by Primula Bond
‘And you’re a nosy devil.’ I laugh softly and tap my fingertips together. ‘But I may as well confess that it made me a little horny when I was down there with them. It’s hard to disconnect, you know? I hope that will be a good thing, photographically. Look at the way Mr Weinmeyer is feeling his way. He’s blindfolded, you see. Not that he has to do much, just lie back. And she handcuffed him, too.’
Gustav groans and forces himself to sit up. Adjusts his trousers, biting his lip with discomfort. ‘Don’t talk to me about handcuffs.’
I stroke my hand down his crotch. ‘It was all very laid-back and gentle, Gustav. No whips. No punishment. Just her being assertive, and him giving her what she wanted. Do you want to see how it makes me feel even now, just talking about it?’
His eyes flicker back into focus. He watches my hand as if it’s a scorpion about to strike. I laugh again, take his hand prisoner and nestle it between my legs.
‘Whatever went down in that dungeon of theirs, it’s put the very devil into you, young lady.’
I see him bite his lip as he touches me there, see the flare of his nostrils as he realises I’ve gone commando under my pretty dress this evening. I push his fingers firmly into me and close my thighs to trap his hand. All this is going on under the white tablecloth as the snooty waiter comes up with the dessert menu and when he sees what is happening this time he nearly swerves away like a horse refusing a jump.
‘Oh, don’t go away, we’ll take a look at the sweet things now, thank you.’
Gustav fixes the waiter with a steely gaze, all the while hooking his other fingers into me under the table as I have instructed him. He is openly challenging the waiter, who has a visible bulge through his white apron. I struggle not to snort as he hands over the menu twixt finger and thumb as if it, or Gustav, might bite.
‘The sweet things. Right,’ he stammers.
‘Thank you.’
Gustav nods, still keeping the waiter’s gaze, and in the same way as I did he lets his arm speak for him, pumping up and down as he strokes me. I look at the two men, the waiter stumbling backwards to fetch the order and the haughty customer revelling in the idea that he can touch me when the waiter can’t. The hushed, candlelit room full of adultery and secrets wavers slightly as Gustav’s expert fingers set alight the embers of desire that have been glowing quietly all day. I fall against the seat, tip up against his fingers, an invitation for him to go further, push deeper, harder into the wetness.
‘Oh God, I’ve been keeping this lust inside me all day. Can’t we just go home?’
I lean close to him, impaling myself more fully by the movement, and make sure he can hear me amongst the buzz of other voices. I lift the menu to hide us so that I can run my mouth over his.
‘Absolutely not. Have you any idea how exclusive this place is? We’re staying here until I say so.’
I sigh. ‘Mr and Mrs Weinmeyer. It’s their fault I’m so wet. They were all over each other like a couple of teenagers.’
Gustav chuckles quietly. It’s a private chuckle, just for me. ‘Teenagers who play with blindfolds and handcuffs, and have Picasso hanging on their walls?’
‘OK, not teenagers. A very kinky middle-aged billionaire couple.’ I chuckle back, pushing him harder into me. My tongue runs across my mouth as the sensations intensify. ‘Who knows? Maybe they’ve got one or two of those Bailey pussy pictures tucked away somewhere as another sex aid. In the bathroom perhaps or above the marital bed.’
‘Not that you need anything like that to spark you off. You’re insatiable. I’m definitely beginning to think I should keep a closer eye on you.’ He leans closer and takes my face in his free hand, smiles roguishly as he fingers me harder and faster until my body clenches round him and reaches its little zenith, too short, so sharp, so sweet, and I moan into his neck as it happens, shivering and trembling. Tit for tat. Both goaded and reduced to jelly in the space of ten minutes. We’re becoming specialists.
He withdraws his hand slowly, wipes its wetness back over my thigh, and then makes me squeal with shocked laughter as he runs one glistening finger down over the menu, leaving a snail’s trail of my juice down the list of sorbets.
‘What were you going to tell me, Gustav?’ My voice is a tiny mew as I try to gather my wits around me like shredded lace. ‘You wanted me here early to tell me something?’
‘I didn’t want to be apart from you longer than necessary.’
