It was years ago, I was young then, and the very thought of going to a lesbian club had sent me into a spasm of fear and anxiety. The two friends who were taking me to Pink had promised that there was no pressure to do or be anything, although they had not taken into account that, in a mask, the pressure doesn't come from without, but from some untapped source within.
I took a long look at myself in the mirror, my other self, the masked self, and slinked cat-like back to the living-room. I clawed at the air.
'Sssss,' I hissed.
'It suits you.'
'It's to hide my feet.'
He made a hook with his finger.
'Come here,' he said.
I rolled my shoulders as I edged on all fours towards him, nose twitching. I arched my back. I purred as I slithered my paws up his legs and stood, resting my palms on his knees.
He nipped the sides of my knickers between his long fingers and thumbs. I sighed with pleasure and the air flew like a small bird from my chest. He gracefully, as if removing peel from an orange, slid the fabric over my bottom and down my legs. He took my thighs and nuzzled my pubes with his nose. Instantly I was wet. Instantly I caught my musky bouquet, piquant as an animal in heat. The mask makes me feel wanton. The drums beat louder. He turned me around and I dropped into his lap, legs open. He made me comfortable and a single finger stroked between the lips of my vagina in a soothing motion. I wriggled.
'This sweater's awful, it's all scratchy,' I complained.
'A present from my mother...'
'Can't live with them, can't be born without.'
'Cynic,' he said, and I laughed.
'There is something incredibly sexy about a girl in a mask laughing.'
'I shall write that down,' I told him.
'You'll forget it.'
'I don't forget anything.'
I nearly fell off the chair as he leaned forward to pull the fisherman's sweater over his head. I dragged at his shirt, he took it off, and it was cosier when we laid back in the same position, my spine angled across his chest, the pad of his finger moving between my legs, softly, like you might stroke a sleeping kitten. He investigated my breasts through my bra, the faint swell of my tummy, my sticky-out hipbones.
'Your BMI is in the first percentile.'
'Does that mean I'm too thin?'
'No, it means everyone else is too fat.'
He eased me away from his chest and removed my bra, placing it on the table beside the chair, one cup tucked in the other. I adore being naked, and I adore being naked in the mask even more. I laid back and he continued stroking me, his right hand between my legs, his left inspecting my breasts. I wondered if he were feeling for lumps. I didn't ask. I wouldn't have wanted to know.
'I love your breasts,' he said.
'More than my feet?'
I felt his chest vibrate and knew he was smiling. I liked being explored in this way, anonymous in the mask, submissive to his touch. His palm shuffled over my waist.
'I love your hips.' He mused for a moment. 'They're like sails.'
His tongue swept over my ear and his free hand brushed my scalp.
'I love your hair, it's...autumnal.'
'When all the leaves are falling and it starts to get cold?'
'Noo,' he replied, stretching the word. 'It's like a rainbow, no, a kaleidoscope. It's not brown or russet.' He sounded like a doctor listing symptoms. 'There are flecks of bronze and gold, red and copper.'
'It can't make up its mind,' I said.
His right hand left the place where it belonged; he twisted me to one side like a wrestler and used both hands to pull the hair away from the back of my neck. He had discovered my tattoo and paused like he was looking at a Rothko in a gallery.
'Do you like it?' I asked.
'It's unique.'
'Hardly.'
'Why's it hidden?'
'Why not?'
He brushed my hair back, straightened my mask, and looked into my eyes.
'Green,' he said.
'Unlike my jacket.'
He laughed as we got comfortable again. I knew he would be puzzling over the tattoo, the whys and why there, those questions people ask, and he already knew me well enough to know there was no point in asking. His right hand slipped over the contours of my body, his finger coming to rest back in the moist delta of curly pubes. His other hand stroked my hair, my chin, my shoulder, the length of my arm, a poem on his lips:
cranium, mandible, clavicle
scapula, sternum, ribs
humerus, radius, carpals
metacarpals and phalanges
He lifted my hand and kissed my little finger.
'Is it going to be better now?'
'It'll take another two or three months.'
I sighed. 'How boring,' I said, and he changed the subject.
'How long have you been here, Katie, in this flat?'
'Two or three months,' I answered; an echo.
'It's really super,' he said, and I thought: what an old-fashioned word; I would have said marvellous or wonderful. 'Where were you before?' he then asked.
'I thought you knew?'
'I can guess, Kensington, I'd say, maybe Notting Hill?'
'Down by the river, actually, in Chelsea. I had a little garret, you know, the poet thing.'
'Why did you move?'
'Interesting question...'
'And?'
'Hold on, I'm thinking.' I glanced down at his hand. 'This isn't the best time for thinking.'
He had cupped my breast and, like a plumber, his right hand was fiddling with the leak between my legs. He kissed my cheek below the mask and I continued.
'I needed a different landscape, you know, like Emily Brontë, she had the moors; or Daphne du Maurier with Cornwall. Did you know, it was her grandfather, George, who wrote Trilby.'
'I haven't read it.'
'I have, twice, actually. He invented Svengali. You remind me of him.'
'Me?'
'Yes.'
