Killer Affair

by Rebecca Chance

  It’s ironic, because Jay and Nathan are totally gay, and couldn’t give a shit about a woman’s arse (yeah, I like my puns!). God knows what the technician fancies, but all I can say is that if she’s gay she’s in heaven with her job. She must see more women’s bits in a day than a gynaecologist – they only get to do the front part, right?

  Normally, of course, I’d be on my knees, shoving my bum back at her. But because I’m being filmed for my reality show, I’m having to lie down. Apparently it’s ‘too real’ to film me naked on all fours screeching ’cause I’m getting acid rubbed into me back there . . .

  ‘You want front done too?’ asked the bleaching technician, as she had been prompted to do by the producer of All About Lexy. And as they had rehearsed, Lexy squealed with laughter.

  ‘Nah, love!’ she said. Her head was raised, propped on her hands, so that the camera directly in front of her could capture her facial expression. Eyes dancing with amusement, full lips curved, she added:

  ‘Frank likes it pink! If he fancied copping off with an albino chick he should’ve done it before he got married, shouldn’t he?’

  ‘God, the hell you women have to put up with!’ Nathan said, shuddering theatrically. ‘Do some of you actually bleach your vadges?’

  ‘Mental, isn’t it,’ Lexy said casually. ‘What some needy desperado bitches do to snag a man. Hey, Ghost Mouse, don’t put “desperado” in! I know it’s wrong, I just like using it.’

  Everyone looked over at Caroline, who was sitting tucked away in one corner of Lexy’s sprawling bathroom. She was ensconced on the loo seat, a suitably humble position for a lowly blogger who was lucky even to be interviewing for this job, scribbling away on a notepad, since tapping on her laptop keys had been banned by the TV crew on the grounds of background noise.

  ‘Cut,’ the director said, sighing. ‘Lexy—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick it up, no worries.’

  Caroline’s cheeks were tingling, that unpleasant feeling when all her little rosacea nodules became activated. She hated attention, and even though the anal bleaching technician, the make-up and hair artists and the crew had only glanced her way for a moment, as Lexy mentioned her, it had made her extremely self-conscious. Absurd, of course. There was Lexy, not only naked but positively splayed open to one of her cores, and it was the fully-dressed Caroline who was shrinking from being stared at.

  ‘Okay to go again?’ the director said to Lexy.

  ‘In three,’ she said, leaving a pause. Then, with the skill of long practice, in just the same tone as she had used before, she repeated:

  ‘Mental, isn’t it. What some needy desperado bitches do to snag a man.’ She paused. ‘Oi, Nathan! You got to keep opening up my area so she can get to it!’

  Nathan tightened his grip on Lexy’s left buttock.

  ‘You’re in good nick, babes,’ he said. ‘Nice and plumptious.’

  ‘Got to have something for Frank to hold on to!’ Lexy said. ‘Oh, look, speak of the devil.’

  ‘You’re the devil,’ Jay commented, his pre-scripted dialogue for the scene. ‘Frank’s the angel, if you ask me.’

  Once more ignored in the far corner of the room, quite removed from the angles of the cameras, which had been carefully positioned to avoid unwanted reflections in the many mirrors, Caroline looked over as Frank Callis, Lexy’s husband, walked into the room. This was scripted too, of course. Caroline had been privy to the whole planning and choreography of this scene, the producer and Lexy conferring on the shape of it, feeding Nathan and Jay their catchy lines, deciding that Frank should enter and feign shock at Lexy’s latest beauty treatment to give the scene some drama.

  ‘What you doing to yourself now, Lex?’ Frank asked, one of the cameras turning to capture his entrance, though naturally it would be reshot as well. His delivery was not lively, but it wasn’t wooden either; apart from several seasons of his wife’s reality show, having been a sports commentator for years he was very used to the demands of television by now.

  ‘Bleaching me arsehole for your pleasure!’ Lexy said, blowing him a kiss. ‘I hope you’re happy!’

