Liaisons

by Various

  Then it’s over: the woman stands, surveys her work for a moment, and then she slips on her long black overcoat, covering her dom’s attire, and exits the room, without a backward glance for Jacob on the bed. Marta is stunned. She can’t, seriously, be leaving him that way? She shakes her head. No, she’s coming back. She’ll go down to the bar for a drink, put it on Jacob’s tab, and then she’ll return and release him. Or she’ll nip off to service another client and come back just as Jacob is beginning to squirm and sweat, wondering how he’ll get out of it.

  The silence is overwhelming. Outside the window, the light is falling, and the room slowly darkens, by imperceptible degrees. A long time passes, hours maybe. Marta feels the need to pee but holds it for so long that the urge disappears. Sometimes she closes her eyes, holds her breath so that she can hear his, like the susurration of the sea, proving that he’s still there, within the hollowed-out figure on the bed, the almost-man that he has become.

  Then, suddenly, she can’t stand it. No longer can she stand to stay here and watch him hang motionless on the bed, like a cur. Not that that isn’t what he’s asked for, paid for even. But it’s over now. He’s got his money’s worth, surely? What joy can he gain here alone, in the darkness, unable to move, waiting for his mistress’s mercy?

  She pushes the door open, causing the hinge to whine a little. Jacob cocks his head to one side, opens his eyes. She moves towards him, confident that he can see little of her in the darkness, although the curtains haven’t been drawn so the room is infused with some of London’s neon and nighttime sparkle. His head follows her movement across the room. She’s holding her breath, walking on tiptoe; she doesn’t know why.

  He doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask her who she is. For a moment she stands over him, and then she reaches out one hand and runs her fingers lightly over his shoulder, tracing the red weal that bisects it. When he winces, she removes it, brings it down and lets it rest for a moment in the pool of his lower back. She feels the sweat that lightly films his skin, hears how shallow his breathing is, still. She moves her hands to his wrists and unclasps the manacles that bind them. They remain limp in the small of his back. Shifting down to his legs, she picks at the knots with her nails, working them loose until the ropes fall away and he is unshackled.

  He still doesn’t move, and she stands now, looking down at him, admiring the patterns that the rope has left imprinted on the flesh of his legs. She wants to say something, but words won’t come. She doesn’t know what there is to say. Instead, almost involuntarily, she brings her hands to her lips and then lowers them to the pink candy stripes across his shoulders. He moans then, low and long, as if inviting into himself the kiss that he can’t possibly have seen.

  Like the dom, she leaves quickly, without looking back. There’s no sane explanation for her presence here, for her having been holed up in his wardrobe, and she can only hope that he didn’t see enough of her face for him to be able to recognise her should they ever meet again.

  Outside, the world seems surreal: all these purposive people, rushing backwards and forwards, while inside that suite time seems to have stood still, have frozen in the air like breath on an icy morning. Walking to the Tube station, she wonders what the mistress will think when she returns to find him unbound. What will he tell her? Or won’t he let her enter? He’s no need for her now he’s free. Unless … Unless he wants to start all over again. She feels a stab of jealousy at his desire, or need, for this woman.

  Back home she can’t sleep for thinking about him. She still, despite having seen him naked, doesn’t know what he really looks like. If she saw him in the street, he would be just another anonymous face in the sea of strangers that London is to her. And yet they have lived through something intense together. A connection has been formed and, in this city with its millions of isolated souls, that counts for a lot.

  Marta thinks she can’t very well not go to work but, when she does, she suggests to her supervisor that she might work in another part of the hotel, get a change of scene by swapping with one of her colleagues. When the supervisor pulls a face, says that it’s important to have continuity, to be familiar with one’s patch, Marta feels a rush of blood to the head – fear overlaid with excitement. She’d have been disappointed, she realises, if her boss had accepted her proposal but, by putting responsibility in the hands of someone else, she can accept more readily what she had to do, can explain it away as fate. Whatever happens, it was meant to be.

