Dressed to Impress Read online

  His gaze flits between the three photos. He can’t say which one he prefers, but the one where Amy’s finger rests against her red red lips captivates him right now. He snatches it off the shelf, holding it up close to his face.

  ‘Amy,’ he moans, imagining that sweet mouth on him, her long strawberry blonde hair brushing over his thighs, ‘oh, Amy, yeah, suck me.’

  Howard is about to come – his balls are drawn up tight to his body, his thighs clenching rhythmically. He takes his hand off his cock for a moment to pull up his singlet. He hadn’t thought to bring tissues with him and he’s too focused on the impending explosion of his orgasm to remember that the reason it’s called a supply room is because it stores supplies. Like tissues.

  It is at this moment that a key sounds in the lock and the door swings open to reveal the object of his fantasies, in the flesh. But Howard is too far gone to stop.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasps, as he ejaculates over his rippling stomach, ‘so, so sorry.’

  Amy is dumbstruck. There is a lot for her to take in. First, that Howard has those pictures of her, which she never thought to show to anyone. Second, that everything she thought she knew about him was wrong. And third, that even if she can’t see all of him because of the shadow she’s casting, Howard is hot. Amy doesn’t know how she never saw that before, never saw beyond the spreadsheets and the sandals.

  Cheeks burning with shame, Howard pulls up his trousers and stumbles past her without a word. Amy knows she should feel outraged, but all she feels is aroused. Oh, and flattered. She has never considered herself beautiful, with her too-big nose and her slightly lopsided smile. When she picks up her photos and looks at them again, really looks at them, she sees how wrong she is. She may not be perfect, but that doesn’t mean she’s not beautiful. For the rest of the day Amy walks around as if she’s high.

  Howard is not in the next day, though, or the day after that, or for the rest of the week. Amy begins to worry that he’s not coming back. She asks around, but no one has heard from him. So she bribes the temp in Human Resources – more boobs than brains – and gets Howard’s private email address. She has to let him know that everything is OK, that even if she is puzzled about how he got the photos, she isn’t angry with him. And she knows just how to prove it.

  When Amy gets home that night, she takes three more self-portraits, each in a different style – one stereotypically ‘sexy’, one classy and the other explicit – because she doesn’t know what Howard would like best. That remote shutter gadget she thought she’d never use is certainly coming in handy. After a quick shot of whisky for courage, she sends Howard an email, attaching the three original photos that he has already seen, and the new ones she’s just taken.

  To: Howard Venn

  From: Amy Jenssen

  Subject: Photos

  Attachments: Amy.zip

  * * *

  Here’s the complete set. If you like what you see, meet me at Pirelli’s for dinner tomorrow night at 8pm.

  We missed you this week.

  Amy

  Howard has spent the last four days in his apartment, too ashamed to go to work, trawling the internet for advice on appropriate wording for an apology card. He sees Amy’s email immediately, and his stomach lurches. He’s sure the attachment will be a copy of the complaint Amy plans on lodging with management. Not that he blames her. He is thoroughly disgusted with himself.

  He has to read the message three times before its meaning sinks in. She won’t be making a complaint. She missed him. She actually wants to see him again. With a shaky hand, Howard downloads the photos. He is of course intimately acquainted with the first three, but not with the others. Exhibit 4: Amy, straddling a chair, biting her lip seductively, dressed like a schoolgirl in a plaid skirt and white cotton shirt tied up to expose her midriff. Exhibit 5: Amy, drink in hand, blowing a kiss to the camera, in a semi-transparent chiffon peignoir that hints at the bounty beneath.

  And finally there is Exhibit 6: Amy, wearing only her birthday suit, bent forward over the desk, looking back over her shoulder into the camera and winking. Howard makes a strangled sound. He can see right between her plump thighs to the blonde-furred crease in between. The lips of her sex look swollen, and he knows she was aroused when she took the photo. It is only with supreme effort, and some differential calculus, that Howard manages to get his libido under control. He’s saving himself for Amy.

  When he arrives at the restaurant, Amy hardly recognises him. His usually tousled hair is swept back; he wears a suit and expensive Italian shoes. He searches the room for her anxiously, and when their eyes meet a broad smile transforms his usually serious face. She stands to greet him and his eyes widen at the way her red dress clings to the flare of her hips.