  Tucked away on the toilet seat, Caroline had a clear view of Frank. His wife’s tanned, hairless, naked body was stretched out on a treatment table covered with white towelling. The contrast made Lexy’s skin glow luminously against the white background. Her dark hair was pinned up on the crown of her head, elongating her neck; it looked positively swanlike as Lexy swivelled to address him directly: she was breathtakingly attractive

  But it was Frank who was holding all Caroline’s attention. He’d never been a classically handsome heartthrob, pursued by adverts keen to use him for underwear or aftershave campaigns: he was no David Beckham or Freddie Ljungberg. However, Caroline was realizing, this must be due to the fact that he did not photograph well. It was her first experience of the capricious gift that nature bestows on some people but not others, the magic of being born photogenic. Lexy had it in spades. Frank did not.

  His features were blunt, his forehead too low. But the dark curls clustering over it gave him a very youthful appearance, and his almond-shaped black eyes were luminous and compelling. He was taller than Caroline had expected, his shoulders wider, his stomach flatter. It was amazing to her, staring at him, that Frank had never had a fan club of admirers, never been considered anything but a safe pair of hands, a very reliable winger, a thoughtful and considered TV pundit. The television cameras did not capture the softness of those wonderful dark eyes, the quiet confidence of his demeanour, and most of all, the luminosity of his skin.

  Lexy glowed because of her excellent and expensive fake tan, but Frank’s colour was all his own. Caroline had copy-edited a press release for a luxury wood company the year before, and still remembered some of the more exotic varieties. Cherrywood, fruitwood, Ipswich pine, red mahogany, colonial maple: poetic names. Well, Frank’s skin made her feel poetic: it looked like the burnished golden pecan about which the press release had waxed lyrical, the heart of a fire against which you could warm your hands. Frank might have been planed down and then oiled deeply, just like the wood; Caroline imagined that if she ran her hand down his chest, which was partly visible at the neckline of his open shirt, it would feel just as smooth . . .

  She caught herself, swallowing so hard it was almost painful. But she simply hadn’t expected Frank to be so handsome. On TV, on Lexy’s show, he came across as – not bland, exactly. But . . . nice. Dependable. The voice of reason on every panel discussion, the foil to Lexy’s high-spirited, attention-seeking loudmouth. Good husband material, a man who had unquestioningly taken on Laylah, Lexy’s daughter, raising her as his own. Laylah’s biological father, a basketball player with whom Lexy had had a famously tempestuous affair, had walked out when she told him she was pregnant. Frank was, in every way but genetic, Laylah’s father.

  Good husband material: that phrase was never used to describe a man who was sexually attractive. But as Caroline, her face on fire now, ducked her head to hide it, she was so dazzled by Frank that all she could manage was to make squiggles in her notebook so that anyone who looked over would think she was writing. She had never seen a man who she had found more compelling.

  Frank said the line fed him by the producer: ‘Babes, you know I like you a bit more natural.’

  Even his voice sounded different than it did on television. Charming, gentle, amused. Sexy.

  He really cares about her, Caroline thought. You can tell he loves her in their series, but in real life . . . he doesn’t just love her, he likes her. That’s just as important.

  ‘Oh, come on, Frank, you love it when I’m all nice and smooth!’ Lexy was saying flirtatiously.

  Frank raised one big hand and wiped it over his face as if he were trying to block out the image of his wife lying naked in front of him with two gay men pulling her buttocks apart, a young woman with a white plastic spatula smearing gel between them, and a camera crew surrounding her, with bright lights illuminatin
g the entire scene.

  ‘Sometimes, Lex,’ he said, lowering his hand again, ‘I wonder where this is all going to end, y’know?’

  Lexy paused. This wasn’t what he had been supposed to say, and she wasn’t sure whether to make an unscripted joke about him and one of her ends; their show was re-run in the daytime, and she couldn’t say anything too explicit.

  Although she was being filmed in the nude, the viewers would see nothing but the blurred curve of her bottom. It was commonplace now on reality shows for female cast members to get their private parts waxed. The network, however, was increasingly strict with Lexy about her swearing and sexual innuendo, and she knew that if she made a joke that was too risqué it would be cut.

