Liaisons Read online

  He turns away; she looks down into his face, her lips parted, pretty face reflecting the anticipation, the desire that I can’t see on his. She spreads her legs, standing on tiptoes in her heels to give him access. And he pushes into her. Her head goes back; her eyes close. I release the breath I don’t know I’ve been holding.

  Straining, thrusting, their bodies join. My hand moves with steady, certain rhythm now, driving towards the inevitable, final scene of this act. I hear her cries, sharp and breathy, punctuating the song of the breeze in my ears. His body slams into hers; his ass squeezed tight. Her tits bounce with each thrust. In the indoor light I see their skin shining with sweat.

  I feel the ice of my own sweat ruining the lining of this jacket. I feel the constriction in my balls heralding the fact that soon I’ll ruin these slacks too. With a vicious smile, feeling like some perverted father-god, I let go of conscious thought. I give in to the blank ecstasy of release …

  I wake up in Michael’s arms, the smell of our sex and his body filling my senses before I even open my eyes. It makes me smile, despite the twinge of pain in my clit as I move to extricate myself from the bed.

  Last night fills my mind. The shower: we spent an hour there alone – maybe more than that – I can’t put time around it now. I think of how he rubbed the soap over my breasts and my pussy and my shoulders and belly. I think of watching him rinse it away in sections, bit by bit, the sight of the suds sliding down my own naked body more erotic than anything he could have done to me with his own hands.

  I stand at the window and look out at the busy ocean, its voice muffled behind glass.

  Water cascading around us, he’d smiled. He pinched my puckered nipples, rolling them between his fingers until I moaned and squirmed and begged him. Until I felt the wetness between my thighs that had nothing to do with water. Then he turned the spray of the shower between my legs and let the stinging pressure savage me into coming again and again and again. And when he lifted the spray to fall harmlessly on my belly and asked me if I’d had enough, when – panting – I swore I had, he called me his sweet liar and brought me over again.

  Will I let him do anything to me? I think I know the answer to that. My body does.

  Wincing and smiling, I steal the shirt lying over a chair at the foot of the bed and drape it over my head. I’ve lain beside Michael; I’ve breathed his breath. He’s held me and kissed me and I’ve felt his body tremble along mine. It’s warm and sweet there with him in the bed, where he possesses me.

  But there’s still a part of this unfinished.

  I open the bedroom door and listen. Silence but for the ever-present sound of the sea outside. I walk on bare feet down the hall to the kitchen, shivering a little in the morning chill, following some instinct that pulls me. The sound of the surf grows louder; rumbling.

  I find him sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cup in hand.

  He looks up at me hovering in the doorway and I realise – something in his eyes tells me – that the shirt I’m wearing belongs to him. I’ve slept in his bed. I’ve held his lover all night. I want to ask where he’s been, but I can’t find any words.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asks me at last.

  I just nod.

  We aren’t the same people who met last night before dinner. He doesn’t get up to pour me a mug of coffee. He simply holds out his own, and I come to stand beside him, take the mug in both hands and inhale the powerful, aromatic brew.

  ‘Brazilian?’ I ask.

  He smiles. ‘Yes. Dark roast,’ he tells me. The good stuff. No bullshit espresso in this kitchen. I take a sip and we both listen to the surf roar pure fury for a minute before it subsides into its steady, grumpy thrashing again. I hand the mug back to him and he puts it on the table.

  We aren’t strangers.

  He pushes the chair back from the table and turns to face me. I stand between his knees while he releases the few buttons of the shirt, lets the oversized garment slide off my shoulders. His fingers stroke my nipples; the dusting of curls between my legs.

  ‘I thought I’d given up on women,’ he says. His finger slides between my lips, probes the tender flesh and I draw a sharp breath, bite my lip hard. He smiles. ‘Michael get rough?’

  ‘I let him.’

  He laughs and slides the finger past my painful clit into my cunt wet with morning arousal. I close my eyes as my tired, over-stimulated flesh responds – yet again – to a knowing, sensual touch. Briefly I think that in all my life it’s never been this way, not with a single one of my so-called straight lovers. I wonder what the hell has happened to me in one night. And can I ever go back now?

