by Tilly Delane
I unashamedly stare at her as she lounges on the light grey leather seat, a perfect vision in silver white, from the tip of her newly bleached hair to the silver pumps on her feet. The skin-tight satin dress she is wearing gives an illusion of curves I never thought I would see on her. It’s knee-length and shoulder free, showing off her creamy calves below and her delicate clavicles up top. I have a thing for nice clavicles. Girls this skinny usually have an ugly hollow just above them, but Kalina doesn't. Her clavicles curve beautifully, creating a perfectly inviting shallow dip at the bottom of her throat that I could run my tongue around all evening.
It hits me that this is the difference between a woman who was meant to be this size and a woman who hungers herself into it. Kalina was meant to be exactly the shape she is and, devoid of jiggly bits or not, that makes her sexy as hell.
“You okay, George?” she asks with a big smile, and I realise I’ve been staring maybe a little too long. “Are the hair and the eyes freaking you out?”
She runs her hand through it and winks, while it hits me that her English has come on in leaps and bounds lately. A few months ago, she wouldn’t have used the articles ‘the’ in that question, and probably got ‘are’ and ‘is’ confused.
Her vocabulary has become huge, too. I mean, better than some English arseholes I know, who communicate mostly in grunt.
I’m not going to point it out to her, though.
I reckon it’s an awareness thing. I think when she’s relaxed it flows, but if I make her conscious of how good she’s becoming, she’ll start stammering and making mistakes again.
I have the same problem when I need to write something.
I’m seriously dyslexic, though my spoken English is fucking fantastic, thank you very much. But I really can’t spell to save my life. At school it used to get worse whenever my English teacher would point out that I was spelling something correctly. If, for example, I had just written ‘choreography’ right and he’d praised me for it, then there wasn’t a hope in hell I would be able to get the next word in the test down on paper with the letters in the right order. Not even if the next word was something super simple, like, say, ‘the’.
So I keep my trap shut in order not to make her feel self-conscious.
Instead, I steal the bottle of Krug out of Sheena’s hand and refill Kalina’s glass.
“No, it’s not freaking me out,” I answer her question. “I’m just enjoying the view.”
“You like blondes, huh?” she says lightly, but I can feel the sting she is experiencing underneath.
I’m not having that. Not on her birthday.
“I like what I see,” I admit with a small smile. “But what I see is not a blonde. It’s a girl who could rock any hair and eye colour under the sun.”
“Way to go on the cheesy compliments, Bryan,” Grace interjects cheerfully, leaning forward to hold out her glass.
Silas, who’s sitting next to Kalina and Grace, rolls his eyes.
“Oh fuck. We’re not gonna call each other by our fancy dress names all evening, are we?” he asks, horrified. “I didn’t sign up for that shit.”
Sheena, who is sitting on my side, snorts a laugh.
“Let me get that straight, baby,” she says to her son. “You let me put blusher on you for this gig, but you refuse to be called Simon?”
Silas rubs his hand over his face in despair.
“Whatever,” he mumbles before he looks up to make eye contact with me, realisation dawning on his face. “I look like a complete twat, don’t I?”
I grin.
“Yup,” I confirm then point at myself, trying to mollify him with a bit of self-deprecation. “But at least you don’t still fit into the clothes you wore at sixteen.”
He smirks at that.
“Thought I recognized the threads. I can’t believe you still have all that.”
“What can I say,” I tell him, holding his gaze. “I’m bad at letting stuff go.”
It almost seems like the women stop breathing for a tick, specifically to appreciate the little moment my friend and I are having here.
This is as close as I’m ever going to get to telling him that I fucking love him and that he will always be my friend, no matter who holds what position in this shit show that is our life.
It’s beautiful, even if I do say so myself.
Then Silas breaks the spell by looking away, a grin on his face, and Kalina leans forward to grab my attention back.
“You used to wear clothes like that?” she asks with round eyes.
I laugh.
“Well, yeah. Suits aren’t really a fashionable thing if you are a teenager in Britain. Too much like school uniform,” I inform her.
Kalina leans back with a mysterious smile playing on her lips and looks to the side.
“What?” I ask her.
I see her smile unfold into a full-on flirtatious grin as she turns back to me.
“Nothing. Just that Madonna has thing for, what are they called?”
She pauses for a moment, gesticulating up and down to indicate, well, basically, me.
“Ah, yes,” she finally carries on. “Blond bad boys in lumberjack shirts.”
Then she leans back, nonchalantly sips her drink – and unashamedly eye-fucks me for the rest of the ride.
