Lovers in Their Fashion (9 page)

Chapter 16

M
errill tried twice to contact Alice at home before giving up. If she was working late, she was working late. Merrill knew Alice kept a bed in the office and had her own private bathroom there for precisely that eventuality. When was she more likely to use it than when she had a hugely important show coming up? That was also, probably, why her cell phone was switched off. Merrill left a happy message and hung up.

It was a pity, though. Merrill wanted to tell someone about her and Tony, and who better than her best friend?

Bernice had spoken the truth when she told Alice that Merrill wanted to be able to produce a man to keep her mother quiet. She had also been looking for someone who would give her a good time, both in bed and out of it. She had certainly not wanted a long-term arrangement that would change the single lifestyle she so revelled in.

As it will, life had crept up behind her and played a little trick.

For Merrill had fallen head over heels in love with Tony Frejus.

If she had reached Alice, she had planned to propose dinner. During the meal, her conversation would have gone something like this.

“Love is madness. Love is temporary insanity. At least, I hope it’s temporary. All I think of is Tony. All I want to talk about is Tony. I love the sight of his face, I love the way his muscles ripple under his shirt. I love even more the way his muscles ripple when he’s taken his shirt off. I love the smell of him, clean from the shower, and I love the scent of him in arousal. I love what he talks about, and the way he says it. I love that Spanish difficulty he has with “d”s and “t”s when they come in the middle of a word. Did you ever hear a Bolivian say “Madrid”? I love it when he goes down on me and I love it when he pulls me over him so I’m sitting on his face. I love it when he throws me down and has me. And oh how I love”—and would she have blushed when she said this? Perhaps. But, knowing Merrill, probably not—”I love his cock. Just the sight and the heft and the feel of it. I love it when he has to pee and I hold it for him. I love it when I take it in my mouth after he’s washed it clean because he knows we’re going to bed. And I love it when he puts it in me.”

That is the kind of conversation she would have had with Alice. Of course she could have had the same sort of conversation with her mother, but it would have needed heavy censorship and Merrill was in no mood to censor her conversation about Tony. The now staid matron Mrs Abercrombie had once been the young Sicilian virgin Irene Secco and in neither of those guises could she have been allowed to hear her daughter rhapsodizing about her lover’s cock. The word alone could have Merrill banished for life.

Merrill had heard many times the story of how Irene, newly arrived in America, had met and fallen hopelessly for the young and vigorous New Yorker Brian Abercrombie – and how her brothers, equally fresh off the boat and still imbued with the values of the old country, had sought out the young American and delivered an uncompromising message. “You may marry our sister with our blessing. Or you may sever your connection and never see her again. Those are your choices and your moment of decision is now.”

Knowing her father as she did, Merrill was still amazed that he had not simply told the two immigrants to get lost. But he had been as utterly besotted with the beautiful young woman as she with him. They had married. She had born him four fine sons and a daughter and they had stayed blissfully together for forty years until his death.

Brian Abercrombie had followed his heart. His daughter intended to do likewise. She had not yet communicated that decision to Tony, nor explained his role in it, but she was sure that, at some level, he knew.

There was one thing she could have added to the list of things she loved about Tony and probably would not have done, even to Alice. She really would have blushed to hear herself say, “I love it when he spanks me” and she was not sure she was ready to run that one past her friend. What if Alice failed to understand? After all, Merrill herself would probably have turned up her nose if someone had mentioned that particular indulgence only a week earlier.

“He
spanks
you? You mean, on your
b-t-m?
And you
let
him?”

She felt differently now. But it still seemed to her the most private and intimate of activities—far more so even than the sex act itself—and not something she could mention to another person. Not even one as close to her as Alice.

Even Tony himself had expressed doubts, however slight. ‘We don’t have to start
every
love-making with a spanking,’ he had said as she prepared to lay across his knee.

‘I know,’ she had answered—but she had lain down there anyway. She had sensed he wanted more. ‘I can’t explain it.’ She had said, trying, ‘It’s very hard to be a woman today. We’re supposed to be independent and I
am
independent and I
like
being independent. But sometimes it seems like that means we have to take the lead on everything. Sometimes I want to take the lead and sometimes I don’t. Being…you know…having you do that…’ she coloured.

