Obsession

by Cathryn Cooper

  Silence duly descended on the crowd as they filed obediently up the stone stairs which were cold and hard to the stockinged foot.

  Katie tagged along.

  Once at the top of the steps, she could see that they were beneath a barrelled and wood-lined roof. Before her was a balustrade of turned wood and ornate roundels. This, she realised, was a minstrels’ gallery. On looking down, she saw a long and shiny dining table with as many as two dozen chairs around it. There was also a long sideboard down one side of the room.

  On the other were a collection of secretaires, cupboard and break-fronted china cabinets that were as shiny and dark as the table and sideboard. ‘Silence!’ said the man with the handlebar moustache. The light in the minstrels’ gallery was turned off. So were the lights in the dining room below. They were in complete darkness, except for one light alone. It hung on brass chains at one end of the dining table immediately above a thick chenille cloth that shone with velvet richness.

  The scene had been set, and although the crowd had been told to be silent it was difficult. Like her, Katie thought, they were trying to control their breathing. Briefly, she wondered if her thumping heart could be plainly heard. To her, its constant pounding seemed to fill her head.

  Complete silence at last descended.

  There was the sound of a door opening and closing. Someone had entered, though it was not possible to discern who until they stepped into the circle of light shed by the single pendant.

  Carew, a smile on his lips and a look of triumph in his eyes, was leading the pretty blonde by the hand. In turn, she was looking up at him in abject adoration.

  They stopped by the chenille cloth and the circlet of light. Gently, almost fondly, he took her chin in his hand and kissed her lips.

  Just as on the dance floor, his hand settled on her shoulder before travelling down to her breast.

  Through the soft silk of her dress, he kneaded her flesh, and all the time his lips covered her mouth.

  Katie, affected by the intensity of the silence and the blossoming eroticism of the scene below her, let her hand travel to her own breast. She could feel what the blonde was feeling, sense the rising arousal that raced from nipple, to belly, to groin. The blonde’s flushed face was her own: so was her squeezed breast.

  Carew’s hands pushed at the wide straps of the blonde girl’s dress. They slid down and pinned her upper arms to her body. The straps of her camisole followed. It was pink and edged with green lace, obviously chosen to match the dress.

  Soon, her bare breasts bounced free. They were round, very white, and extremely pretty. Her nipples were pink, like new rose buds and, like her camisole seemed to match her dress.

  Carew bent his head and kissed each soft bosom.

  Then he took one in his hand, raised it so it strained away from her ribcage and lay in his hand like a gift or a prize possession.

  Katie had a need to draw more breath, to hide the moans that threatened to escape from her throat. She bit her lip as an unseen hand worked its way under her dress and up over the soft expanse of flesh that started just above her stocking tops. The hand ran further. Her buttocks tensed against the cold draft that came with it. But the fingers were pleasant. She swayed slightly and opened her legs. At last, the hand settled on her bare behind. She presumed the hand was Edgar’s - not that it mattered.

  In the darkness, touch was her only communication with those around her. The sight of Carew and the blonde had aroused her; the touch of the unseen hand had amplified her desire.

  Another draft of cold air accompanied a hand that raised the front of her dress. Unknown fingers tangled in the delicious moistness of her pubic hair. She sighed and her chest heaved. Obligingly, she opened her legs. Now, she thought to herself, she was experiencing as well as watching a sexual encounter.

  Below in the dining hall, Carew bowed his dark head over the blonde girl’s breasts which were on full view. He kissed and sucked at one, then the other. Between sucking, he glanced at the gallery. He smiled as he pinched each nipple. They were no longer pink, but bright red from the intensity of his unending attention.

  As fingers from two different hands and two different men invaded Katie’s sex, Carew stripped the girl’s dress and camisole from her body.

  Naked, except for flesh-coloured stockings held up with garters of green buds and pink roses, the girl did not attempt to cover herself.

