Bound to You (26 page)

‘Mmm. That’s nice. But do you think it’s possible to attract the right patrons in the first place?’

‘Are you kidding me? I know loads of men – and women – who’d be up for just a snuggle!’

‘Hmm, I suppose I agree,’ I conceded. ‘You can get by without sex. But you can’t get by without snuggles!’

‘Well, I can’t get by without sex,’ he confessed, ‘but I would never confuse the two. I would be an exemplary snuggle-shacker.’

He squeezed me to him and nuzzled me in sweet, platonic demonstration. I started laughing again. It wasn’t just Sebastian’s body that made me swoon.

What I really wanted, though, was to expand the repertoire of our activities. I talked about it with Gina. ‘I know that it isn’t just about sex, Gina, else why would we go for these long brunches? We’re usually together for nearly twenty-four hours when we see each other. It’s crazy the ground we cover in conversation. But I want to do cultural things with him. We spend so much time talking about culture it seems odd that he never suggests anything.’

‘So find an exhibition or event you think he’d enjoy and ask him if he’d like to go.’

‘Argh, I can’t! What if he says no?’

‘Why the hell is he going to say no? Unless it’s an artist he doesn’t like. Just ask him.’

‘I suppose it’s that a tiny part of me resents having to do the asking. Shouldn’t he be asking me by now?’

‘Nichi, he’s not a mind reader. Maybe he’s just not too good at formal dating.’

‘I guess. I hardly am. OK. I’m going to email him.’

‘Why don’t you just phone him?’

‘Because we don’t phone each other. And I’m not about to start now! He has to make the first phone call.’

‘How feminist of you . . .’

‘It’s not about that. I just want to know that he wants me.’

I knew Gina was right. I just had to ask him, but still I agonised over my choice of exhibition. I was desperate to minimise the chances of him declining. But why the hell did I have the feeling he might? I was just being paranoid. I knew it was early days but our connection was heady, intense and very, very real. I hadn’t met anyone since Christos that I felt might be perfect partner material and I was determined to give this every possible chance.

Finally, I made my selection: a retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s work. I was sure Sebastian would appreciate it, unless he’d already been. To make it even more difficult for him to say no, I told a white lie and said that I had press tickets.

‘Yes, let’s do it!’’ he replied, within a few minutes. ‘Always good to see what the fellow obsessives are up to!’

Why had I worried so much?

The Saturday before the date I decided to go and have my hair blow-dried. It was an indulgent treat I’d only recently been able to afford, now that I finally had a decently paid job, and I’d never have felt the need to bother when I was with Christos. Yet despite his warmth and that dimple-flashing, beaming smile every time we met up, I realised that Sebastian had never actually paid me a proper compliment. I had no doubt that he found me attractive, but I still wanted to make the effort, and to entice him to remark.

Again, we met at London Bridge station, near to where the exhibition was being held at the Tate Modern. In the end I had opted for a tight black pencil skirt, stockings, black heels and a sheer, grey, leopard print shirt. And fuchsia pink underwear, nails and lips after an amusing conversation we’d had in bed one morning about how the sight of bright, feminine colour worked Sebastian up into an even more dominant state.

This was the thing about being submissive; it made me want to desperately please Sebastian in a way I’d never felt like doing for any man before. It unnerved me, but already I trusted him implicitly and yearned to explore it.

Before I left the house I reconsidered the knickers. I decided to leave them off and smiled to myself slyly as I reached for my leather jacket and bag.

When I got to the station, Sebastian was already waiting for me, dressed in his usual monochrome, accessorised with the odd splash of grey. I tried not to race to him. He reached out to hug me and kissed me lavishly. And then he did something he’d never done before. He took my hand. Who cared if he thought it didn’t matter to compliment me. This was the only kind of compliment I was really after.

The exhibition was quiet with just a handful of other visitors mooching about.

‘Do you know much about her?’ Sebastian asked me. I shook my head. ‘So you can’t be my expert guide?’ he teased me.

‘Well, I was very much hoping you could be mine, Mr Pro-Artist!’ We looked at one another and laughed, then kissed spontaneously. Another first. Why had I left it so long to ask him if we could do something like this?

