Cahill guffawed. “Don’t believe it, my love. Ayako will turn on you when you least expect it and gobble up the best man at the table. I know because it’s happened to me before.”
“Hey,” I said to Neil, tilting my chin at him from across the table.
“Hey,” he smiled. “Good hunting.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Giradeau smirking.
We were playing Texas Hold’Em, probably the most popular game in casinos over in America these days, and reasonably easy to learn. Each player gets two hole cards—two cards dealt facedown. You have your round of betting, and next comes the flop—three cards dealt faceup on the table. Communal cards, anyone can use them in combination with their hole cards to make a winning hand. On goes the betting, and then you have the turn—a fourth card flipped onto the table. Finally, we come to the river—the fifth card dealt to the table.
It was a lively game. A Tory MP got to read Vivian in Braille over on the settee. Ayako, obviously in a playful mood, gave an Oxford salute to one of the newbie males, spanking his bare bottom and kissing him between sharp cracks of her palm against his ass. Then Cahill disappeared into a bedroom for a while with a young Indian solicitor, having won a rug burn, but the girl wanted to blow out the candles. The newbie guy was having a good night—first a spanking then a bucket seat lap dance from Vivian.
I held my own for a while, and then Giradeau made it clear he wanted to be inside me tonight. We played a hand where he won my knickers, and that rattled my cage. I could handle sleeping with him—it was how bad I played the hand that bothered me. In poker-speak, I was “on tilt”—letting emotions affect my judgement. Another hand passed, and the focus shifted to Vivian for a bit, and I thought I had settled down. I managed to play well enough again that a couple of the others told me, “Nice hand,” getting out of a tight spot with no counter-stakes. So far, so good.
Helena had warned me, “If you want to bluff, the trick is to play the next hand exactly how you played the winning hand.” So I thought I had my strategy down. Unfortunately, I forgot another crucial piece of advice. Don’t bluff against a dangerous flop. I had a jack and queen of spades as my hole cards, and the flop came up ace, queen, ten of diamonds. Still too many bets at the table, and dummy that I am, I kept chasing for a king and praying no one had a flush. And then it was Neil versus me.
There’s a great exchange in an old W. C. Fields movie, My Little Chickadee. A guy asks over cards: “Is this a game of chance?”
And Fields shoots back: “Not the way I play it, no.”
I was in way over my head. Bluff. Keep bluffing.
I could barely say my raise, it sounded so silly in my ears. The too cute lingo. And such a request in front of a group of people.
“I think I want you to find Nemo for me.”
Like the first game, there was an eruption of clapping and whistles like a television audience at a sitcom.
Wicked grin on Neil’s face. “Oh, I think we can do better than that. I think you’ve got nothing but that necklace around your pretty neck, Teresa. I’ll see you and raise you a rug burn.”
Ayako folded. Time to see the cards.
Flush. He beat me.
I don’t know why I didn’t fold earlier. I knew he couldn’t be bluffing, I knew it. I shouldn’t have taken him on. But you wanted this, didn’t you? Come on, you didn’t lose, you made yourself a gift—
“I’ll just get my coat,” said Neil, reaching for his wallet and car keys.
“What for?” I said. “You’re not done here.”
Surprised, amused smiles around the table.
“You don’t want to blow out the candles?” he asked, offering me the safer way out. I was touched that he was a gentleman about it. I still couldn’t be sure Helena hadn’t disobeyed my instruction not to fill him in about me, but I wanted to believe this was Neil’s personal chivalry, not acting on orders.
A voice, my own but still a stranger’s, said boldly, “I’ll go neon.”
6
Going neon. Doing it there for everyone to see. By now, of course, I had already performed sex acts for an audience, but the audience changed each time. And the electric charge of nerves over doing intimate things on display never lost its intensity. I was on edge with anticipation that this time it would be different, going all the way, abandoning all my inhibitions for the ultimate act.
