Red Hot Lipstick

by Jeremy Reed

  It had begun like that. She had discovered in herself a repressed exhibitionist, and one afternoon she had stepped out to the balcony fully clothed and slowly with her back to the park, she had done a provocative strip-tease, all the while treating it as perfectly natural. She had slipped out of her top, and unfastened the back hook-and-eye catch of her black bra, and then imagining the increased excitement of someone watching her moves, she had unzipped her short floral skirt, and stood there with nothing but the dividing string of a black thong parting the compact curves of her bottom. And it was the day he first appeared. She had seen him out of the corner of her eye, the sort of man she had never known before. He was dressed in black trousers and a white frilly shirt, and was wearing light make-up. He just remained standing to the left of her vision, and she saw that he had been flying a pink kite which was shaped like an exotic fish. She thought of him as the Kite Man; he was gentle and in no way menacing, and they seemed to communicate without gestures. Roberta felt a sense of growing excitement in the young man's presence. It was as though he was directing an erotic beam at her, and she made no effort to conceal her breasts, but rather she sat there, legs arched in an acquiescent pose, inviting his attention. He stood for a long time looking directly at her, and then with the return of a light flurrying wind, he had relaunched his pink kite, and Roberta watched as their communion was choreographed on air waves above the trees.

  When the young man disappeared, she was compelled to go indoors and excite herself. With the expertise of a gold-painted fingernail, she achieved intense orgasm thinking of the afternoon's encounter; when later that night her boyfriend came to the flat he found her waiting for him in nothing but a pair of pink transparent panties, and the passion she injected into lovemaking was fiercer than he had ever known. She had wanted him to do everything, and had surprised him with the dexterity of her tongue and fingers. But Roberta was disappointed that her boyfriend never noticed or commented on the little details, like how she had painted each toe and fingernail a different colour, and how she was wearing a perfume that was new for her, 1000 by Jean Patou, a heady, resonant scent which spoke of seduction; how she had tied her hair up in a black velvet band, and worn an anklet with diamanté sparkles in it – he had missed the things she knew the Kite Man would relish.

  And she had played on him the tricks that men so often do to women, when they fantasize during sex that they're making love to a curvier female: she had brought the young man into her mind as Paul thrust so vigorously that the bed started to walk across the room, and when she had screamed out with pleasure it was the afternoon she was living out the feelings of intense arousal the young man had transmitted to her body.

  The next day, she spent a long time preparing herself to look beautiful for his arrival. She wore a shocking pink lipstick, let her luxurious black hair float loose, chose an emerald sequinned bikini bottom, and placed a gold chain round her waist. She looked like someone made up for a Helmut Newton shoot. Roberta knew that the young man would take in every feminine detail.

  He appeared at exactly the same time as on the previous day. It was precisely 3.30. Roberta felt the rush of excitement in her abdomen as she stood leaning over the balcony and looking out across the park. She pretended not to have seen him, and turned round several times so that he could see how the emerald bikini fitted her bottom. She felt confident to flaunt herself in a way she would never have done with her boyfriend. She was discovering a vocabulary of sex in her gestures that had belonged previously to fantasy. She stood cupping her full breasts in her hands, and then with slow deliberately undulating movements, began applying oil to her body, running it in and around her nipples, extending the downward play of her hands to her navel, and then going back up again to her breasts. She was getting turned on by her sensuality. And every time she looked up, he was standing there watching, his pink kite at rest in the grass.

  And again she experienced an amazing hum of energy in her erogenous zones. She was becoming freed of all inhibitions, and to test his responses she slipped a single finger into her elasticated bikini, one which had a black fingernail, and left it there. He came a little closer, and sat in the grass watching. Her impulse was to run a finger across her crotch; she was itching to be tickled between the legs. Instead she began studiously massaging the sole of her left foot, imparting, she hoped, an invitation for him to follow.

