The Pleasure Quartet (32 page)

She was naked.

From her silky hair down to her bare feet.

But that wasn’t what made her so spectacular and forced me to hold my breath as I gazed at her on and on.

By now in my accumulation of adventures I had come across a score of naked women.

But none like her.

As if the mathematical equation of the balance of her features, sharp cheekbones conjugating with the downwards curve of her impish nose, and the plump thickness of her lips were not all in
perfect unison and striking enough, there was something else that made her wonderfully, hypnotically unique.

Where her long neck ended, a distinctive junction, borderline, began an unmistakable pattern of interlocked tattoos that covered her whole body. Strong shoulders, delicate chest, long arms,
thighs, similarly long legs. The illustrated map covered her body from neck to ankles.

I held my breath.

My gaze was captured by a plethora of details: flowers knitted in embrace, dragon heads with delving tongues – one extending all the way down from navel to cunt, another circling one
breast and seemingly biting its hard pink nipple, exotic fauna and flora racing across her parchment skin, words in a variety of languages and scripts.

She was an illustrated woman come to life.

She broke the silence.

‘Hello, Moana.’

‘You know my name?’

‘I know everyone who attends the Ball.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked her.

‘I am the Mistress,’ she replied. ‘They call me the Mistress of the Ball.’

I stood riveted to the spot. I suddenly remembered her from Cape Reinga, at the climax of the Ball, in her costume of wings as she had impaled herself against the muscular, erect stranger
who’d ceremoniously walked out of the crowd. Had she been covered with tattoos back then? I had been standing too far away to see clearly, or my memories were confused. But her pale face was
unmistakable. She hadn’t aged a day

Her scent, a complex but exhilarating, invisible broth of musk, sharp green notes and subtle threads of danger, reached out in my direction.

She beckoned to me.

‘Come.’

She took hold of my hand and this fleeting contact with her was electric, shocking me to the depths of my perception, teasing every nerve-ending in my body and forcibly drawing me towards a new,
febrile state of skin-surfing emotions.

Already I knew I would willingly be a slave to her will, her commands and desires as she led me along whatever path she chose to. I no longer had any awareness of my environment, of the
oppressive weight of the castle’s maze of corridors and elaborate architecture.

We climbed a warren of circular staircases until we reached what I guessed must be the final dimension of living space at the top of one of fairy-tale turrets which from a distance made the Mad
King’s castle so distinctive. Walls of ochre bricks, sturdy wooden beams criss-crossing the angular ceiling, a small window, a forest lawn of rich, thick, colourful Persian rugs, no other
furniture, a brief glimpse of a profound night outside.

The night? Had we not reached the castle barely an hour or so ago, the sun only beginning to set?

I had lost all perception of time. As if I had arrived (or been lured?) into a new dimension.

The Mistress pulled my cotton shift above my head and laid me bare.

I shivered.

Her kiss warmed me.

She tasted of cinnamon, and roses and flavours that had been hitherto beyond my ken. Her lips were silken pillows of delight. I abandoned myself to the sensation.

Her eyes, wide open, just an inch away from mine, deeper than the Sargasso sea, reaching for my soul and the birthing centre of my lust, our cheeks touching, her breath an evanescent gossamer
breeze, the warmth rising from her naked body shrouding me in a cloud of intoxication, triggering rapid, frantic movement between all my synapses and every square inch of my skin burning bright,
coming alive.

Her tongue caressing the barrier of my teeth, parting them, fucking my mouth, hungry, generous, invasive.

I felt as if I was floating in mid-air.

The Mistress’s hands, firm, tender, demanding, gripped my arsecheeks, testing my flesh’s resilience, then roved across my body, wandering over me like a divining rod, exploring,
unearthing every knot of desire buried beneath the surface of my skin.

I grew dizzy as the heavenly kiss persisted, my mind now suspended in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, starved of oxygen, no longer anchored to the castle, the planet.

I almost fell. Disengaged our hot lips.

The Mistress held on to me.

Then lowered me tenderly to the ground.

I was a puppet, aimless, directionless, broken, totally in her thrall.