Kalina
The man is painfully hot.
He’s hot in his suits, he is hot in sweatpants, and he is extra scorching in this.
And he’s giving as good as he gets.
I don’t take my eyes off him for the rest of the ride to London, and he never once wavers in looking right back at me.
By the time we get to the restaurant where we are going to have our pre-show dinner, I’m a bundle of hot, desperate, slippery need.
Just from looking.
I’m so lust drunk, and yeah, a little tipsy from the champagne, I barely take in the white linen on the tables and the general silver service ambience when we enter the place.
I do realise, though, that we stick out like sore thumbs. Thing is, I wouldn’t have minded going somewhere much simpler but, of course, we are limited to places that have parking for stretch limos.
To my relief, the maître d΄ doesn’t bat an eyelid as he comes over to greet us. From what he says to George, I get the idea that George explained to them ahead of time why we are not rocking up in the formal wear that all the other patrons are wearing. I guess it is that attention to detail that makes Diego so successful.
The maître d΄ ushers us to follow him and my whole body catches fire when George puts his hand on the small of my back to guide me to my place at the table.
I’ve been in the company of many men in a lot of different guises and at a lot of different functions but not one of them has ever actually done that. I always thought that was just a romance novel cliché. I guess not.
We are barely seated when Grace and Sheena excuse themselves to go to the toilet. They look at me expectantly, but I shake my head.
“I’m good,” I say with a smile.
It’s a lie. I need to pee. It’s been a two-hour ride, of course I need to pee.
But I’m also not getting through this evening without doing something about the state I’m in.
So I will wait for them to return before I will make my own excuses.
Timing is always key.
Diego
She’s so turned on, I can fucking smell it.
Her pussy is calling to my tongue like a siren.
I bet she tastes divine.
Our little game of don’t-look-away in the limo has left her in that delicious state of permanent arousal, and when I put my hand on the small of her back, I can feel her shiver with lust through the cool fabric of her dress. A shiver that goes right up my arm, through my heart, into my balls and to the tip of my permanent hard-on.
She is absolutely killing me.
I make sure she is seated at the head of the table, as is befit for the guest of honour, and take my place to he
r left. Grace sits down opposite me and Silas next to her, so Sheena ends up opposite him, on my other elbow. We have barely ordered drinks, when Grace and Sheena excuse themselves.
Kalina stays and peruses the specials menu.
I pick mine up, and the letters immediately start swimming in front of my eyes. But it doesn’t matter. I made sure I had the restaurant read out the specials to me over the phone earlier, while I was on my way to pick up the others. I’ve already made my choices and memorized them.
For a moment, it occurs to me that Kalina also might need help with the menu. Her everyday English may have expanded exponentially in the last three months, but these posh places with all their poncy linguistic acrobatics are maybe a bit too tricky for her grasp still.
I feel like a failure.
I look over my menu, trying to catch Silas’ eyes. He’s one of the very few people I am not directly related to who know how difficult reading is for me.
He wasn’t looking, but the force is strong between us today, and his head comes up almost immediately. His eyebrows ask me if I need help, but I surreptitiously shake my head and then indicate to Kalina and the menu with my eyes. He blinks in understanding.
“You okay reading the menu, Kalina?” he asks, and it pains me that I can’t be that person for her.
She looks at him and frowns. She seems seriously puzzled for a moment. Then understanding lights up her features.
“Pardon?” she says in a pretend French accent, which is cute as hell. “Oh. Ah. No, thank you. I’m fine. It’s all here in French as well.”
“You speak French?” I ask her, intrigued.
She turns to me and smiles.
“Qui. Und Deutsch, och Svenska, y un poco de Español.”
“Wow,” I say, genuinely impressed.
“I didn’t know that,” Silas says, eyebrows raised.
We are interrupted by the waiter bringing us a breadbasket with all sorts of fancy artisan bread rolls, the sommelier hot on his heels.
On one of Grace’s recommendations, supported by the respectful nod of the sommelier, we have moved from champagne on to a Pinot Gris. Due to the lack of Grace’s presence as he returns with the bottle now, the sommelier appears to choose me to go through the whole wine tasting spiel, but I indicate for Kalina to do it.
It’s her birthday, she gets to say yay or nay.
No idea if she knows anything about wine, but she does a great impression of somebody who does, and the Pinot passes muster. Once the sommelier has retreated again, reassuring us that the waiter will come back for our food orders as soon as everyone is at the table and we’re ready, Silas picks up the conversation from before.
