Undone (21 page)

My peak ebbed away, leaving me reeling in its aftermath, depleted of strength.

‘I could feel your pussy gripping my hand,’ said Sol. ‘You liked my bedtime story?’

I nodded, glowing with contentment and experiencing a huge rush of warmth towards him. I felt recognised and understood. No man had ever done that before, had taken the seed of a fantasy I’d owned up to and spun it into a bespoke narrative for my enjoyment. Away from the bustling theatricality of Club Sybaris, we’d found a dirty, secret space of our own where we could conspire and dream, beyond the pale. It seemed an intimacy greater than fucking. The secrets we shared were mounting: the threesome, the lies, the pretence, the sex.

Sol withdrew his fingers and half stood to unzip his flies. We froze simultaneously at the sound of a car rumbling along the adjacent road. My heart skipped a beat. Sol turned, watching over his shoulder.

‘Unfasten me,’ I urged. ‘We’ll be spotted.’

‘Wait,’ he said, eyes on the section of road running past our hideaway.

‘Sol, please!’

He rummaged in his trousers and his cock sprang free, jutting at an angle and gloriously hard. He grasped my hand, making me let go of the railing, my anchor, and pulled my fist onto him. He was thick, warm and resilient in my grip. As the purr of the car engine grew louder, I laughed, realising Sol was getting a kick from the risk. So I played along to accommodate his pleasure, trusting him to judge the situation. Gently, I worked his length, relishing how his smooth skin slipped over its bone-hard sub-structure. The beam of headlights shone onto the dark road ahead. The car moved closer as my heart beat faster. Seconds later, a taxi crawled past, its driver a dark silhouette in the grey interior. I slowed, fearing the man would turn and see us, me wide-legged and jerking off a guy. Then the cab was gone, engine fading.

Sol gave a quiet laugh. ‘Phew.’

‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ I said. ‘Get comfy.’

Sol turned, knocking my hand from his boner.

‘But I don’t want comfy.’ His voice had a sudden edge to it. ‘I want you here on these steps. Want you in this skanky part of town. Want to treat you like the greedy little slut you are.’ He pulled a foil from his pocket and tore it open with his teeth, spitting out the strip and tossing the wrapper to the ground. He rolled the rubber onto his cock. ‘Sorry there’s only one of me, Cha Cha. But, trust me, I can make it feel like ten.’

He raised himself over me, his cock bumping at my entrance. He grabbed my wrist, pinning my arm awkwardly above my head as he drove into me. His bulky shaft pushed me open, my heavy, wet insides clinging to his thickness. I cried out, as thrilled by the hand squeezing my arm as I was by the cock surging into me. He shoved high and hard, his fingers tight around my wrist.

‘There we go,’ he said. ‘Nice and gentle to start with, huh? Build you up to it.’ The steps dug into my shoulder blades as he fucked me in long, slow thrusts. His blunt end bumped at my inner flesh, seeking the furthest reach of me. He shifted the angle of his strokes as if determined to rub himself into every slick, pulpy millimetre of my enveloping grip. His jacket gaped, baring his broad hairy chest, and its weighted pockets bashed into the steps.

‘You want it harder, slut?’

‘Yes. God yes.’

He built up speed, hips pumping, fast, aggressive, greedy. My head bumped against the uppermost step. I gasped, swamped by pleasure. A nagging voice told me I should be wary of him but I didn’t listen to a word. I raised my head, grabbing the railing with my free hand. A step grated against my lower back, rubbing my skin raw. I didn’t care. My breasts bounced as he pounded into me. Sensation overwhelmed me, his driving cock hitting my most sensitive, tender depths, turning me soft inside. And throughout, he held me spread open beneath him, my leg tethered to the railing, my opposite arm pressed into the steps.

I was his, splayed. I was my fantasy and so was he. He’d arranged my body to suit his purposes, and I had no choice but to let him fuck me however he wished. For the first time in a while, I felt safe with him. He might be dangerous, yes, and a man not to be trusted. But the very elements that ought to have frightened me made me want to be taken under his wing. Because, sure, if you were on the wrong side of him, this man was trouble. But if you were on the right side, and he wanted to protect you, then the fear belonged to other people. I was safe within the sphere of his dubious power. Safe getting ruthlessly fucked by him in a neglected part of town.

‘You want it harder, Cha Cha?’

