Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  The name stirred old memories. Movies again.

  ‘We’re some distance from Vegas, off the Navajo Tribal Park. This is where the next Ball is being set up,’ she said.

  She extended her hand to help me step out of the car.

  The weight of the outside heat wrapped itself around me as soon as my foot trod the powdery ochre sand of the desert floor.

  I turned round, somehow expecting some form of encampment, tents, improvised shacks where we would be staying but my view of the surrounding boulders was blocked by an imposing building, with tall antebellum Greek columns limning its facade. It stood there incongruously, like a giant blot on the landscape, a sign in Spanish designating it as a hotel, ‘Gran Mension Del Desierto’. It stood in the middle of nowhere as if dropped from the skies.

  ‘You’ll be staying there. We all are,’ Madame Denoux said. ‘We’ve already taken your suitcase and your violin to your room.’

  The lobby had apparently been taken over by Ball and Network staff. Impromptu circus performances were occurring at the front desk and dotted all around the cavernous terracotta’d space that seemed to me wildly ostentatious and unnecessary considering that its sole purpose was to usher guests and their luggage from the check-in area to their bedrooms.

  Right in the centre of the hall, an aerial hoop had been set up and hung down precariously from a fixture in the ceiling. Below it, a large soft mattress was stationed, though in my view it was not nearly large enough considering the heights that the woman on the swing was reaching as she swung, pendulously, sometimes hanging by her hands and then pulling herself up to perform a flip through the hoop or mid-air splits as she dangled, seemingly impervious to the power of gravity. Her ginger hair was cut into a short, gamine crop and she was dressed in a black and white striped body stocking. When she turned the stripes in combination with the form of her long, lean body gave her the appearance of a spinning, zebra-coloured barber’s pole.

  To the left of the door, two young men clad only from the hips down in soft hemp trousers were performing abdominal crunches with their knees hooked through the top bars of the luggage trolley. Their blond hair hung down and just scraped the floor as they extended their torsos into straight planks, and then their stomach muscles tightened visibly beneath the thin layer of skin without an ounce of fat as they scissored back up again, touching their elbows to the rack when they reached the top. They were identical twins, I realised as they swivelled simultaneously and turned their heads towards the hoopist when she let out a loud triumphant whoop after completing a particularly complex trick.

  At the front desk, a group stood with their passports organising rooms and keys with the hotel staff. They were dancers, I guessed, by the light, supple way that they moved, different from ordinary human beings. The women possessed lean calves and girlish narrow hips, and the men sported broad shoulders, slim waists and arses so tight, high and firm I could have cracked the shells of walnuts by throwing them against their buttocks. The sort of physicality that only comes with years of training.

  I sighed. It had only been a few days in reality, but it felt like a long time since I’d had any opportunity to go swimming or running, and I missed stretching my limbs, feeling my heart race and my blood pump and the wonderful sense of aliveness that I found in exercise. Antony ran every day, usually ten miles or more, rain or shine, no matter where he was, or what other urgent matters he had to attend to. He didn’t talk about it. I had asked him once, about his habits, when I noticed the beaten-up state of his toenails.

  ‘Hey you.’

  I jumped about a foot in the air as Antony’s voice reached my ears, just as I had been thinking about him.

  ‘Christ!’ I said, putting my hand to my heart to still my racing breath. He touched his hand gently to my shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, laughing, ‘did I scare you?’

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  He was wearing sunglasses that were now pushed onto the top of his head, a thin white cotton collared shirt with the two top buttons undone, a pair of sky blue, knee length denim shorts and tan boat shoes. Despite his English heritage he looked unfeasibly tanned. Antony browned easily.

  ‘I meant to call you, but it was all very last minute,’ he explained. ‘And I figured Aurelia would have let you know. I’m staying on with the show. She’s asked me to help direct some of the acts. I don’t fully understand myself, to be honest. Someone called just last night and I got on a plane. I don’t like to be at a loose end, you know …’

  He paused and brushed his fingers through his hair, knocking his sunglasses off in the process and catching them in one hand before they fell to the floor. ‘And with the play finished, there’s nothing to keep me in London for the moment. I didn’t have any other work to go on to. So, here I am.’

