A Stranger's Touch (3 page)

I found then that I couldn't speak.

The air shifted again, and when he answered, his voice was level with where I sat, no longer towering above me. "Funny how you never refer to yourself as an escort," he said, his tone puzzled, but gentle. "Many of your ilk do."

"I'm not an escort. I'm a prostitute. A whore, if you prefer. I don't mind. I'm not interested in going to parties, eating dinners, dancing. That stuff bores me. I just want to be close to my clients' bodies. I want them to fuck me. I want to make them come."

"I know you do. It's part of who you are, Red, and above all things I do not wish to change that. You are a delight and a joy to me. We do not do the things we do together to change anything, but to make you more fully yourself. More fully alive. Do you understand now?"

I wasn't sure I did.

"I want to understand," I whispered. "Please, help me. I know I will not see you again after tonight."

As I spoke, tears crushed my words to silence. There were so many things I wanted to tell him. I wanted to beg him to let me go wherever he went, I wanted to tell him how I felt, ask how he felt, too. I could say none of it. Instead, I cried. He stood up once more, rested his hands on my head--the left side this time--and waited for me to finish.

Oh, of all the things I worshipped him for, the greatest of them all was this: how he let me be who I was, feel and think what I wanted to without interference. Nobody before or since, not even Robbie, had treated me with such honour. Though it was Robbie I loved.

After a while, I was calm again.

After another while, the stranger began to massage my hair. This time, his fingers gave me not pain, but a curious sensation of warmth. It felt as if golden coins were easing themselves through my skin and blood, melding together into a vast expanse of richness. When I blinked, the movement made colored sparks flash behind my eyelids. I began to laugh, although I didn't really know why.

"That's it," he said, his voice carrying an echo of the laughter I offered him. "Find your joy, Red, and live in it. It is your best and brightest gift. Even more beautiful than the glories of your hair. Because whatever happens, know that you are loved. Deeply loved."

Something powerful surged up then from a place within that I'd never explored, and my laughter deepened and broadened until it filled not only myself, the stranger, and the room, but the whole of the street, the city, the world. The joy of it danced round the skies and sprang upwards to meet itself from the earth beneath. It was gold and the deepest red, the wildness of green and the brightest blue. It blinded me; it made me see. I could never describe it. And all the time, my laughter beat with the pulse of the air, the rhythm in his fingers. It tore aside the shadows of my life, and I stepped into sunlight.

Finally, the flood of it eased, whispering to me of promise and memory. I was myself again, but more so.

I smiled.

"You love me," I said.

"Yes. I love you. We love each other. Has that not been clear to you all along?"

Without waiting for an answer, he took his hands away from my hair. The colour and warmth remained within.

As if I were as light and free as a child, the stranger leant over, put his arms around my back and under my legs and lifted me up from the chair. From instinct, I hugged his neck for safety and from need, feeling for the first time the heat of his skin against my fingers.

"You're...you're real," I stammered, stupidly. "I was beginning to think you might not be."

"Yes," he replied. "Very real."

I knew then what he would do, this last time we would ever meet.

We spent a long time exploring each other there in the darkness, the rich murmur of laughter rising from one or the other of us in turn. I kissed and licked his neck, his shoulders, his chest. I stroked his balls and took his cock deep inside my mouth. He allowed me to take my fill of him. When he came, I swallowed him down with laughter and a sense of being present, right here, right now, for the first time.

When he made love to me, he was as gentle as somehow I'd known he would be. He knelt on the floor, lifted me up and lowered me slowly down onto himself, allowing me the time I needed to grow used to how he felt. His cock was long and slender in my flesh, penetrating my arse as if perfectly fitted to entering my body, and stretching me into the shape I was meant to be. He licked and kissed my face and neck, and I moaned anew at the warm delight of his tongue.

"Ah, Red, remember who you are. The lust, the history, the laughter," he said as his thrusting became more intense.

I wrapped my legs around him, becoming part of him, giving myself without holding anything back to the tides and demands of his body. Suddenly, we were there, together, in the place where everything was equal and everything was free. He gasped, cried out--words I could not catch--and then his warmth and wetness filled me up. I opened my mouth wide and laughed at the astonishment of it, just as my cock leapt against him and my spunk layered his chest. Almost as it had the first time we met. He laughed with me, smearing my juices over both our bodies. He smelt glorious. But even then the shadow of his leaving hung in the darkness between us, a pain I would have to bear.

"Yes," he said, still inside me. "You will have to bear it, but you are strong now. Enough for us both."

"You...you give me such joy."

"I know, and it is yours to keep."

Carefully, he pulled himself from me and laid me down onto the carpet again.

"I wish I'd been able to see you," I whispered. "You're so beautiful. My hands and tongue tell me so."

"You see me with your skin, and it is there that it counts for you. You will always have me, in your flesh."

I lay spread-eagled, satiated beyond measure on the floor, feeling the buzz of carpet against my back and arse. My stomach and wilted cock were sticky with cum.

This was the end. I understood it. With all my strength, I treasured the final few moments he shared with me. A breath on my cheek and a light touch on my mouth, his lips to mine. I could feel his smile with every part of my body. When he spoke, I was ready.

"As I have told you and as I have done to you, remember. Beyond everything, I leave you yourself, Red, and contained within you all the life that is yours in abundance. Dwell in it."

Then, as I knew he would, he walked out of the room.

It took me a while to gather myself together enough to leave the house. As I stumbled down the stairs, mind humming with confusion and--yes--delight, I realized that the gift I was taking with me was not sorrow, but joy. To my surprise, Robbie was waiting outside on the street. Under the lamplight, I could see the shimmer of his hair and the sudden spark of the cigarette in his mouth. When he saw me, he nodded and pulled the cigarette from his lips, crushing it under his boot.

"He left," he said before I could speak. "I watched him go. It looked...final. No more easy money there then."

"Yes. No more easy money."

Robbie reached out for my arm, drew me into his side. "You cold?"

"No. Just thoughtful, that's all."

"What happened?"

I told him. Everything we'd said and everything we'd done. He, more than anyone, had the right to know it. When I came to the part where the stranger made love to me and how I'd wanted, for a while, to be with him for always, even though it was impossible, Robbie gasped and gripped me a little tighter, but said nothing. After a while, I carried on, completing my story until there was nothing left I could tell him.

In the early morning city glow, everything around us seemed silent. Too early for people, too early for love perhaps, or hate. I took hold of Robbie's hand. He made a sudden movement, as if to protest, but I shook my head.

"Please," I whispered. "Everything I do and say and think is for you, and everything given to me, including love, is yours. Whatever has happened or will happen. You know it."

"Yes," he said. "I know it."

I kissed his mouth then, smiled with the well of laughter I carried within me now. He smiled back. I thought with pleasure of all the moments to come, with the men I serviced, with Robbie, and with everyone and everything I had yet to encounter.

Then we walked together out into the day.

Anne Brooke's fiction has been shortlisted for the Harry Bowling Novel Award, the Royal Literary Fund Awards, and the Asham Award for Women Writers. She has also twice been the winner of the DSJT Charitable Trust Open Poetry Competition. She loves reading dark and quirky crime novels and has a secret passion for bird watching and chocolate. Preferably at the same time. She once took a balloon flight in Egypt but spent most of the time screaming, and she hopes she never has to do it again.

To learn more about Anne and her writing, please visit her website at: http://www.annebrooke.com

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