  ‘Hi, Howard, I’m really glad you came.’ Amy winces at her double entendre. ‘Um, I mean, I’m so happy you’re here. You look great.’

  ‘Thanks, my brother gave me some advice on what to wear.’ Howard blushes. ‘I don’t go out much.’

  Once the waiter is out of earshot, he starts to apologise. ‘Amy, I’m so sorry about everything, I –’

  ‘It’s OK, Howard.’

  ‘No, you have to let me explain,’ he insists, and the next words come out in one long rush of a sentence. ‘I saw you at the print shop that night, but I was too shy to say hello, and then the assistant interrupted you and you got flustered and you forgot to stop the machine and it just kept on printing. It had already printed those photos before I stopped it, and I couldn’t just leave them there. And then, last Monday when you …’ Howard finally pauses, not for breath, but because what can he possibly say that would make things all right?

  ‘It’s fine, honestly –’

  ‘It’s so not, what I did was wrong, it was –’

  ‘Howard,’ Amy interrupts, ‘I said it’s fine. I’m grateful it was you who found them, not some random weirdo. So stop apologising. And … about that other thing … well, it’s my right to be upset or not. And I’m not.’

  She slides a hand up Howard’s thigh.

  ‘Now, let’s start our date for real.’

  To Howard’s delight, Amy continues to make physical contact with him throughout the evening, playfully slapping his arm when he makes an unexpected joke, letting her hand linger on his when she passes him the bread basket. He insists on paying, even though Amy demurs. He is old-fashioned, he admits. But it’s the least he can do, under the circumstances.

  He thanks her for a lovely evening and sees her to a cab. He makes no assumptions that Amy will sleep with him. But Amy is feeling bold. She knows what she wants; it is within her reach; she wants Howard. When he opens the door for her, she whispers in his ear ‘Come with me, I want to show you my studio,’ then pulls him into the cab with her.

  It’s only a short trip to her house, where Amy removes her glasses and pours them some wine, and Howard follows her into her study.

  ‘This is it,’ Amy says. ‘Look familiar?’

  Howard’s throat goes dry. He definitely remembers the desk, although, when he saw it, Amy’s delectable body was draped over it.

  Here goes nothing, she thinks, unzipping her dress and letting it fall to the ground with a hush.

  Howard also recognises the lingerie Amy is wearing. His collar suddenly seems too tight. When she strips out of her stockings, her corset, her bra and her panties, all the air seems to leave the room.

  ‘Amy, you’re –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘– so lovely.’

  She spins, slowly, showing off her peach of an ass. When she bends forward over the desk and looks back at Howard, the expression on his face is pure unadulterated lust.

  Howard approaches lovemaking as he approaches most things in his life, with the precision required to achieve the most desirable outcome. His trembling hands move over Amy’s body slowly, calculating the degree of her response to each touch, assigning each a value weighted in proportion to her pleasure.

  But when Amy shimmies her hips in desperation and pleads, ‘Howard, lick me, please, put your tongue in me,’ she undermines any goal of orderly erotic progression and forces him to act on instinct instead. Gone are the carefully measured caresses of before. He falls on her with an intensity both thrilling and frightening. The man Amy thought she knew is gone. This man, behind her, who traps her against the desk, who growls when she tries to turn around, is some other person entirely.

  Howard’s hand presses down on the small of her back, and she feels his long tongue snaking into the hot wet core of her, his nose pressing against her anus, his fingers worrying at her clit. She comes on his face before he’s even taken his coat off.

  When the aftershocks have died away, he helps her to her feet.

  ‘Wow, Howard, just, wow.’

  Amy starts to undress him now, a reverse striptease of coat, tie, cufflinks, shirt. He keeps his eyes open when she kisses him, as if he’s scared she’ll disappear. That just makes Amy hotter. When she pulls his belt free and pushes his trousers and pants down, though, she is taken aback.

  ‘Sweet fucking Christ, Howard! That’s not a cock, that’s a club!’

  Amy is too shocked to watch her language. She knew it was big – she had seen his member in the half-light of the storage room, before he had turned away from her – but she didn’t know it was this big. Nothing had quite prepared her for the sight of that magnificent thing, emerging fierce and flushed and swollen from the dark blond thatch of his pubic hair.

