by Jeremy Reed
Johnny listened to the sampling on the video soundtrack, and decided to go home. He walked across the park, his eyes burning into the bottom of a girl wearing skintight jeans. He kept those round, compact proportions in his focus for as long as he could, curves enhanced by the girl wearing high heels. When he got home he showered, called a number of friends, put on an Aretha Franklin CD, and relaxed. He still had two hours to pass before the time of his intended meeting with Brigitte at Green Park.
He pondered on the definition of tainted love. There was the song of that name, a Northern soul number; originally sung by Gloria Jones, the song had achieved international success through Soft Cell, a duo whose infamous reputation for sleaze and backroom bars had invited media sensationalism. The singer with Soft Cell, Marc Almond, had come to stand for a black eye-linered imp, a man whose private life was the speculative fancy of every tabloid.
That was one definition of tainted love. But Johnny reflected on how the lyrics were comparatively harmless, and were only afforded a double meaning by Almond's adopted bondage gear, and sexually ambiguous image. Like those of most pop songs, the lyrics were essentially about unrequited love. There was the sort of tainted love attributed to Oscar Wilde, but Brigitte couldn't mean this. But whatever, there was a distinct flavour of decadence to her proposal, and Johnny let his imagination run riot with the subject. Tainted meant corrupted, contaminated, stained, blemished – not the sort of associations he would have afforded a glamorous young French girl. But why had she picked on him? His mind kept returning to that question. Brigitte's looks were exceptional, and while Johnny was reasonably good-looking, he wasn't that distinguished.
As he splashed a little Chanel cologne on his torso, it suddenly jumped out at him. In the old days, and in imitation of Marc Almond, he had had a Gutterhearts tattoo worked on his lower right arm. Yesterday, he had been wearing a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and Brigitte must have recognized the red and blue tattoo, with a dagger piercing a flaming heart, standing out on his arm. It was a sign to a complicitous cult. Johnny satisfied himself that this would account for Brigitte's reference to tainted love, but he was still marginally disquieted, and it was this tension which contributed to his sexual excitement.
Johnny paid special attention to his appearance. He put on a white cotton shirt and black trousers, and snaked a red belt through the loops. He gelled his hair back in a Presley quiff, and slipped on a pair of patent leather ankle-boots. He looked good, and the little diamond stud in his ear glinted like a star. He would conquer Brigitte and be tainted in the process.
The minutes were dragging by. He played music and consulted his watch, and tried to banish sexual fantasies from his mind. He was already overexcited, and hoped the tube wouldn't be full of girls in mini-skirts, the foreign tourists who swarmed into London exuding hot blood and sexuality.
When Johnny got on the tube his worst expectations were realized. He found himself in a compartment full of mini-skirted tourists, and his eye registered a strip of black gusset, as a blond thing rearranged her tanned legs under a floaty wisp of a skirt. It was all too much, black gussets, white gussets, and Johnny felt the bulge in his crotch tightening.
He was glad to decamp from the sexual heat of the compartment, and he hurried into the milling entrance of the station foyer. There was Brigitte, dressed as she had been on the previous day, with men's eyes running over her body like a swarm of glinting flies. It amused Johnny to think of men dispersing into all different parts of the city, with Brigitte's image exciting their respective fantasies. Wankers would be manoeuvring her into positions all night.
Brigitte was compliant to Johnny's demonstrative greeting, and he found himself kissing her directly on the lips. Her response was immediate and feverish. Her kiss tasted of summer in the South. 'Let's walk in Greek Park a bit,' she suggested, and as naturally as if they had been a couple for years, Johnny fitted his arm around Brigitte's waist, and felt the rhythmic undulation of her hips as she walked. It was still light, although the dark was coming on, and couples were dotted under the trees, or sat on benches. They entered directly into easy conversation, and talked of their mutual longing to be by the blue sea, and of little things – families, backgrounds, the moment, the alienation that large cities bring to the individual. And still Johnny didn't raise the subject of how or why they had met, and all the improbabilities surrounding that meeting. He was completely under Brigitte's spell; the seductive qualities of her voice, her natural vivacity, her curvaceous body, her whole mysterious ambience left him fascinated. It was like time had suddenly stopped as they crossed the park, and chose a towering chestnut tree under which to sit, as the night advanced.