As Neil came out from behind the table to gather me in his arms, I had the stroke of luck that his body hid my involuntary shiver. I could feel my honey sliding down the inside of my thighs, already so wet for him. It was surreal, me standing there, naked, and this dark-complexioned man striding purposefully around a card table while a group of people watched, their eyes not knowing whether to fix on me or on the incredible throbbing hard-on above Neil’s strong, athletic legs.
His hand reached out and felt huge against my mound even before I tasted his breath and felt the invasion of his soft tongue. “Uhhh,” I moaned, because three fingers penetrated me all at once and began to play, and shit, I got to tell you I lifted my leg to wrap around his waist and let him slide them further in. I wished I could have melted into his chest, so wide and firm against my crushed tits, his mouth coming down to suck in one of my nipples. But before my hands could grip more chunks of back muscle, he flipped me cruelly around to take me from behind.
I made a cry of half-hearted protest as I heard the creak and scrape of chairs being pushed back, men and women coming around to flank Neil on either side, his huge black dick pointing north, and his hand, oh, Jesus, his hand cupping me again. My pussy lips on display for everyone, wet sopping pussy for everyone to see how open I was getting, and the fear and the thrill competed simultaneously for my mental attention. They could bang me, one after another, couldn’t they? And I wouldn’t complain. They’re gazing at my crack, and just this alone was making me so wet.
“Give it…to me,” I rasped.
And in answer, a tree trunk was shoved between my legs. The cone of a missile ramming in and yeah, give it to me, give it to me, as I bent over the card table, palms flat on the green felt. Neil’s cock slid out of me, and all I could think as I shut my eyes tight is they see me. They see my pussy lips gripping him, willing him back in, and it was a pornographic movie in my head, visualising my own vagina and Neil’s penis in and out of me, uh, uh, uh. I opened my eyes and stared into the calm black almonds of Ayako, keeping her place at the table. She reached out and took the weight of one of my tits in her small, white hand, fingering the nipple, teasing it hard, and then I lost total control, both my hands shooting back to grip Neil’s thighs as I came.
But we weren’t done, not by a long shot. His great hands lifted me under my ass and my thighs, urging me to get on the table and lie on my side. His arm hooked under my leg right under the kneecap, and now everyone had a spectacular view of me dripping for him. I could smell my own juices, and it was beyond being stripped, shamed, embarrassed. All the way to a cathartic liberation. The warm head of his cock nudged just once, one exploratory push against my lips below, and I couldn’t hide the exquisite torture on my face. I heard him whisper over me, a simple, brutal command. “Play with yourself.”
“Stick it in,” I whispered back.
“Play with yourself first.”
I did, just as I did for him that first night. My middle finger slid down to my clit and worked a rhythm, knowing my mouth was open, my eyes straying to each fascinated expression. Cahill a mirror of my awe, Ayako looking at me as if I were a beautiful oil painting, Vivian, coolly detached, wishing she were the centre of attention. George was in the background. No one seemed to pay attention to the fact that he was jerking off in his chair. Poor George, always forgotten. For a brief instant we made eye contact. I felt a sympathetic urge to give him something, to somehow share this with him, and my mouth enunciated the words, do it, just before I shut them tight at another orgasm.
When I opened them again, a creamy torrent of semen had flown from his cock o
nto the rug, his penis very red in his fist. And still pointing up. Everyone ignored him except me. And Ayako, who gave him a passing glance, seemingly trying to decide something. Then her attention came back to me. Vivian eyed Neil’s cock greedily. Helena had told me that she’d paid almost twice the price to have him as her escort a couple of times, and both times he had turned down gratifying her for extra cash at the end of the evening. She had never won a rug burn from him in a game. Never. She would have loved it to be her on that card table.
And Giradeau. Watching me. Waiting for his silent message, the one he predicted I’d give him when Neil fucked me.
“Play with your pussy,” Neil chanted in a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah!” I kept chanting back. “Oh, yeah!”
I felt Neil getting harder inside me, and as he thrust, it wasn’t a reward for my obedience so much as giving in to his own urges. Hard shockwaves of brown cock slipping in and out of me, bam, bam, bam, his balls jostling up against my ass as I took him all the way to the hilt. My breasts jiggling with his momentum, and Neil saying loud enough for all to hear, “You want them to suck your tits, don’t you? You want them to suck your tits?”