  But he never moved. He watched her, and he kept his senses attuned to the wind. When the wind picked up a bit he launched his kite and with an expert hand navigated it above her balcony. The pink kite swam in the blue sky. And then Roberta realized he wanted her to catch it, and she held out her hand and got a firm hold of the line. It was her first contact with him, and although it was only a kite she stroked it as she might have done his body, exploring his chest, massaging his stomach, working a little finger across the outline of his cock until it triggered and demanded her whole hand to support its weight.

  She noticed there was an envelope attached to the underside of the kite, and she knew instinctively it was intended for her to open. As she slipped the letter free, so he began to retrieve the kite, making it impossible for her to supply an answer to his note. When she opened the blue envelope, she thrilled at the contents of the message: 'I shall come here for thirteen days,' it said, 'and on the fourteenth we will make love. On that day I want you to wear for me whatever is most exotic in your wardrobe. I have fallen in love with you from a distance.'

  And that night Roberta again gave Paul everything, for she fantasized about what it would be like in bed with the stranger on the fourteenth day. Paul couldn't understand Roberta's sudden increase in passion and her desire to experiment with new positions. He was frightened. He assumed that someone had been teaching her the things that he had never dared introduce into the bedroom. She now luxuriated in the 69 position, her tongue snaking up and down his length while she convulsed with climactic tension, and hungrily engorged him at the moment of his orgasm. Paul didn't dare question this lovemaking, but he was suspicious. He tried calling her at unusual hours, but she was always in, calm, and betrayed no guilt in her voice or signs that she was with a lover. On the contrary, she appeared surprised at the extra attention he was giving her personal life. But much to her disappointment, he still failed to notice her femininity; the things to which she had devoted such special attention seemed to mean nothing to him. Roberta wondered if Paul would ever perceive the mystique that surrounded a woman's body, and she suspected he wouldn't. Even though she attached much importance to little things in their foreplay, he gave no indication of having noticed. His obliviousness to her erotic signals made her lonely, and the volcanic lust that came alive in her at night and forced her body into the elastic positions of a dancer, was generated by her communications with the stranger in the afternoon, and had little to do with Paul's experimentation. Still, he was a good lover who would come two or three times in the course of their heated sessions, and Roberta was increasing her own knowledge of how to orgasm.

  And so the meetings continued. Each afternoon she would dress for her visitor, and he would sit right below her balcony and commune with her that way. On the thirteenth afternoon she stepped out of a long black skirt and was wearing suspenders and stockings. She wondered that no one else came to this place which was notorious for lovers at night, but during the day remained deserted. She wanted to make love to him right there on her balcony, her legs wrapped round his back all through the lazy July afternoon. Each day the tempestuous desire to have physical contact with him increased, and each day he sent her a message via his pink kite. It was a sort of magic. She was spellbound, and he transmitted energies that flooded her mind with sexual imagery. The link between them was unbreakable. Sometimes when she thought of him she could have sworn flame crackled from her fingertips, and that her eyes changed from green to purple with passion.

  When the fourteenth day came, it was just as she had expected. The sun was up, a light breeze shivered in the plane trees,
and she felt fired up with passion. She spent from noon onwards preparing herself. She took a bath scented with lavender, plum and ylang-ylang, repainted her nails in individually enamouring colours, spent a long time on her make-up, chose a pair of the wispiest green transparent panties, wrote the words I LOVE YOU in red lipstick on her bottom, put on a black sequinned micro-skirt with a green chiffon top, and awaited her lover, for she had come to think of him as that. And he was there in his usual place, playing a kite into the trees and clearly awaiting her arrival. She stood there looking the perfect accompaniment to his elegance, he was once again in his white frilly shirt and black trousers, and was wearing a sparkling brooch pinned to a black beret. This time Roberta kept her clothes on, for she wanted the stranger to undress her in the intimacy of the bedroom. Her skirt was so short it revealed almost everything, but preserved the little mysteries that he would soon make his own. And anyhow she felt his eyes could see right through her clothes. He had that sort of magic.