  ‘But then …’ he says and, with my eyes closed, I listen to the gentle rumble of his voice as his finger moves behind my pelvic bone, coaxing my hips into movement too ‘… I thought I’d given up on a lot before him.’

  Oh so did I. So did I.

  ‘And now you,’ he says. He grinds his finger into my softness and I open my eyes, give a little cry half of pain. His eyes – the colour of sun-touched morning water – are focused on my face. I’m trembling, my pussy clenching helplessly around his finger in an effort to prolong the sweet, unbearable rocking.

  ‘Are you gonna take him away from me, pretty girl?’ he asks me, and I hear the sadness, the anger in his voice. I squeeze my eyes shut, open them again.

  Once – before last night – I would have sunk behind the cold, calm voice of reason. Before last night I would have said, ‘It’s just one night. An experiment.’ I would have lied to him, to Michael, to my own conscience.

  Now, I let myself fall into that unforgiving, demanding blue.

  ‘Are you gonna send me away?’ I counter. My voice almost, not quite, breaks from the pressure of my racing heart.

  He swallows. The pressure of his fingers inside me makes my legs shake, my head swim. I’m falling. No. God, I’ve already fallen. And hard.

  ‘No.’ And his voice is low and rough. ‘I can’t send you away.’

  Her scent and the scent of the coffee mingle in my brain: earthy, heady, druglike. From the corner of my vision, I see movement, see him pause in the doorway, yawning. Naked as God made him … or as a god. Still caressing, teasing her, I look past her and meet his gaze. He takes in the sight of us and then he smiles.

  I slide my fingers from between her legs as he comes around the side of the table and she moans a little with disappointment. But only until his hand touches her lower back and his lips brush hers.

  ‘Did you both start without me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies with a smile.

  ‘You’re late,’ I add.

  I stand and lift my fingers to his lips. He licks the taste of her from them before I wrap my fingers around the base of his neck and pull his mouth to mine. His lips are already bruised from her kisses last night, and I bruise him a little more. When I’m done, his breath comes fast and shallow. His lips are red.

  She moves behind him, and peers at me over his shoulder, a smile playing about her lips. I return it. I can’t resist her either, with her evening-sky eyes and her mischief.

  But I decide that there are worse fates than this …

  We move in symmetry, orbiting each other. Touching when we get too close, when we fall into each other’s gravity. Drawn in by a core of desire that ties us up, binds us together. I’m not sure how I belong here. Or why. I just accept it.

  I’m standing behind Michael. He’s on his knees. I stroke his lover’s cock and bring it to his mouth. I tell him to suck it. I call him a slut.

  I know he’ll punish me for it soon enough, and the thought turns me liquid hot inside. I watch, fascinated by his mouth sliding along the shaft, by the glisten of saliva-wet skin. It excites me to see him like this: obedient. To see us dominating him, because the truth is that he really owns us. He tames us, traps us and plays with us, and we use him, punish him in return. I guess that’s the game.

  His lover pushes him away at last. We wait, unsure of the next move: we’
re making the rules up as we go. Improvising. Cheating a little for advantage … I know Michael is: his hands stray to his cock and he makes no move to hide it.

  His lover smiles. ‘I want to watch you fuck her … and I want to fuck you.’

  Michael smiles because he knows he’s won. I have another moment of doubt, thinking that I’m incidental, just a novelty. Or maybe a necessary evil. But, as Michael rises and turns to me, as I see desire, dark and light, in the way both of them look at me, I forget uncertainty. I only know need: the burn kindled so slowly, so subtly that it takes me by surprise.

  My heart speeds up to a frantic pitter-patter, pitter-patter. The blood pounds in my head. Michael puts both hands on my waist and kisses me. The taste of a man’s kiss flavoured by another man’s cock makes my stomach clench with excitement. Makes my clit throb. This is forbidden and terrible and I’m shameful for loving it, for wanting them both.

  ‘I’m a bad girl,’ I hear my voice saying as he releases me from the kiss, as he moves me back up against the table, pressing my ass to the edge so that I scrabble up to plant myself on the top.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispers, voice husky and distracted with lust. ‘I like you like this.’