'In what way?'
'You must read the book.'
'I've got a lot to catch up on.'
'Me, too, there's never enough time.'
'Time for what?'
'For anything...writing, Twitter, working as a waitress at stupid events. I'm trying to write a blog, so the whole world knows how interesting I am, which I'm not. I've got, like, a million half-written stories; the emails keep coming, more every day. I worked it out. I'm going to have to live for 200 years and I'll still never catch up.'
'Poor baby,' he said.
I had turned to look into his eyes. I didn't want to talk about what I did, where I lived, why I had moved. I lowered my head and our lips met. He was a good kisser, a give-and-take kisser; relaxed, leisurely, kissing like someone eating melon at a picnic. I sucked his finger when he put it in my mouth and he wriggled the digit back between my legs. Life has few perfect moments. This moment was perfect, naked in a mask, his mouth roaming the nerve endings of my mouth, the pad of his finger nursing that mysterious place, so precious and vital it makes me believe that it isn't all random, all chaos, that there is some universal purpose to our lives; to everything.
Perspiration ran off me as if I had become a bubbling stream. The monkeys in my mind were still. I threw back my head and wedged my legs across the arms of the chair, his finger a hovering presence over my clitoris. I moved languidly like a dancer at two in the morning, like a leaf caught in the breeze. That small fist was opening and closing inside my belly. My breath raced. Contractions ran through me; it felt as if my insides were a length of wet cloth growing tighter as it was wrung out. The drummer in Hotel Costes filled the room with pulsing heartbeats.
I had a fleeting vision of myself in the black mask spread naked with the flame of my clitoris glowing and erupted like a burst balloon filled with water, the arc of silky discharge squirting in a shower of raindrops down my leg. I was proud and ashamed, I always had those twin feelings, and happy, too, happy in a way outside the normal
register, like the first daffodil of spring can make you happy, or a snatch of Bach or Bizet.
My breath came in gasps. A snake slithered up my spine. Aftershocks raced down my legs, the ripples a flowing tide. My heart was bursting. Liquids flooded from me. I felt the same and different, my body retuned, recalibrated, replete. At the moment of orgasm you are living fully and totally in the present. An orgasm is anticipated, like the sunrise on a new day, and unexpected, like winning a prize in a competition you can't recall having entered. Time freezes and there isn't a feeling of loss, a void, a little death, but a reminder that of all human activity, none is more perfect. The orgasm is my driving force, the random consequence of meeting a stranger in a bar or at a ball and taking him home to warm the bed sheets.
The music switched to the next track. I turned in the chair so that I could kiss him again. I squeezed one of his nipples hard enough for him to recoil in pain and our teeth clashed. He bit my neck and I squirmed down across his chest until my knees touched the carpet. He went to pull me back, but I wriggled free. I loosened his belt, his jeans, his boxers. I pulled off his shoes, desert boots suitable for wandering in far away places. He was hard and I sensed his body relax as I licked the length of his cock. It was pretty, playful, the head pink, the column creamy white with thin blue veins like spider thread. I ran my tongue along the groove; the taste was feta and olives, Mediterranean, and I wanted to feel his sperm on my face.
I often ask myself why I like being down on my knees in this way and assume the appeal was grafted on to my DNA by the repetition seven days a week during the school year in chapel. With my bottom resting on my heels and my elbows on the ledge of the pew in front of me, I stared at the life-sized carving of Saint Sebastian, the young Centurion martyred for his love of Christ by a flight of arrows. As I reached puberty and the first unexpected tingles began to prick my nipples, the statue began to appear to me less as an example of sacrifice than a symbol of masculine virility, a counterweight to the convent's toxic cocktail of oestrogen and exploding hormones. With his strong thighs half hidden by a toga, muscular chest, heavy lips, sharp cheekbones and dreamy eyes, Saint Sebastian looked more like a lead guitarist from a progressive band than a Christian martyr; more contemporary than historic. In my bed at lights out, alone for a moment with my own thoughts, the whittled saint with the woodworm holes drilled into his toes and sandals became an object of desire and also absurdity when I recalled the allegory of the sculptor, who makes religious images by day and kneels before them to pray at night. It's hardly surprising that I always preferred Camus to Sartre.
Tom had slid forwards in the chair, bettering the angle for my assault. I sucked his cock in the same steady way that he had nursed my clitoris, my lips moving slowly, gently, back and forth. His fingers locked at the sides of my head. I paused to nibble the sleek helmet before swallowing it down once more, sucking and licking, pausing to give my jaws a rest, and drawing the soft outer skin between my palms. I sucked his balls, one, then the other and plunged his cock back down my throat. I gagged momentarily, taking the entire length beyond my tonsils, then out again, up and down, the music far away, the light changing as the sun slipped from the wintry sky.
His grip grew tighter. I thought he was going to come and anticipated the stream of his semen pouring down my throat. But he stopped suddenly, grabbed the scruff of my neck and pulled me to my feet. He kept hold of me in this way, like a caveman grasping me by the hair. We crossed the room to my bedroom where he tossed me across the saffron sheets christened the night before.