  Instead, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her neck was white and strained. A tremble started at her throat and ran over her whole body as his hand explored every inch of her flesh before his fingers tangled in the close-cropped triangle of her golden pubes.

  ‘Open your legs,’ he said, his finger visibly tapping at that point beneath her downy lips where her clitoris nestled.

  The girl, her eyes still closed, willingly obliged. Her inner thighs were as white and as firmly plump as the rest of her.

  With sympathetic desire, Katie opened her own legs that much more. Prying fingers nudged between her wet lips and dabbled deliciously at her rearing clitoris. The hand behind her cupped her buttocks. One finger parted from its colleagues and invaded the valley between. Tentatively, it tested the availability of her tightest hole.

  She gulped, moved slightly, but did not cry out. She would enjoy, she told herself, but she could not possibly forego watching Carew and the blonde.

  Through half-closed eyes, she could see the pink slit that divided the golden curls of the girl below. She could see Carew’s fingers open those lips so all the inner petals were on view to the audience above.

  Did the girl know that every intimate part of her body was being looked at and savoured by the crowd in the gallery?

  It was hard to tell and, anyway, the fingers that so deftly pleasured her own sex made such questions seem totally irrelevant. If she could have murmured, she would have, but she remembered that the man with the moustache had said the observers were to stay silent.

  So, instead, she undulated on the two hands, her hips eddying back and forth. As she swayed, tantalising sensations coursed through her body and made her limbs tremble. Groans of pleasure caught in her throat. Yet, despite her own desires, her eyes did not stray from what was happening down in the dining hall.

  ‘I’m going to blindfold you,’ she heard Carew say to the blonde girl. ‘Are you willing for me to do that?’ His voice was beguiling, totally irresistible. It rose upwards, echoed, and held in the air nearest the ceiling.

  Wet and swaying on the fingers of hands that reached in the darkness, Katie herself wanted to say yes, but she didn’t. In her head, she willed the blonde to say yes, to take this scene and her own responses that much further.

  Perhaps it worked. The blonde who was so naked and so vulnerable did not hesitate to answer. ‘Yes,’ she said in a breathless rush. ‘Yes, Carew darling. I’m willing.’

  From somewhere - it was hard to tell where - Carew produced a blindfold and fastened it around the girl’s eyes. Katie was aware of the girl’s jaw dropping slightly and of her red lips parting over her pearl-white teeth. It was, she thought, as though her heart had quickened and she needed more air.

  Katie breathed more deeply as the fingers between her legs did incredible things that made her sex wetter and her legs tremble. With steadfast determination, she savoured the sensations generated by the prying fingers, but kept her gaze fastened on the scene and the man below.

  Like a showman who has the audience enthralled, Carew looked up at the darkness of the gallery and smiled. Then, with triumph stencilled on his face, he turned his sharp blue eyes back to the submissive blonde. He reached out with both hands and, with studied precision, began to play with her breasts as though they were his to do with as he pleased.

  Obviously his dominant actions did not repel the blonde girl. On the contrary, she groaned and thrust her white breasts a
nd fleshy nipples more forcefully into his hands. All the while, her little pink tongue flicked excitedly through her parted and so very red lips.

  Carew stood to one side as he pushed and pinched at her breasts. It was, Katie could see, purely so those in the gallery might see and silently applaud his use of the blonde’s naked body. Every so often he looked up and smiled with undisguised triumph. Then the smile was swiftly swallowed as he turned his attention back to the girl.

  ‘Sit up on the table and open your legs wider,’ he told her.

  Blindly, she reached out behind her to the thick redness of the chenille tablecloth. With some help from him, she eased herself into a sitting position up on the table. Dutifully, she opened her legs.

  ‘Lean back on your hands,’ he ordered.

  She did so, and the gallery was treated to the sight of her open sex; its pinkness, its wetness edged with a surround of golden plumage like some work of art in a bright gilt frame.

  The forked fingers of Carew’s right hand opened her lips still more so that the area between her legs seemed all pinkness and no gold at all. One finger from the other hand dived without ceremony into her vagina.