  As he spreads my legs so far apart I wince. Worried, I check for the coffee cup and the saucer but they’re gone. It’s only me on the table, spread wide, my feet resting on air. So wet I feel a trickle of liquid over the crack of my ass. Michael’s finger finds it. He rubs the bud of my entrance, probing a little into tender flesh. I shiver.

  ‘Should I stop?’ he asks.

  I look over his shoulder into eyes the colour of the restless sea outside. I know what he wants. He runs his hands down Michael’s shoulders; his chest pressed to Michael’s back. His hand moves over Michael’s, pressing into me again. I struggle to find a mouthful of air. To nod. To tell them, ‘Yes. I consent.’

  I feel Michael’s finger slide into me and I close my eyes against the whisper of pain that burns up in the desire that overwhelms it. He fucks my ass slowly with one finger. Then two. I feel another touch, just as male, just as devastating, on my clit. I don’t open my eyes. I concentrate on breathing, on the agonising pleasure between my legs.

  Michael moans and then I do look. His face is red, his fingers curl a little in me, tensing. I see his lover’s hand stroking his cock with the same rhythm that’s making my clit quiver and tighten.

  ‘Are you ready for him?’ he asks. And I nod, mute. Too far gone with nerves and lust and too drunk on the unthinkable to manage words. Seconds pass, or is it years between the burning emptiness of their fingers leaving me and the cool, slick caress of lube.

  My fingers grip the edge of the table. My shoulders are arched with tension, my lower back tied in knots.

  I can’t, can’t, can’t. But I want it, oh, God, I want it. I want Michael’s cock hard against my opening. I want the sob in my throat, the pain that’s not pain.

  ‘Fight me,’ I hear him say. ‘Push back.’

  Automatically I do what he says, never mind that my brain is telling me it doesn’t make sense, and I feel him sliding inside of me. I feel the lust breaking away from pain. Feel my hips moving up, ass off the table, fucking. Vicious and hungry, I’ve left all inhibitions behind. I’m his, theirs.

  I complete the triangle, the triad, the triskelion: sacred three.

  I’m almost there when Michael stops, hilt deep in me, and I protest in wordless moans, but his fingers only tighten on my thighs. I watch his face as he holds his breath. He’s filled in turn. And I know. Oh I know how it feels while I watch him bite his lower lip. That wanting. The sinking, going under, the tremor in his chest and stomach. The high of submitting. And the pleasure rising and rising as the rhythm builds again.

  My teeth mirror his, sinking into my lower lip. Harder and harder. I taste blood and I think I can’t take any more, but I’m so close. I need it. I need it so badly. I see my torment reflected in Michael’s face, in his lover’s face. We’re all falling together. Doesn’t matter now who’s on top. Nothing matters but the end.

  The release.

  Heat rushes up my body, heat explodes between my legs. Pulsing on and on and on. I hear myself scream.

  I feel Michael’s cock spasm, I hear them both moan. I look into Michael’s eyes. Not really thinking, because I can’t think, but I don’t need my brain to get it. I know.

  Shaking so much I can barely move. I tell my overwrought muscles to relax. I close my eyes, lean back and let my head rest on the cool, hard table. Wood under my head. The thought makes me laugh a little; I’m giddy.

  ‘She likes it,’ he whispers to Michael, in a breathless voice. I hear them laugh.

  It’s over. But it’s just begun.

  A.D.R. Forte has written numerous short stories for Black Lace collections.

  My Tutor

  Primula Bond

  DOES ONCE A year count as infidelity? How can it? The moment is so fleeting, like an eclipse or an equinox, like one of those festivals that spring out of the calendar before you’re ready. Even though it’s regular as clockwork, every single year, it still hits you between the eyes. The dreamed-of, long-awaited carnival celebrated with such fever, such intoxication, such wild dancing, that everyone wonders, hidden under their real and imaginary masks, how the fuck we cope with our happy mundane lives back home.

  Every summer my heart lurches to see it’s only a week away, two days, a day, one hour, till I take the journey again. Anyone would think I was travelling across the globe. It’s only an hour to Oxford, but it couldn’t be further away from home. From the present. I wave to my family from the train, hiding my blushing cheeks, the new lingerie in my bag, and then I’m gone.