I laid back, head on the pillow. He straddled me backwards, dipped between my legs, slid his palms beneath the cheeks of my bottom and his tongue oozed back into the soggy pool of my vagina. His cock swayed above like a battering ram at the gates of the castle keep and I opened my mouth to allow him entry. The pleasure of having his tongue tending my clit and his cock in my throat was almost too much to bear and I felt a spasm like a hot needle pass through me. I was like a thirsty creature at a salt lick lapping away, my dribble keeping his cock oiled, my throat expanding and contracting as I gulped it down. His tongue parted the cowling about my clitoris like the prow of a ship furrowing the sea. The little bulb was throbbing, and I had that rare feeling of transcendence, that my whole body had become one erogenous zone, a feeling bathed in the miraculous and sublime.
My heart beat faster. I licked and stippled, a painter with a fine brush. I sucked the bulbous head like you suck an ice cube. I bit down, his body grew tense and he withdrew, the motion jerky, unexpected, and I would have cried bitter tears but he slid round and eased up inside me, lips on my lips, his chest pinning me down. The spasms, paused like a video, started again. I arched my back, pushed down with my heels and gasped as his cock reached places never reached before, the membranes vibrating with unfamiliar sensations, my muscles firming and softening like a sea anemone swallowing a giant fish.
He had been silent all the time I was sucking him off, but now he started to pant like a runner at the end of a race. I could feel the tension across his shoulders, in his loins. I could feel myself coming and held back. The feeling started in my chest, ran down through my tummy into my womb and I roared as a climax like a tidal wave gushed through my body.
Tom was overcome by my spasm. He tensed, slipped from me as he was about to climax and, just as I had wanted, as I had telegraphed into his mind, the creamy stuff like milk from an urn poured over my belly, my breasts, my face, a long stream of semen, sticky as glue, body hot and tasting of bitter chocolate. He held on to his cock like it was the short handle on a whip, pumping out every last drop and I licked it up like the greedy girl I am.
He dropped to one side, snuggled under my arm and lay there panting, fondling my breasts; two gladiators given their freedom. He was puffing for breath.
'You're amazing, Katie.'
He turned my nipples in his fingers, then rubbed them with the flat of his palm. We were quiet for a long time, dozing. He stroked my hip bone. I loved the feeling, that sense that time was suspended. The shadows had folded into darkness and the mirror on the closet looked like a grey door that would lead to another dimension.
After making love, there's nothing like making love again, slowly, idly, like walking without a destination, or swimming in a warm sea. I had some bread and eggs, some Comté from Borough Market. I'd make a cheese omelette and open the bottle of red wine I'd brought back from Spain and had been saving for a special occasion. I would have just one glass, I decided, and keep refilling his glass. I wanted to know more about Tom Bridge. I wanted to know everything, and I wanted to wake up with him next to me in the morning.
When the telephone rang in the next room, it sounded like a car bomb and the vision shattered like shrapnel through glass. I could just make out Lizzie leaving a message, and I suddenly had a cramp in my foot. He slid his arm from under my neck.
'Do you need to get it?' he asked.
I shook my head as if trying to shake away the sound. He turned on the lamp.
'I have to go,' he said, a sigh in his voice. 'I have a dinner tonight with some colleagues. It was arranged ages ago.'
I didn't say anything. He stroked my cheek. The phone message came to an end.
'Can we have breakfast together?' he then asked and I shrugged.
'I don't eat breakfast.'
'Can we not eat breakfast together?' he insisted; his eyes above me were bright, even with the light from the lamp behind him. 'And can I take you to lunch?'
'I'll have to check my diary.'
'With my sister?'
'Your sister.' I thought for a moment. 'Is she going to inspect me?'
'Probably.'
'I don't know if it's a good idea. Sisters don't like me.'
'I can't believe that.' He bent down and kissed the tip of my nose. 'I'm sorry I have to go.'
He swung around and stepped away. As he left the room, I was struck by the ivory white of his round bottom between the tan on his broad back and strong
legs that could have been carved by the same sculptor who had shaped Saint Sebastian. He returned dressed, the tail of his scarf over one shoulder. He sat on the edge of the bed. The smell of sex in the room was overpowering, an aphrodisiac; the devil's perfume. I felt bereft and tried not to show it.
'I'm sorry,' he said again, and I sealed his lips with my finger, something men never like.
'Don't apologise. I'd promised to see a friend anyway.'
He knew I was lying and I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew.
It was a pact.
7
Stucchevole
From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier's novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can only have slipped by the censors by its sly subtlety and incisive examination of the human condition.
Set in the Paris Bohemia of the 1850s, it is in Trilby where we meet Svengali, a name from fiction that has found its way into the language, like quixotic, Scrooge and Catch 22. Svengali is a music teacher and would be impresario with a perfect ear and an eye for the main chance. Trilby O'Ferrall works as a laundress and artists' model. She is young, pretty and vulnerable. All the men she meets fall in love with her, which forms the body of the book. When she enters the orbit of Svengali, he becomes obsessed with making her his protégée and a singing star; a Diva.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 7