‘My poor baby. Pull the other one.’ I flick at him with my napkin, and a couple of pairs of famous eyes glance at me, then rest on Gustav. Pride swells inside me. He’s well-known here as well as in London, and I’m going to bask in it. ‘You said in your text something about “developments”. So what did you want to tell me?’
He orders our puddings. It’s a different waiter now. This one looks even more wary than the last. Gustav dismisses him and takes my hands. His face goes still, and pale, and serious.
‘I spoke to Pierre this morning.’
‘That’s good. That’s really good.’ My voice is wooden and my hand feels cold even inside his warm grasp. I should have known we couldn’t hold him at arm’s length for long.
He nods gravely. A lock of black hair falls into his eyes. ‘He phoned me just as I was watching you walking away through the Strawberry Fields bit of the park. He wanted to apologise for the shock tactics on New Year’s Eve.’ He smiles, a slightly grim smile which doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘But he couldn’t stop talking about you, either. He thinks you’re a bit of a harridan.’
‘Charming!’ My head swings up. Unease stirs in the pit of my stomach. It seems to be an automatic response whenever Pierre’s name is mentioned. ‘What makes him say that?’
He brings my hand up to his lips and kisses the thin skin on the back. It still makes me shiver. His eyes are watchful between the thick lashes as he plays my fingers across his lips.
‘You gave him a piece of your mind when you were all waiting for me to get home from the airport.’
‘He needed to know that I’m on your side, Gustav. No matter what.’
‘He heard you loud and clear, it seems.’ He continues to rub my hand across his mouth, his dark eyes surveying me as if he’s seeing me in a new light. ‘You seem to understand each other.’
‘Not difficult to understand my message to him. I told him to man up and talk to you.’ I can’t help trembling. My body is still tight and hot from Gustav’s fingers, but my head and heart are cold. I hold my hands up. ‘Look, I’m shaking. Why does this stress me out? Making up with your brother is a good thing, right?’
Gustav sits back and studies me. I want him to take my hands and comfort me. I want him to put his arm around me. A long black shadow has sidled in between us. Two shadows, actually.
‘You’re stressed because of Margot. Because Pierre coming back is optimistic and positive, he and I agreed on that this morning, but he drags after him all that shit, the past, that part of my life you don’t belong to. And you’re stressed because I haven’t done a good enough job of reassuring you.’
I nod. ‘You’re right, as always. That connection he has with her – it flaps around him like a shroud. And how do we know she’s really gone? Where is she now?’
‘It seems she eventually chewed him up and spat him out. That’s all he will say for now. God, if only I could have spared him all that humiliation. She managed to wreak even more havoc on him than she did me, because he was more vulnerable.’ He nods, as if confirming something to himself. ‘I let him down. I’ve done it too many times. I’ve got to be here for him, whenever, wherever.’
I try to smile, but I can’t quite manage it. ‘You said all that in one phone call?’
‘We’ve spoken a couple of times, actually.’ He is silent for a moment. I hear the waiter putting down two bowls on the table with the tiniest of clunks.
A weak, addicted loser. Pierre’s bitter words echo distantly in my ears.
‘We’ve already come a long way, partly thanks to you
, signorina. Look at me.’ He pulls my hands away from my eyes. He kisses the tip of my nose. ‘He can’t hurt you or shut you out, OK? This is between him and me.’
I nod wearily. Pierre is a shifting tectonic plate under our feet. I pick up my spoon and press it into the fragile hillock of meringue on my plate. I tap it and thin cracks spider down it, like Humpty Dumpty’s head. Raspberry mess spills out of it. Me and my big mouth.
‘I don’t think he likes me.’
Gustav’s chocolate mousse is halfway to his mouth but to my astonishment he starts laughing.
‘Funny girl. Sometimes you get it so wrong. The most brilliant thing is he’s grudgingly admitted that he does like you. Admires you, even. And if he wasn’t with Polly now, which incidentally makes him doubly family, who could blame him if he was half in love with you?’
I inhale sugary crumbs of meringue. ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!’
‘Yes, because who could ever do anything by halves when it came to you?’
Gustav pats me between the shoulder blades as I start to cough.
