Undone

by Kristina Lloyd

  ‘You want it harder, Cha Cha?’

  The question was rhetorical. Harder wasn’t possible. Tremors bunched in my thighs, my swollen clit responding to every fleeting touch of his body. In the quiet night, my gasps were loud and incongruous. Above me, he grunted with rising urgency, his noises like knots tugging in his throat. I could tell he was close, oblivious to how he sounded, not caring where or who or when he was. The noises had to come out; he couldn’t keep them down. I remembered his inhuman howl when we’d fucked on the forest floor, far away from everyone. As he thrust into me, his cock banging deep, I felt we owned the world. We were the world. We were there at the beginning of time, emotionally overwrought in a hellish, leafy paradise, and now we were here at the end in this decrepit dystopia, fearful of cameras, cars, people and each other. We were everything. We were infinite. And it was as tragic as it was beautiful.

  Then I was coming hard, memories of his primitive cries mingling with his presence. He responded with high, thin groans of breathy disbelief. His grip tightened around my wrist and he arched his neck. He groaned, slowing, then he came, his staccato cries prefacing his spurts and shudders. His noises dropped to silence. For a moment he was poised above me like a half-fallen statue, his head bowed. Sweat gleamed on his collarbones, and the military squareness of his shoulders filled my vision. After a short moment, he withdrew and slumped towards me with a grunt, releasing my wrist. He nestled into my neck, his breath streaming over my skin, and rested his hand on my stomach.

  ‘Lana,’ he breathed.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Lana,’ he repeated.

  I toyed idly with his hair. ‘I’m listening.’

  He didn’t reply and we lay there, sprawled on the grubby steps, me with my leg still attached to the railings, his collar still fixed around my neck.

  At length, he said, ‘Lana, do you feel guilty?’

  ‘All the time,’ I replied quietly. ‘It’s a woman’s lot. You?’

  ‘Yeah. All the time.’ He gave a soft laugh. ‘It’s a Jew’s lot.’

  For a long while, we didn’t speak. We were motionless on the steps, my hand in his hair, his hand on my belly, the two of us feeling guilty but unable to say why.

  I stopped writing there to look at him, lying peacefully beside me in the hotel bed. He sleeps as if he hasn’t a care in the world while I’m anxious and restless, unable to fall. Dawn has slid into mid-morning, and all I’ve managed to do is nap. When I was gazing at him just now, thinking we’d need to check out in a couple of hours and wondering how things would be in the future, his eyes flicked open. He looked directly up at me, expression unchanged. I think he’d sensed me watching him, as if I’d filtered into his dreams.

  ‘You doing, Cha Cha?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Writing.’

  ‘What you writing?’

  ‘My diary.’

  He gave a sleepy half-laugh, eyelids dropping shut. He rolled towards me and slotted his hand between my thighs. ‘All your secrets,’ he murmured.

  No, I thought. Not all of them.

  Part 5

  Monday 4th August

  I haven’t written here for a few weeks, and for a good reason. Very good! We are an item, a couple, exclusive and monogamous. I refer to him as my boyfriend, amused to be forty-one and using the language of giddy teens. I feel inappropriate and vulgar; mutton dressed as lamb; woman being girl. Girl. His girlfriend. He’s thirty-eight. I joke that he’s my toyboy. It feels as if we raided a sweetshop and ran off with all the Haribo. We’re gorging on rainbows and nobody else can share; nobody can understand what it means to be this alive.

  Logic tells me I’ve been here before. This is infatuation, in love, insanity. It’s a common chemical imbalance and I’ve no reason to feel so goddamn smug, as if he and I are the only ones ever to take this path, hand in hand, tongue around tongue. But logic can go fuck itself because I’m eating all the rainbows, and sweet, succulent colours run riot in my veins. Now we’ve made this commitment to each other, there’s no stopping us. The game playing’s off. Caution’s sulking in a corner. My knickers are in shreds. My heart is bursting. We are drunk on our desire.

