He is also barefoot. She begins to laugh.
‘Did you burn the salad?’ she shouts, above the racket.
He scowls down at her.
She goes into the kitchen and sees the blackened pieces of meat. She bins them. Shaking her head, she pops a piece of tomato from the salad into her mouth, and immediately spits it out. Salty. The salad goes the way of the steaks. The alarm finally stops blaring. She looks up and he is standing at the doorway.
‘You’ve never cooked, have you?’
‘No,’ he confesses. ‘Do you want to go out?’
‘No. Why don’t we just have some chip butties?’
‘Chip butties?’
‘Oh. My. God. You’ve never had a chip butty? You don’t know what you’re missing. You have to have one.’
‘OK.’
‘Let me get ready and I’ll pop over to the shop and get the ingredients.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he offers.
They walk together to the local fish and chip shop where she orders a big bag of chips.
‘No fish?’
‘No fish. Now we need to go into the corner shop for some bread.’
‘Don’t we have some back at the flat?’
‘Nah. We’ve got the good stuff back there. This is poor people’s food. For this we need a loaf of cheap, white bread.’
She picks out a loaf of sliced white bread and Blake pays for it.
‘That’s it,’ she says.
‘Are those all the ingredients you need for our meal?’
‘The rest we have at home,’ she says, and with horror realizes what she has said. She has called the flat home.
But he says nothing. She hopes he has not noticed.
In the kitchen, Blake sits on the counter and watches her liberally butter four slices of bread, load two up with chips, squirt tomato ketchup in a zigzag pattern over them, sprinkle salt, and close them into two chunky sandwiches.
‘Voilà. The famous chip butty.’
‘That’s it?’
She pushes a plate towards him. ‘Taste it.’
He eyes it without desire.
‘Go on. I tasted caviar for you.’
‘That’s true.’ He takes a tiny bite and begins to chew cautiously.
‘No, no, that’s not how you eat it. You have to attack it. Like this.’ She opens her mouth and takes a huge bite.
He follows suit. It is strange watching him eat with such abandon.
‘Well?’ she demands.
‘Not bad actually. Kind of satisfying.’
‘This is what a lot of kids on the estate live on most of the time.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, my mother never had a drinking or a drug problem so she didn’t have to dip into our food money to finance her habit.’
‘Did you have a happy childhood?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. Until my mother got sick I was very happy.’
‘How come you never had a boyfriend?’
She wipes her lips with a paper napkin, swallows, and grins. ‘All the boys were scared of Jack. And after my mother got sick and my father left any thoughts of boys were gone.’
‘Who’s Jack?’
‘He’s the closest thing I have to a brother.’
‘Why were they scared of him?’
‘Because Jack is not only big and strong, he is also utterly fearless. When we were growing up there was nobody he was scared of. Everybody knew Jack had taken me under his wing. And nobody wanted to mess with him. Once Billie, Leticia, Jack and me went to a club, and a guy there wanted to dance with me. He wouldn’t take no for an answer so Jack said, “You heard her. Now scram.”
Of course, he didn’t take that too good so he waited with his mates for us outside the club.’
Lana stops to pop a fat chip into her mouth. ‘And surrounded us. One of them had a knife. I was so frightened. I remember Jack looked at me and said, “Shhh… you know I got ya,” and then he smiled. That Jack smile. And I knew it would be all right. I walked out of the circle and they closed in on him. I can still see them now. Tattoos, broken teeth, rings where there should be none. But what shocked me was Jack. He was like a stranger. I couldn’t recognize him.
‘All those years I thought I knew him, warm and friendly, an unshakeable rock, and suddenly I see this fiend turning on himself, snarling, “Come on then. Who’s first?”
They advanced in a group. He kicked the one with the knife in the throat and another he punched in the nose, bled like crazy. Then he felled another two guys, I don’t know how, it happened so fast, and then it was over. The last coward ran away. It was like watching a movie. And you know what the first thing he said to me was? “Are you all right?”
‘Unusual guy,’ Blake says. ‘Did you never want to go out with him?’
‘No, he is my brother. My safe harbor. I’d do anything for him, though.’
He nods. There is no expression in his face. ‘How long has your mother been ill?’ he asks, and takes another bite of his sandwich.
‘Just before I turned fifteen. And that was also when my dad left. I was so scared she was going to die. If not for Jack, I don’t know how things would have turned out. He came around every day and did what my father should have done.’
‘And you’ve never seen your dad since he left?’
Lana shakes her head.
‘Did you not want to?’
‘No. I heard he married again and had more kids, but he really doesn’t interest me anymore. He ran out on us.
He thought my mother would die and he would be saddled with me.’
‘Hmmm… You’ve never had an orgasm until you met me, have you?’
Lana is certain her face must be bright red. ‘Was it that obvious?’
‘A bit. You never had a boyfriend but you must have masturbated while growing up.’
‘You don’t know what my life was like. For most of my life I’ve been terrified of losing my mother. Whenever she was ill, I slept with her. And when she was not—which was not often, and I returned to my own bed I could never do anything—my mother is such a light sleeper she will wake up if a pin drops.’
