Forty 2 Days

by Georgia Le Carre

  Without warning he grips the two sides of the high collar of my lovely dress and rips it into two. I clutch the torn ends of my ruined dress together and stare at him in shock.

  He looks down at me, breathing hard. Strangely, he is as cold as ice. My mind is in unbelievable chaos. I have misjudged the extent of his fury. Underneath the façade of calm he is seething with anger at what he perceives to be my duplicity. I want to cry at the wanton destruction of something so beautiful, but in fact I am too shocked to cry.

  ‘Dress only in what’s in the box and meet me in the bedroom,’ he commands curtly, and walks away from me.

  I stand there a little longer, too dazed to move. I glimpsed the fierce hunger, and need; now all I see is the iron control in his tense shoulders. He stops in front of the bar and pours himself a whiskey. I pick up the box by the side table and go to the bathroom.

  Quickly, I take off the torn dress and stuff it into the chrome bin under the sink. As the lid closes over it a sob escapes my lips. I had never owned anything so fine before. It had suggested curves where there were jutting bones and made me feel so elegant and sophisticated. I could still see Fleur grinning with delight and Madame Rêgine rasping, ‘One of a kind. You will not find another like it.’

  I press my hand to my mouth and avoid my reflection. I will not cry. I will be strong, I tell myself while, another part of me stands appalled by his violence. I know what is in the box. I pull the satin ribbons and lift the cover of the box.

  And frown.

  It is not white lingerie and shoes.

  As if in a trance, I pick up the familiar velvet box and open it. Under the yellow lights of the bathroom the diamonds in the sapphire necklace glitter like the bling on a rap singer. The next thing I find in the box is even more surprising. Billie’s shorts, the ones I borrowed to wear to the party. I must have left them behind. I had totally forgotten them. I remember that night again. What did it mean? That he himself has gone through all my stuff and kept these? That this item of clothing means something to him? I open the last item—a shoe box. A pair of snake skin orange Christian Louboutin shoes, but startlingly similar to the ones I wore the first night we met.

  I try to imagine how he came upon them. Did he describe them to Laura? Did she then search the net and give him a list to choose from? I undress quickly. I consider leaving my knickers on, but I remember his eyes when he held my hands behind my back and told me everything I should be wearing is in the box.

  The necklace is cold on my skin. I pull the shorts on, zip and button them. I get into the shoes and look at myself in the mirror. Oh dear. The shorts hang about my hip bones and my rib bones show. I look gawky and awkward and as sexy as a pole in shorts. I console myself that the lights in the bedroom will be muted. I stare at my breasts. The nipples are erect. This morning I could have covered them with my hair, but now that the front has been feathered that option is gone.

  I touch the light switch and kill the light, in the hope that he will not see the silhouette of my skinny frame, or my half-naked exit from the bathroom. My steps falter and I stand uncertainly by the wall in my high heels. Half-hidden in the shadows at the edges of the room, I stand and stare at the magnificent specimen sitting shirtless, in a pool of light on the bed.

  His legs are crossed at the ankles and his arms are folded across his chest. The muscles of his arms seem even more defined than I remember. He must have taken his frustrations out in the gym. He moves slightly and the action ripples the golden row of thick muscles in his stomach. My mouth dries. Suddenly I feel exposed and ashamed of my body, my arousal. My hands rise up to cover my breasts. My nipples are hard pebbles against the palms of my hands.

  ‘Come in,’ he purrs. His voice is silk, but his eyes are shadowed and his face is a blank wall. Expressionless. Impenetrable.

  He begins to unbutton his trousers. I stare at the flat stomach, the beautiful body that I have longed for. The trousers slip to the floor. Black briefs. The bulge is clearly, clearly visible. Dear me, but it’s been so long. I feel my own body producing its juices, getting ready for the sweet invasion. He steps out of his briefs. Wow! Nothing has changed. He is as gorgeous as ever.

  But I don’t move. I can’t. My soul refuses to allow me to go forward. Not towards that demeaning drill again. I remember it like yesterday. Go to the middle of the room, strip, turn around, spread my legs as wide as they will go, and bend down to touch the floor. Then it had been strangely exciting, but now it seems sordid. I’m not here because he paid me to be here. I’m here willingly. I am here to atone for a wrong I did him. I’m here because, even though he doesn’t believe it, I’m crazy in love with him.

