A hoot from outside made us all turn our heads.
I hurried to the front door, my heart sinking in anticipation of seeing Mr Ramsamy arriving to say the arrears payments hadn’t been enough to save the house, but to my relief it was a small white delivery van. From the gate of the folly, further down the road, I could see Goodness whistling and waving. Obviously the van had driven there first, and he’d then directed it to the main house.
The driver climbed out and opened the van’s back door and removed a cellophane-wrapped bunch of what must have been two-dozen roses in white, red and pink. Holding the flowers carefully, he made his way towards the gate.
‘Delivery for Ms Caine,’ he called.
‘That’s me,’ I responded. Delight fizzed through me as I hurried out to help him with the bouquet. I saw there was an envelope slotted between the colourful blooms but there wasn’t any time to open it as I thanked him, saw him out, and placed the roses on the hall table.
Da Silva craned his neck to take a better look.
‘Do you have an admirer, Emma?’ he asked, sounding impressed.
‘I have a grateful client,’ I said, and the irony was that even though I was telling the truth, he must have assumed I was lying.
When they left twenty minutes later, I was in possession of a signed agreement that, until my circumstances changed, Roger would pay fifty per cent of Mark’s care home account.
It was more than I’d ever hoped for when I made the suggestion, and it was the confidence the night with Simon had given me that had made me brave enough to have my say. And once I had explained how I felt – well, maybe Roger wasn’t as bad a brother as I had thought he was. Maybe all it had taken was some honesty from me to break him out of his traditionally disapproving role.
Honesty could only go so far, though. Right now it was not a commodity I could freely trade in. I could only hope I wouldn’t end up splitting my life apart with lies.
Once they had left, I opened the envelope. There was no message, but instead there was a gift card of some kind for a lingerie store in the same mall Simon’s firm was refurbishing.
My heart lifted, not only with the prospect of buying new underwear, but with the certainty that I had pleased my client.
He was treating me (and himself of course) to some choice underwear. Most certainly, that meant I would be seeing him again soon.
I drove to Sandton a few days later and rather shyly presented the lingerie gift card to the immaculately groomed saleslady who approached me, smilingly offering her help.
‘I received this as a present but I’m not sure how much it’s for,’ I told her. ‘I can’t see an amount on it anywhere. Could you check up for me before I use it?’
She took the card from me, holding it between her pink-manicured fingertips. She looked at it carefully and then looked back at me with an enquiring expression.
‘This is not a gift card, ma’am.’
‘Oh.’ Accustomed as I was to disappointing news, my stomach gave a reflexive lurch. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please come to the till. Let me check it for you.’
I followed her there and waited while she had a whispered conversation with one of her colleagues before inserting the card into a reader.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. It’s not a gift voucher. It is a charge card.’
‘A charge card?’ Parrot-like, I repeated her words, still not quite understanding what she meant.
‘It’s a new account. It has been opened in your name by a Mr … Mr Nel. He’s provided his billing address. All we need from you is your signature here, and also if you could give us some id just so we can put you on the system as the user.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ I offered weakly, feeling a tentative smile spread over my face. To be honest, I wasn’t totally sure what I felt about this. To have unlimited spending power at an exclusive lingerie boutique was a heady sensation.
I had a feeling that Jan the psychologist would not have approved of the lingerie card at all and would have advised me to return it unused. Luckily, the salesladies were not Jan.
‘What a wonderful surprise for you!’ Both of them were laughing in genuine delight at my confusion, and even if they were wondering inwardly exactly what kind of relationship I was enjoying with this wealthy and mysterious Mr Nel, they didn’t let their curiosity show.
I used my card with restraint, buying just three bras and five pairs of panties, one glamorous black satin negligee and one suspender belt plus stockings. While my purchases were being carefully wrapped at the till, I reflected on the fact that it was lucky Simon fitted into my clothes. It would have been awkward to explain that I was buying two different sizes for myself and the account holder. In fact, it might have wiped the smiles right off their faces.
By the time I’d left the store and returned to my car, some of the pleasure I’d felt at the gift had evaporated. In its place had come worry. The more largesse Simon showered upon me, the more I was going to end up relying on him. He might be my willing slave during our sessions, but right now I understood that I was becoming enslaved to him as well, my bonds pulled tighter with every lavish present and payment I received.
But, if I was honest with myself, it wasn’t only Simon’s generous presents that were doing it. After all, I’d received goodies from other grateful slaves as well. I’d been given chocolates and an orchid and a couple of bottles of wine. So, in all truthfulness, I had to admit that it wasn’t the gifts that were causing my dependency on him.
It was the stimulation of our conversations and the happiness I felt when I was with him. The delicious heat that kindled in the pit of my belly, leaving me breathless with desire, when I thought about the raw lust I’d seen in his eyes, the exquisite pleasure of his fingers and tongue, my blissful ascent into orgasm. The intense eroticism of our sessions and the satisfaction of controlling him with his own power, knowing that the desire I kindled in him would find its outlet in pleasuring me. The honesty of telling him what I really wanted and the wholeness I’d felt afterwards.