Kusama’s formative work consisted of drawings she’d done as a teenager growing up in Japan. They were full of darkly sketched organic shapes. She had suffered from hallucinations most of her life and that psychic distress seemed to manifest itself in her work.

‘It reminds me of the kind of thing I used to produce with my art therapist when I was anorexic,’ I said, and grimaced. ‘Just in terms of the obsessive, repetitive, bodily forms.’

I’d told Sebastian that I’d been anorexic during one of our late-night conversations, and he’d implicitly understood that it was little to do with vanity and far more to do with control. He nodded now.

‘Yeah, I think I have a few of these locked away in my vault. All done during my Lana period, of course.’

‘Lana?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘Oh, Juliet’s mother.’

Ah. That conversation on our first date now made a little more sense.

‘Was it a difficult relationship?’

Sebastian sighed and spluttered out an awkward laugh at the same time.

‘That’s one way of putting it. For years she used to drop in and out of my life on a whim. I used to constantly worry about the impact on Juliet. I was crazy head over heels in love with her. When she came back it was always the same. “We should be together, Sebastian, let’s get married, Sebastian, I love you Sebastian.” But then I’d wake up one morning sometimes weeks, sometimes just days later and she’d have vanished again. It went on for years. She even lived in Thailand for two of them and we resumed the relationship all over again when she returned.’

I listened solemnly. Even now Sebastian’s story percolated pain.

‘What was her reasoning?’

‘Well, I think she had a few undiagnosed mental health issues, but that’s not really for me to say. But she couldn’t empathise, and she couldn’t commit, not even to living in the same place for more than a couple of months at a time. And she could hurt me over and over with no sense of having done anything wrong.’

‘That sounds awful. Did you have anyone reassuring you that it wasn’t your fault? What did your friends say?’

‘They would badger me repeatedly about her, urge me to end it. Until they met her of course . . .’ Sebastian trailed off and smiled ruefully.

I couldn’t be sure, but something told me that Sebastian was referring to the hypnotism of her beauty. For a moment I felt uneasy. But then I felt honoured that he found it so easy to talk to me like this. I ran my fingers down the outside of his arm in comfort. Suddenly a more sensual picture caught Sebastian’s eye. ‘Aha! A pomegranate. A particular favourite of mine. I like to think of it as my spirit fruit.’

‘You know it was a pomegranate that had Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, right, not a apple?’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ He smiled, seemingly impressed with this arcane snippet of knowledge, and then came up very close behind me as I examined the picture, and whispered flirtatiously into my ear, ‘Trust you to know that, Nichi.’ I felt his breath, that sharp smell of his, and I longed for him to touch me. But instead he moved away and gestured his head towards the next room.

The culmination of the exhibition was an installation called the Infinity Mirrored Room, a mirrored labyrinth decorated with hundreds of tiny coloured balls that hung like suspended firework spray from the ceiling, the rainbow lustre magnified in every direction. It was like floating through a sugar-hued hanging galaxy, a magical experience, and as I walked ahead of Sebastian, I couldn’t help but examine our reflections caught among the lights. He was a moving study in muscular grace, and the rosy lights picked up the colour in that sensuous mouth of his. Meanwhile, there was me, little curvy Nichi, trying so hard to offer myself up to him as an object of desire.

I noticed the matching grey and black of our garments, as if we were dressed in a lover’s uniform. Yet we stood there together, apart. I waited to see if Sebastian would catch my eye in the mirror but he didn’t. Absorbed in the lights, his face locked in on itself the way I imagined it did when he painted. It was as if he were studiously refusing to meet his own reflection, let alone mine, and it left me with a curious sense of disconnection from him. Only minutes earlier he’d been revealing details of his emotional life to me in the most intimate way.

Sebastian was an enigma. Perhaps that’s why I was so willing to serve him sexually. Because by trusting him to dominate me, I hoped that he might entrust me with access to the most intimate, vulnerable parts of him.

‘Well, that was beautiful,’ Sebastian said as we left the gallery. ‘I’m really glad we saw it. Now, are we going to yours, or would you like to come back to mine?’ He was testing me again with this proposition.