“Y—you’re going to split me!”
“You want them to suck your tits, don’t you?”
“Y—yes.”
“Say it.”
“I want them to suck my tits!” I said in a little girl voice.
Neil must have given them a look of permission, me lost within myself, because there was a sudden vampire scramble towards me.
Ayako, the closest, reached me first and took my right nipple into her mouth, sucking me like ice cream. Cahill pawed my left breast hungrily, his tongue flicking an orbit around the areola before his lips came down, and damn it, I made eye contact with Giradeau. It was purely accidental, but no doubt the fool would make a big deal out of it.
Not that it mattered really. Because as I lay on the table, being fucked by Neil, the others sucking my breasts, the only thing I had on was that gold necklace from Tiffany’s that Daniel had given me.
Neil rammed away, such wondrous thunder as the base of his cock hit my gates, his hand reaching around to play with my clit a couple of times, my fingers covering his and guiding him, and as he thrust on and on, and the others sucked my nipples, I felt like the card table was a raft drifting on an open calm lake, hands slippery on my skin with the film of my own perspiration.
I began to shudder and go into spasms, the hands gripping me, some comforting, some merely wanting to feed off the energy of my orgasm. Cahill’s bold hand came around and its knife edge sank into the crack of my buttocks. Different mouths on my tits, me playing with myself, this beautiful man’s cock inside me, and I shook and shuddered, coming violently and thinking, See my pussy, see my beautiful pussy as I take him in, watch me come, watch me—
Daniel. I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see George anymore either.
Neil thickening inside me.
Ayako close to my ear: “Come on her belly, Neil, please.” She sounded so distant, so far away.
The mouths were gone from my nipples, and I keened in grief over their sudden absence. Neil’s hands moving me again, posing me, on my back now and thrusting harder as I cupped my jiggling tits and felt Neil shoot a powerful burst inside me once and then he pulled himself free, sliding his cock along the wet mat of my fur and shooting again. Shooting a third time. His spunk actually felt more than warm, as if it were cooked in that cannon-size dick he’d been ramming into me. And oh, he was still jetting across my stomach like spirals of confetti.
I was panting hard. I looked into his eyes for what was there, and he wore the strangest expression. It wasn’t conquest or self-congratulatory lust. Something else there, close to a genuine lover’s admiration. He’d take me home tonight. I knew that for sure. Fucking me—and fucking me here—was all too easy, as if his sexuality expressed in this room were a mask. I saw it in his eyes, how he seemed to say: “You wanted it like this, but I can take you higher—alone.”
I was still floating down. I closed my eyes and did a rag doll surrender. Sticky. Sweaty. Hot. Dirty. I felt the tug of his hand. He didn’t want to leave me while the rest of the players stared on as if I were a traffic accident. I felt a head rush and almost swooned, and his protective arm came around my waist to hold me balanced. I saw that George had creamed himself again watching us.
“Show’s over, guys,” Neil said with a modest grin. And he led me to the washroom off the lounge area.
After we washed in turn and got dressed, he never even asked me, and I didn’t suggest it either. We merely walked side by side out to his Ford Focus.
His place. One of the corners of Hackney starting to get gentrified. No pastels here. Definitely a guy place, not that there was a jockstrap lying around or a Page Three calendar, but definitely masculine energy. One of those monochrome landscape prints of New York, pre-9/11 with the Twin Towers, framed on the wall. The lounge furniture seemed to have been bought as an ensemble, good-quality dark wood right down to the old-fashioned settee with wooden armrests. A copy of The Stage lay discarded on the coffee table next to one of those Daffy Duck mugs you can buy from the Warner Bros. stores (had to be a gift).
“What’ll you have?” he asked. “I keep a reasonably well-stocked bar. You want rum? Gin?”
“I’d better stick to white wine,” I said. “I’d like to keep my head clear after that scene. I don’t know how we top that little performance.”