The reason why Simon’s gifts brought me such delight was that I saw them as proof he was thinking about me outside of our sessions; that he cared about me. Or seemed to.
I was starting to need him, both physically and emotionally, and those bonds were the most dangerous ones of all. Because, as Simon had already explained to me, he could – and would – sever them at a moment’s notice when he met the right person.
Chapter 26
‘Emma? Hello, is that Emma there?’
The caller was a woman with a screechy voice and for one very confused moment I simply could not place her.
‘Speaking. Who is that?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No,’ I snapped, not in the mood for game playing.
‘It’s Bee-Bee. Gavin’s wife.’
‘Oh. What’s up? Is everything ok with Mark?’ I asked, anxiety flooding through me as I realised why she might have phoned.
‘Mark’s fine. Listen, I’m phoning you because Gavin wants to do something for his birthday. Mark’s, I mean. You know, he would have been turning forty on April the twentieth.’
‘He is turning forty,’ I corrected her.
‘Of course. I – I mean …’ she stammered, ‘he is turning forty. He’s turning forty. So we’d like to have a little family do at our place. On the Sunday after his birthday.’
A little family do with the Caines …? No, thanks. Not when I had the choice of other, more pleasant activities like chewing my own arm off.
‘I’m busy that day, I’m afraid,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ She sounded rather nonplussed. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I am the mistress of my diary,’ I confirmed, to a puzzled silence.
‘So you mean you can’t come?’
‘No.’
‘To your own husband’s party?’
‘No.’
So Bee-Bee did what she did best, apart from purchasing expensive consumer goods a
nd then bragging about them, which was to call on the higher authority of her husband.
‘Gaaaviiiin?’ she yelled. ‘I’ve got Emma on the line and she says she can’t come.’
A pause.
‘I don’t know why.’
Another pause.
‘Oh, ok, then. I’ll tell her Mark will be there on his own.’
Mark?
‘Hang on,’ I said to her. ‘You’re actually taking Mark to this?’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘He can’t travel!’
‘Gav specially asked the nurses and he told me they said it would be ok. They said he can go out for a short time if he stays in his wheelchair. They said he hasn’t had any more fits since they changed his medication in February.’ She raised her voice again. ‘Yes, Gav, I’m cooo-miiing. Just finishing off on the phooo-oone!’
‘All right,’ I said hastily. ‘I didn’t realise that. I’ll try to make a plan and be there.’
‘Oh, fine. Good. See you then.’
Bee-Bee hung up after that, leaving me glowering at my cellphone in frustration.
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to spend time with them, not even out of loyalty to Mark, even though I knew that in these circumstances, it was the right thing to do.
What I wanted now was to spend time with Simon.
There. I’d admitted it. I might as well be honest to myself.
I hadn’t spoken to him since he’d told me he was going to sleep in the other bed after our night at The Saxon. The flowers and the lingerie charge card had been sent over ten days ago now.
I was missing him terribly. I was missing everything about him. His smile. His wit. His kindness. And that was before we got onto the subject of physical attraction – the intense sexual desire I felt for him … not that we’d ever actually had sex, of course, since it didn’t enter into my job description. What was most frustrating of all, though, was that I knew I could not contact him.
He might have given me the most expert oral pleasure and the most intense orgasm that I had ever had, but that did not alter the fact that he was a client. I could never overstep professional boundaries by phoning him. I’d agonised for hours over whether or not to make an exception by thanking him for the card, but in the end I’d decided against it. I would have to wait for him to call.
And the waiting was torment. There was nothing for me to do, no way to hurry the process except by trying to distract myself by focusing on my other clients, and occasionally immersing my thoughts in the memories of our night together. Although even those memories were now tainted with worry and doubt.
When he finally phoned the following week, he sounded abrupt and stressed and I wondered whether he was battling with another deadline in his demanding renovation project, or if something else was wrong.
‘Thank you for the gift you sent,’ I said.
‘Glad you enjoyed it.’ His voice softened momentarily.
He made an ordinary dungeon booking for the next day, which left me feeling rather slighted and just a tiny bit cheap. He knew the rules – didn’t he? I was sure he would not disrespect my request for no physical contact in my place of work. So what did this mean?
I fretted over it after he had rung off.
This session was clearly going to be all about him. Was satisfying me no longer on his agenda then?
Or, despite my best efforts, had I not met his expectations the last time we’d been together?
‘This is why you shouldn’t see clients after hours, Emma,’ I told myself sternly. ‘You should never have become physically involved with him. There’s no point in agonising over this. Go and do something constructive.’
I rode Admiral and cleaned the dungeon. Then I thought about Simon. I took the dishes to the outside sink and washed them. Then I thought about Simon again.
Perhaps he was bipolar or depressive. Hell, perhaps he was even schizophrenic at worst, or at best, incurably moody like Mark had been. The fact that none of these diagnoses made any sense based on what I knew about Simon so far didn’t stop me from trying them on for size, just to see if they would fit the shape of my insecurities.