  ‘New games, Lana?’ he mocks when I make no move towards him, but his voice is different. The silk is gone. It is sinuous and alive with the kind of unthinking lust that only a man knows how to feel.

  I watch him bound off the bed, and come towards me, tall, dark, dangerous, and looking for trouble. He stops in front of me. Heat comes off his body in waves. The air thickens. I want to taste that golden skin. I blink to break the spell. Take control, Lana. The blackness of what I have made him become envelops me like a bleak shadow. His vengeful eyes bore into me.

  A strange fascination with danger slides down my spine. I want to shut my eyes and try to picture him as he was, but I don’t. One wrong move and he’ll take me now, roughly, and the chasm between us will become wider, impossible to breach. But a woman is never without options, my mother always said. Start the way you mean to carry on. I need not be powerless. I can be as powerful as Billie, as powerful as my mother.

  I take my hands away from my breasts and slip the copper button of my shorts out of its eye. Slowly I unzip my shorts. His eyes do not follow my fingers but watch my face. Even so my fingers are trembling with a kind of feral excitement. I don’t have to push them down my legs. They are so loose they run down like water. For a while I stand there in my necklace and my high shoes.

  When I lift one leg to step out of the shorts, he catches my leg firmly under the knee and forces it up high so I am spread open to him. I feel air in places that have never seen the sun. My gesture of submission has done nothing to lessen his cold regard. His eyes are deliberately barren. I wonder how someone can be as turned on as he obviously is and still look so cold and distant.

  His other hand cups one bare buttock possessively and my pussy, already wet, floods and clenches with anticipation. He plays with the wetness he has aroused. Pleasure and delicious release shimmer between us. It has been so long. My body doesn’t care how he does it or why he wants to do it. It just wants him inside. It has always been like that for me. My body weeping for him. He lets his fingers sweep along my open sex and brings it to his mouth. He sucks his fingers.

  ‘Mmnnn you still taste like heaven.’

  I whimper and that sound has an electrifying effect on him. With a growl he thrusts his fingers into me. Again. And again. Harder. Faster. A sound escapes my lips. My head presses against the wall and my hips thrust towards his hand. He is rough, but after all this time I welcome it. My pussy creams with the force. I feel the excess fluid trickle down my thighs.

  But it is not enough.

  I rock my hips mindlessly. Looking to fill that ache. Where his fingers cannot reach. Begging him with my body, with every jerk and every gasp, but he will not give me that. His fingers pump with a steady, forceful tempo, pushing me towards a rough, humiliating climax.

  Which comes while I am standing on one foot like a stork, my body twisted open. The rapture is explosive. My muscles lose all their strength and I sag against the wall behind me. The dizzying roar of my own blood abates to a dull thud. He looks at me with frosty eyes. He wants me to lower my head in shame while he pretends he has felt nothing. But I know different. My eyes defiant, I lift a hand and cup his hard erection.

  ‘You are as aroused as I am.’

  He smiles. ‘Sure,’ he drawls. ‘I want to fuck you. What man wouldn’t? To tell you the truth, babe,
I’m drowning in lust.’

  He lets go of my leg and with rough hands grabs me by the upper arms, whirls me around, and pushes me forward. My palms and forearms hit the wall. My right cheek is pressed against the cold surface of the wall and my breasts are crushed into it. He takes the hair that covers my face from his gaze and hooks it behind my ear. He wants to watch me. My eyes swivel desperately to the side to look at him, but I cannot see him.

  ‘‘You taste and smell the same, let’s see if you feel the same,’ he says, and, lifting me slightly off the ground, grasps my thighs and spreads them wide apart. My shoes fall off with a dull thud. He returns my bare feet to the ground soundlessly. His large hands grab my hips and tilt my lower body so it is perfectly aligned with his cockhead. For a second I feel him tease me by running it along my clit and then he drives into me.