‘Anyway, enough about that. We’re going to meet at the Library Hotel’s rooftop bar next week.’
I shove too much gooey meringue into my mouth and it sticks to the palate, even the insides of my teeth.
‘That’s great. Just the two of you. You need to have a heart-to-heart.’
‘Oh, no, he wants you there, Serena. He has a proposal for you.’
I can only grimace awkwardly as I try to chew through the sugar, glad of the excuse to say nothing. I down an entire glass of wine in one gulp to wash away the meringue. Gustav’s face is so open just now, his black eyes so bright. He spoons in his pudding like a little boy at a birthday party, happy that he has taken big strikes towards his long-lost brother.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ He beckons to the waiter, leans across and kisses me lingeringly, a new and precious habit of his. ‘I want to get home and celebrate my girlfriend’s burgeoning successes. This is going to be a fabulous year, Serena Folkes.’
It would take a heart of stone not to enter into the spirit of it. The other diners watch us through the flickering candlelight as we stand up. Gustav takes my leather jacket from the waiter and helps me into it, first one bare arm, then the other, zipping me up tight, buttoning the fiddly buttons on my green leather gloves, which match my filmy green dress. Running his hands round my hips and bottom to smooth down my skirt. Finally curling the wispy tendrils of hair that have fallen from the loose knot at the back of my head and brushing them away from my hot face.
‘Perfect,’ he says, leading me proudly out of the restaurant.
We must have broken a record for getting through New York traffic. The hired limousine bounced and weaved on its cushiony suspension up Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, the driver’s screen closed by Gustav as soon as we got into the car so that the invisible chauffeur couldn’t see him running his hands up my bare legs, under my skirt, teasing the uncertainty out of me with his warm, wandering fingers until I was putty in his hands once again.
‘I’ll ravish you right here on this seat if he doesn’t hurry up,’ he muttered, his breath hot and harsh in my hair.
At last we’re back at the apartment building, galloping through the revolving glass doors into the lobby, past the Mount-Rushmore-faced doormen, into the lift, kissing breathlessly, nearly doing it in there, tempted to shock whoever is paid to stare at the CCTV all day, but the lift is too quick so we crash against the huge wooden door of the flat, where’s the key, his hands are still up my dress, somehow we’re getting through the door, putting my camera kit carefully down before falling half on, half off the massive sofa in front of the window.
Gustav rips his jacket and tie off, half unbuttons his shirt, panting hard, spins me round so that I’m facing out of the window, looking down over the waving treetops of Central Park. I think of the enormous chalet back in Lake Lugano, the place where we first had sex. The big sofa in front of the fire, the picture window with its panorama over the flat lake and the craggy mountains, Gustav bending me over the back of the sofa so I could hardly breathe and taking me from behind.
My back is to him now. I want him to take me, any way he wants, but it must be now.
I know Gustav is hard, because I made sure of it in the cab. With superhuman control he is slowing the pace, unpinning my hair first of all so that it falls over my shoulders and back, tickling my skin as it tumbles. He scoops it up in handfuls and buries his nose in it, twisting and curling it round his fingers like a knuckleduster and tugging my head hard so that he can nibble at my bare neck.
His mouth moves over the top of my spine, still tugging at my hair to keep me still, kissing the ladder of vertebrae while his fingers fumble for the zip.
‘Just pull it off, Gustav,’ I hiss over my shoulder, trying to wriggle out of the dress. ‘It’s more of a petticoat. It will just fall away.’
His fingers stop on the zip. My hair is wrapped tight round his knuckles.
‘Did they ask you to join in?’
His voice is low and guttural, like a growl.
‘What? Who?’ For a mad, crazy moment I think he’s referring to Pierre and my cousin Polly. Pulling me into their tangle of limbs, his hands, her hands, his mouth, his hands on me. The picture, and the knowledge I can never confide it to Gustav, gives me an evil kick inside.
Gustav becomes rougher, circles his hands round my neck, up my face, claws his fingers through my hair.
‘The Weinmeyers. In that red dungeon of theirs. Did they want you to come right into the bed with them, make up a full-on threesome?’
