by Jenna Ellis
I squeeze my lips together. This is torture. Exquisite torture. To have a gorgeous naked man leaning over me, telling me to relax, when every fibre of my being is urging me to lever back on my knees and impale myself on him.
But God, his hands feel good.
He’s leaning right over me now. The hair on his thigh tickles my leg.
He only has to move slightly and he will be able to see all of me. I fight the urge to turn over with every ounce of self-control I possess. I ache to be below him. I picture it, as if it’s actually happening, and yet, despite how close he is, I can’t do it. I don’t have the nerve.
I can’t face being accused of overstepping the mark, or of throwing myself at him, like he did the other night. I know instinctively that if he wants anything more than a massage to happen, then it will have to come from him. I sense he knows this, too. He might as well have put me in chains.
And then he moves down.
He leans against my buttocks, flattening his hands against them, pressing, kneading. It’s so intimate – so shocking – and yet . . . On the other hand, maybe this is what any professional masseur would do. Perhaps he gets this done all the time.
But all I can think is: How is he feeling? Does he want me, too? Is he staring at me now, growing hard? Blood pounds in me. If I were a cartoon, there would be kettles of steam coming out of my ears.
His fingers are lower now, splayed out against my hips. His thumbs massage the crease of my thighs and buttocks, slipping inwards, just inches from me. I can’t breathe. I am inwardly trembling, my nerve endings screaming.
Is he going to touch me?
Is he going to touch me where I need him to?
I can’t bear the tension. I feel myself aching, screaming.
I can’t believe this is happening. He’s intimately massaging me. We’re millimetres away from this straying into proper sex. But then he breaks the crackling, sizzling silence.
‘So, I hear you met my wife.’
It’s a statement, not a question. His tone betrays nothing of what he feels about this fact. We could be chatting in the kitchen. Even more alarming is that his tone doesn’t give any indication that he’s noticed what he’s doing to me.
‘Uh-hnn,’ I croak. I’m breathless. Dying of heat, unable to breathe, uncontrollably turned on, but now we’re talking about Marnie. His wife.
I picture her watching us, like she watched me dance for her, but that somehow only ups the sexual tension crackling over me, like I’m live with electricity.
What has she said? Did she tell Edward that she dressed me up? That he almost caught us together? Edward is a sucker for a girl all dressed up.
I think of her note and of the vibrator she gave me, and how she assured me it was our little secret. Was she telling the truth?
But I can’t think about Marnie as his hands now move down, massaging lower, but somehow this is even more of a turn-on. His thumbs circle my inner thighs – not somewhere I ever thought of as an erogenous zone, but suddenly he touches somewhere halfway down on the inner edge of my thigh and it’s like he’s found the key to somewhere I never knew existed. Who knew I had an erogenous zone that specific, right there? I gasp, astounded, and I know that I’m going to come and nothing is going to stop it.
I’m trembling. I can’t help myself. He must know what he’s doing to me, but I don’t care. I can’t think. I can’t concentrate on anything apart from his thumb on my thigh.
‘She told me you were really helpful. Thank you for that. Poor Marnie. She’s got a lot on.’
Is that all she said? I can’t tell, but I don’t care. His thumb is still circling, higher and higher, the erogenous zone stretching with his touch.
‘It was nothing,’ I manage in a mumble. But it wasn’t nothing. THIS isn’t nothing.
I want to scream, but instead, wide-eyed and staring forward, on total red alert, eyes popping, I stop breathing as his thumbs reach the top of my inner thighs. I tremble violently in the silence that follows, waiting for the final millimetre, waiting for him to discover how wet I am. For him to make this moment flip from the pretend to the real. I’m nanoseconds away from pushing myself onto this thumb. I ache and strain for the release I know will come.
But then his hands move away. He grabs both of my thighs with both of his hands and, in a powerful, sudden movement, runs them down the length of my legs in one glorious, smooth wet stroke. It’s so unexpected and so strong, it’s as if he’s pulling the orgasm out of me. I open my mouth and gasp, my head exploding in a thousand stars as his hands move down past the backs of my knees and my shins.