  She blew him a kiss that opened like a rose on her lips. He could taste the scent of her lipstick from his spot on the grass. He walked over to a tree and stood with his back to it and looked full at her, and then he walked straight towards her, his kite over his shoulder. She signalled to him that the door was open, and she waited out on the balcony, determined that their passion should start there, before progressing to the bedroom.

  And he was just as she had expected. His blue eyes were like bits of the sky, his mouth tasted of the accumulated heat of July days spent outside, his body was sinuous and charged with erotic tension. She pulled him down on to cushions, and his bands quickly had her out of her skirt and chiffon top. She could no longer think, and surrendered to him totally. And when he picked her up to carry her indoors to the bedroom with its curtains already drawn, she could see that there was someone watching in the trees. It was only an ordinary voyeur, but it excited her to know that someone else knew what they were about to do. And who knows, Roberta surprised herself thinking, perhaps in time he too would court her in a ritualistic way, and become her new lover.

  Blue Bra Straps in a Bookstore

  Ruby put on a cassette of Billie Holiday and settled to the mid-afternoon vacuum in the second-hand bookshop. Billie's voice sounded like a blue Sunday afternoon, when there's nothing to do but walk round the docks dreaming of a lost love in Paris, and of a future the mauve of lilacs, the mauve of a rainbow. The voice covered the whole gamut of inconsolable pain, and of singing to pay for the next desperate fix. Lady Day had become an icon for those who celebrated loneliness within love.

  Ruby had a pile of second-hand fiction to mark up, and she busied herself checking first editions from reprints, novels in dust-jackets from those without, a nice copy of Andre Gide's Strait is the Gate, a valuable first of J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, and an undistinguished edition of En Menage, Huysmans's novel about fin-de-siècle French prostitutes.

  When she looked up, he was browsing in the fiction section. She had seen him in the shop often, and remained insatiably curious about his remoteness, the fineness of his aesthetic features, and the aura of mystery attached to his person. She had heard that he was a cult writer with a small but fanatical following. His books fell into a decadent tradition and incorporated surreal, sci-fi and futuristic imaginings. He looked like someone who didn't really belong to the insurgent crowds down Charing Cross Road. To Ruby he was clearly an Aquarian, and someone who was looking out for his future species to arrive. He could have been bisexual, but on one occasion she had watched his eye trapped on her shoulder, conscious that her dark blue bra strap had snaked free from her top and was visibly, suggestively in his line of vision. She had the hunch that he desired her, but he looked incommunicatively introspective, and she sensed it would take just the right combination of felicitous events before he approached her directly as a person, and not an assistant.

  Ruby was glad she had touched up her lipstick, its scarlet gloss standing out in contrast to her pale face and green eyes. She was wearing a skimpy green top designed to show off her midriff, and tight blue jeans which mapped out the contours of her curves like a second skin. She was a quiet girl who had known love and the bitterness of its going wrong, and who preferred to take refuge in the imagination rather than settle for the wrong partner. She was a dreamer, who punctuated her life amongst books with intermittent forays to clubs, although her love/hate attraction to the latter was inspired more by the wish to dress up outrageously than to immerse herself fully in an atmosphere of noise and claustrophobic pressure. Like all shy people, Ruby nurtured the repressed ostentation of a glam diva.

  She looked across at his slim figure. His eyes and fingers were busy at work on a line of shelf novels, and she noticed the way his touch choreographed rather than handled the books which aroused his curiosity. Ruby was hoping he would come up with items of interest, for then she would have the chance to engage him in conversation at the till. She knew she was looking good today, and her electric charge was up and affording her confidence.