“I’m an actor,” he laughed. “We’ll improvise. White wine, it is.”
I looked around while he opened the bottle. The rowing machine in the corner, the Hugo Boss jacket left folded on the back of his desk chair.
“So,” I said with a mischievous grin, “this is escort money.”
He looked at me with mild surprise then grinned and shook his head. He tossed up a hand to say okay, you got me. He recovered well. I suppose it couldn’t be the first time he’d had to fess up to it.
“Somebody told you.”
“Sorry. Somebody did. It wasn’t Helena, believe me.” I didn’t like lying—okay, I don’t really mind lying, but I knew confidentiality was a two-way street. If Helena insisted her escorts be discreet, it was important she be the very model of discretion. And if I weren’t playing a client, Helena would have no business telling me.
“I do. That’s not Helena’s style.” He handed me a glass and said, “You don’t look like you have a problem with it.”
“I don’t. I have a couple of friends who use them, and they tell me that with male escorts, unlike the girl kind, a date doesn’t have to mean sex.”
“That’s right, it doesn’t.”
“But sometimes it does,” I said, moving closer to him.
“I’m very much on my own time now,” he whispered, and he set his drink down on a coaster and put his arms around my waist. We fell effortlessly into dancing to the music on the stereo.
“Why do you do it?” I asked.
He offered a small self-deprecating chuckle. It was a nice relaxed sound that with his bass pipes sent a shiver down my spine. I could listen to that voice of his for ages.
“Why do I do it?” he echoed. “Well, I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’m beginning to think maybe I’m not God’s gift to theatre after all. I love acting. I love plays. But there’s such cronyism in the theatre world, and it’s so hard to break in. And then when you think you’ve had your big break, you learn you’ve got to prove yourself all over again. And they’re so bloody negative in this country! They’ll piss on the five commercials you’ve done, that you’re not Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. They’ll find something. After a while, you don’t mind the struggle, you don’t even mind the snickers when you say you’re actually an actor, but I do insist on living comfortably.”
“And the escort dates give you some spending cash.”
“Hell, no! They pay for this whole bloody apartment these days. Sad to say but it’s the acting gigs that give me
spare change. Wish it were the other way around, but that’s life.”
“Who’s your little pet?” I asked.
I pointed to the black ball sitting on a nine-inch stand next to his computer. Jeez. Another webcam. Was I the only one who hadn’t bothered to run out and plunk good money down for one of these? We were one step away from science fiction movies where everyone talked back and forth to monitors.
“A gift from a friend,” said Neil.
“Let me guess: a woman friend?”
“A good friend,” he said, nuzzling my neck. “That’s not really important, is it? Forget that. Here, let me show you.” He went to boot up his computer.
“Boys with toys,” I said. “If I see a subscription to Stuff magazine, you know I’m outta here.”
“I’m not that sad,” he countered.
But I went over to the coffee table, dug under The Stage and picked up his copy of King magazine with Mya on the cover, arching my eyebrow and giving him a playful, accusing glance.
“Forget that,” he said, “come here and look at this. It’s amazing, state of the art.” I went over, and his arm reclaimed my waist, his free hand clicking away on the mouse. “Check it out, check it out—”
I heard a tiny faint whrr and giggled as the black ball panned and tilted. Neil steered us to the left, and the camera followed. Back to the right, and it moved with us. On the screen, a high-resolution square of video reflected our expressions of childlike wonder at the ball’s cleverness.
“There’s face-tracking software so it moves with you—within limits, of course. It’s great for when I’m practising monologues and stuff.”
“That’s all you’ve used it for, huh?”
“It’s good for home security.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
I began to strip in front of the camera. On the tiny screen, there were the slightest jump cuts and ghosts as my body moved. And then I got to work on him. He let me undress him, unbuttoning his shirt from behind so that the screen offered an exquisite brown chest that begged for my fingertips. Yes, I’d seen it before but never tired of the view. Unbuckling his belt, undoing his trouser button, slipping my fingers into his underwear to grip his penis, my hand jerking his cock with a millisecond delay.
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