He does the same thing to my legs three times and then flicks the sweat off the bottom of my soles, as if he’s flicking away energy, and each time my orgasm rolls over me like a wave. A giant tsunami of a wave.
‘There,’ he say, satisfied. ‘Better?’
Does he know what’s just happened? Does he know that he’s just given me the most extraordinarily intense orgasm? Of a kind I’ve never, ever had before?
I can’t move. My mouth presses dumbly into the towel.
‘That’s me done,’ he adds. His voice is hard to read. ‘You look less tense already.’
He’s got to be kidding, right?
That’s it? Just like that, he’s going? Is he really going to pretend he doesn’t know what just happened?
I turn slightly and see him grab the towel. He ties it around his waist and tucks the end in, before turning towards me, but he can’t hide the huge bulge beneath the towel. My throat is completely dry, my insides clenching with desire. I just want to rip the towel off. I just want to see his huge erection. I want to hold it, lick it, taste it, fuck it. The proof is right there, but so out of bounds.
‘Take your time,’ he tells me. ‘You can stand it more than me.’
And then he opens the door and he’s gone, in a blast of cold air.
I hit my forehead on the wooden slats.
43
The next morning I’m still trying to work out what happened. I’ve been in a headlock of confusion all night. On the one hand, there’s the quite overwhelming fact that Edward Parker massaged me naked in the sauna and gave me the best orgasm of my life. And on the other, that actually, as far as he’s concerned, nothing happened. Except everything did. My head goes: we had sex, no we didn’t, we had sex, no we didn’t. It’s exhausting.
As I make my way downstairs, I glance at the nudey bronze man and the framed artworks on the wall and try and put my finger on how it can be that Marnie and Edward Parker live like this. How can they function normally with such a crazy undercurrent of sexuality going on all the time?
But then, maybe I’m just not used to Americans. Maybe my Englishness makes me naturally more uptight. Maybe their art holds the key. Maybe their sensuality is just part of them, part of their artistic nature, and I’m just picking up on it, like the cultural novice I am.
What is increasingly clear to me is that they live their lives on a different level from anyone I’ve met before. People like Dad and Scott and Tiff are of an altogether different class. And it’s not just to do with money. It’s to do with an aesthetic. The mundane level of life that my people settle for and call happiness isn’t even on the bottom of the Parkers’ radar of enjoyment.
I hear voices as I approach the kitchen.
‘There you are,’ Marnie beams, as I come into the kitchen. She marches over to me and claps her hands, then gently strokes my cheeks, back to her usual tactile, lovely Marnie ways. Her eyes sparkle as they stare into mine, as I try to cover my shock. I can’t help but smile at her.
I had no idea she was back in the house. Was she here last night when I was in the sauna with Edward? I couldn’t find him, after I’d come out of the sauna and doused myself in a shockingly cold shower. I guess he must have gone to one of the ‘red rooms’. His study, perhaps. Or maybe he was with Marnie all along. This house is just so weird. The way it can swallow people up and hide them.
I glance ov
er to where he’s sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping a coffee. He munches a piece of toast and doesn’t look up from his iPad. Just seeing him sitting there in a white T-shirt makes me flush. I can’t stop thinking about his naked bum and his hands. Oh my God. His hands.
‘Morning,’ I say to them both.
It’s the first time I’ve seen Marnie since I danced for her, and even though she’s being so friendly now, I can’t help remembering her laughing as I scuttled away along the corridor in my half-undress, tripping over myself. I’m determined to try and regain my professional status with her. She’s not remotely embarrassed about it, so I guess neither should I be. Certainly her wide-eyed, innocent grin betrays nothing of what happened between us the other night.
‘You’re OK?’ she checks.
As I meet her eye, I’m pretty convinced her comment is not loaded and that she has absolutely no idea what happened in the sauna last night. But why would she? Edward didn’t know either, did he?
‘Uh-huh. Fine, thanks,’ I reply, with a deceptive smile. This is all just so weird. I cover up how freaked out I feel by opening the cupboard where the cereal boxes are kept.