I wished that I had somebody I could chat to about this. I should reconnect with my old work colleagues – a couple of them had been great friends, but it had been me who had cut off the lines of communication after the company closed and they moved on to other jobs. I’d neglected to return their concerned phone calls, and replied to their emails with brief and vague messages.
I realised now that I had become something of a recluse in the months after I’d lost my job; a far cry from the woman who’d hosted legendary four-course dinners for Mike’s business associates or my marketing team, sending my guests home after midnight replete with good food and reeling from a surfeit of fine wine.
Without a stove, I couldn’t invite my friends round for dinner, but I could meet them somewhere for a drink. The problem was that although they were ad-agency types who wouldn’t be overly shocked at what I was doing, I wasn’t sure I could trust them not to gossip about it.
I did find an unexpected listening ear later that afternoon when I drove to Adult Land to drop off the business cards I’d had printed, and to purchase a selection of strap-on dildos in preparation for the Judge’s next visit on Friday.
Thandeka was alone in the shop, and she greeted me with genuine warmth before offering me a seat on the bar stool next to the counter.
‘How’s business?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘It’s going well, thanks,’ I told her, ‘but I didn’t know when I started out that things could get so complicated.’ Choosing three of the strap-ons at random from the selection she placed in front of me, I passed them to her to ring up.
Her perfectly plucked eyebrows rose slightly. ‘Complicated how?’ she asked.
It was at that point I discovered that having a trio of large anal penetration devices within nudging distance made it a whole lot easier to have a full and frank conversation about matters sexual.
‘I went too far with a client who requested it, and I don’t know where I stand with him now,’ I explained, and Thandeka leaned forward, concerned, as I filled her in on more of my story.
In fact, updating her properly, while learning more about her experiences while working at Adult Land, took so long that I had to put my shopping in two black bags and wait outside while she locked up the shop. We resumed the conversation over half a bottle of white wine at a secluded corner table in the pub across the road, where a scattering of people were having after-work drinks while eighties music blared from the loudspeakers.
‘Working in the sex industry can distort things sometimes,’ Thandeka sympathised. ‘It makes you question people’s motives.’ She had to raise her voice for me to hear her over the poignant notes of Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’.
So do I, I thought.
‘Have you had similar experiences?’ I asked her.
‘Clients wanting to date me? Yes, of course.’
‘And how do you handle it?’
She chewed her lip briefly before replying. ‘Basically, Emma, men are men. They’re going to be right for you or they aren’t. And I don’t think buying sex toys or having domination sessions makes a difference, except at least you know more about what they’re really like.’
‘Simon doesn’t see me that way,’ I told her, looking down at a watermark on the table’s polished wooden surface. ‘He’s already said he’ll stop his sessions when he meets the right partner.’
Thandeka smiled. ‘You want to be with him, though, don’t you? I can see that.’
‘I do, but that would be unworkable and impossible. I can’t even let myself entertain the thought.’ The Foreigner song ended and U2’s ‘With or Without You’ began. One of my favourite songs, but right then the lyrics just weren’t doing it for me. I took a melancholy swallow of wine.
‘From what you’ve told me …’ She made a face. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this.
’
‘No, do,’ I encouraged her, eager to get an honest perspective on the situation.
‘He sounds a lot more right for you than your husband was. I mean … you stopped working on those sex lines before you even met Mark. How could he have held that against you?’
‘I don’t know. I think it was because the image he had of me – the ideal, I suppose – was different from how I am. And for too long he tried to believe his version, not mine.’
‘Well, you need somebody who will appreciate the real you, and who won’t blame you for things you can’t help, or insult you in horrible ways. Whether that person ends up being Simon or not. It might be that you and Mark were both very dominant people, but …’
Her phone started ringing and, apologising, she answered with a smile, ‘Hey, babes. Yes, I’m running late tonight. I’m having drinks with a girlfriend. Want to join us? We’re at the pub across the road from work.’ She waited, listened. ‘What? Sorry, say again – it’s a bit noisy in here. ok. Will you get pizza when you leave the office, then? My usual, please. Lots of garlic, hey? Love you too.’
I didn’t have the chance to ask her whether she’d met ‘babes’ at Adult Land or somewhere else because, while she slid her phone back into her bag, she picked up our conversation immediately. ‘As I was saying, you and Mark could both have been very dominant people, which is why you fought so much.’ I choked on my last sip of wine when she added, ‘But Emma, you mustn’t rule out the possibility that he could simply just have been an arsehole.’
Chapter 27
When Simon arrived the next day, he still seemed preoccupied. I could read his body language from the moment he climbed out of his car, and when he walked inside the folly he gave me only the briefest of nods and offered no physical contact before turning and closing the door behind him.
Not a hug. Not a kiss on the cheek, nor even a handshake. Despite the comforting chat I’d had with Thandeka, affronted did not begin to describe how I was feeling.
‘Emma, it’s been a tough couple of weeks, and to be honest, I don’t know what I need from you today,’ he said, after refusing my terse offer of coffee.
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