  Howard looks embarrassed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says, ‘we don’t have to, you know, go all the way.’

  ‘Uh, excuse me? Of course we’re going all the way.’ Amy strokes the prominent ridge running up the centre of his penis with her fingernail then binds the shaft with her hand. She starts pumping it up and down in short, fast strokes.

  ‘But I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘You won’t hurt me. Believe me, after what you just did to me, I’m more than ready to take you.’

  She sits on the desk and opens her legs wide.

  ‘So come get me.’

  Howard advances, but doesn’t try to enter her yet. First he examines her, pinching and pulling and probing at her sex until he’s satisfied that she is indeed wet enough. Amy whimpers and squirms when his thumb circles roughly over her clit.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he growls, as he spreads apart the delicate pink frills of her cunt and pinches her bud. ‘I’m not done yet.’

  And with that he wrings another shattering climax from her.

  He enters her while she is still coming, and with each spasm her clenching sex sucks his cock higher inside her, until he is buried deep in her, right up to the root. He cries out as her nails rake his back. She feels so good to him, so right, he doesn’t know how long he’s going to last. He’s afraid he’ll shame himself by coming too quickly, so he pulls out. It will buy him the precious seconds he needs to regain his composure.

  Amy looks furious, until Howard orders her on top of him. Then she smiles like a Cheshire cat and pushes him onto his back and climbs aboard, circling the head of his cock teasingly before slamming down onto him. She arches her back to let him hit her depths, then tilts her pelvis forward and tenses her inner thighs.

  ‘Fuck, Amy,’ Howard groans, ‘you’re so tight.’

  She fucks him fast, then slow, then fast again, refusing to let him get accustomed to her rhythm. It is maddening and she knows it. But she also knows when it is time to stop teasing and start an undulating slide up and down his cock that will wrench a release from him whether he wants to come or not. In the haze of his pleasure, Howard thinks he can hear a shutter clicking, and he shouts himself hoarse as Amy rides him, ruthless, to the end.

  The Shoes

  Grace Moskowitz

  Call it lust at first sight: I wanted to get fucked in those shoes from the moment I saw them, singing their siren’s song to me through the glass of the store window. I stopped, my stride arrested by the sight of them, gleaming black and beckoning me. I dragged my friends into the store with me, making them wait while I tracked down the elusive salesgirl and asked her if I could try a pair on in my size. When I slid my foot into the first one, I looked straight down and the angle of the top of my foot, criss-crossed by the broad elastic straps, made me feel my heartbeat throb in my throat. I knew these shoes would be perfect. I knew I had to have them.

  I’ve been a fan of stilettos since I met Victor, an old boyfriend who had infected me with his enthusiasm. It was from him that I learned of their power, not only over a man, but over myself as well. I thrilled to the contradictory feelings of vulnerability and power that wearing high heels gave me.

  Victor told me and showed me that it wasn’t the trampy bad-girl associations with spike heels that made the sight of a woman wearing them force thoughts of urgent and ferocious sex to course through his mind and body; for him, a woman in heels conjured up more than just thoughts of trollop/dominatrix.

  It was the contradictions inherent in a woman wearing high heels that appealed to him.

  He taught me that it was the contrast that affected him so strongly, the contrast of the woman’s elegance and grace and the vulnerability that threatened to overtake her when her pace and agility were constrained by unstable narrow heels; her gait shaky, her feet arched dramatically to show her calves to greatest effect. He can do anything to her when she’s so beautifully hampered, and she is utterly defenceless against either his need or her own stroked and fanned desires. Just as Victor saw careful construction as an irresistible invitation to deconstruction, elegance as begging for defilement, grace as needing to be disgraced, he responded to the dichotomies of femininity that were aroused when he saw a woman wearing stilettos. Both images of woman were simultaneously present, conspiring to get him hot and hard. With stilettos, a woman approaches iconic femininity and grace, underscoring the man’s rough maleness. To him, when a woman wore high heels, the extremes of masculinity and femininity were emphasised. And his response to perceived feminine weakness was twofold and immediate. Something about female vulnerability aroused both his protective tendencies and his consuming need to exploit that vulnerability, to take control of her body, her will. Her responses would be beyond her control, dictated solely by him. The shoes give her elegance and in the elegance is an invitation to defile. Lipstick is there to be smudged. Mascara is there to run. Beautifully styled hair is there to be pulled and dishevelled. High heels are a constant reminder of that ambiguity.