She’s wearing a blue leather pencil skirt cinched in at the waist and a printed T-shirt with a kind of rock band-thing slogan on it and a collarless leather jacket. She has heavily made-up eyes and pale lips, and she looks like she could step right into a magazine.
She grabs her coffee and takes a quick sip. She’s obviously in a hurry.
‘So, will you get there at around eight?’ she says to Edward, going over to the breakfast bar. She leans down behind him and kisses his cheek, expertly commanding his attention.
From behind the door of the open cereal cupboard I spy on them. I realize, with a jolt, that I’ve never actually seen them together before. I haven’t let myself imagine it, but now that I see them here, in this mundane domestic setting, I see something I hadn’t expected: they’re perfect. Portrait-picture perfect. Side-by-side like this, they’re bizarrely matching: a male and female version of the same beast.
And right here and now, I see what I haven’t wanted to believe, that of course Edward is innocent. He didn’t intend to give me an orgasm at all. It was all my own stupid fantasy again.
He has Marnie. Desirable, sexy, amazing Marnie. Why would he even look at me twice? Why would he even consider me, a lowly employee, in a sexual way at all? I’m a clotheshorse, at best, I remind myself. Someone who drunkenly threw herself at her boss.
He jolts out of reading, and almost subconsciously lifts his hand to stroke the side of Marnie’s head, a gesture so familiar it makes my heart ache.
‘Huh? What’s that?’ he asks.
‘Ed,’ Marnie chastises. ‘I’ve told you ten times . . .’ She stands back, puts her hands on her hips and then rolls her eyes at me, as I shut the cupboard and put the cereal box I’m holding on the counter. ‘The party. You remember. The party. My set . . . ?’
Edward sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose, then pulls an embarrassed face. ‘That’s tonight?’
‘Uh – yeah,’ Marnie says, not amused.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ he swears. He’s genuinely annoyed with himself. ‘Sweetheart, I can’t,’ he implores her.
She cocks her head at him, exasperated and disappointed.
He makes a helpless noise. ‘Lloyd’s in town. We have dinner at the club with the investors. I totally . . .’ He puts his hands out. ‘My screw-up. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.’
I can tell from the crestfallen look on Marnie’s face that it’s a big deal. He stands and takes her in his arms. They fit like a pair of lovebirds. He whispers something in her ear and I watch his hand ruffling the back of her hair, like he loves the feel of her neck. The same hand that massaged my inner thigh, just hours ago . . .
I turn away, my cheeks pink. I tip some cereal into a bowl, but my hand is shaking.
‘I know,’ I hear him say, his voice loud and bright. ‘Why don’t you take Miss Henshaw?’
I look up to see that Edward and Marnie are both staring at me, although Edward’s look is dark and unreadable. ‘You’d like to get out of here for a while, wouldn’t you?’ he asks me.
This is such a loaded question, I don’t know how to answer.
‘Yes, God, yes,’ Marnie says. ‘Of course. Of course you must come.’ She strides confidently towards me with a grin. ‘Poor Miss Henshaw. I feel like we’ve totally neglected you. Like you’re a little bird we haven’t fed. You come with me and let loose a while.’
A caged bird. Is that how she thinks of me?
‘Where?’ I ask.
‘Baby, you’re coming partying with me. We’ll leave Mr Boring behind.’ She playfully sticks her tongue out at Edward, then pushes the bowl away from me. ‘There’s no time to eat. You can grab something in town.’
She links arms with me and sweeps me out of the kitchen. I feel Edward watching us go.
44
I do need to get out of the house. The second we get through the gates, my sense of claustrophobia lifts and I realize that Marnie’s description of me as a caged bird was more accurate than I thought.
At the last minute Mrs Gundred comes with us and we both sit in silence as Marnie talks on her mobile. Gundred’s an odd fish. She rattles away on her laptop and entirely ignores me.
I focus instead on Marnie and, as I hear her talking to a friend on the phone about the party and how she’s been practising her set, I start to feel part of something cool and exciting. I’m so grateful she’s brought me with her. I’m so grateful that I have something to occupy my mind, other than my obsessive thoughts about Edward. As I look at Marnie laughing, watching her reflection in the window of the limo as she laughs, I feel such a huge sense of retrospective shame about my secret orgasm. What would Marnie think if she knew how desirable I find her husband?