  And yet Frank’s reaction, though unscripted, had been so good, so honest, that it would work fantastically on TV – if she could find something light and funny to respond with . . .

  ‘Mummy!’

  Laylah tore into the bathroom, her plaits bouncing on her shoulders, her blue eyes wide as she took in the sight of her mother splayed on the beauty therapist’s table. She skidded to a halt beside her father as, following in her footsteps, her little brother London, a stocky four-year-old, tumbled in behind her. With his tight dark curls and burnished skin, his slanting eyes and square jaw, he was the image of his father, apart from the light eyes that were clearly from his mother’s gene pool. Suddenly shy at the number of people present, he slipped behind Laylah, aware that all the attention would be on her as soon as she entered a room.

  And he was perfectly right. Laylah stole the scene.

  ‘Oh no, Mummy!’ she said, nailing that world-weary tone that small children can sometimes assume. Playing for the cameras, as she had been taught, she folded her arms over her chest and stuck out her small pointed chin. ‘Why have you taken all your clothes off for the men again?’

  ‘And cut,’ the director said gratefully.

  Chapter Four

  He was blindfolded, helpless, his sweat beginning to soak into the silk bonds that held him strapped, spread-eagled on the mattress. No wonder the Marquis had had him escorted to this room, with its four-poster bed whose curlicued mahogany pillars looked as heavy as marble. No matter how much he thrashed, trying to loosen the woven cords around his wrists and ankles, the wood to which they were fastened barely even creaked; and not only was he a strong young man, his muscles were not merely for show. He was the son and apprentice of a blacksmith, his biceps mighty, his stomach thick and solid for balance, to hold his back safe against the swing of the forging hammer: no footman, hired for height and decoration, no young Regency buck who sparred with Gentleman Jackson at the latter’s Bond Street boxing salon for sport.

  That last image made his blood stir. None other than Lord Byron had recorded in his diary that, after pugilistic instruction from Jackson, the two men had enjoyed an encounter just as sweaty, just as intense, but even more stripped down and private. Byron swore that he had had carnal knowledge of Jackson, and whether it were true or not, the vivid picture that this conjured up, the Champion of England and the famous poet, the one all muscle and sinew, the other a beauty for the ages, naked, wrestling for physical supremacy, on a bed identical to this, the sound of their panting as they struggled one to conquer the other with urgent cocks rather than clenched fists – not just the sounds of them gasping for breath, but the slick of sweating flesh against flesh, the quick spit of saliva into a palm, the moist slick of that fluid, enhanced by thick drops eagerly released in anticipation, up and down a thrusting shaft, the final gushing rush of release into mouth or arsehole, the groans of both men as they gave and received in turn . . .

  His cock was straining now. If his hands had been free – even one hand, even his less-favoured left hand, which lacked the long expertise in pulling his own cock with the exquisite torture that would inevitably lead to the longed-for explosion – he would have come immediately at the picture of those two men. It was their physical competition that excited him so much, the element of constraint, of force, one compelling the other to a surrender that was so desired but also so erotically resisted to prolong delight.

  This was what he craved: the being forced, the forcing in turn. This was why he found himself now, here, oil worked into his body as if he were a harem slave, tied to a bed, desperate for satisfaction, but longing to greet the Marquis with a stiff cock whenever he deigned to enter this bedroom, rather than a belly smeared with his own almond-scented liquid.

  It was agony, this waiting, this anticipation. When, finally, after God knew how much time had passed, his tears wetting the silk blindfold that kept him in delicious darkness, he heard footsteps in the passage, the doorknob turn, his balls tightened, his cock sprang even fuller, even more erect, its tumescence now more pain than pleasure . . .

  Oh, heaven help him! No – heaven would scorn to reach out and save him from what awaited him. It was his punishment for being who and what he was, not just for desiring men, but for his need of restraint and restraining. For it was not just the Marquis who had entered the room, who was staring at his naked and aroused body. There had been more than one set of boot heels stepping heavily down the corridor, into this bedroom. One man closed the door while another walked to the bed, stood beside the mattress, his gaze as hot on the young man strapped down there as if it were a flambeau held by a footman, so close it could burn the skin.