Despite her absolutely minimal skirt Brigitte sat down beside Johnny, their shoulders touching, their togetherness fluent, and their first kiss followed almost immediately. Their lips hungrily found each other, and formed a sustained circular motion. Brigitte's tongue slid into the back of Johnny's throat, and his hands correspondingly traced the outline of her prominent nipples poking through her red top. She was braless, and her breasts were conically plump like avocados. Johnny kneaded her nipples, and drew from her excited gasps, his tongue exploring her neck, and hers complementing his discovery of sensitive nerves, and soon he was lying fully on top of Brigitte, his erection beating out a drum rhythm on her pubic areas, and her skirt disappearing to her navel as they fitted their bodies together in a preliminary try-out for the sex which they knew would come later. It was all too perfect, and a nagging sense of disquiet continued to occupy Johnny's mind. He glued himself to Brigitte's body, and in his urgency contemplated entering her there on the grass, under the heavy shadow of the chestnut tree – only that seemed to make something too easy of the situation. There was much more excitement to come, and Johnny preferred to hold back, despite the encouragement of Brigitte's caresses.
Her fingers were already travelling the sensitive highway between his balls and the tip of his cock, a route that she electrified with her fingertips. Johnny felt a volcanic rage in his groin, a glow that suffused every point in his body. They lay together, unwilling to separate, their bodies lighting each other up, and gently, without causing any disequilibrium, Brigitte pointed out the coolness in the night air, and she suggested they go back to her place in Half Moon Street.
It was barely a ten-minute walk, and on the way there Brigitte explained that she was in London to improve her English, and was working as a home-help to a family who allowed her her own little apartment in their town house. They were away for a few days, and Brigitte was using the leisure time to see the sights in London. Johnny noted how men in the streets danced their eyes over Brigitte's assets, and her body rippled to each affirmative pressure his hand applied to her waist. They walked back leisurely, drinking in the night air, and both dazzled by the ease they expressed in each other's company. And again Johnny wavered on the brink of asking Brigitte why she had acted so impulsively in handing him that note on the tube, and again he failed to take the initiative.
Brigitte's apartment was upstairs, and Johnny followed her as she climbed the stairs, his eyes taking in nothing but the limitless expanse of fishnet thighs. He was both apprehensive and excited, and a fraction afraid he might be sprung inside her flat. For a moment he thought of retreating, bolting back to the street, and forgoing the prospect of pleasure which awaited him.
But it was too late, and Brigitte opened the door to a tasteful, dimly lit apartment, the shaded green lamps throwing light over a sumptuous sofa and chairs, the whole place appearing elegant, modern, and well furnished. Brigitte collapsed into a chair, and simultaneously reached over for the sound system. Johnny listened as the familiar synth bars of 'Tainted Love' sounded in the room, and the even more familiar Almond vocals took up the theme. The voice, singing theatrically flat, told the story of a ruinously perverse love, and brought back all manner of associations to Johnny, the summer in which he had first heard the song, and the girls he had met on holiday t
hat year. For a time he had become a Soft Cell aficionado, and so his eventual gravitation to the iconic Gutterhearts tattoo.
Johnny sat in the chair closest to Brigitte, and at first it appeared as though the spell had broken, and that they had suddenly grown cold, awkward in finding speech, and set apart by their being total strangers to each other. Even Johnny's sexual alertness had vanished. The song was part of a compilation CD, and Johnny found himself relistening to other Soft Cell favourites like 'Memorabilia' and 'Say Hello Wave Goodbye'.
Brigitte shifted in her chair, taking up various seductive poses, and then right out of the blue, she said, 'Johnny, it was your tattoo I noticed first; I saw in you a conspirator. I wanted to know you, and see if we could have a little tainted love. I too have a tattoo, a heart and dagger, but you can't see it. You'll have to discover its existence.'