  The blonde cried out and Katie jammed her fist against her mouth. She too had a finger invading her vagina from behind, and the hand from in front had her clitoris trapped between finger and thumb.

  But no matter her own pleasures, she could not draw her gaze away from the man and the girl beneath her.

  As the blonde writhed on the table, Katie herself began to gyrate on the fingers that so tormented her.

  She bit her lip to keep from crying out, but she did not close her eyes.

  It was as though she were sharing the blonde’s dilemma and feeling Carew’s fingers inside her too.

  She would not miss a thing. She would watch what was happening to the blonde and, by the same token, she would get to know Carew Bentley Thompson that much better.

  Wet secretions spread like virgin honey between her thighs. Like the blonde who writhed on the table, she was trapped within the moment, a willing victim of her own desires, her own sexuality.

  Vaguely, she was aware of Carew signalling to someone up in the gallery.

  There was a movement, a rush of cold air, a sliver of light, as a door opened and closed. Someone had left the darkness of the balcony, though it was not possible to tell who.

  Katie heard Carew give an order, his voice as impeccably perfect as his looks. ‘Bend over!’

  Still blindfolded, the girl obeyed.

  Like a dark shadow, another form glided into the room. He was silent on his feet. He could not be heard. The crowd only saw him once he had entered the light. The blonde would not know he was there.

  He was a well-built man with youthful looks but a manner that put him around thirty.

  Katie’s breathing quickened. Without rushing it, the man below unbuttoned his flies.

  Her own mouth dropped open and her legs trembled. As his vibrant and very stiff penis came into view, the hand that manipulated her sex at the front, took her jewelled nub between thumb and finger. The fingers squeezed it, tapped it and, gently, a fingernail dug into its dewy head.

  Silently, her eyes round at the sight before her, her own sex wet and yielding, Katie gulped an extra mouthful of air. Her legs were shaking. Her sex was open and pouring.

  ‘Are you ready for me, Poppy?’ she heard Carew say.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ said the blonde who was now face down. Her bottom was white and as pretty as a peeled pear beneath the hanging light.

  ‘Then open your legs, you little hussy,’ demanded Carew.

  The girl obliged.

  Katie did the same. Two fingers that had obviously been waiting their chance’ slid into her vagina.

  A pin could have dropped and been heard in the gallery. All the same, there was an impatient sound of breath being held and lips being licked.

  ‘Right,’ Carew said from down in the dining hall. ‘I’ve seen your bottom. Now you are going to sit on my cock and ride it till I come. You will not come yourself until I say so. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, Carew darling!’ gasped the blonde. ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then stand up. I will lay on the table now.’

  Dutifully, she stood up.

  How vulnerable she looks, thought Katie, as she gazed at the slightly plump and very white body that looked doubly naked above the flesh-coloured stockings and rosebud garters. Then she wondered herself whose fingers were kneading her sex, dividing her lips and entering the rich moistness of her portal. Was she really faring any better?

  She decided she was. Below her, it was not Carew who layout on the table. It was the other man who had appeared from out of the darkness. Trousers around his ankles, shirt and jacket pulled up to his chest, he lay out on the dark red of the chenille cloth. His knees were bent at the table’s edge. His member stood obscenely upright like some outlandish candlestick.

  Entranced by the sight of such a noble penis, and shivering with pleasure, Katie could not help but gyrate on the invading fingers.

  Her orgasm was approaching, and yet she held it back as though she too was awaiting the word from the good-looking man with the dark hair and the sharp blue eyes.

  Mesmerised and abandoned to her pleasure, she watched as the blindfolded girl reached for, then touched the man’s naked knees, then his thighs.

  Carefully, she climbed up onto the table and balanced herself over him.

  It was an amazing sight to see her like that, white bottom, open thighs and a purple penis upright and pointing directly at her choicest lips.

  Slowly, the length of livid flesh disappeared as she lowered herself onto it.