I think about Edward at home alone in the house right now. Did he deliberately want me to go with Marnie today so that we wouldn’t be alone together? What would have happened if we were? Would we be able just to hang out together? Pretend nothing happened last night?
As we arrive in the city, I make a resolution. I’m going to stop my stupid, girlish crush on Edward and focus on the future and my role as the Parkers’ nanny. I will avoid any situation in which I’m alone with Edward and keep our relationship strictly formal.
I owe it to Marnie. Sweet, kind, attractive, bubbly, vivacious Marnie. I will not let her down. I won’t do anything to jeopardize her marriage or complicate her relationship with Edward. My crazy, abandoned moment in the sauna with him will remain a secret.
So. Decision time. My crush on Edward stops right here and right now. I’m so excited by my resolve, I almost blurt it out to Marnie.
We stop on a Manhattan street that seems vaguely familiar. And then I remember. This is where Marnie’s shop is. I look expectantly through the limo’s window for the shop front, my attention caught by the crowd of fashionable people on the street. I want to pinch myself. I’m in New York but, unlike the other night when I was meeting Edward, this feels much more real and tangible. I’m actually going to be able to get out and take a look around.
Mrs Gundred leaves the car, without a word to me or Marnie, and walks inside a dark doorway. Is that the lingerie and ‘intimate collection’ emporium? I would have thought someone as uptight as Gundred would be shocked, but she’s obviously something to do with Marnie’s business. I wonder if she’s ever had a go on one of Marnie’s vibrators. I sincerely doubt it.
‘OK, listen up,’ Marnie tells me, when she’s finally finished her phone call with a flurry of ciaos and air-kisses. She takes out a wallet from her handbag and grabs a bundle of notes. ‘Take this,’ she says, pressing it into my palm. ‘My treat. Although don’t tell Edward. Go to José’s boutique in the Meatpacking District. You’ll find it. Everyone knows José’s. Tell André, or JoJo, that I sent you and they’re to find something for you to wear tonight. They’ll understand.’
&n
bsp; I stare at the money in my hand. ‘Really?’
Is this my pay cheque? Is this the money for the first week? I want to ask.
‘Take it, take it,’ Marnie implores, wrapping my fingers around the notes. Then she takes a leather pad from her handbag and rips out a cream page. In fountain pen she writes an address and a mobile number. She smiles at me. She looks like she feels sorry for me. ‘Listen. I want you to take the day. You don’t need to be back here till much later on. I’m going to be tied up all day. Take in the sights. Do the tourist thing, if you want.’ She grins at me.
‘But . . .’
‘Here’s my number and the address of the shop,’ she interrupts, handing me the piece of paper. ‘Call me if you get lost or need anything.’
I stare at the note and the money in my hand. She wants to get rid of me, I can tell, but she’s being so generous, I can’t help grinning.
‘Go go go, little bird.’ She shoes me away, opening the door. ‘Go explore the city. Go have fun.’
And right there and then I realize that I am like a little bird, and at last I’m free.
45
New York is simply dazzling, although I have to admit that it’s quite overwhelming on my own.
The day is so perfect, I hum that Lou Reed song I love on a loop. The sun is shining, the trees are in bloom, the city is breathtakingly beautiful and I can’t help but soak it all up – the street buskers, the pigeons, the yellow cabs, the subway signs. It’s all vaguely familiar from TV and films, but the vibrancy, the feeling that everyone is on the move here, everyone is living an interesting life, a million stories being played out all around me, takes my breath away.
I take a cab to Central Station, just to look inside, then go to the Empire State Building and queue up to ride in the elevator to the top and chat to an old couple from San Francisco who are here on their Golden Wedding anniversary trip. I write a postcard to Ryan and Dad when I’m at the top of the tower looking out over Manhattan, watching the cruise ships in the distance on the Hudson. The Statue of Liberty looks tiny. Like a piece on a board game.