‘Being spanked, Merrill. It’s all right to say it.’

‘Having that thing,’ she went on, ignoring him, ‘means this time I don’t have to take the lead. I can be led. I’m putting yourself in your hands. Knowing that you love me and you won’t hurt me and it’s really just a game. A wonderful game that gets me right in the mood for stupendous sex. Understand?’

He shook his head. ‘I understand the bit about games and getting in the mood. Obviously. I don’t understand about leading and being led.’

‘Tough.’ She snuggled her face into his side. ‘Get spanking, Mister Soft Hands,’ she murmured. ‘And don’t hurt me.’

‘What? I can’t hear you.’

She lifted her head. ‘You heard me perfectly well. Now get on with it.’

I
t had happened, that first time, so easily. Tony, as much the alpha male as John Pagan—in fact, it interested her that two such dominant men should be able to maintain their easy and unquestioning friendship—had turned up his nose when she took out one of the thin cheroots she sometimes affected. ‘You’re not actually going to light that?’

In fact, Merrill almost never smoked and she had produced this one more for the effect than because she wanted it. The smell and taste of a cigar were something she put up with in order to make the impression she wanted to make. Clearly in this case the impression was unwelcome. Nevertheless, she had started, it was her apartment and she felt the need to make a point by continuing.

She lit the cheroot.

‘I don’t believe this,’ said Tony.

‘What, my love? What don’t you believe?’

‘I don’t believe you expect to smoke that damn thing in my presence.’

‘Whose apartment is this?’

‘Whose lungs are these?’

He had caught her wrist. She could have stubbed it out, wasn’t enjoying the taste at all, but (one) she hadn’t had the forethought to bring a saucer from the kitchen to stand in for the ash tray she did not possess and (two) she did actually object to being caught by the wrist and told what to do. In her own apartment. Even by Tony. So she had resisted.

And he in his easy strength had marched her into the kitchen, taken the cheroot from her, held it under what, even after these years in England, she still called the faucet and dropped it into the waste disposal.

She had stamped her foot in anger, he had grinned at her, she had lifted a hand to slap the silly grin off his face and he had caught her wrist. ‘Oh,’ he had said. ‘You want the physical stuff, do you?’

He had sat on a stool at the chopping island, swung her into the air, deposited her face down across his knee, held her hands behind her in one of his and begun to swat her behind with his hand. She had kicked out furiously. And then a little less furiously. And then she had not kicked out at all. That was about the same time as he found he no longer needed to hold her hands. Just before he undid her jeans and pulled them to her knees. Which itself was not long before he had rolled down her panties and begun to work on her bare bottom.

An increasingly red bare bottom.

The noises she made that had started as angry shouts and imprecations had turned into mellow gasps.

When he let her go she had slid to the floor, remained standing, looking away from him, her hands by her sides. Then she had said, ‘Let’s get this straight, shall we? I do not like and will not put up with being told what to do. I do not like and will not put up with people coming into
my
home and taking over from me as though they owned the place. And me. I do not like and will not put up with…’

She had run out of things she did not like in the face of one big thing that she did. She had turned to him, naked below the waist as she was, wrapped her arms round his neck and fastened her open mouth firmly on his.

Then she had stood back. ‘Fuck it. You started the fire, Mister. You take me to bed and put it out.’

B
righton defies definition. Some call it the Gay Capital of Britain, or even San Francisco in Sussex, and there’s no question that people who prefer to love their own sex are well catered for—so much so that some of the staider and older inhabitants try to avoid the Kemptown area, and in particular the streets around St James’s Street and the Old Steine. Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall are said to have loved the place.

But Brighton is also the capital of what used to be called (with a  wink) the Dirty Weekend in the days when unmarried men and women needed to be altogether more clandestine about their doings, and heterosexual couples still descend on it every weekend in huge numbers.