The question was rhetorical. Harder wasn’t possible. Tremors bunched in my thighs, my swollen clit responding to every fleeting touch of his body. In the quiet night, my gasps were loud and incongruous. Above me, he grunted with rising urgency, his noises like knots tugging in his throat. I could tell he was close, oblivious to how he sounded, not caring where or who or when he was. The noises had to come out; he couldn’t keep them down. I remembered his inhuman howl when we’d fucked on the forest floor, far away from everyone. As he thrust into me, his cock banging deep, I felt we owned the world. We
were
the world. We were there at the beginning of time, emotionally overwrought in a hellish, leafy paradise, and now we were here at the end in this decrepit dystopia, fearful of cameras, cars, people and each other. We were everything. We were infinite. And it was as tragic as it was beautiful.

Then I was coming hard, memories of his primitive cries mingling with his presence. He responded with high, thin groans of breathy disbelief. His grip tightened around my wrist and he arched his neck. He groaned, slowing, then he came, his staccato cries prefacing his spurts and shudders. His noises dropped to silence. For a moment he was poised above me like a half-fallen statue, his head bowed. Sweat gleamed on his collarbones, and the military squareness of his shoulders filled my vision. After a short moment, he withdrew and slumped towards me with a grunt, releasing my wrist. He nestled into my neck, his breath streaming over my skin, and rested his hand on my stomach.

‘Lana,’ he breathed.

I said nothing.

‘Lana,’ he repeated.

I toyed idly with his hair. ‘I’m listening.’

He didn’t reply and we lay there, sprawled on the grubby steps, me with my leg still attached to the railings, his collar still fixed around my neck.

At length, he said, ‘Lana, do you feel guilty?’

‘All the time,’ I replied quietly. ‘It’s a woman’s lot. You?’

‘Yeah. All the time.’ He gave a soft laugh. ‘It’s a Jew’s lot.’

For a long while, we didn’t speak. We were motionless on the steps, my hand in his hair, his hand on my belly, the two of us feeling guilty but unable to say why.

I stopped writing there to look at him, lying peacefully beside me in the hotel bed. He sleeps as if he hasn’t a care in the world while I’m anxious and restless, unable to fall. Dawn has slid into mid-morning, and all I’ve managed to do is nap. When I was gazing at him just now, thinking we’d need to check out in a couple of hours and wondering how things would be in the future, his eyes flicked open. He looked directly up at me, expression unchanged. I think he’d sensed me watching him, as if I’d filtered into his dreams.

‘You doing, Cha Cha?’ he mumbled.

‘Writing.’

‘What you writing?’

‘My diary.’

He gave a sleepy half-laugh, eyelids dropping shut. He rolled towards me and slotted his hand between my thighs. ‘All your secrets,’ he murmured.

No, I thought. Not all of them.

Monday 4th August

I haven’t written here for a few weeks, and for a good reason. Very good! We are an item, a couple, exclusive and monogamous. I refer to him as my boyfriend, amused to be forty-one and using the language of giddy teens. I feel inappropriate and vulgar; mutton dressed as lamb; woman being girl. Girl. His girlfriend. He’s thirty-eight. I joke that he’s my toyboy. It feels as if we raided a sweetshop and ran off with all the Haribo. We’re gorging on rainbows and nobody else can share; nobody can understand what it means to be this alive.

Logic tells me I’ve been here before. This is infatuation, in love, insanity. It’s a common chemical imbalance and I’ve no reason to feel so goddamn smug, as if he and I are the only ones ever to take this path, hand in hand, tongue around tongue. But logic can go fuck itself because I’m eating all the rainbows, and sweet, succulent colours run riot in my veins. Now we’ve made this commitment to each other, there’s no stopping us. The game playing’s off. Caution’s sulking in a corner. My knickers are in shreds. My heart is bursting. We are drunk on our desire.

Most week nights, Sol swaggers into The Blue Bar straight from work, hot, sweaty, dirty, stinking of building site and as randy as a bull. I’m neat, petite and blonde, and he wants to mess me up. He drinks bottled beer, grins mischievously, and for the next hour or so, we chance it. If no customers are in, he’ll paw and grapple, nuzzling close or landing a swipe or two on my butt. I play at being nervous and disapproving, wriggling away because it’s fun to do so, and, anyway, I truly am nervous.