  Still, when she knocks twice, three times, at the suite door, checking that no one is in, her heart is pounding, and her hands shake as she swipes the room card even now she knows he’s not there. She walks in, eyes the bed nervously. As always, it’s unmade. Beside it, on the glass side table, is the usual used coffee cup.

  She walks over to the bed, looks down at it, as if she might see the imprint of his body on the base sheet. She lays her hand on it and his scent rises from it like smoke. Inhaling it deeply, she feels fainter still and has to sit down.

  For a while, Marta remains utterly still. Then she thinks she needs to get on, clean and tidy the room and get out of there as soon as possible. She mustn’t be there when he returns, just in case he did get a proper look at her face. She dips back out into the corridor, takes some cleaning materials from the trolley and returns.

  It’s now that she sees the note, on the bureau, beside the telephone. It’s in the same place as usual, on top of the pristine white pad, with the silver pen placed neatly next to it.

  Was it you? it says, simply.

  There’s no signature, no name, today. She panics, gives the room a cursory clean and tidy, and hurries out. In the corridor, she has to sit down, she’s so afraid and so excited. He must have guessed; he isn’t stupid. Yet the note, short and uninformative as it was, seems to hold no threat. He’s not going to complain to the management that a maid was hiding out in his wardrobe, spying on him – and not out of embarrassment because of what he was doing, or not primarily. No, she feels there’s almost an invitation in there somewhere. But an invitation to what? She knows that she’ll only find out by accepting.

  Walking to the Tube through the rain, Marta stops at a news kiosk for a paper and a magazine full of celebrity gossip. She hates herself for reading such trash, but she knows there’s a sleepless night ahead, a night of questions whirring around in her brain, and sometimes, when she’s like that, only trivia of the most banal kind can distract her.

  Deciding to take the bus instead, she locates the stop she needs and then opens her magazine, holding it in one hand beneath her unfolded umbrella. The rain patters against the umbrella, lulling her. Maybe, she thinks, she will sleep after all. She didn’t get much last night, after releasing Jacob and returning home. She’s exhausted.

  She half turns where she stands to check the number of the approaching bus, and her attention is caught by a flickering bank of screens in the window of an upmarket electronics store by the bus stop. There’s a man in there, on screen after screen after screen, talking, gesticulating, looking very serious and concerned. She can’t hear the words but she feels he is saying something of great import. She looks back at her trash mag, then lifts her eyes, almost unwillingly, to the screens. There’s something familiar about him, something that she can’t put her finger on. She can’t place his face, yet she feels that she knows it, in some dark part of herself. Her eyes roam down to his body, swathed in a well-cut, well-fitting suit. It’s the same unusual shade of sage green that she remarked upon when she brought back Jacob’s laundry yesterday, freshly washed and pressed. She swallows. The newscast ends, and the name flashes up, reminding viewers of the speaker’s identity should they have missed it at the start. Jacob Tavernier, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.

  Her eyes travel along the row, every screen relaying his image and his name back at her. In her mind’s eye, inscribed over the top of them, is the note, his words. He was summoning her, she’s sure of it now. He knows she’s the one who can save him. />
  Running back to the hotel, Marta thinks that maybe an interesting life is not that big a deal after all, that one can be surrounded by people, always on the move, rolling in money, doing important, worthwhile things, and still be the loneliest person in the world.

  Slipping through the back door to avoid her colleagues on reception and evade their inevitable questions, she slips through the kitchens and takes the service lift up to the eighth floor and the penthouse suite. She has her room swipe in her bag, along with her uniform, but she knocks instead. She’s not sure if he’ll be back yet, if the broadcast was live or used video footage.

  The door opens, so slowly it feels as if her heart will burst. His face appears. He’s still wearing his overcoat, collar turned up against the rain. His hair, damp, is a burnt-sugar colour. He smiles but makes a gesture of helplessness with his hands.

  ‘I was hoping you’d come,’ he says, yet it comes out like an apology.