Brigitte came over to Johnny's chair, and sat on his lap, and placed her arms around his neck. His desire returned instantaneously, and he slipped his hand into the soft divide between her legs and coaxed that moist little valley. Brigitte responded with passionate rollings of her bottom over Johnny's now indomitable erection. She turned round to face him, scissoring her legs around his back, and working her crotch on to his pointed bulge. Johnny rolled her fishnet tights back, a movement she assisted all the way to her ankles and down over them, her scarlet panties jumping into view. He was so urgent he wanted to shred her panties with his teeth, and his tongue snaked into the wet divide of her crack. He picked her up and carried her to the deep sofa. Brigitte playfully wriggled, scratched, tickled, and kicked her legs into the air, and ended up facing the opposite way to Johnny, her lips swallowing on his cock, while his tongue eagerly enquired of her pussy.
Johnny could hardly hold back. Her deep throating rhythm tongued him to ecstasy, and was so relentless in its movements, that he let go and chased a hot jet of come into her throat. He was still excited, and remained erect, while Brigitte sucked the remaining drops from his cock, and once again teased his length from the base to the tip.
Johnny snapped off Brigitte's scarlet panties, tearing them from her bottom, and there the tattoo was on her right buttock cheek, but low down, and the words 'Tainted Love' were written on the red heart. Johnny placed his mouth to the spot, and placed a love bite on the surrounding area.
'There's another one too, in the front,' said Brigitte, and Johnny manoeuvred her on to her back and saw the tiny tattoo on her shaved triangle. Johnny couldn't hold back any longer, he plunged into Brigitte, and a shriek escaped from her lips. He rode her furiously, and her voice orchestrated the pleasure she was receiving. And when she came — her nails sunk into his back, her body synchronized to his every thrust — it was with an agonized scream. They lay together, his tattooed arm draped around her tattooed bottom, and brought together by 'Tainted Love'.
He Was a She
Martin sat in a gold swivel-chair five storeys up above Chelsea Harbour, reviewing the river's glaucous spine, and watching a tourist ferry negotiate a grey-green passage through the toxic undertow of the city's effluvia. It was an afternoon in late July, and a haze sat over the precinct like a thumbprint indented on a photograph. He could just make out the figures of three Japanese girls walking round the harbour beneath him, all of them dressed in tight, washed-out jeans. One of them had dyed her hair a dramatic scarlet, and he imagined its silky texture resembling a poppy's fragility.
Martin worked as a literary agent. His mind was fogging out from a surfeit of undistinguished fiction. Most of it was too full-frontal and lacked imaginative space. The writing was too close to what it described, and so there was no dimension on which the imagination could operate. Martin disliked the flat surfaces of social realism in the same way as he felt an antipathy to men who identified only with their masculine role. He liked the harmony established by dualities, the imagination in prose as it transformed the external world into a tangent of surprise, and the dichotomy in men who released the feminine within them by living out the fantasy of being transvestites.
Martin wondered how his colleagues would react if they knew that beneath his sober black trousers he was wearing a black suspender belt, pink silk panties and fishnet stockings. His fetishistic obsession with female lingerie had begun early, and had been linked to the intense but unfulfilled sexual desire he had felt for his sister, Janine. Catching glimpses of her in her bra and panties, watching her button her lips with scarlet lipstick or meticulously delineate her eyes with a black eyeliner pencil, had engendered in him a corresponding propensity to emulate her pronounced femininity. And when she was out, and he found himself alone and moody in the house on a Sunday afternoon, the silence punctuated only by Bessie Smith's broken-hearted blues, then he would begin the ritual of trying on Janine's flimsy black panties, and making up his lips and eyes with innovative flourishes that came instinctively rather than by studied emulation. Dressing up had caused him to realize extreme excitement, so too the thrill contained in the danger that he might be discovered. All he knew was that the need was ungovernable, and the risk negligible compared to the stimulus of the act.