But my man, my strapping, sexy, hungry bastard, he won’t take no for an answer. Before long, my skirt’s around my hips and his cock’s inside me, fat, urgent and thrusting. We’ll fuck over an oak table in one of the church-pew booths or up against the bar. Sometimes we fuck behind the bar, pretending we have customers in and he’s humiliating me in front of an audience. I do my best to keep an eye on the monitor relaying images from the street-level doorway. The stained-glass doors open on to the balcony, catching glints of sunlight in their leaded blue-green tiles. August heat fills the room. We’re grateful whenever a breeze steals in to trickle over patches of damp, bared skin. Sometimes, when I’m dazed with bliss, I lose sense of where I am. The LED counter casts its sapphire blue haze and the glass doors sparkle like gems made of tropical seas, a glitter of turquoise and jade. I swoop through my surroundings, flying into cerulean skies or swimming in subaquatic depths. When I come, my world turns watery and I float in its etherised blur.

I can’t get enough of us. In the late afternoons, it’s mainly fucking, maybe a little spanking, or the type of cocksucking he refers to as ‘service provision’ where he holds still while I work him, careful not to spoil my make-up for my evening behind the bar. Invariably, he tops me with his attitude and his muscle. It’s embedded in the way he moves and holds me, in the half-hypnotic words he mutters in my ear. He likes to claw my buttocks as we fuck, and my skin is flecked with scarlet marks. When I go for my late-morning swim, I sport the evidence of aggressive, reckless sex. The younger Lana would have been embarrassed but not me, not any more. I’m proudly, defiantly happy. The wounds put an extra wiggle in my stride as I make my way to the poolside. Can they see? Do I care? Hell no. And, best of all, the wiggle’s still there when I’m fully dressed and no one’s in the neighbourhood to see me.

One time we fucked in the Ladies’ loo, watching the empty bar through the two-way mirror, the sensuous oak, leather and lapis lazuli blues contrasting with the tiled white sterility surrounding us. He had me bent over the sink, inches away from a streaming tap, threatening to stick my head in the water to show me who was boss. I had to make a dash for it when three young women entered the bar, glancing warily around in search of life.

‘Hi, ladies!’ I breezed into the room, straightening my clothes and caressing my wiggle. ‘It’s Happy Hour till seven!’

I fiddled about behind the counter as they pored over their menus, praying none of them would need to powder their nose. I knew Sol would be watching me through the glass, probably finishing himself off, his big dick in his big fist, but what could I do? How could I get him out without any of them noticing? A few minutes later, Sol sauntered from the bathroom, grinning as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Two of the women glanced at him. I repressed a smile as I searched for something to say, concerned they’d realise we’d been up to no good.

‘All fixed, ma’am.’ He raised his pinched fingers and stuffed them in his jeans pocket. ‘Your washer needed replacing.’

‘Oh, great, thanks.’

His grin broadened as he headed for the exit. ‘Any time, Cha Cha. You call me if things get wet again.’

My hidden smile turned to laughter.

Damn, I adore his cheek.

Raphael or Bruno clock on at six as usual. Then, depending on how busy we are, Sol and I will take the rear stairs and head across the cobbled mews to my flat for a couple of hours. I tell the guys we’re going to eat and sometimes we do, but sometimes we just fuck again and then I wolf down some cheese and crackers. I’m sure the twins know what we’re up to. Their grins are bigger than ever but they’re polite so they act oblivious. I’ve given Sol the code for the gate to the courtyard so he can park his car if there’s space but I haven’t given him a key to my flat. I’m not quite ready for that yet. My home is still my own. Most nights, I’m back at the bar for nine, where I’ll work until midnight, full of the joys. Sol stays at the flat, watching TV, cooking, napping, reading, or playing video games. He’s brought his Xbox over and he puts his laundry in with mine. I bought him an ashtray but asked that he smokes out of the windows or on the back patio, and he said he does that at his own place, anyway.

He’s a fairly tidy guy but, during the day, I find evidence of his presence strewn around the flat, and the reminder of him warms me. He devours thrillers, leaving fat curling paperbacks with gold embossed covers splayed open, their pages folded, their spines cracked. I feel a certain amount of identification with those books: well-thumbed, well-read, sought out with a robust, compulsive hunger. Neither I nor those paperbacks are held at a distance, and nicely preserved. Our physicality is incorporated into his because he’s greedy to have us, his possessions. We get his attention, one hundred percent, and he treats us with a rough carelessness born of wanting. He lays waste to us in his cherishing. His fingerprints are everywhere, and he’s dogeared my heart.