  Carew, for all the world like a master of ceremonies at some artistic jamboree, stood to one side.

  He was looking from the bouncing girl to the gallery. He spread out an arm, and waved his hand in an introductory way as if to say, ‘Look at what I have done to her and done for you. Who else could orchestrate such a performance as this?’

  Oblivious to everything, the girl rode the solid member of the supine man, then as he began to tense beneath her, she cried out.

  ‘Please, I need to come. Please!’

  ‘Go on then, Poppy,’ ordered Carew. ‘Go on and come!’

  With that, he whipped off her blindfold and, as she cried out with delirious pleasure, she saw too late that the man tensing in orgasm beneath her was not the man she had thought it to be.

  Not that she could resist pumping up and down on him until it was all over. Like Katie up in the gallery, she had been driven by her own sexuality. Unlike Katie, she had been oblivious to that fact.

  At the same time as the blonde cried out, Katie did too.

  Her hips thrust back and forth on the hidden hands that so pleasured her beneath her skirt.

  The cry coming from the blonde had been one of happy release and delirious delight. The one that escaped Katie’s lips had a haunting quality. It was as if some exotic bird were escaping from her throat. It was also as though there were many more where that one had come from.

  Carew heard that cry. For a moment he seemed unnerved. He looked in her direction and narrowed his eyes against the gloom.

  He could not see her and, as yet, she wouldn’t let him see her.

  She was of a different breed to the blonde on the table.

  To be one of his toys, played with briefly and discarded, was not enough for her. He was a challenge, but one she thought she could rise to.

  Murmurs of approval rumbled through the gathering as they made their way back down the stairs.

  ‘What a performance!’ The tall man with the ginger moustache slapped Carew on the back as everyone thronged around him down in the corridor.

  ‘Always is!’ said someone else and, like most
of the men, beamed with approval.

  Carew, every inch the man, the stud, the master of ceremonies, appeared to grow taller, as though feeding on their adoration. Like all men, being admired by women was one thing, being admired by one’s own gender was quite another. He was chieftain, he was king among his peers, Monarch of the Glen. He laughed with them, bantered and sallied forth with quips and jibes all at the woman’s expense.

  All the same, most women there clung onto his words, lapped them up as a cat might milk that has been laced with arsenic.

  ‘You’ll get caught out one day, Carew old chap,’ said a tall man with over-greased hair and a monocle. ‘Some little woman will get her hooks into you and that will be the end of your little performances.’

  Carew grimaced and eyed him darkly. ‘The day I take my clothes off and have her there before you all instead of letting someone else do the job is the day I’ve met my match - in more ways than one!’

  They all laughed and clapped - even Phoebe. Katie only smiled - with her eyes, more so than her lips. ‘Don’t you think he’s a right card?’ Phoebe’s eyes were still on Carew as she spoke.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ replied Katie. ‘And cards can be low or high, kings or queens. You can even make houses from them, but they’re easily knocked down. After all, they’re only cards.’

  Frowning, Phoebe turned and looked at her. Cloaked by shadows, Katie was gazing at Carew, her eyes slightly slanting.

  ‘You look like a cat out hunting blackbirds,’ said Phoebe. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. ‘What have you got in mind, Katie Fisher?’

  ‘Him,’ replied Katie. ‘Carew Bentley Thompson.’

  Chapter 2

  Katie met Phoebe for lunch at a neat little tea shop in town where a variety of teas could be ordered: China, Earl Grey, Ceylon, Darjeeling or Lapsong. If the figure could stand it, there were also dainty little cakes topped with icing and bits of sugar, or homemade scones served with thick cream and dark red strawberry jam. The tablecloths were outstandingly white, the furniture very dark. Silver cutlery reflected the light that filtered from the window between the potted plants and paper poppies. In winter, there was usually a coal fire burning in the red brick fireplace, but this was August. Hiding the grate was a fire screen on which delphiniums and lupins bustled for space against a green and yellow background and the pale roof of a thatched cottage.