And some people, married or single, gay or straight, just love to live there. John Pagan was one of those. He loved the raffish, bohemian atmosphere of the place, he loved the proliferation of small bars and restaurants with their own eclectic approach to putting together a menu (you can have altogether too much of huge international hotels and their globalized menus), he loved the way people took you as you were and let you be and he loved the intimate scale of the place, which meant that only by walking could you properly take it in.

King George IV, who first came here in 1783 as Prince Regent, built a fairytale Royal Pavilion that still stands. What the English call Regency architecture started at that time and Brighton has some of the best. And it has a pier. John’s attitude to the pier was ambivalent at best. He loved what it had once been. He hated what it now was.

His walk took him past it and into a bar. He ordered a sparkling water and a coffee and took them to a table by the window, from which he could watch the passing multitude.

‘You don’t look like a sparkling water man.’ Her accent was Australian.

‘I don’t?’

She sat at his table. Surprised, he gave her the briefest of glances before looking through the window again. ‘Not a hard liquor kind of guy, either, I’d say,’ she added.

‘Is that right?’

She placed a finger to her lower lip as if miming judicious thought. ‘Wine,’ she said decisively. ‘Red wine. Expensive red wine. That’s what I’d expect to see you with.’

John put down his glass with a sigh. ‘Look, Miss…’

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

‘Oh, God.’ He looked at her properly now. ‘Is there a more terrible sentence in the whole of the English language?’

‘Depends whether you think you have an obligation to be sociable.’ She laughed. ‘You thought I was on the game, didn’t you?’

John liked to think he was the master of any social occasion and never blushed. He was almost right on the first count, but hopelessly wrong on the second. It was the tips of his ears that game him away—they burned bright red.

‘It did cross my mind,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘That’s Brighton for you.’ She held out her hand. ‘Fran Nolan. We met at Tony Frejus’s place. He threw a party a couple of years ago and you came.’

John took the proffered hand. ‘Of course we did. I’m sorry. John Pagan.’

‘No worries. And I know who you are.’ She gestured at his drink. ‘You still don’t look like a sparkling water man to me.’

‘Only when I’m on my own.’

‘Don’t want to risk being a solitary drinker, eh? Well, John Pagan, you’re not on your own now, are you? So what’ll it be?’

He smiled. ‘You’re a fast worker.’

‘Oh, do you think so? I’ve had my eye on you since that party. Which was two years ago, John Pagan. But you had someone with you that night.’

Carly Warr. John remembered her. A short term fling, neither of them serious or so he’d thought, and when she showed signs that that might not be the case for her, he’d dropped her. Painlessly, as he was only here for a short spell of home leave before heading back to…where had it been before Rio? Cape Town. That was it.

‘And since then you were almost never here.’

‘I’ve been working abroad.’

‘I know where you’ve been. Do you imagine I never made enquiries? Tony was heartily sick of hearing questions about his friend with the film star’s looks and the rugby player’s body. But you’re here now, and this time I don’t see anyone with you. So. I’ll ask you again. Can I buy you a drink?’

John laughed. ‘No, Fran, I don’t think so. Not on an empty stomach. But you can let me buy you dinner, if you haven’t already eaten?’

It was her turn to laugh. ‘If I had, I’d lie. But, no, I haven’t. Where do you want to go?’

‘You know Brighton better than I do. Where do you suggest?’

‘
I can’t take my eyes off you,’ Fran said when she had made her suggestion and they had gone there. ‘When I saw you walking along the front, I couldn’t believe it. And then you went in that bar.’

‘You followed me?’

‘You bet your life I did. Ever since I met you, I’ve dreamed of seeing you again. Don’t you know you have that effect on a girl?’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘I’m making a fool of myself. You are free, aren’t you?’

‘Couldn’t be freer.’

‘And looking for someone?’

‘Oh, yes. I think you can say I’m looking for someone.’

‘Oh, God, I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I? Let’s change the pace. So. How long are you home for this time?’

‘I’m back to stay.’

‘Permanently? Really?’

He laughed. ‘Nothing’s for ever, Fran. But, yes, I’ve accepted a new job. It means I’ll still have to travel, but I’ll be based here.’