‘They’re clients, Gustav.’ I shrug as carelessly as I can. Feel the dress slipping further down. Try to force the other images to slip away with it. ‘I was working, for goodness’ sake. Just like you told me to.’
‘Nobody dares say no to them.’
‘I did. I said no.’
My voice is a kitten’s mew and he doesn’t hear me.
‘Did they want you to join in their sordid little scenario? Tell me!’
‘Yes, they were screwing each other and having a whale of a time doing it. But you’ve shown me worse, remember? The dominatrix videos at your old house in London? Which they intend to bid for, by the way.’
Back he comes, uninvited. Pierre, with his black eyes, his unkind mouth. Asking about the house. Calling me a Rottweiler, a harridan, doubly family. Doubly his.
‘They can have the Baker Street collection for free if that’s what they want!’ Gustav’s voice is a low hiss in my ear. ‘Those films were all artifice. The situation you were in this morning was a real live couple cavorting in their own home!’
‘And how much healthier does that seem, compared with all that other pervy stuff? You told me yourself you hated it!’
His face goes dark. His body goes dead still behind me. I push against it, and he doesn’t move. I clench my fists. This is good. Talking is good. Fantasising is bad.
‘You’re not listening to me, Gustav. There was no danger. No threat, to me or to you for that matter. Yes, they went all the way, but you know something? I was fascinated by it. Like observing animals in the wild. Mrs Weinmeyer may look as if she’s made of porcelain, but she was on top today. She was in charge.’
He winds my hair tight round his fingers again as if it’s a lifeline. ‘And Mrs Weinmeyer’s influence will have made its mark on you, however much you try to deny it.’
I lean back against him. ‘Maybe it’s not such a bad influence. Remember I don’t have any other female role models in my life. Polly hardly counts. She was my partner in crime when we were kids. God, how I used to look forward to her visits to Devon. I used to cry for hours when she’d gone back to London. When she was on a visit we were let loose, we could do whatever we wanted, go to the pub, camp on the beach, hang out with boys, because nobody wanted us in the house.’ I stop for a moment, remembering the crazed look blurring Polly’s lovely blue eyes on New Year’s Ev
e, the way she clung to Pierre as if he might slither out of reach. ‘I used to think she was the mature one, teaching me the facts of life, but I’ve caught up with her now. And she’s a bit off kilter at the moment.’
‘Well, you know her better than anyone, and I doubt Pierre can sort her out. He’s way too wrapped up in himself at the moment. You’ll have to go out with her, see what’s up.’ He holds me so tight I can’t breathe. ‘I want to be sure you’re not drawn into anything you can’t get out of. People like the Weinmeyers have your reputation in their hands.’
‘I love that you worry about me. But it was fine, really. Harmless.’ I attempt a careless laugh, but I’m not feeling careless now. Pierre is in my head, in the room again. Giving me that same lascivious look as when I was trying to make diplomatic overtures on New Year’s Eve.
‘The Weinmeyers could make you or break you.’
‘You know that they will make me. You were practically in the room with us!’ I decide to brazen this out for the moment. ‘I know you called when I was working at their house, Gustav. So either stalk me or send me out with a minder every day, or let me go about my business.’
‘I know you wouldn’t lie to me. You’re useless at it. There’s this funny kind of grimace that passes over your lovely face when you lie. Even so, I think I’ll come with you in future. It’ll be fun! And if you get into any other kind of trouble, or get sucked in to the point of no return, well, I’ll be there to watch!’ Gustav’s grip on me relaxes very slightly. ‘So. Let’s get into the imagined scenario. Tell me some more about the kinky Weinmeyers.’
I try to face him, but he pushes me against the back of the sofa. I let myself go limp, relish the relief of it. ‘You won’t like it, master. They asked me to sit on the bed.’
‘Go on.’ He waits. He still has my hair tangled in his hand, but he has stopped stroking me. The dress is half unzipped, slipping off my arms. ‘Did they touch you?’
I stretch my arms along the back of the sofa but my fingernails are digging into the palms of my hands. ‘I was kind of off balance and when I toppled onto her she got my top off and she kissed my – she kissed my nipples.’