  At his insistence, the heels always stayed on.

  Teetering, unsteady, riven by lust, I would lean towards him, or, thrown off-centre by too sudden or swift a step, fall against him, needing to be rescued, needing to be ravished. I’d look at my legs, lengthened by the stilettos, my shiny scarlet toenails accented with the criss-crosses of strappy sandals. The arch would shorten the perceived length of my feet, feminise and round them. I felt delectable, sultry and tempting, a victorious vixen, an enchantress and goddess of the sensual: regal, commanding, hotter than hell. In short, I felt like someone completely different.

  But that was standing. It’s a paradox: standing in heels makes you more vulnerable, less steady, yet you feel more powerful, more in control, the essence of feminine supremacy. When you’re lying down in heels you are no longer in danger of falling, the physical problem of hampered mobility no longer exists, but the increase in psychic exposure rises in inverse proportion to the security of your ‘stance’. Supine, I gave myself over to sensation. I lost my authority, or let it be taken from me, as I gave myself over to drifting down the dark current of desire. I don’t know whether I surrendered myself to the Bad Girl lurking inside me or Victor turned me into one, but when I wore high heels lying down, when I glimpsed them against the mattress or the heels became tangled in the sheets, there was no doubt that I was one, that I behaved as she did, and more importantly was driven by the same always gratified desires as she was.

  Victor had encouraged my purchases and enriched my collection, which included pumps with impossibly skinny silver metal spiked heels, high-heeled and high-topped boots, lacy or strappy stiletto sandals, and criss-cross, kinky-ballerina shoes with wide leather straps to wind around an ankle and calf, inspiring thoughts of both graceful dancers and raw bondage. I discovered that it was precisely this juxtaposition of class and trash that embodied the appeal of high heels. To wear them made me ultra-feminine, graceful and ethereal; it also made me earthy and sensual, vulgar and direct. I owned several pairs of what would have been demure, ladylike pumps if not for the height of their heels or the angle to which they pitched my body. I became a high-heel devotee; hell, even my rain boots were a pair of shiny black vinyl spike-heeled ankle boots, whose heels were made of rubber.

  But it had been a long time since I had added to my shoe rack. After Victor and I had broken up, I hadn’t had someone who appreciated the allure of high heels enough to justify my breaking my budget to buy a tempting new pair. Besides, I had plenty of old favourites to wear to the theatre and to dinner, to nights out with the girls, and to enliven otherwise boring meetings. I had a good variety to wear not just to incite admiration and lust from friends, co-workers, acquaintances and strangers, but also strictly for myself, for my own sensual enjoyment, walking into a café with a magazine to grab a selfish hour of latte-fuelled dalliance, feeling inspired and inspiring as I luxuriated in decadent deviance. And in addition to the defiance of reading the latest New Yorker when I should have been working, wearing a pair of sexy shoes and drinking a rich and slightly bitter drink, I also wore them when I was back home, alone on my bed, wearing nothing else, rubbing my aching clit to a lather, pressing the heel of my hand up into my pulsing pussy. I guess you could say that Victor’s shoe appreciation had rubbed off on me.

  When I saw the pair in the window, I knew I had to have them. It had been far too long since I’d been this excited about footwear. I was pleased and surprised to learn that the shoes were priced reasonably. I guess the manufacturer figured shoes like this weren’t going to get much actual wear and tear, and thus didn’t need to be made with pricey materials. But that just enhanced their appeal. There’s such a thing as being a Bad Girl, and then there’s plain old fiscal irresponsibility; it’s nice when one of these conditions doesn’t necessitate the other. Fetish on a Fixed Income: if I’d written the book, those shoes could be the centrefold. And the fact that the shoes were cheap – literally – underscored the part of their appeal that was predicated on the fact that they were the footwear of a cheap woman – a tramp, even. These were not the classy footwear of my sueded-silk slingbacks with the gathered and pointed toes; they didn’t confer elegance or sophistication, delicacy or fine-boned, highly strung beauty. These shoes proclaimed their origins; they announced the wearer’s designs and motives. These shoes screamed of sex.