Over the years cross-dressing had grown to be something inseparable from his notion of sexual pleasure. Martin could find no anomaly in transvestism, and rather than its alienating him from women, he had discovered to the contrary that most sexually adventurous women found men in women's lingerie a big turn-on. But to Martin the chief pleasure lay in the element of surprise. He liked a woman's fingers to discover for the first time that he was wearing frilly transparent panties. Reactions varied considerably from deepening a woman's caress to having her withdraw her advances until he had reassured her of the provocativeness of his particular fetish. Either response afforded him pleasure, and he had grown to choose exclusive lingerie and to wear the sheerest Dior silk stockings.
Another ten minutes and Martin would be free to leave for the afternoon. He had taken to coming in early on the ferry and to leaving by mid-afternoon. In an hour's time he would meet Simone, a rendezvous he hoped would result in his taking her back to his apartment. He rejected the novel he was reading, the chunky wooden prose doing nothing to elevate its subject from routine platitude. He looked out over the harbour. The monochrome grey cloud was giving way to a blue sky ceiling. Light was hitting off the river. Everything seemed transformed, as though he had stepped out of a cinema into reality. He read the sunlight as a propitious sign for his meeting with Simone.
Before he stepped into the lift to leave the building Martin went to the men's room. It fired him to think that he would check the seams of his stockings and apply perfume in a room visited by his apparently conventional colleagues. He had always derived kicks from violating gender restrictions. And often he had felt like flaunting his difference right in front of their eyes, and slipping back to his office in a red cocktail skirt. But he contented himself with locking a cubicle door and adjusting his seams in the inviolable silence of that unit. Wearing silk panties kept him permanently sensual and erect, and he looked on his chosen items of lingerie as a form of infallible aphrodisiac. He was hard and throbbing. He could feel the excitement chasing through his nerves, and he liked to think that he had found in Simone a woman who would respond with hot passion to his particular needs.
As he came out of the cubicle, and was checking his hair in front of the mirror, Paul breezed into the men's room. He was the youngest partner in the company, and Martin had noticed an almost imperceptible femininity in his face and manners which the young man worked hard to repress. It wasn't anything obvious, and probably nobody but Martin would have noticed. As Martin was leaving the room — he couldn't be sure — he thought he heard Paul remark, 'I know your habits, and I do it too!'
Martin walked to the lift, the phrase still ringing in his head, but he couldn't be sure if it had really been spoken by Paul, and he had no intention of going back to ask. The voice haunted him, but once out of the building and under a sheer blue sky curved above Cheyne Walk, he forgot the voice and
excitedly anticipated his meeting with Simone.
He had purposely arranged to meet her in a wine bar close to his apartment, so that the transition from one to the other could be affected with ease. The place was dark, and Simone was sitting waiting for him, her leggy pose winning his immediate attention, her black micro-mini appearing as an incidental to her sheer black tights. She had on a stylish purple beret with matching lipstick. Already he was imagining her lips working that purple texture into his telescoping cock. She looked like a girl who would swallow all of it.
Martin liked to talk to women about scent, make-up, what was being worn on the catwalks, and he so avoided any discussion of literature that it was often with surprise that his female partner discovered that he worked as a literary agent.
This evening he felt inordinately aroused. On the previous occasion he had met with Simone his fingers had discovered the wetness between her thighs, and he had drawn from her the sinuous contortions of a body he now intended to convulse with orgasm. Her hands on that occasion had failed to discover his secret by going inside his fly, and had instead coaxed the outline of his cock through his tight-fitting jeans. If she had detected the presence of suspender straps through the skin-moulded denim, then she hadn't let on.
They sat and drank wine and talked, and Martin quickly began stroking Simone's legs, working his hands in long brush strokes from her knees to the tops of her thighs. He could feel his cock straining above the ridge of the little pink panties attempting to contain it. He was all the more excited to note, from the one time that she had rearranged her legs, that she too was wearing pink panties. It crossed his mind that they might even have purchased identical garments, something which would make their coming together a bizarre union of corresponding tastes. Simone was growing visibly excited, and from the deep protracted kisses she had started to give him, her tongue working in every corner of his mouth, he knew that the time would soon be right for him to suggest that they returned to his apartment.