  The impact makes me shudder and my breath catch in my throat. My mouth opens in a soundless cry. I draw a breath quickly. Prepare myself for the next swift thrust of pleasure. It comes before I am ready. This time I cannot help it, I utter a strange cry, but my muscles are already clenching him and sucking him even deeper into my body.

  He sets up a rapid pace. Every wild plunge into my depths has me jerking in response. Slowly I am lifted higher and higher until I am standing uncomfortably on the tips of my toes, my hips tilting higher and higher, wanting more and more of the gloriously thick invasion. My thighs and calf muscles are so tense they start to ache and my heart is beating so fast I feel it thudding like a drum inside my ribcage. My sex becomes a greedy, hungry mouth sucking at him.

  I force myself to hold my body in the same position while he hammers into me until, with one last painful thrust that I register at the base of my womb, he calls my name and finds his climax. His cum is slick and hot inside me. For a second his nose nuzzles in the crook of my neck and then he rouses himself and pushes away from me.

  I don’t turn to face him, but slowly set my heels down to the ground and push myself away from the wall. I will gather myself a tiny bit more before I turn again to face his condemnation. I feel weak, raw, bruised, abused, vulnerable, but…satisfied. I should have felt shame, but I don’t. I love this man.

  I turn around slowly.

  He is dressing quickly. While buttoning his shirt with his back to me, he says, ‘I will get Laura to send you a morning after pill.’

  A stray thought. A bit late for that, mate. If he knew. If he only knew. I say nothing, suddenly feeling my nakedness. Soon he will be dressed and I will be the only naked one in the room. I begin to walk to the bathroom.

  ‘Wait,’ he orders. I long to cover myself, but I do not. He cannot humiliate me. I will not allow it.

  When he is fully dressed he turns and looks at my exposed body. It is masked well, but it is still there, the hunger. Still now. When he has just been satiated. So much remains that my eyes widen. It is the same for me: I want him again. I am just as helpless to the call of his body.

  But he turns away from me.

  I watch him go to the side cupboard and pull out a book. It is covered in leather. Looks like a journal. He tosses it on the bed next to me. ‘This is for you. I want you to keep a record of everything I do to you.’

  ‘Why?’ I whisper.

  ‘For my reading pleasure?’

  ‘That’s just sick. I’m not doing it,’ I say.

  As if I am a life-size doll he picks me up and tosses me on the bed. I land on my back with a bounce, but I stare up at him defiantly.

  He stands over me. His face is hard and forbidding. Very gently he touches the necklace.

  ‘You’re nothing but skin and bone,’ he says, almost to himself. His hands reach for my ankles and lifting them up he opens my legs into a V. Turning his head to one side he kisses my right ankle and runs his hot, velvety tongue along my calf. My breathing quickens. At my knee he stops and sucks the tender skin at the back of it, and then that cunning tongue licks on to my inner thigh.

  ‘How much do you want me to taste you?’ he whispers.

  As an answer I moan and try to push my sticky legs further apart.

  ‘No, ask me nicely.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I beg.

  ‘Please what?’ he asks enjoying his dominance and control. His finger lightly circles my wet opening.

  ‘Oh God…please, please… Taste me,’ I beg shamelessly.

  ‘Will you write your journal?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I will.’

  He straightens his arms and holding my trembling legs open wide he looks at my sex, swollen and drenched with both our juices, a glistening treasure.

  ‘Cunt,’ he dismisses, and letting go of my legs leaves the bedroom.

  I had heard him tell Tom to wait downstairs, so I knew he was not going to stay the night, but I still flinch when I hear the front door shut. I cup myself between my legs. Slick and sore and unsatisfied. I want more.

  Ten

  That night I dream of my mother. In my dream we are in a shop. It is very similar to Madame Rêgine’s boutique, but it is full of wedding dresses. My mother points to a long dress that is ripped in half. ‘That’s perfect for you,’ she says.

  ‘But it’s torn,’ I say.

  ‘That’s how Victoria likes it,’ she says sadly.

  I wake up disturbed and unhappy. I have never spent a night away from Sorab and I miss him terribly. It is four in the morning and it is dark outside. I get dressed in the jeans and T-shirt that I arrived in and leave the apartment. I exit the lift and the night porter nods at me. I return the gesture and open the doors.