“That’s impressive, Kalina,” he ponders. “And unusual. I don’t want to sound like a typical English prick, but usually people in the rest of Europe learn English as a foreign language first, or not? How come you learned, like, all the other ones first?”
She looks at him blankly for a moment, while she chews on a piece of bread then she laughs and shrugs.
“There are more than two hundred languages spoken on the continent, Silas,” she answers in perfect English. “So speaking three or four is hardly all of them. My family considered German and French the more important ones. We lived in Sweden for a bit. And I chose Spanish next because it sounds nice. And because I like Spanish literature. And Spanish art. The food is good, too.”
I can’t help it.
“What about Spanish men?” I ask, and watch Silas chuckle silently.
She smiles mysteriously and gives me another one of her sultry gazes, eyelashes at half mast. It really shouldn’t work this well with her naturally dark eyes obscured by those green-blue contacts, making it hard to read what’s actually going on in her mind, but fuck me if my dick isn’t trying to burst through the buttons on the fly of my Levi’s now.
“Ah,” she says with a regretful note. “Most Spanish men are dark. I told you before, I prefer blond.”
Silas laughs out loud at that.
“You two crack me up. Just so you know, you’re looking at the best of both worlds there, Kalina. That bastard is half Spanish, believe it or not.”
She draws back a bit and her eyes go from bedroom-heavy to round so fast, it’s comical.
“For real?”
I nod.
“For real.”
“So, Diego...” she starts, questioningly, waiting for me to fill in the blanks.
“Is my actual middle name,” I answer.
She leans into me again, lightly putting a dainty hand on my arm and scorching me all the way into the deepest, darkest corners of my lust-addled mind.
“I’m finally finding out things about you today,” she says and searches my eyes. “I like it.”
There is an interesting emphasis on the word ‘you’ in there that makes my heart break into a tap dance routine.
Then she abruptly retracts and gets up, just as Grace and Sheena reappear at the table.
“Excuse me, people. Looks like I need the toilet after all,” she announces. “If the waiter returns, I will have the grilled artichoke hearts, then the lamb cutlets.”
On that note, she grabs the rest of her bread and swans off in the direction the other two women just came from.
Kalina
I’m sure there is a special kind of prison, somewhere in France or Switzerland or some other country where they are still big on etiquette, for people who walk through a swanky restaurant, munching on the free bread filler-uppers, but I’m starting to feel too woozy to care.
Tasting the Pinot Gris was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or the drop that brings the bowl to overflowing as they say in my native tongue. Which seems more fitting, given the circumstances. I only had two glasses of champagne in the limo, but I haven’t eaten since breakfast. If I don’t count the strawberries.
And there is also still the small matter of me feeling hornier than I ever have in my life. That’s not helping with clarity of mind either.
Which is why I’m about to do something about it.
As I weave through the main body of the restaurant, dutifully ignored by the other patrons, I hope and pray that this upper-class establishment has the kind of toilet cubicles that give you full privacy.
My hopes are rewarded with an expanse of ‘restrooms’ that truly deserve the name. The individual cubicles are generously sized and completely built up in brick and mortar, tiled to the ceiling and with solid wood doors.
There are three in total and each of these little havens for bodily functions has its own marble sink, overlooked by a gilded mirror. The obligatory hand wash and hand cream dispensers rest in a wire holder screwed to the wall. There is a wicker basket with rolled up hand towels on a plinth and a stylish laundry bag made from Hessian to put the used ones in. Next to the toilet roll holder, a small silver box is screwed to the wall, containing an array of different sanitary products along with a bunch of those paper disposal bags that have a Spanish flamenco lady printed on them. I never knew what that was about but seeing her always makes me happy. And, of course, there is a bowl of potpourri, dispersing its scent from a specifically designed alcove in the wall.
I look around me while I pee and try to work out when the last time was, I went to somewhere like this.
It’s been a while.
It’s nice.
I step up to the hand basin after I’ve finished relieving myself, and stare at the woman in the mirror while I soap my hands.
I don’t know her. She might be anyone.
This green-blue-eyed platinum blonde sex goddess might well have no qualms about getting herself off in a restaurant toilet.
And I really need to get off if I want to make it through this evening.
I watch her as I hitch up my dress to my waist and spread my legs a little, and a thrill runs through me, but it’s just a little too weird this. So I lean forward to rest one arm on the edge of the sink and my forehead on top of the arm, closing my eyes. As soon as I do, I see Ge
orge’s face. His luscious mouth. His stormy grey eyes, always so soft when he’s at Sheena’s house but so harsh when we see him in town, doing business.