  She steps inside. Suddenly she feels powerful, charged with a sort of demonic energy that takes her beyond herself, into that realm that she thought was forever closed to her.

  ‘Onto the bed,’ she says, pointing to the other end of the room, surprised by her tone.

  He bows his head, turns, but as he walks away from her he throws her a glance over his shoulder, and she sees a fire in his eyes that belies his cowed demeanour.

  She strides after him and, as he climbs onto the bed, still in his outdoor clothes, she reaches into her bag, tosses him her housemaid’s coat. ‘Strip,’ she barks, ‘and then put this on. Now.’

  She watches as he fumbles with the buttons of his coat, his fingers trembling. ‘Faster,’ she commands. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  He does as she bids, pulling off his coat without undoing the rest of the buttons, causing some to pop off and spin across the room like coins. Frantically he pulls off his sage suit beneath, then his matching tie and his sharp, starched white shirt. She remains still, watchful, amazed by her own sense of calm and mastery of the situation. She knows what she wants, where she’s going. It feels as if she’s been sleepwalking through her life until this point, and now she’s suddenly awake. She feels utterly lucid and clear-sighted and in control.

  ‘What now?’ he says. His voice is pleading, pathetic. She feels like smacking him. She points at the uniform. ‘That,’ she says. ‘Or have you forgotten?’

  ‘Sorry, Mistress.’

  ‘I should think so too.’

  At that, all at once, laughter starts to ripple up inside her. Her mask, she realises, is slipping.

  She suppresses the laughter, but he must see it in her eyes, for as soon as he has slipped the costume that she has provided over his head, his own eyes lose their desperate subservience and he reaches up to her, places a hand on her face, on her cheek. She tries to pull away but she’s falling, falling, letting him pull her down onto the bed.

  ‘Stop it,’ she giggles. ‘I’m the one in charge, here.’

  He laughs too, and this time, as he unbuttons the housecoat to reveal his nutmeg-brown torso with its fine blond tendrils and his cock rising proudly from its nest of darker, thicker hair, his hands are sure, unfaltering.

  He doesn’t need saving, she knows that now. He just needed to learn how to laugh. He wasn’t the only one.

  She’s laughing as she rolls him over, spanks him playfully on his arse cheeks as she pulls off her clothes with her free hand and tosses them to the floor beside the bed. Sitting astride his back, her pussy oozing onto on his warm and pliant flesh, she smacks him again.

  ‘C’mon, horsey,’ she titters.

  He rises on all fours beneath her, and she lies forwards against his back, breasts crushed against him, reaching one arm around him. As her hand grazes his downy bollocks, his cock insinuates its way into her moist palm.

  As she moves her hand up and down Jacob’s taut shaft, Marta closes her eyes and lets herself dissolve into the moment, lets herself be all body, nothing but this woman here in this room with this man. For the first time in her life, Marta thinks nothing.

  Carrie Williams is the author of the Black Lace novels The Blue Guide, Chilli Heat and The Apprentice. She has also contributed to numerous Black Lace short story collections as both Candy Wong and Carrie Williams.

  Under the Big Top

  Mae Nixon

  MY MOTHER ALWAYS drummed into me that I should never be tempted to hitch-hike. But when I went away to university and Mike, my boyfriend, went to another two hundred miles away I began to grow a little disobedient. Well, we were young and horny and neither of us could bear the thought of going a whole week without getting laid.

  So every Friday night my friend Kelly would give me a lift to a lorry drivers’ café on the A1 and, before long, I’d be on my way. And, in spite of my mother’s fears, none of them ever tried it on. To tell the truth, they were mostly just glad of someone to talk to and, if that someone happened to be a young woman with long blonde hair and curves in all the right places, the journey would be just a bit more interesting.

  I even got to know some of the regular drivers and, after a while, I grew used to their routines. I knew that, if I arrived by a certain time, I was guaranteed to get a lift with one or other of my driving buddies and would arrive in Durham just before the Union bar closed.