I thought about it for a moment. He’d asked me back to his numerous times but I preferred to be in my own space where I had ready access to my magic complexion-saving cream if I slept in my make-up accidentally on purpose. Or maybe I just preferred to have Sebastian in my space so that I could sleep the next night with his pine-river scent lingering about the pillows, have a little more of him etched on my life. No, going to his could wait.

‘Not tonight. Let’s stay at mine.’

No sooner had we made it through the door than Sebastian came up roughly behind me and began to grope my bottom. When I reached my hands back to stroke along his arms he grabbed those too.

I ground myself back into his groin and strained my head back to kiss him.

‘Would you like anything?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’d like you to bend over the bed for me.’

My skin prickled. The sex games between us always started sensually, with some gentle kissing and fondling that worked itself up into a fever. Sebastian had never commanded me like this before.

I shuffled obediently into the bedroom and kicked off my shoes.

‘A-a-ah! Did I say you could do that? Put your shoes back on.’ Sebastian came up behind me and placed a strong hand on the nape of my neck, then stroked it down over my collar bone, then my cleavage, until his fingers slid under the fabric of my top. His breath was cool on the back of my neck. Yet I burned as he blew on me. ‘You know how much I love high heels. And you really do have a penchant for slutty ones, Nichi.’

I thought about retaliating for a moment but Sebastian was caressing me to distraction already, inching his fingers down into my bra and stretching out the cups so that he could pull on my nipples.

‘You could probably make me cum just like that,’ I told him between snatched breaths.

‘That’s if I let you,’ he replied immediately.

Suddenly he slapped me hard on the backside.

‘Ow!’ I cried out and swooned back into him.

‘What did I say about your shoes, Nichi?’

‘You didn’t give me a chance!’ I retorted.

Sebastian whipped his hand out from underneath my bra and clamped it back around my neck.

‘So let me help you,’ he said, rearranging my shoes in front of my stockinged feet. ‘Step up!’ I slipped them back on, nervously resting back onto him for balance as I did so. God knows what Sebastian had in store for me. The feel of his body behind me filled me with delicious apprehension.

Then, he brought his curling lips back to my neck, and whispered, ‘Whoever knew you were this contrary?’

I was breathing hard now, the movement of my chest causing my bra to protrude out of my shirt where Sebastian had pulled it back. ‘But I’m not,’ I retorted weakly.

Sebastian thrust me face down into the mattress. I was bent over the bed now, ass in the air for his delectation.

He fondled his hand approvingly over the thin fabric of my skirt then lavished the tips of his fingers up alongside the insides of my thigh. I quivered under his touch, braced myself for the spanking I knew I was due any minute. Then Sebastian wrenched up my skirt, over my hips, arranging it in neat creases over the small of my back, until my bare white bottom was completely exposed.

‘Oh,
Nichi
.’

Shit, of course! I’d completely forgotten that I wasn’t wearing any knickers.

‘You mean to say you went all the way round a civilised art exhibition with me without wearing any panties?’ His soft, wave-breaking voice had lowered a tone. I’d gone commando because I thought it would titillate him when we finally made it home. But maybe, secretly, I had also hoped that he was going to use it against me.

The delicious anticipation of my first proper spanking had me quivering. And the quivering betrayed my lust, betrayed my need to have Sebastian honour it with his hand.

For a split second, I wondered if Sebastian would do to me now what I had once done to my clients, putting them into position then backing off to heighten the anticipation of punishment. But the sight of my smooth white skin, the spongy curves of my generous ass, must have implored him to strike it and without giving me a moment to brace myself, Sebastian’s rampant hand came hard down on my behind, sending that sensual heat coarsing through my cheeks and down along the backs and insides of my thighs.

He slapped me two, ten, twenty times, staggering the spanks, increasing the strength until I was flinching away from him, each slap, each scolding kiss of his fingers on my stinging flesh leaving me a little more supplicant to his whim.

“This is for daring to try and play cocktease, Nichi. You think it’s original to go out without your knickers on?”

Should I reply? I had no sense of what was the right answer any more. Whatever I said would be used against me. And I wanted it to be.