  ‘You filthy catamite,’ the Marquis said softly, and more tears dampened the blindfold even as, to his humiliation, his hips thrust upwards at the insult, silently showing his submission. ‘You deserve more punishment than I alone can give you for your disgusting lusts.’

  And even as the Marquis’s leather-gloved hand closed around his cock, other hands unfastened the cords around his ankles, freeing them, pushing them up towards his chest. The mattress sagged with the heavy weight of a man climbing onto it, up between his spread legs, still in riding boots, the squeak of the leather unmistakeable. He was to be fucked by a gentleman who did not even deign to strip before he drove his cock in, just loosened his breeches, spat on his hand and went to work.

  It was glorious. It was all he could do not to shoot straight away into the Marquis’s calfskin glove. He grit his teeth, threw back his head, held out as long as he could, and his reward, on feeling the stranger’s hot eager come flood his arsehole, finally, was to yield his own to the Marquis’s mouth, which was now tightly sealed around his cock, lapping up every drop of the catamite’s filthy, sinful, forbidden spunk.

  ‘You wrote this?’ Lexy stared at Caroline, turning over the pages of print-out to see if there was any more of the story. ‘You wrote this?’

  Caroline nodded, pressing her lips together to control her fear, as she couldn’t tell from Lexy’s stunned reaction whether she loved or hated the Regency gay sex scene, and it was crucial that she did. This was the second test: Caroline had passed the first, as Lexy had liked the first-person narrative that she had challenged Caroline to write about the anal bleaching scene. Lexy didn’t know yet, she had said, what she thought the book should be; a novel, a biography, a combination of the two. But she had pronounced the piece to be easy to read, full of personality, and not pompous or patronizing. From the way she’d delivered the last words, it was clear that some of the other potential ghostwriters had been exactly that.

  So Caroline had demonstrated that she could write in a way that appealed to Lexy. And her attitude was clearly acceptable; in fact, Caroline’s deference provided Lexy with a great deal of amusement. Lexy had a way of looking at Caroline with lightly concealed mockery every time Caroline acted too humbly or seemed intimidated by Lexy’s sheer physical confidence.

  They were meeting today in the bar of a Bloomsbury hotel, all black leather sofas and parchment-toned orchids on polished silver tables, and Lexy had already laughed out loud at Caroline’s insistence that she was perfectly fine just drinking tap water. Lexy was on Pinot Grigio, which she had ordered with a slice of lemon in it. The nervous waiter had b
rought the lemon on the side, and Lexy, tutting loudly, had plonked it into her glass, commenting on how annoying it was when people couldn’t listen properly. The waiter, not knowing where to look – her famous face, her famous breasts and her famous legs were all very much on display – retreated backwards as if she had been the Queen, bowing and mumbling apologies.

  ‘Well,’ Lexy finally said, putting down the pages once she had confirmed that the Regency bondage and buggery scene ended at the point that two out of the three participants reached their climax. ‘I’d never have guessed it! You don’t look the type at all. But they say the quiet ones are always the filthiest, don’t they? Fuck me, I need a drink after that!’

  She picked up her glass, drained the wine, sucked enthusiastically on the lemon, and waved over to the barman to order another. Then she turned back to fix Caroline with a stare that, for the first time in their acquaintance, had respect in it. Caroline had emailed Lexy the anal bleaching scene a couple of days after the meeting in Sandbanks, and though Lexy had rung her up that very day to convey her approval, she had added that she had a big question which needed to be resolved. As far as Caroline was concerned, that could have been almost anything, and she held her breath until she heard what Lexy was about to say.

  ‘No offence,’ Lexy had said breezily, which naturally meant that something very likely to insult was coming down the pipeline. ‘But can you be sexy?’

  Caroline – who was at work, in her usual uniform of Next grey skirt and M&S polyester crepe shirt – looked down at herself instinctively and winced.

  ‘I could try, I suppose,’ she said feebly.