Blake takes his last bite and pushes away from the stool.
‘Got some work to do. Can you amuse yourself for a bit and meet me in an hour’s time in the bedroom?’
‘OK.’
In the bedroom she reaches for his trousers. She wants to give him pleasure the way he taught her.
‘Easy, tiger,’ he says and spreading her legs, he latches onto her clit covered in its sweet juices and begins to gently suck it. The sensation is indescribable—delicate ribbons of pleasure rise from his mouth and enter her being. She trembles against his mouth. She forgets to think, she becomes an extension of her sex, her core. He is teaching her sex, what it can be. Her nails become claws that dig into his shoulders. Her mouth opens and her muscles begin to contract with anticipation of the explosion that is coming.
But when he judges the train wreck is almost upon her he deliberately slows his movement, brings her back down only to begin again on that velvet-soft swollen flesh. His eyes monitor her reaction. Again and again until she is holding his head in her hands and begging him to let her climax.
‘I can’t take it anymore,’ she pleads.
And this time he relents. He lets her come. It shocks her by its intensity. She screams his name, but strangely, he refuses take his mouth away from the painfully sensitive blood-engorged sex. She tries to wriggle away but his grip is steel. Then, suddenly she is no longer pushing his head away and begging him to stop, but pulling him back in; the waves of ecstasy are coming back. And again. Three times in total she jerks, shakes, trembles and soars before she falls from her great height. Her hands flop to her sides, spent.
She feels him take his watching eyes away from her and lay his cheek for a moment on her stomach and listen to her ragged breathing.
Then he bounds up, full of coiled energy and picking her up lays her on the pillow. She is so
spent she looks at him with hazy, passion-filled eyes. She wants to tell him that she has never experienced such a thing before. She wants to tell him how beautiful and awesome it has been, how complete he has made her feel; perhaps she might even have blurted out that she is in love with him and has been for some time now.
There is no one but him for her—she would take the bad, the good, even the indifferent—but he places a silencing finger on her lips. He does not want words from her. He wants only claim of her body and only when he wants it. All he was doing was defining her as his. As her eyes flutter shut she hears him step out of his trousers and feels the mattress give under his knee.
‘Ah,’ she says.
Twenty two
t is late, nearly twelve, when Blake slots his key in the Idoor and enters the apartment. The sliding doors to the balcony are open. A gentle breeze lifts the curtain. He sees her asleep on the sofa and feels a frisson of some strange emotion. He stands over her and watches her. In the soft light, the pattern on the lavender wallpaper looks like thorn vines that the prince has to hack through and she is the princess from Sleeping Beauty. He can still remember reading it for his sister. So many times. Her favorite. He hated it. Corny nonsense. He sits next to her and her sleeping body tilts twenty degrees towards him.
He runs a finger along her cheek. She opens her eyes.
‘You smell of whiskey. Where have you been?’
He chuckles. ‘Doing my rounds.’
She puts a hand to his cheek. It is cold. She puts her hand on his chest. Through the shirt material, her fingertips register the beat of his strong heart.
‘You reminded me of Sleeping Beauty.’
‘That must make you Prince Charming then.’
A look of sadness crosses his face. His hand gently traces the line of her cheek. ‘Don’t deceive yourself, Lana.
Our liaison can only ever be temporary. I am spoken for.’
His words stab her like a knife. The wounds are whispers. ‘Who is she? Where is she now?’
‘She’s from an old family like me. She has to finish her education. She is only twenty-two. Next year I will be thirty-one and she will be twenty-three. Then we will marry.’
‘Are you in love with her?’
He looks amused. ‘No.’
‘Is it like an arranged marriage?’
‘Something like that. There is some leeway, there has to be some attraction, but marriage for us has always been a merger of two great families. The Lazards marry their sons to Rockefellers and the Rockefellers marry their daughters to Hapsgoods. It works well.’
‘Is love ever a part of the equation?’
‘Love is vastly overrated. We consolidate our wealth and position and make arrangements to cater to our specific tastes.’
‘Specific tastes?’
‘Some of us are gay; others are pedophiles.’
She looks at him in shock. ‘Are you condoning pedophilia?’
‘I’m not condoning anything. I’m stating a fact.’
‘So you wouldn’t report a pedophile who was abusing a child?’
He shakes his head. ‘That is a matter between the pedophile and God as God made him that way.’
‘What about the child?’
‘Time’s march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy, however tiny it might be, is to ask that a link be broken in that web of iron. No one deserves such a miracle—Jorge Luis Borges.’
‘What an unkind world you live in.’
‘Your tragedy is that you live in the same world as me only you do not perceive it, and that makes you careless.’
‘And your tragedy is your fatalism.’
‘On the contrary. It means I recognize the threat.
Cause and effect. Unlike you, my wife and I will guard our children in such a way that they will never be exposed to dangerous situations.’
She looks at him, calmly, shamelessly discussing his bride to be with her. ‘If you are already engaged to be married why are you never seen together and why are you being touted as the most eligible bachelor alive?’
‘You will never understand us. Don’t try.’
‘Is it the same reason your family doesn’t appear in the Forbes rich list?’