Right then I would have done anything she could have asked me, however fatal the consequences.

Her lips moved lower.

Lighting my nipples like a match until their hardness grew so painful I wanted to scream. The silk cloth of her mouth roaming across my breasts, licking, swimming my tide, biting in small
increments of torture, like a conductor orchestrating the inexorable rise and rise of my pleasure. A warm breath brushing my earlobe.

She began to speak. Her voice deep, full, as if she was addressing a vast audience, as if I was not even there. ‘Pleasure is everything. Sex, life, the Ball. It’s what makes life
worth living, even when it is just a fleeting thing, a brief moment, it’s what we aim for . . . Nothing else matters.’

Her gospel.

The true meaning of the Ball.

Why it existed and had done so from ancient times to the present. And I had now been allowed into the holy of holies, for real, and unlike Cape Reinga, when I had been cast in just a menial,
minor role, I was now being finally welcomed into its wonderful harbour.

Yes, nothing else counted.

Teasing my pussy, studiously grazing my cunt lips, the sharp edge of her teeth lingering invitingly above and around my nub, her fingers penetrating me, digging, drilling, exploring my inner
walls, burying themselves in my primordial heat, riding the waves of my lust unleashed.

Briefly my eyes opened halfway on the landscape of her square shoulders and her back, and it appeared as if the whole world of images decorating her was actually in movement, miraculously
brought to life, morphing into continuous new shapes and colours, symbols and words as her hair shifted softly from side to side, parting like a sea to expose the delicacy of her neck and the line
that separated the milky whiteness of her skin from the canvas of her illustrations.

She turned me over.

Kissed me all over.

Entered me again.

Fucked me in so many beautiful ways.

Loved me.

The world surrounding me disappeared and, untethered, I flew on the wings of desire like a bird freed from the burden of gravity, my only connection to the days I had known and lived held
through the velvet lilt of her breath as she ruined me forever, her touch a magic instrument bent on changing me from chrysalis to butterfly, coaxing the phoenix from the embers of my past and
breathing on the glorious flames.

I came.

And came again. Uninterrupted cascades of pleasure falling over each other like a parade of avalanches.

Unbridled.

I was wet.

I was curled up inside the shelter of her arms, a child again. A whole new woman too.

A hostage to her warmth.

I descended the platform steps of my receding orgasm.

Opened my eyes.

The expression on her face was both tender and melancholy.

‘Okay?’ she asked me.

I nodded.

I felt both bone tired and exhilarated. A nonsensical combination of emotions.

She rose, her expansive wilderness of tattoos, tendrils and impossible images in full flight, colours bright in the morning light now invading the room where we had sated our lust.

The Mistress held out her hand.

‘Time to join the rest of the Ball, Moana,’ she said and pulled me up.

The cotton nightshirt I had been wearing lay crumpled on the rug on which we had fucked. I shook it out and lifted it over my head, although doing so seemed futile.

I followed the Mistress back to the Ball.

We travelled across rooms and down staircases and down more staircases, journeying through a horizontal maze, until we reached the base of the castle. I was thankful that the
simplistic outfits provided had not included a pair of towering high heels, though I would have been even more thankful for an elevator.

I realised I was still unaware of the Mistress’s name and felt I had to ask her, but it was too late. When we reached the area where most of the party guests seemed to have congregated,
she darted away. I caught a final glimpse of images flittering across her back like a projector screen and a swish of auburn hair and she was gone, disappeared into the throng.

She had led me down to the dungeon. If the BDSM party that I had attended with Gwillam, where I first came across Iris submitting to Thomas’s whip, had been the antithesis of everything
that I had expected from such an event, what I saw in front of me was like a scene from an S&M picture postcard come to life.

The walls appeared to be made of stone. Sconces jutted out at regular right angles, devoid of any decorative features. Plain white candles affixed to them gave off a dull, flickering light and
dripped fingers of wax, like creeping mould, below. It was the sort of lighting you might expect to see in a medieval prison.