  Billie's voice continued to infiltrate the shop, the death-wish implied by 'Gloomy Sunday' seeming to create a black rainbow indoors. She knew he would be listening, as he riffled the books in the poetry section, extracting one or two volumes and placing them together with others in his left hand, while with his right he continued to browse. He was dressed in black and white. A white cotton shirt, and black trousers. Usually he wore a sparkling brooch somewhere on his clothes, and this time she could see that the glitter on him was in the form of a single drop earring which flashed in his hair.

  Ruby felt unnaturally anticipative and excited. She noticed how without any fabrication both her bra straps were visible again, as though his presence excited this state of déshabillé. She let it go, realizing that the little hints of blue-black were a glamorous flourish to her appearance. She would appear just a little provocative in his eyes.

  She found it hard to concentrate on her task, particularly as he had moved over to the erotic section and was assiduously preoccupied with a book he appeared to be tasting at leisure. She could see that he was far away with the text, and that his blue eyes had entered another dimension of reality. Ruby was hoping that he would purchase this book, for it would offer her another clue as to the geography of his mind.

  It was raining outside. It was her private belief that playing Billie Holiday invited rain, and the abrupt shower rapped on the shop window with glass knuckles. With no customers other than the solitary young man who had been attracting her attention for months, and with Billie Holiday's voice orchestrating the fast London rain, the shop seemed to Ruby like an intimate recess designed to bring about their meeting.

  Having finished pricing the books piled on the counter Ruby went over to the fiction section to place the books in alphabetical order on the shelves. She had kicked off her shoes and was conscious of the way her jeans created a provocatively constricted walk. Two weeks ago she had sewn a scarlet love-heart logo on one of the back pockets, and she imagined his eye focusing on it as she climbed the steps to a high shelf. She tried to act unselfconsciously, and once on glancing down she could see that his concentration hadn't shifted from the erotic book he was busy perusing.

  Or had it? She couldn't be sure. His movements were always understated and on the edge of being retrieved. Ruby walked over to the relevant sections to place books, and then crossed the shop and looked out at the scintillating torrent as it drummed across the traffic and the streets. Pedestrians were racing for cover. A black cab was sheeted in prismatic crystals. And Billie Holiday kept on singing across a quirky sax and orchestra. The whole band sounded like they were playing on a ship's deck in perilous seas.

  Ruby ran her hands over her round bottom packed into tight denims. She felt particularly sensual, and savoured the moment of running her tongue across her perfumed Dior lipstick. A lover in Paris had once told her that Dior lipsticks tasted of aphrodisiacal aniseed. She wondered how the young man still browsing in the e
rotic section would respond to the flavour of her ultra-scarlet gloss. There was no let-up in the rain, the sky was an inky purple over Leicester Square, and the summer shower thundered across the West End. There were Chinese girls opposite running for cover into a supermarket hall. The traffic had stalled to a collectively irate hum.

  Ruby went back and sat by the till and followed Billie Holiday's blue tangent of broken-hearted reverie. There wasn't much to do but sit and wait for the young man to come over to the counter and pay for his increasing pile of books. She had been shy in the past, but with both her bra straps showing she was determined to engage him in some sort of personal conversation. She had decided she really fancied him, and felt desperate that this could be the last time he would visit the shop. What if he were to disappear for an extended holiday? What if a lover called him across the seas to a foreign country? Ruby ran over the inventory of possibilities in her mind. And the rain kept on throwing itself at the window, as though someone was hammering tacks into a carpet.

  He was still squatting down, paying particular attention to the erotic fiction. She hoped he would come across to the counter soon for she feared new customers would in time intrude on what she had established in her mind as their privacy.

  She could feel his concentration break, and he stood up abruptly, scanned a last shelf and made his way over to the counter. He was even more beautiful than she had imagined, his lips were full and sensual, and he wore a tiny diamond chip implanted in his left nostril. Ruby was suddenly conscious of her own charms, her tanned waist, her pronounced breasts, the projection of her hipbones. And almost without being responsible for saying it, she said, 'I've noticed you here before, I wish you came in more often.'