  ‘Well, it’s good to see you.’ I clenched my thigh muscles together. Watching the bare-chested twins stomach crunching and gazing at the queuing dancers’ arses had made me horny, and Antony’s presence would fix that. Besides which, I felt more at home with a familiar face. I’d spent enough of my working life travelling that it had lost its glamour, even with the added theatrical extravagance of the Ball and its cohorts providing a welcome distraction from the mundanities of yet another hotel room.

  ‘Lauralynn, Viggo and Alissa are on their way as well,’ he added. ‘They needed more time to pack, so took the later flight.’

  ‘It’ll be just like London then,’ I said, ‘but warmer.’

  I was even pleased to hear that Alissa would be joining us. Our initial rivalry had subsided into an easy sort of intimacy, the kind of understanding that develops sometimes between two women who have fucked the same man. I was still acutely jealous of her at times, and wildly jealous of her tits, which she had told me, and I had eventually come to believe, were in fact 100% real and their firmness and unfeasibly high position a result of the genetic lottery, youth, and the vitamin E oil she painstakingly rubbed over her chest each morning after spraying them with an ice cold rinse in the shower to aid her circulation.

  Antony took my hand as we approached the desk. The small wheelie bag that contained his few changes of clothes and personal items had already been whisked away. He wasn’t usually the type for public displays of affection, but I happily wound my fingers through his without thinking much of it.

  We had been booked into separate rooms, it transpired, but neither of us complained as the clerk explained the set-up and programmed our door swipe cards. We both liked to have our own space. Separation made each other’s company so much sweeter. We filled in the obligatory paperwork, took the keys and headed for the lifts. Madame Denoux – Giselle – had left us to relax and settle in and would call our rooms later to explain further the working arrangements for our respective projects over dinner.

  Though separate, our rooms were right opposite one another and, we discovered once inside, shared a door at one end that separated each of our immense bathrooms.

  ‘Come inside?’ Antony asked, as we stood in the hall between our two doorways in a silent standoff, deciding whether to now separate or freshen up together. He did not seem as poised and nonchalant as he usually did. In fact, since Aurelia and the Ball had torpedoed into our lives he had lost that bored, impassive expression that had previously driven me mad at times until I’d learned to just accept it as a part of him.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I couldn’t face opening my higgledy­-piggledy overpacked and oversized suitcases at that moment anyway. I would make use of the complimentary toiletries and robe in Antony’s room and when I could be bothered, pop over for my own things.

  He opened the door and we moved inside.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, looking around. ‘Bit more glamour than what I’m normally used to.’ The room was cavernous, occupying nearly one half of the whole floor and containing a kitchen suite, long sofa and two armchairs, a writing desk th
at was set up by a large window with a view overlooking the desert plain, and a giant super king size bed. The bathroom alone with walk-in shower, hot tub, toilet and bidet was the size of most of the rooms I’d previously stayed in while on tour. It felt so incongruous to come across such lavish use of space, or maybe it was something being in the heart of a desert called for.

  I opened a few cabinets and quickly located the tea and coffee facilities. The room only had instant. There was no espresso machine or even a bag of filter and cafetiere in sight. Even Aurelia, and her Network, didn’t think of everything, I thought, as I filled the kettle with water, rinsed out a couple of cups and located a plug socket.

  Antony was still standing near the doorway, looking lost.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked him. ‘Tired?’ I’d had a night’s sleep after the flight, I recalled, even if it had been in the back seat of a car parked outside the hotel, and he’d only just arrived.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m OK.’ He stepped towards me and took the white china mug I was holding out of my hand and set it on the nearby cabinet, then folded me into his arms.

