Eleonora moaned.
“You OK?” Jack whispered.
“Hmmmm…” Her voice had deepened.
Another lengthy curtain of silence settled across them. They both had known for a few weeks that this moment might come. There had been an inevitability about it. They had always been attracted to each other, even when they had both been with others. Only a sense of betrayal had slowed the progress of the lust.
“Yes,” Eleonora said. The sound came from the depths of her throat.
Jack’s fingers sharply pinched her nipple while he adjusted his position so that his cock now faced her opening. Immense heat radiated outwards from her. He breached her tenderly. She was very wet. They docked. Below the distant and invisible ghost of Giulia. As if she were giving them her blessing.
The Atlantic night was littered with a million stars. They had spent the day swimming, playing in the waves and snoozing on the beach, Giulia carefully sheltered from the sun’s rays naked under her old Strangers in Paradise T-shirt, now punctured with small holes, and the billowing white skirt. Her pale skin reddened much too fast. Tomorrow, she had decided, she would acquire a sun hat at the shack where you could also find sunglasses, shawls, second-hand tourist souvenirs and all sorts of African knick-knacks. They’d found a free tent and stocked up on mineral water, fruit and cans at the hut where food was on sale, dispensed by little black kids in djellabas sporting sparkling ivory teeth who spoke pidgin English and always appeared to be taking the piss out of the visiting foreigners and hippies who’d migrated down here.
Half a dozen fires burned at regular intervals along the beach, with small groups of young people huddled around them. Guitar playing here, off-key singing there, lazy conversations drowning the sound of the waves dying against the shore. Most of the kids in the group Stieg, Marta and Giulia had now joined around the campfire came from Eastern Europe, boys with hair down to their shoulders, unkempt, rangy, girls with plump lips and voluptuous curves. Everyone was still naked after the afternoon’s exertions.
Joints were passed around and Giulia, light-headed, relaxed. Her mind floated in a soup of warm pleasure. Sitting cross-legged, now oblivious to the fact that everyone could see all the way inside her, beyond her burgeoning-anew forest of pubic curls no doubt, she took yet another deep puff from the thick hand-made cigarette making its leisurely way around the circle. A hand landed on her shoulder just as she we was beginning to lean back, on the point of blissfully dozing off.
“Hey, piccola signorina,try this one,” a stocky guy with a severe buzz cut so unlike most of the other men at the colony, was handing her another joint. “This is the real stuff, the good stuff. I see you’re a fan …”
Giulia extended her hand and took the new cigarette between two fingers and brought it to her lips. Inhaled.
Jesus. It was powerful. A wave of drunkenness surged across her brain and she could feel the vibrations extend like tendrils through every cell in her body.
“Wow,” she mumbled,”this is good. Really good.” All of a sudden she felt as if she were pinned to the ground.
She closed her eyes to surf this powerful new sensation.
Someone laughed. Close to her or was it maybe miles away?
Giulia could feel the blanket of the night surrounding her, protecting her, as every single past memory haunting her until today slowly began fading away into the gulf of yesterday. She felt in the darkness for her bottle of water and drank the rest of it down in one single gulp. Then inhaled again from the magical joint that killed all bad memories. Sighed. Then cried a little, a thin line of tears gliding down her warm sun-streaked cheeks. She was floating on air. A pair of hands lowered her head to the ground and settled her on an improvised cushion created by wrapping a partly-empty rucksack with some discarded piece of clothing.
The joint was delicately taken from her fingers.
Did she actually sleep or was she just daydreaming?
An instant later or maybe it was already hours beyond the stroke of midnight, Giulia opened her eyes. There was a chant swirling across the campfire, drunken or stoned voices singing an old barely recognisable sixties song in unison. Marta was dancing, her wild hair flying, obscuring the crescent of tonight’s moon; another couple, right by Giulia’s side, were embracing, limbs entwined, murmuring sweet nothings or could it be gentle obscenities into each other’s ears. Giulia looked around, here was a tangle of legs to her left, all moving tentatively as if their dance had slowed down and was unfolding in deliberate slow motion. As she moved her head, a powerful wave of dizziness engulfed her. With difficulty, as if fighting against a river’s current, Giulia peered up at all the legs, the unsynchronised ballet gesticulating in front of her eyes.