  The air outside is crisp and fresh. I walk along the side of the block, cross the road and enter the park. Then I begin to run. There is no one else around and I run until I am breathless and so weary I can barely walk. Then I stumble onto a park bench and watch the sun come up. My thoughts are jumbled. I refuse to put them in order. I am actually afraid of them. Afraid of the future.

  A man and his German shepherd come into the park. It is off the lead and it runs at great speed up to me.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he shouts. ‘She won’t harm you. She’s just a puppy. She wants to be friends.’

  She jumps up on my knees and starts licking my face. Her exuberance is such that I break out in laughter. Oh, if only life were so simple. I look into her gold-brown eyes and run my fingers through her silky coat feeling the wild life that is coursing through her body. In contrast, I feel drained and jaded. As if I am a husk left on the mill floor. After a while the man whistles and she bounds away, but the exchange has left me lifted as I walk back to the apartment. The night porter is getting ready to go home. Soon Mr. Nair’s shift will begin.

  I stand in the shower for ages. When I come out my mobile is double blinking. Fleur has left a message that two racks of clothes, shoes, and accessories will be arriving at 10:00 am. I am to choose whatever I want and somebody will come and pick up anything I don’t want at 5:00 pm. I am to call her if I need any help. I text back to thank her. Then I text Billie.

  Are you awake?

  Billie calls back. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Oh good, you’re awake,’ I say, happy to hear her voice.

  ‘Yeah, the little monster got me up early.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be asking me if I’m all right?’

  I laugh guiltily. ‘Hey, you want to come around about tenish. Fleur is sending some clothes for me to try on. You can help me decide which to keep.’

  ‘That’ll be fun.’

  ‘I’ll call a minicab for you for ten.’

  ‘Got to go. The creature has just started wailing again,’ she says. ‘But see ya tenish.’ I hear Sorab’s cries in the background just before she terminates the call and feel a sharp pang of loss. That should have been me. That’s my life. Not stuck all alone in an empty apartment. I know that Billie is enjoying her time with Sorab. With her, true affection is masked by insults. Hello, Repulsive, she will say to her lover. I realize that I already miss him too much.
Maybe tomorrow I will tell Blake it is my turn to babysit Sorab. And have him with me for two days.

  At nine thirty I invite Mr. Nair up for a coffee. He comes through the door holding his I’m the Boss mug, his eyes bulging with curiosity.

  We sit at the kitchen counter. ‘What happened to you, Miss Bloom?’ he asks.

  ‘I had to go to Iran suddenly.’

  ‘Oh! No wonder. Poor Mr. Barrington. You broke his heart,’ he states, enlarging his eyes dramatically. I watch him bite into a biscuit. Crumbs land on his jacket. I look at them, but my mind is spinning.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I ask as casually as I can manage.

  ‘Because,’ he says, ‘I was the one who gave him your letter.’

  ‘My letter?’

  ‘Yes. Have you forgotten, you sent your friend with a note instructing the porter on duty to give the envelope to Mr. Barrington? It was a strange note, very formal, not at all like you, but I knew it was you because I always recognize your handwriting.’

  I take a sip of coffee, swallow and lick my lips. ‘What did Mr. Barrington say when you gave it to him?’

  ‘I tell you, Miss Bloom, it was the oddest thing. He practically snatched it out of my hand, tore it open and read it right in front of me. The contents shocked him so very much I saw his eyes go back to the top of the letter to read it again. Then he crushed the letter in his hand and walked out of this building…and I have never seen him since.’

  I bite my lip. The past. I can never change it, but then would I? How can I regret it? Sorab came out of my sorry past.

  Mr. Nair pops the last bit of biscuit into his mouth and hops nimbly off the stool. ‘My ten minutes are up. I’d better go.’

  ‘My friend Billie will be coming this morning. Will you call me to let me know when she does?’

  ‘I can do better than that, Miss Bloom. I will show her up myself.’

  I thank him and close the door.

  An hour after the stuff that Fleur sent arrives Billie breezes in with Mr. Nair in tow.

  ‘Thanks, Mr. Nair,’ I say relieving him of a large bag of baby things.