  We stood like that for a long while. He held me against him and stroked my hair, and I breathed in his scent, a mixture of cologne and sweat and washing powder and something more, the particular perfume of his skin, masked though it was by the manufactured odours of shower gels and cleansing products.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, stepping away. ‘I need a shower.’

  ‘Me too,’ I replied.

  ‘Come on then, join me.’

  He took my hand and pulled me into the bathroom.

  It wasn’t like him to be so tactile, or so clingy, I thought, as I slipped out of my clothes and turned the shower tap on. He had gone back to find his toothbrush in his toiletry bag and I had ample time to admire his form when he reappeared. The shower head was in a wet room rather than a cubicle and so there was no foggy screen door to separate us as he stood at the sink by the vanity unit.

  I stood, openly voyeuristic, and watched him unfold his neatly arranged bathroom kit and pull out his travel sized tube of toothpaste. His thighs were thick and strong and when he turned his back to me and bent over to reach for the face cloths that were folded and stacked on a shelf below the sink I admired the view of his arse, as pert and firm as any of the dancers that I’d seen at the front desk and complete with a winsome dimple in each cheek. The muscles in his calves were tight and visibly clenched as he leant forward. He turned to face the mirror, and I caught a flash of his cock and balls, hanging down low in the warm humidity of the shower room, firm and thick and half way to a semi hard on.

  I silently gave thanks to whatever god or goddess or random act of fate had ensured I had been blessed by a stream of handsome boyfriends. Good looks weren’t everything, I knew that, but they sure did help.

  Antony finished brushing his teeth, and stepped into the shower.

  ‘No, stay,’ he said, as I began to step out from under the shower head and let him get under the water. He squeezed some of the complimentary, rose scented bath gel onto his hands, rubbed his palms together to create a lather and then cupped them onto my breasts. He bent his head down and kissed me, and I shut my eyes to prevent droplets from running into them. I slipped out of his grasp and with a gentle push shifted him into the space that I had been occupying a moment before so that I was out from under the water, and I soaped up my hands and began to run them over his body, paying particular attention to the smooth skin of his penis which was steadily growing under my touch.

  I wanted to feel him in my mouth, but didn’t much fancy getting down on my knees on the hard ceramic tiles.

  ‘Come to bed,’ I said, and stepped away from him to the towel rail, wrapping myself in one large fluffy white towel and holding up another for Antony.

  He turned off the water and followed me.

  We fucked; the simple, straightforward sort of sex born of desire and affection and tiredness. I crawled onto the bed and turned over onto my back and he slid on top of me. I was already half-wet, and I reached for his cock immediately and positioned him at my entrance as he pressed his lips against my collarbone, each of my breasts, my throat, my mouth, making me wetter still. We lay together partially conjoined, and I kissed him back and caressed the length of his muscled body, marvelling as I always did at the unusual softness of his skin, grabbing the flesh of his firm arse until I became wetter, wet enough for him to slide fully inside me.

  ‘Ohh, fuck,’ I moaned. The first stroke always felt so good.

  I clung on to his thighs, holding him inside me and pulling him deeper as he thrust until he came and we sank back against the sheets, spent. He lay on top of me for a while, breathing heavily and nuzzling into my neck. I held him tight, my palms pressed against his shoulders in a firm embrace and then moved my hands upwards and stroked the nape of his neck, his hair. He pressed his lips to mine, hard, then his cheek against mine, and then he kissed my ear before carefully disengaging and slowly pulling his cock out of me. He tumbled over onto the bed alongside me and threw out his arm so that I could huddle into the crook in his shoulder.

  ‘Summer,’ he said, after we’d lain silently for a few moments.

  ‘Mmm?’ I replied, sleepily. I’d known something was coming. He’d seemed more emotive, less distant than usual, and preoccupied, as though words were on the tip of his tongue that he was waiting for the right time to articulate.

  ‘We haven’t talked. About Alissa. Or … that night in the lift. The rope.’