Overcome by sudden nausea, all she could register was the four or five cocks dangling just inches away from her face, as the men continued their unstable movements in a parody of dancing. Her eyes focused on the varied penises. Dark, pink, long, thick, cut and uncut, floating in the shadow of the thin slice of moon, illuminated by the sparks from the camp fire.
She tried to raise herself but she was still too disorientated and she stumbled. To regain equilibrium, she had to grab hold of one of the dancing men’s legs. It was the guy with the buzz cut. She was so close to his crotch that she could even smell a trace of urine rising from his semi-hard cock. He was circumcised. Memories came flooding back like an uncontrollable torrent. Giulia’s throat tightened.
A hand settled on her head, guiding her even closer to the rising cock of the man.
“Good girl,” someone said.
The penis made contact with her parched lips.
The other men in the circle all moved closer.
She remembered the large sunflower sewn to her old tote bag in Barcelona. She smiled as if she compared herself to the flower, she was now its apex, its centre, and every cock surrounding her was a petal.
She half-opened her lips and allowed the man’s penis to enter her mouth. Closed her eyes. The group began to clap as she started sucking the thick meaty trunk.
The first man came quickly, but as he retreated from her taking a few steps back nearer to the campfire, another cock was presented. She swallowed and opened her mouth wide open. This was unreal, she thought, her stomach tingling, knowing all eyes were on her, as if she was putting on a show for everyone there on that endless beach.
She serviced them all. One by one. By the end she felt hollow and the effect of the pot had begun to fade, and her mind was now in turmoil at what she had just done so willingly. No one had even attempted to force her. Although mentally disembodied, she had somehow called them to her, to her mouth, her warmth, like some crazy form of primeval earth mother. And they had answered her call and the circle of men had naturally converged towards her.
It occurred to her that every man had tasted sort of different.
But tiredness now got the better of her, and Giulia slumped to the ground pulling her scattered clothing around her and quickly fell asleep.
At dawn, she awoke. Stieg and Marta were no longer there, but many others, some strangers, others whose faces she recognised still from yesterday, were curled around the embers of the fire. It was like a topsy-turvy landscape of bodies after a battle.
Her head was now quite clear although she had the beginnings of a migraine. She rose, throwing the remnants of her improvised clothing aside, and headed towards the sea to cleanse herself. Naked in some twisted form of paradise, she reckoned.
PART TWO
LE FEU FOLLET
DANCING IN THE DARK
ONE OF THE MEN lived in Germany, so Cornelia concentrated on the two others for now. She was aware that the trail was unlikely to lead her to Giulia. The Italian girl had probably disappeared altogether, fled back to Italy, reintegrating a world of deceptive normality, and was unlikely to ever be a threat to anyone again. Good for her. But Cornelia had now been forced to intervene twice in this sorry affair and felt she had no choice but to retrace her way up through th
is network she’d uncovered. Maybe it was a sense of duty, being professional to the end, that now motivated her.
She hoped that,if she could ascertain why the kill had initially been sanctioned, she would be able to assess the danger and take the necessary action.
Getting to meet Enrico Santaclara proved relatively easy. A brief period of surveillance outside his suburban villa in the Neuilly area soon pinpointed his routines and he, like most men, was ready to be deceived by a woman’s good looks and sexual candour, and within a week she had inveigled herself into his life and his bed.