I crept inside, casting my gaze around the room in search of Iris, who should have been easy to spot in her white frock, since all the guests in this room were dressed in dark grey. The men wore
three-piece suits and blood-red cravats; trousers and matching waistcoats with crisp shirts beneath in a paler shade of grey. Their black leather shoes were pointed and shined mirror-sharp. The
women were attired in charcoal-coloured cotton dresses that nipped in at the waist and reached all the way to the floor. Beneath their wide skirts, voluminous petticoats rustled, in the same shade
as the men’s pale shirts. Their hair was pulled into high knots on the tops of their heads and tied with white ribbons. Grey ballet slippers covered their feet. It was like a congregation
gathered at a funeral parlour from another decade.

They broke apart for me, creating a clear path and revealing a raised stone platform at the front of the room. On it was a large X-shaped contraption, and affixed to that, back facing the
audience, was a naked woman. Iris. Her wrists and ankles were strapped onto each of the four corners of the cross with leather buckles. Her hair was scooped over her right shoulder, revealing her
slim, bare neck, its curved lines to me the most sensual part of her, perhaps because of the vulnerability apparent there. I moved in a daze through the crowd towards her, my eyes all the time
fixed on the spot where her nape met her spine.

Thomas was dressed in the same formal attire as the men who stood around us. He was seated on a high-backed, armless wooden chair, positioned to Iris’s left, legs crossed. I approached,
and as I grew nearer, he met my eyes. A sense of stillness loomed over the whole scene, and I had the impression that everyone was waiting for something to happen. Iris had not so much as twitched.
She was so motionless that I wanted to move around to the front of the cross to check that she was still breathing.

To the right of the cross stood a polished metal trolley on wheels, like the sort that adorned dental clinics the world over. Arranged upon it lay a variety of implements for inflicting
sensations. Some I recognised: a paddle designed for beating flesh rather than sending ping pong balls flying over a net, a dark-handled flogger with long strands of heavy animal hide, a deep
purple dildo and matching leather harness, a slim, tapered glass butt plug. Some I hadn’t seen before; a slim silver tool with a round, coin-sized, pronged dial at the end of it, a series of
vicious looking whips, one with threads of barbed wire and another made from just a single tail, thick at one end and growing steadily thinner to the other, where it finished with a knot of
multi-coloured strands that appeared soft, but I guessed were anything but.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I whispered to Thomas, feeling very self-conscious in the silent room. My words came out in a breathy hiss.

‘You,’ he replied.

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’ He shrugged his shoulders and uncrossed his legs, re-crossing them again in the other direction. ‘I offered, of course.’ He grinned, and glanced at the selection
of implements on the metal tray and then at Iris. ‘But she wanted you.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I felt a mild thrill of pride and power. I was flattered, but still unsure of demonstrating my unskilled techniques in front of so many people who I imagined were
probably experts in the sexual arts. ‘How did you know I would be back?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been gone hours. You’ve been waiting all that time?’

He looked confused. ‘The tattooed woman . . . the Mistress . . .’ He stalled, kept searching for words. Shook his head a little as if doing so would shake what he meant to say to the
surface of his brain. ‘Sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘I’m sure she told us her name, but I’ve forgotten it, and she was just here . . . Anyway. She told us that you would
come. We’ve only been here a few minutes.’

There was no sign of a clock on the walls, and no windows to indicate the time of day by the light outside. Perhaps time had another meaning here, expanding and constricting according to
individual experience of pleasure rather than counting down by the minute and hour.

‘I don’t know what to do with any of those things,’ I told him, ‘besides maybe the flogger. And even that, I’m not very good at.’

‘You know what to do,’ he responded. ‘Just go with your gut. Don’t think about it. Feel the thread that ties you together.’ He pointed to his heart and then slowly
drew his finger away into the air in the direction that I was standing, as if indicating the presence of an invisible length of spider’s web that joined us.

Iris remained immobile. I mentally blocked out the presence of the grey-clad army of onlookers, pretending that no one else was present but she and I. I imagined that we were back at the Ball by
the sea in Cape Reinga again, but older and wiser, and the murmur of the crowd’s breaths and other inevitable sounds – bodies jostling, shoes tapping against the floor, skirts rustling
– became wind against the shore, or the beating wings of sea birds.