic tool slide out of him and his anus contract mechanically, as if trying to stop it from sliding out. Every time he withdrew his cock from Lisa, he impaled himself automatically on the dildo, which advanced, hammer-like, deep inside his belly. It was a strange mixture of pain and joy. He wanted to drag the pleasure out, but he had been too randy for too long. Far too soon, he exploded with a cry, almost forcing Lisa over the railing with his last thrust. He wrenched himself loose from the plumber girl's embrace as the last spurt of sperm shot into Lisa's belly. He turned, still hard, and, without bothering to admire the plumber's finely muscled body, grabbed her by the hair, forced her around, and slammed his dick hard inside her. Again and again he slammed Elodie, his fingers inside her sex, crushing the lips of her vagina, her clitoris. Just before John came, he pulled his cock from the plumber's arse, drew Lisa's face down and forward, and with a few quick movements, masturbated himself to a climax into Lisa's mouth., His ecstasy was intensified by his sudden realisation that a couple had been watching from the balcony opposite. Catching the thrill, they had half undressed and begun to copulate while watching the threesome. The girl's breasts dangling over the baluster for all to see added a dangerous spice to the fun.
It was fortunate that they were in a quiet, residential street, John reflected humorously when his body had calmed down a little. Apart from the neighbours opposite, nobody seemed to have noticed that there had been a minor orgy in progress, which was just as well for someone with his kind of job.
The couple had shouted for them all to come over, but John had declined. Now that the first flush had worn off, all he wanted was Alicia. Even the screams on the other balcony couldn't rouse him any more, not even when Lisa said that the boy's girlfriend was masturbating and squirting.
Elodie said she had another job and had to go.
When he was alone again with Lisa, he allowed her to wash him under the shower and pleasured her twice more with his fingers until she, too, was sated and said she had to go home because she had a dinner date with her boyfriend.
"Does he know you fuck other men?" John asked crudely.
She grinned.
"I tell him, but he doesn't believe me. I tell him all the details while we make love, and he thinks they're just dirty stories to excite him. Which they are, of course."
As soon as he shut the door behind Lisa and was alone again, Alicia's face came back, and the sex he'd just had seemed really just that: sex. He was glad Lisa wasn't the clinging type who'd want more. He'd have been pleased to oblige if the circumstances had been different, but not now.
He wanted Alicia, and not just for sex. He wondered what he could do to please her. How would she respond if he arranged tickets for the theatre, perhaps as early as Tuesday? Should he send them round with flowers, or would that be overdoing it?
But before he could put his plan into action, his father called from London to announce that his godmother had suddenly died. His parents expected him to show up for her funeral service.
John groaned inwardly. He was caught between the demands of a high-tension job and a high-voltage woman, and now this. His first instinct was to say no. His godmother was a cousin twice or even three times removed. In fact, he wasn't at all sure how close their family ties were. They called her "cousin" out of courtesy more than anything else, he believed. Besides, she had never bothered to help him during her life. He couldn't even remember her from an overnight stay at her place during a European tour offered by his parents in his early twenties. He tried to recall her face and her voice, but all he could remember was that he had been as sick as a dog the whole time he'd been at her place. He vaguely recalled her feeding him some kind of nauseating English slop because he couldn't hold normal food down, but after that all memory stopped. He had been too ill to remember anything else. However, he knew it would hurt his parents if he didn't show up, and he had always liked his parents. Reluctantly he accepted, provided his bosses agreed. That, he knew, would be a mere formality. His father had been doing business with them for years. There was no decent way out.
Putting Alicia from his mind with a sigh, he worked through the night to bone up on French fund analysis methods and managed to make it through Monday on coffee and the excitement he always felt in his job. By the end of the day, he had the projections and performance statistics needed to convince his colleagues to switch away from a few dodgy bond issues and to adjust their analysis routine. It wouldn't be long, he thought, before the Paris office started showing satisfactory results again. There was fundamentally nothing much wrong with what they were doing. It just took an outside eye to spot the anomalies. That was all.
He explained all this to his New York bosses when calling in to make his daily report on Monday evening. They were pleased with his performance and agreed to let him go for a few days, as he had expected.
Now that he had successfully taken the first hurdles of his corporate rescue mission, he was beginning to think almost automatically about Alicia again, wondering whether she liked the same things he did. He thought she might. He wasn't much of a museum man and had never particularly gone in for a highbrow lifestyle, and Alicia didn't seem the complicated type either. He liked his work, and he liked the good life, the trips to the countryside and the coast, the dinners, the stays with friends. And he liked sex, lots of it.
Waking up on Tuesday morning, he got her panties from under his pillow, where he had hidden them in a kind of adolescent hope that they would make him dream of her. The light scent left by her vagina had faded almost entirely. He looked at the label on her lingerie, noting its size, and put it back. He'd buy some dainty stuff on his way to the airport and have it delivered to her door. She'd know who sent it.
* * * *
Early in the afternoon, he was in London.
Like Paris, it had a definite air of its own. You would never confuse it with any other city, he thought, as a taxi took him to Churchill's Hotel near Marble Arch. His parents would be staying at Claridge's, their traditional port of call, which was a good enough reason not to go there. He liked his parents very much but wouldn't want to spen
d his days under their watchful eye. His mother still thought he was an adolescent who didn't wash behind his ears and could be expected to bring home the wrong girl.
He lunched with them, though, before they all went to the cemetery for the funeral service, which was to be a big affair with lots of people from all walks of life. John, who had never paid much attention to his family, preferring to focus his interest on his friends instead, learned to his surprise that his dull godmother with her annual gift of a silly one-pound note for his birthday had been a personality in her day. Apparently she had led a scandalous life when she was young. She had been a single mum with a child by a decadent French aristocrat and later the favorite model and mistress of well-known British painter Murson, whom she married just when his paintings were becoming worth a fortune. Her husband had boozed himself to death shortly afterwards. John thought idly that he didn't even know what his godmother's child looked like. He seemed to recall a photo showing a punk with an overdose of make-up and greasy hair. And from family stories he seemed to remember that she had turned from a rebel teenager into something rather dull and respectable, obviously quite unlike her mother.
When they arrived at the cemetery, the car park was already full with cars ranging from Bentleys to small economy models of the kind favored in European cities.
Dozens of people were making their way inside. John was quite cheered by the sight of so many visitors. It felt as if they were all on an outing instead of at somebody's burial. He tried not to look too happy, but nobody seemed to notice him. They were all busy talking and saying hello, apparently also under the impression that they had walked into a party. It must be the ghost of his godmother throwing a final party for herself, he thought.