He lived alone behind the high gates of the expensive, sprawling property with its wild, untended gardens, in a large, sparsely furnished house of polished, wooden floors and echoing rooms. Untouched art books littered the coffee tables and expensive prints and erotic lithographs adorned the white walls, turning the labyrinth of interconnected rooms into a private museum open only by personal invitation. The kitchen was all shiny copper pans and dark, imposing black ovens and a massive ebony-coloured fridge freezer which could feed a regiment for weeks in the event of a nuclear war, but in Cornelia’s presence Santaclara would only use the microwave. Or maybe she hadn’t yet graduated to the point where he would condescend to cook for her or allow her the liberty of the kitchen. It all somehow reminded her of a stage set, every single detail perfect but awaiting the spark of life to take on the necessary added dimension that would make it resonate. In fact, there was also something theatrical about Enrico Santaclara.
The man was silver-haired, tall and lean, his voice clipped but suave and his Italian accent melodic, whether he was speaking French or English, the latter he spoke with an easy fluency, serenading Cornelia with suggestive sweet talk from the moment he realised her ready availability and evident curiosity. With him, she had quickly realised that there was no point pretending to be a naive tourist and, instead, made no secret of her worldliness and possible experience. The best way, she felt, to seduce a seducer.
She had informed him that she was in Paris for several months attending an advanced business studies course, paid for by her hedge fund employers back in Boston, but had quickly established the fact it was pretty useless and unlikely to teach her anything she didn’t already know, so was now just enjoying most of her time in the French capital to relax, philander and see whatever came up. Her name was Marti. A diminutive for Marlene, a name she didn’t truly like to be used in her presence, she had told him. The explanation appeared to satisfy him.
He turned out to be a good lover, ardent and enduring, just a tad rough at times, which she had expected from his connections with the network she had uncovered in the course of her perfunctory investigation. Demanding too. Cornelia didn’t mind the exercise in the slightest. A girl had to do what a girl had to do, and anyway body parts were just body parts and she preferred her relationships with no emotional strings attached, and enjoyed pretending that the men were in control.
“You like?”
“I like,” Cornelia replied with a hushed tone in her voice, as the man’s nose dug into her mons and his tongue brushed up and down her clit, arousing her, playing with her, pleasing her. She was tied to the bed, her hands cuff-linked to the metal bedposts, her ankles held wide apart with thin silk strips connected to a pair of leather belts nailed by metal studs to either side of the bed on the wooden floor.
She squirmed as Enrico’s warm, halting breath streamed across her bare stomach and the pressure against her cunt increased and he slipped a couple of fingers inside her, stretching her open.
“You still like,” he asked. His fingers digging deeper, while his tongue tirelessly kept on brushing up and down against her hardening nub.
“Hmmm, hmmm…” she nodded.
It was the first time he had bound her. She had offered no resistance.
“Good,” he mumbled, his lips occupied, lapping up her now flowing juices. “Ah, you taste nice…”
“Am I a slut if I tell you it feels so sexy to be tied up, to feel helpless and at your mercy, at a man’s mercy?” Cornelia whispered.
He raised his head from her genitals and looked at her with a cruel smile spreading across his lips.
“Not at all, Marti. It’s natural. Very natural. It means you are reconnecting with something that lies deep inside you, a kernel of your own sexual identity. You crave to submit. That’s what it is. Goes back to when we were cavemen. Things have changed since in society, but there is that fire still buried in the depths of your mind and body, the essential law of domination and submission, of men and women. The true balance. It’s good you accept it. Really good.”
She didn’t need any lectures.
But she quietly moaned again as another finger opened her wider. The pleasure was real. There are some things you can’t disguise.
“Good girl,” Enrico said. He looked her in the eyes. “Now I’d like to blindfold you. Is that OK? If there’s anything you don’t like, object to, all you have to do is say so, you know. I’ll stop. We can even agree on a safe word. Look at it as an adventure, see how it goes, no?”
“OK,” Cornelia said.
Shortly after her sight was taken from her, still spread-eagled across the bed and obscenely open to his touch and explorations, she felt a cold, large object being inserted into her. Then another at the rear after she had been lubed up and he had raised her rump by placing a hard cushion under her to facilitate the angle of penetration.