  I knew what he meant. The sex we’d had then had been more violent than any that had gone before. Antony wasn’t, in my opinion, a natural dominant, but on that evening he had come closer to dominating me in a truly kinky way than he ever had before and I knew that I had responded so naturally and intuitively I had shown him a side of myself that I had previously kept hidden, a side that might have shocked him. I also knew somehow that it wasn’t something that came as a surprise. However I had behaved on that night was no more or less than the hints I’d displayed on other occasions. I hadn’t revealed a new side of myself, just maybe uncovered something that he was already aware of but hadn’t previously been faced with so starkly.

  I lay there silently wondering what to say, but couldn’t come up with anything much more than applying further pressure against his chest with the arm that I had draped over him in a squeeze of affection.

  He paused, and then when I didn’t say anything, carried on.

  ‘I guess what I’m meaning to say is that I know neither of us is perfect, and I know that there are parts of you that maybe I don’t fully understand. And that our relationship is unorthodox. But I want to be with you, Summer. I like you, for everything that you are, even the fucked up bits, and if I can ever do anything, or be anything that would help you … then I will.’

  I knew that he was talking about sex, about the dark things that I sometimes craved and the high level of my sexual desire, which pop culture, if nothing else, had told me again and again and again was abnormal compared to the rest of the female population.

  ‘I like you too,’ I replied, then scooped myself up onto my elbows and haunches and kissed him.

  It might not have been everyone’s idea of romance, but it worked for us.

  We napped together until Giselle called us down for dinner, to meet the rest of the crew, and to hear about what the coming weeks would bring and what we would each be expected to contribute to the Ball.

  We’d been working hard for several weeks now, and were just a few days away from our first full dress rehearsal. The main set we would occupy, one of many such being built, would prove unavailable today as the carpenters and rig staff were putting their final touches to it. Andrei suggested all the performers should take a day off, to recharge their batteries and decompress in anticipation of the big night.

  I was initially reluctant to do so, absorbed as I wa
s in the flow of my improvisations and unwilling to allow cumbersome external factors to temper my overall mood of melodic detachment. Many of the dancers suggested we go to Vegas to play the tables and let steam off, while others, Viggo and the majority of the dressmakers and set dressers amongst them, suggested we visit the Hoover Dam which was, it appeared, a mighty sight to behold, a minor wonder of the world, Viggo insisted. Antony hesitated between the two alternatives but sensing my lack of enthusiasm said he would defer to my choice. Lauralynn came to the rescue, proposing instead a hike into the desert, to enjoy an old-fashioned picnic. After all, she argued, we were camped amongst some of the greatest beauty of the natural world and all we did was hide away under a variety of canopies and tents, practising and fine-tuning our craft all day long. We agreed to disagree and all go our own ways. Only a few of us opted for the hike. The blonds, as I had come to think of the two twins that I had seen stomach-crunching on the baggage trolley on our first day, and who had subsequently turned out to be two of a group of gymnastic octuplets, initially opted to head for the Strip, much to my disappointment. They were quite something all together and sweating in shorts or swimming topless would have made a wonderful distraction, albeit not necessarily a relaxing one. The two pixie-haired girls, Nina, the ginger-mopped hoopist, and Elena, the brunette with the great tits who had been our opening act for the final night of the play, decided to travel together to the Hoover Dam, and the group of firm-arsed ballerinas who Antony and I had queued behind for so long at the check-in desk just wanted to sit by the hexagonal-shaped hotel pool and sip cocktails.

  Then, Alissa got involved. She was evidently unwilling to let Antony and I wander off without tagging along, but more obviously had her eyes set on the blonds. ‘Surely I can bag at least one of them, there’s eight for god’s sake,’ she muttered to Lauralynn, as they eventually agreed to neglect the slot machines for another day and follow us. Apart from that first day, when the other six of them had apparently only been standing a few metres away but out of my sight, I had never witnessed them apart. They even shared the same suite, all eight of them housed together though sleeping separately, each in their own bunk bed. None of us girls had a clue what act they would be a part of, though we certainly speculated.