  Most week nights, Sol swaggers into The Blue Bar straight from work, hot, sweaty, dirty, stinking of building site and as randy as a bull. I’m neat, petite and blonde, and he wants to mess me up. He drinks bottled beer, grins mischievously, and for the next hour or so, we chance it. If no customers are in, he’ll paw and grapple, nuzzling close or landing a swipe or two on my butt. I play at being nervous and disapproving, wriggling away because it’s fun to do so, and, anyway, I truly am nervous.

  But my man, my strapping, sexy, hungry bastard, he won’t take no for an answer. Before long, my skirt’s around my hips and his cock’s inside me, fat, urgent and thrusting. We’ll fuck over an oak table in one of the church-pew booths or up against the bar. Sometimes we fuck behind the bar, pretending we have customers in and he’s humiliating me in front of an audience. I do my best to keep an eye on the monitor relaying images from the street-level doorway. The stained-glass doors open on to the balcony, catching glints of sunlight in their leaded blue-green tiles. August heat fills the room. We’re grateful whenever a breeze steals in to trickle over patches of damp, bared skin. Sometimes, when I’m dazed with bliss, I lose sense of where I am. The LED counter casts its sapphire blue haze and the glass doors sparkle like gems made of tropical seas, a glitter of turquoise and jade. I swoop through my surroundings, flying into cerulean skies or swimming in subaquatic depths. When I come, my world turns watery and I float in its etherised blur.

  I can’t get enough of us. In the late afternoons, it’s mainly fucking, maybe a little spanking, or the type of cocksucking he refers to as ‘service provision’ where he holds still while I work him, careful not to spoil my make-up for my evening behind the bar. Invariably, he tops me with his attitude and his muscle. It’s embedded in the way he moves and holds me, in the half-hypnotic words he mutters in my ear. He likes to claw my buttocks as we fuck, and my skin is flecked with scarlet marks. When I go for my late-morning swim, I sport the evidence of aggressive, reckless sex. The younger Lana would have been embarrassed but not me, not any more. I’m proudly, defiantly happy. The wounds put an extra wiggle in my stride as I make my way to the poolside. Can they see? Do I care? Hell no. And, best of all, the wiggle’s still there when I’m fully dressed and no one’s in the neighbourhood to see me.

  One time we fucked in the Ladies’ loo, watching the empty bar through the two-way mirror, the sensuous oak, leather and lapis lazuli blues contrasting with the tiled white sterility surrounding us. He had me bent over the sink, inches away from a streaming tap, threatening to stick my head in the water to show me who was boss. I had to make a dash for it when three young women entered the bar, glancing warily around in search of life.

  ‘Hi, ladies!’ I breezed into the room, straightening my clothes and caressing my wiggle. ‘It’s Happy Hour till seven!’

  I fiddled about behind the counter as they pored over their menus, praying none of them would need to powder their nose. I knew Sol would be watching me through the glass, probably finishing himself off, his big dick in his big fist, but what could I do? How could I get him out without any of them noticing? A few minutes later, Sol sauntered from the bathroom, grinning as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Two of the women glanced at him. I repressed a smile as I searched for something to say, concerned they’d realise we’d been up to no good.

  ‘All fixed, ma’am.’ He raised his pinched fingers and stuffed them in his jeans pocket. ‘Your washer needed replacing.’

  ‘Oh, great, thanks.’

  His grin broadened as he headed for the exit. ‘Any time, Cha Cha. You call me if things get wet again.’

  My hidden smile turned to laughter.

  Damn, I adore his cheek.

  Raphael or Bruno clock on at six as usual. Then, depending on how busy we are, Sol and I will take the rear stairs and head across the cobble
d mews to my flat for a couple of hours. I tell the guys we’re going to eat and sometimes we do, but sometimes we just fuck again and then I wolf down some cheese and crackers. I’m sure the twins know what we’re up to. Their grins are bigger than ever but they’re polite so they act oblivious. I’ve given Sol the code for the gate to the courtyard so he can park his car if there’s space but I haven’t given him a key to my flat. I’m not quite ready for that yet. My home is still my own. Most nights, I’m back at the bar for nine, where I’ll work until midnight, full of the joys. Sol stays at the flat, watching TV, cooking, napping, reading, or playing video games. He’s brought his Xbox over and he puts his laundry in with mine. I bought him an ashtray but asked that he smokes out of the windows or on the back patio, and he said he does that at his own place, anyway.