Next came the nipple clamps.
She held her breath. This she didn’t like. But she offered no resistance or objection.
She blanked her mind totally, banishing the genuine pain he was now casually inflicting on her, moving into a mental zone of both appreciation and indifference. At the same time, the adrenaline flowed freely inside and her endocrine system booted into action and she could even perversely manage to enjoy the way she was being defiled. It made no sense, but then she was no an average woman and she had long been aware that there was some sort of broken short circuit within her senses and soul that allowed her to do these fundamentally bad things or accept certain things to be done to her and her body. Cornelia had dabbled in the arcane rituals of BDSM on previous occasions. It had left her unscarred, if puzzled. But if this was what it took to properly close an inopportune chapter in her life, she was willing to go through with it with her eyes wide open.
She felt trussed and stuffed like a turkey when Santaclara brutally took hold of both her ankles and forced her spread legs even further apart. It made her sinews scream, as he forced her open to a yet more revealing and humiliating angle. Cornelia just hoped he wasn’t about to immortalise the session by taking photographs. That would be too tawdry. And she would then have to later locate them and destroy the evidence before the fool spread it over the Internet or wherever it served his kicks.
‘You like the view,” she joked, her voice rasping.
“Very much so. Somewhat pornographic, to say the least,” Enrico said.
More ridiculous than arousing, Cornelia reckoned. But it took all tastes.
“Just don’t put a carrot down there,” she added, with a mocking tone in her voice. “I don’t think the colour orange conjugates elegantly enough with my skin shade.”
Santaclara chuckled.
“It’s good you have a sense of humour. A virtue seldom seen in American women,” he said. “But do take this seriously, Marti. I see you’re no novice, though.”
“I’ve dabbled,” Cornelia said.
“And it excites you?” he asked.
“Sadly, yes.”
“That’s what I thought. I think you’ll make a very good subject.”
“For what?” she asked, as he tightened a new pair of thin leather buckles around her ankles and began adjusting a spread bar between them to maintain the impossible, strained angle between her legs.
“If you enjoy this sort of play, this scene, my dear Marti, I believe I can answer all your dreams and beyond. It doesn’t have to stay here. We could make
it a long journey further down this intriguing road.”
“Surprise me,” she said.
“I will,” Enrico said, behind her back. “But enough of your repartee, young lady. I want you respectful, and silent.” His fingers moved to her mouth, pulled her lips apart and placed a ball gag there which he fastened at the back of her head.
“There,” he said, satisfied with the paraphernalia she was now encumbered with.
Cornelia didn’t appreciate the fact she had been silenced. It turned her into more of a victim than she wanted to be. She no longer had access to the humour that could defuse the sordid side of the power exchange. The bastard visibly knew all about the psychology of domination. She drew her breath, speculating as to what would come next.
“Let’s put this slut through her paces,” Santaclara said.
Initially, he attempted to break her physical resistance with a clever and ever fiercer catalogue of implements, from paddle to whip, until the sore skin of her buttocks screamed to high heaven and blood almost burst through the deep, raised lines of purple criss-crossing her arse cheeks. Cornelia steadfastly refused to emit the slightest sound. This only encouraged Enrico Santaclara to test her will further. He moved her around on the bed and pulled Cornelia to her feet and attached a different set of metal clamps to her nipples to which he connected small weights and then did the same to her labia. Her whole body was now on fire, pain and anger coursing like a whirlpool through her veins.
He marched Cornelia out of the bedroom and down to a cellar with padded walls. Here she was fitted with a dog collar connected to a metal chain, a leash which he pulled her by and then ordered her down to her knees, where she was made to crawl like an animal on all fours while still having to prevent the thick objects stuffed deep into her vagina and anus from falling out, parading subservient in a circular motion with her chin downwards and the ball gag was briefly removed and she was allowed to drink some lukewarm water from a dog bowl on the cold stone floor to avoid getting dehydrated.
I Was Waiting for You Page 11