He bestows her a smile. ‘That’s better. Now you are beginning to understand. The greatest fortunes are all secretly earned, ferociously guarded.’
‘So… You are the most eligible bachelor because…’
‘The impression of meritocracy must be maintained at all times.’
‘Ah, the taint of elitism.’
‘No, but close.’
‘Why so evasive? I am bound by contract. I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to.’
‘If you controlled eighty percent of all the wealth in the world… Wouldn’t you want the status quo to carry on?
We prefer to trade anonymously behind a façade, behind the public faces. Kings, prime ministers, tsars, sultans, and emperors come to power and lose it to the jealously and dissatisfaction of the people. We have, uninterrupted, ruled from behind the scenes for centuries. Our secrets are precious.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Time you were in bed,’ he says, and lifts her into his arms. Her hands go around his neck.
‘You’re getting long, Bloom.’
‘Too long for you, Barrington.’
‘Never too long for me, Bloom.’
She turns her head and sees their reflections in the mirror on the opposite wall. Her long nightgown trails behind her and in the soft light from the nightstand they look like the romantic hero and heroine of the black and white movies her mother likes to watch. But we are not, she reminds herself. All his plans don’t include me. The thought is depressing. It makes her feel sad. She buries her face in his neck.
‘To sleep?’
‘Not quite, Bloom,’ he replies quietly.
He drops her in the bed with a plop and looks down at her tousled hair on the white pillows. In the shadows his eyes are unreadable.
‘What is it?’
He brings his mouth towards her and her mouth lifts to meet his. This time their kiss is special. She feels him trembling and the answering purr of her own body. It is as though they are drinking from each other. Their bodies meld together.
And when they are lying sated in the dark he says, ‘I love it when you come and your pussy grips my cock.’
She turns her face away from him and shuts her eyes in despair. She understands what he is doing. Always, she must be reduced to an orifice.
Twenty three
oday, Lana is happy. Billie has called to tel her the Tgood news. The antineoplastons that her mother is on are working. The tests are back—the tumors are regressing. Her mother will have to carry on her treatment for another three months, but she can return in two days’
time to England and carry it on there.
Lana is so happy she cries.
To celebrate, Blake has taken her out to dinner at Le Gavroche. She has already dined on the most delicious cheese soufflé cooked in double cream followed by grilled scallops. Her dessert, a raspberry millefeuille in praline-flavored chocolate, has just been put in front of her.
Blake has the Le Plateau de Fromages Affines. She watches him cut a slice of strong cheese. It is almost transparently thin. He places it on a small square of cracker and slips it into his mouth. She imagines the flavors building up in his nose, the cheese melting on his hot, silky tongue, and cheesy liquids traveling down the back of his throat. She watches the movement in the strong column of brown throat. The entire operation is fluid, elegant, almost a ceremony. It is his education. There is no greed in him. Not even for her.
She looks away and meets the eyes of another man. He is looking at her with the same expression she must have had in hers while she was looking at the banker. Now she knows what lay in the belly of all those men who gazed at her with desire in their eyes. She looks down at her dessert, dips her finger into the praline-flavored chocolate, and
places it on her tongue. She raises her eyes and Blake says, ‘You are in bad trouble.’
She doesn’t take her finger out. ‘What kind of trouble?’
she mumbles.
He smiles and is about to answer when a flash of surprised annoyance crosses his face. Its appearance and disappearance is swift. Very quickly his face resumes its neutral expression. Lana turns her head curiously to see what has caused the disturbance. A silver-haired man is walking towards their table. When the man arrives, he ignores Lana, and looks only at Blake.
Blake’s lips twist. ‘Father, meet Lana. Lana, my father,’
he introduces.
His father looks at Lana. His eyes are pale blue stones.
He pushes his glasses up his nose. He looks mild and harmless. If she had seen him in the street, she would have smiled at him.
‘Run along to the ladies and powder your nose or something. I need to speak to my son,’ he says.
His rudeness makes Lana gasp. She picks up her purse automatically and makes to rise, but Blake’s voice is like a whiplash. ‘Stay,’ he commands.
Lana looks at him. He is staring at her. She puts her purse down, and he shifts his eyes from her to his father.
‘When I have finished dinner I will come to you,’ he says softly, and stands.
The old man says nothing. It is obvious that he is livid, but he turns around and leaves the restaurant.
Blake sits. ‘Sorry about that,’ he apologizes. But he has changed. Become remote and preoccupied. ‘My father can be brusque sometimes.’
He looks at her uneaten dessert. ‘Do you want coffee?’
She shakes her head and he calls for the bill. He puts her into a cab and watches it drive away. Then he hails another cab and tells the driver to head to Claridges. He checks his phone, his brother has called. He calls him back.
‘What’s up, Marcus?’
‘Have you seen Dad?’
‘On my way to him now.’
‘Any idea why he suddenly decided he must see you?’
‘Nope,’ he lies. They chat a bit more and then he hangs up.He doesn’t immediately to go to his father’s rooms. He goes to the bar and orders himself a large whiskey. A girl comes up to him.
The Billionaire Banker Page 13