  He’s a fairly tidy guy but, during the day, I find evidence of his presence strewn around the flat, and the reminder of him warms me. He devours thrillers, leaving fat curling paperbacks with gold embossed covers splayed open, their pages folded, their spines cracked. I feel a certain amount of identification with those books: well-thumbed, well-read, sought out with a robust, compulsive hunger. Neither I nor those paperbacks are held at a distance, and nicely preserved. Our physicality is incorporated into his because he’s greedy to have us, his possessions. We get his attention, one hundred percent, and he treats us with a rough carelessness born of wanting. He lays waste to us in his cherishing. His fingerprints are everywhere, and he’s dogeared my heart.

  He wears glasses to read, and he looks seriously sexy and sexily serious, a debauched evil genius. He’s generally in bed by the time I’m home, occasionally reading but usually not because it’s late. The windows are raised and the blinds are angled to allow air into the room, slats of white light from the mews striping the bed. If he’s awake, he’ll give me a dozy, welcoming smile as I join him and I know he’s getting hard under the duvet. If he’s asleep, he’ll stir and instinctively roll over to embrace me. Invariably I manage to wake him fully because his nearness makes me horny and I’ll never get to sleep if we don’t fuck each other senseless. We have sex when I’ve got my period too. I’m pleased he’s not one of those guys who are prissy about blood. Far from it. He revels in the slippery chaos, and he likes making, as he calls it, ‘a butcher’s shop’ of the bed.

  I know I ought to be more concerned about what might have happened between him and Misha at Dravendene Hall but the more I know him the more I trust him. I don’t think he’s capable of inflicting deliberate harm. Accidental, perhaps, but aren’t we all? If he has a secret, I’ll guard it with him should he need me to do so. But he’s not asking me, and I’m not quizzing him. I’ll wait until he’s ready, even if he’s never ready. And, in the meantime, I’ll try and forget that I ever found a horrible, damp, chlorine-scented towel in my turret room. The threesome never happened. That worn, salmon-pink towel does not exist.

  After midnight, in the depths of dark, we often take sex to the next level. Considering he claims to have only recently begun exploring his dominant side, he appears to know what he’s doing and certainly isn’t reticent about expressing his desires. I suspect he’s been practising this for longer than he’s letting on. He told me he’d been to a couple of fet nights in the US, after initially claiming he’d never been to such a thing. He was quick to suss out how my speedcuffs worked, and he knows his way around knots too. Sexually, he’s able to strike the perfect balance, ensuring I’m OK without letting that detract from our nasty games. Is the latter an instinct or a learned skill, I wonder?

  He hasn’t told me much about his long-term ex, Helena in New York, but I wonder if perhaps their relationship had a DS dynamic. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe he wants to make me feel special by having me believe he’s never shared anything so depraved. Mind you, I’ve had more than my fair share of twisted, dominant lovers, and I’ve never known anything as good as this. Even so, I’m pretty sure there’s something Sol’s not telling me about his life to date. But, again, if he has kinky secrets, I can wait.

  When it’s late, he often cuffs my wrists and shoves my head into the pillows, refusing to fuck me until I’ve begged for what I want. He makes me debase myself; that’s the worst and the best of it. He doesn’t do it to me. I do it to myself. Sometimes, he makes me select the handcuffs I’d like used on me from the drawer containing my collection. He makes me bring my choice to him by holding it in my mouth, crawling to him on all fours, like a dog fetching a toy for its master. Other times, he uses rope to truss me in all manner of configurations, his favourites being the ones where I’m stripped of my dignity, ankles by my ears, belly in folds, my arse and cunt on view. He uses a vibrator as a cruelty, shaming me for coming and for enjoying his perversity.

  I usually remove my make-up before getting into bed. Some nights he’ll ask – no, tell – me not to because he wants to fuck my throat while I’m nice and neat, and I refuse to let him do that at the start of an evening. Which, of course, makes him want to do it all the more. But I make him wait. Then, at night, he shoves with rough, crude strokes till mascara streaks my cheeks and my mouth is a smear of Pleasure Me Red or Ruby Woo. Then he comes on my face, ruining my public self. He’ll grasp a fistful of hair, insisting I take a look at my reflection. Bars of lamplight from outside slice through the blinds and fall raggedly across my body. The image in the mirror is of a broken whore, a defeated clown, her lips bleeding into a blotchy face, his cream sliding into her inky tears.