  And everything changes when I get there. I change. I take so much more care with mascara, lipstick, my maquillage, even though before the night is through my face will be kissed and licked until the mask is smudged and smeared and wiped away.

  I take the key from the porter and hurry across the quad to my guest room. All chintz and carpets, even a double bed, so different from the scruffy single room I slept in when it all began. That’s on another staircase, in another quad, and I can never go back there, because the reflection in this unfamiliar mirror is twenty years older.

  Baron was furious. As always he had his back turned. He was smoking and leaning like the caricature of an Oxford tutor against his mantelpiece. ‘Browning, Bella. I asked you for an essay on death and Browning.’ He tossed my essay aside, the handwritten pages fluttering hopelessly into the dry grate. ‘Not a regurgitated A level question on the madness of Ophelia.’

  Hot, stupid tears were making my eyes water. ‘I’ve been up all night crying. Sorry.’

  ‘Fucking marvellous. Finals in a week and you’re acting like a schoolgirl. And not in a good way.’

  There was an ambiguous silence. I think he was trying to make a joke, but I was far too nervous to get it. I didn’t know him so well then. I tried to open my book with trembling hands, burning up with embarrassment. I’d heard Baron swore at his students, and everyone hated him for it, but it had never happened to me. Maybe because usually we were tutored in pairs, but coming up to Finals he was taking us individually. Oh yes. He took me individually all right …

  I looked at his shoes. Highly polished brown brogues, tapping impatiently. I could imagine his brutal fingers twisting those thin laces into shape every morning. Or maybe, in the old days, gripping a cane and whipping it down on some poor student’s bare bottom. My stomach knotted tighter. I couldn’t tell if it was a kind of hectic, Ophelia-like excitement or because I just felt horribly thick. John Baron was a world renowned expert on Victorian poetry, Robert Browning in particular. And me? I wondered what the hell I was doing here. Sometimes the entire gamut of English literature may as well have been written in Swahili.

  ‘Some post-grad rugby player dumped you?’

  My breath caught with surprise. Where were the barked questions, the impossible list of sources and research and
revision to complete by next week?

  ‘What makes you think he’s a rugby player?’

  The shoes stopped tapping. I froze as Baron stepped over the surprisingly luxuriant Persian carpet and perched on the sofa arm furthest from me. My biro snapped in half, bleeding blue ink over my denim skirt, and I tried to dab at it with my snotty tissue.

  ‘Because you’re like all their groupies. Blonde, buxom. Gagging for it.’ Baron crossed one long leg over the other, took a drag and blew smoke out noisily. What brilliant props we all had when we smoked. ‘Guy’s an idiot.’

  ‘How do you know it’s Guy?’ I looked up, blushing even more furiously. ‘How do you always know everything?’

  He had his tweed-sleeved arms crossed, cigar smouldering between his fingers, and he was staring at me. He never stared at his students. He always looked at their work, his books, the mantelpiece, finally the door. I realise now that he was an awkward academic. But we just thought that he was middle-aged, abrupt and scary. So the first time I saw his eyes under the longish tawny hair I was stunned. They were like a lion’s. Hazel, and flecked with gold.

  ‘I meant guy, as in man. So I’m right, am I?’ He tapped the cigar ash into a saucer and actually smiled. ‘Gorgeous girl like you. He’s definitely a fucking idiot.’

  Our shared laughter was sudden and intoxicating, but I was so exhausted and hot and weakened by the softness in Baron’s voice that I burst into tears again.

  ‘Bella, time’s nearly up.’ He leapt up and marched about the carpet, gesticulating towards the window. ‘The bar will be open for lunch. The Cornish pasties are always tasty.’

  I shook my head and cried even harder. Now I’d got over the embarrassment, crying felt fantastic. A relief. Weeping in Baron’s study, where no one else could get to me, tears and snot dripping all over my short skirt and my tights, my hysterics a valid excuse to forget the bloody tutorial and my useless essay.

  ‘Not hungry?’ Baron sighed, and I heard the pop of a cork. ‘What happened, then, to make you bawl your eyes out all night? What did that Guy do to you?’