  It was so easy and familiar that I more or less forgot that I’d ever worried about hitch-hiking. One Friday night I arrived at the transport café a little later than usual and all my regular pals were long gone. The place seemed deserted.

  It was a cold, drizzly night but I didn’t even have enough cash on me for a cup of coffee so I didn’t dare shelter in the warm. I waited for ages, growing progressively colder, wetter and more depressed. I was just about to give up and ring a friend to come and get me when a huge American-style truck turned into the car park.

  I watched it pull into a parking space. The driver had his hood up and his outline seemed huge and sinister, but I couldn’t afford to be choosy. When he jumped down onto the Tarmac I came out of the shadows.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘you look like a half-drowned angel.’

  ‘I need a lift to Durham,’ I tried to say, only I was so cold that my words came out strangled and shivery.

  ‘You look to me as though you need something nice and warm inside you.’

  ‘I … er …’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t mean this …’ He handled the front of his jeans. ‘I meant some nice hot soup or something. Let’s go inside?’

  ‘I haven’t got any money.’

  ‘I kind of gathered that or you wouldn’t be hanging around in a freezing cold car park waiting for a lift from a stranger. Didn’t your mother ever tell you hitch-hiking was dangerous?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘And she was right. Look, come on inside and I’ll buy you a hot meal then give you your lift to Durham.’

  ‘You’re going to Durham?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m planning on going all the way.’

  Inside it was wonderfully warm and smelt of frying bacon. I followed the driver over to a table and we sat down. He unbuttoned his duffel coat, pushed down the hood and I saw his face for the first time. He had long, dark, curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a pencil-thin moustache. His face was all angles: chiselled cheekbones; square jaw; a long thin nose. He reminded me of a pirate, and the red bandana tied around his neck seemed to emphasise the impression.

  He smiled at me and I noticed that one of his front teeth was capped with gold and his eyes were a vivid blue. He coughed theatrically and I realised I’d been staring at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I fiddled with my coat buttons to hide my embarrassment.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I bet your mother told you it was rude to stare as well, didn’t she?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So … do you like what you see?’ He held his arms wide and looked down at his body, inviting me to look.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said witho
ut thinking.

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘No … no … you misunderstand. It’s just that –’ I stopped mid-sentence, suddenly aware how stupid I must sound. ‘You see, when you got out of the van with your hood up I couldn’t help being reminded of the Grim Reaper. I’m just relieved that you look so normal.’

  ‘Normal? Never been called that before.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Johnny Lee. Pleased to meet you.’

  We shook hands and he held on to mine slightly longer than was necessary. I could feel hard calluses on his palm. He slid his hand slowly out of mine, trailing his fingers across my skin. A tiny shivery tingle slid along my spine. ‘I’m Jo.’

  I ate a bacon sandwich while Johnny tucked into a huge fry-up. After several cups of tea I finally felt warm again. We didn’t speak much while we ate but, for some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  He wore a denim shirt that was a little grimy around the neck and a leather waistcoat over it. When he reached out for a bottle of ketchup I saw a thick rope of old scar tissue running up the inside of his forearm.

  I don’t know what came over me but I couldn’t resist the urge to reach out and stroke it. I caught his wrist in my hand and ran my thumb along the puckered ridge of his scar. Johnny used his other hand to unbutton his sleeve and he pushed the shirt up to his elbow revealing more of the scar. I ran my trembling fingers along it, reading it like Braille. When he finally pulled his arm away I realised I’d been holding my breath.

  ‘How did you get that?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Accident at work.’

  Outside Johnny helped me into the lorry. The cab was huge and luxurious. The seats were broad and comfortable like armchairs and, behind us, was a curtained-off partition where the driver could sleep. Johnny took off his coat and tossed it into the back. He started the engine and it roared into life.

  ‘It’s a powerful beast, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a huge one before.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re right, it is. I didn’t realise you made a habit of accepting lifts off strange lorry drivers. What’s the story? Fetish for the smell of oil? Got a thing about big hairy men with dirt under their fingernails?’