  All my outlines are gone, and it feels the same on the inside too.

  ‘That’s how badly you want it,’ he once said, addressing the mess of my face in the glass. ‘That’s how low you’ll stoop for it. Greedy little slut. What are you?’

  Afterwards, he holds me close, soothing me when I’m broken and sore, making me whole again.

  ‘You’re so strong,’ he once said. ‘I couldn’t do what you do, Cha Cha. Couldn’t risk falling apart like that. I’ve got to stay in control.’

  But I can only risk falling apart because he makes it safe for me to do so. He’ll catch me if I fall. He’ll piece me back together. We’re co-conspirators, and ours is a beautiful, complete cycle; a process of abandoning ourselves to dark, erotic pleasures then returning to the light, sharing and understanding, adoring each other for wanting to play this way.

  And then I sleep. Finally, I can. After so many restless nights since Misha’s death, I sleep a deep, sound, restorative sleep. I seldom even wake when Sol gets up at seven. He’s gone by half past. We see less of each other at weekends because I’m busy with the bar and he returns to Brighton, further along the coast, joking that his dick’s had it and he needs some sleep. He usually observes the Jewish Sabbath, too, despite identifying as an agnostic Jew, so Friday nights and Saturdays are his. ‘An ethnic habit,’ he said. ‘I don’t light candles or go to synagogue. I just chill the fuck out.’

  I’m considering offering the twins some extra hours to free up more of my time. I’d like to visit Sol’s flat, see him in his own space, but he claims it’s too cramped. Instead, he says we should take a trip to his London house some time.

  ‘Don’t you have family there?’ I said, flattered but horrified.

  ‘Distant family.’

  ‘And you’d introduce me?’

  ‘Sure, why not? You think you could act Jewish and get them off my back?’

  He is sexy, irreverent, charming and smart. With him, I’ve remembered the joy and rootedness that sexual, emotional intimacy can bring. I look back on my life pre-Sol, when I was single and dating, and I see a woman who doesn’t realise she’s living with a void, oblivious to the scar tissue that’s hardened her heart. I wasn’t looking for love. I’m still not. But I think it’s trying to find me. And, to my surprise, I’m not running scared.

  All this has happened since we decided to put the riddle of Misha’s death behind us. After fucking on the steps near Club Sybaris, we had a heart to heart in the hotel room, lying in bed
in the curtained dark, spooning loosely, the aircon whirring and clicking. Without the aircon, the room was stuffy, its windows locked tight, but the aircon was noisy so we kept it on low.

  ‘I was out of order, I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice low, croaky and regretful. ‘But I hated seeing you with someone else. Made me think I might lose you. Jealous, possessive. Ugly emotions, I know. But I’ve had so much loss in my life that I’m in constant fear of more.’

  ‘Everyone fears loss.’

  ‘Yeah, probably. But not everyone acts as if they’ve the right to demand reparation.’

  Behind me, he sighed heavily and his breath stirred my hair. I was still wearing the collar, enjoying the mild discomfort and the sense of him resting around my neck, encircling the route between my heart and my brain. Guarding it with his combination lock.

  ‘I’m not trying to make excuses,’ he continued. ‘I just want to tell you how it is for me. How I feel as if can never trust anything. Can never enjoy happiness without fearing it’s going to be snatched away.’

  I felt him shift higher up the bed and prop his elbow on the pillow. He stroked from my waist up to my shoulder blade and down again. My skin was moist with sweat.

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I like to keep moving,’ he said. He rubbed my hip, his touch distracted and familiar. ‘As a kid I got used to being between two homes, Queens and London. Now, not settling means lower risks. Keep ahead of the game, ahead of surprise and tragedy. Change, move. Try and outwit the future that wants to ruin your belief you’re in control of your life.’

  ‘None of us are in control,’ I said. ‘We just keep trying to convince ourselves we are. Because the reality of our powerlessness is too much to bear.’