by Vina Jackson
‘I will,’ Dominik said.
He had been trying to contact Summer in New York for a few days now, but her phone kept on going to voicemail on every occasion, whatever the time of day over in Manhattan, and he was beginning to worry slightly. She had promised to keep him informed of any adventures there, but so far the news had been pretty prosaic and uninvolving. Incomplete?
‘I’m having a small party tomorrow with a couple of my playthings, but was thinking of opening it up. Would you be interested in attending? Watching, maybe?’ Lauralynn asked him.
‘Wouldn’t your . . . acolytes object to a stranger being present?’ he queried.
‘Not at all. They know how to serve and do as they’re told. Though I guess you’re not into using guys, are you? A step too far?’
‘No,’ Dominik confirmed, hiding the fact from Lauralynn that he had given thought to switching, being on the receiving end in order to better understand what it might feel like to be a submissive, rather than out of taste. According to BDSM lore, many doms had supposedly done their time as subs. It helped them understand the dynamic better. The problem was just that he was not attracted to men. Fascinated by their cocks, yes, but not by their faces or personalities. So watching would have been interesting, educational even, but somehow he knew he was not quite ready for this.
‘Maybe not this time,’ he responded, mindfully not rejecting a future occasion. Right now, his thoughts were of Summer and the bubbling maelstrom of lustful intentions she drew to the surface of his imagination.
‘Pity,’ Lauralynn said. ‘It would have been nice to have some new company. I could teach you a lot,’ she continued.
‘No doubt you could.’
‘My gut feeling tells me that you’re not much of a man for toys, are you?’
‘Your instinct serves you right,’ Dominik said.
‘Victor is,’ Lauralynn remarked. ‘A hell of a lot. Loves his spreader bars, he does. I find that they work well with girls, but guys somehow always get cramps. Most men, that is. Some of them, especially the gay ones, will take anything and more. I don’t come across many of them in my business, though; they keep to themselves and their own rituals, I guess,’ she added as an afterthought, and Dominik felt there was a note of regret in her voice when she revealed this.
The midday sun was rising above them, with just the flutter of a breeze animating the greenery in the surrounding trees. Lauralynn brushed a breadcrumb from the corner of her mouth.
‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ she said to Dominik, glancing at the sun. He’d taken his linen jacket off. ‘Probably the last warm day we’re going to have this year. London, eh? I just love the sun.’
He smiled at her.
Her blonde hair unfurled all the way across her shoulders. She stretched, sat up for a moment and in one swift movement pulled off her tight print blouse. She was braless beneath it. His eyes went to her delicately pierced nipples and the exquisite shade of pink they wantonly displayed and then to a blue tattoo, an ideogram in Chinese calligraphy on her left shoulder. She rolled over onto her stomach, kicked off the faded denim hot pants she had been wearing and began sunbathing in just her thong. The mountains of her arse were like a geometric symphony delineating a perfect curve with mathematical precision. The line of the elastic was ever so askew, indicating from her overall tan that she was quite accustomed to sunbathing in the nude.
Male passers-by began to slow down to catch a longer sight of her as they ambled along the path nearest to the grass, while assorted families spread along the park’s lawn threw them angry looks. There was something eminently provocative about the way she just lay there, her bare back and arse cheeks being roasted by the sun.
She was shameless, and she knew it.
Spread like this, legs exaggeratedly apart, in a public park, she would from a distance have onlookers believing she was stark naked.
Before she had turned onto her stomach, Dominik had noticed how the flimsy material of the thong clung to her skin and how the deep cleft of her cunt was visible through it.
He liked Lauralynn and thought they could, given the chance, turn out to be really good friends.
He took off his shirt, his turn to catch the last sun of the year.
Soon, they were both dozing in the arms of the lazy autumn heat.
Dominik dreamed of Summer, though, not Lauralynn.
3
The Romance of Ropes
Shadows had begun to fall across the small enclosed garden outside my even smaller window in the East Village apartment, and the remaining light barely illuminated my body in the mirror so that with the corset on, I had an almost mummified appearance, like a strange woman in a Victorian cabaret show.
The garment bit into my skin with all the hard comfort of a steel embrace.
I loosened the laces at the back and leaned forward, carefully unclipping the row of metal hoops from the studs that held the construction together at the front. The boning had left an interesting set of marks on my torso, an art deco effect of symmetrical grooves running parallel round my waist and up to my breasts, vivid red against pale white.
My flatmates and I had just returned from performing a free open-air gig in Union Square, part of a month-long series of informal events celebrating American composers in advance of the upcoming Thanksgiving celebration. It was early November and the sun was beginning to sink earlier from the sky, its absence heralding the arrival of a sharp autumnal chill. We were heading out shortly to one of the rooftop bars in Midtown, to make the most of the evening air before winter brushed her cold hands over the city and banished all but the most determined cigarette smokers indoors.
I had performed while laced tightly into the black under-bust corset that Dominik had bought for me and instructed me to wear to one of Charlotte’s parties in London, which kept my chest, as well as other parts of me, warm beneath the thin black knitted shift dress that I wore on top.
It seemed like a lifetime ago now, one of my first experiments in kink, when I had dressed and served as a maid for the evening in an attempt to discover how I felt in a submissive role when following the orders of those other than Dominik.
My behaviour had been impossible to analyse after the event, because clothed in the outfit and attending to the ring of the bell that he had provided for the guests to summon me, I’d felt as though I was following his instructions rather than those of the individuals who had asked for another portion of dessert or a glass refilled.
I missed him terribly, more than I had ever expected, and more than I would ever admit to him. Our communication since he had left had been brief, sporadic. The sound of his voice filled me with such longing that I began to leave my phone switched to voicemail most of the time, so I wouldn’t have to face speaking to him.
Dominik had not ordered me to wear the corset beneath my clothes at this afternoon’s gig. I had chosen to do so of my own accord, in an effort to recreate the sensation of dominance that I missed so much.
I tried to take advantage of the extra emotion that arose as a result of his absence by throwing my energy into my music, channelling grief and frustration into my violin like a lightning rod, though inevitably, some of the loneliness lingered, and my thoughts were filled with memories of the scenes that Dominik had created in London and fantasies of all the things that I wanted him to do to me. I became irritable and withdrawn, annoyed by the intensity of my own feelings.
I had tried emailing Charlotte for her advice, but she’d either mysteriously vanished or was ignoring me. Chris had completed his short tour with the band in America and had returned to London. He had no plans to visit New York again anytime soon, and besides that, he wasn’t keen on Dominik, so I hadn’t confided in him. I’d spoken to old friends in New Zealand over Skype, but they were settling down now with office jobs and long-term partners. My life was so different, with the orchestra, New York, Dominik, that I felt at odds with them as well.
Socially, I was at a bit of a loose end, but musical
ly at least, my efforts did not go unnoticed.
Simón, the Venezuelan guest conductor the ensemble had been working with for the past season, had won a post with the orchestra permanently, and he seemed to have taken a shine to me, subtly praising my performance with the odd wink or lingering stare in my direction over the rostrum. I had only begun to notice his attentions once we began rehearsing for the series of Thanksgiving concerts, perhaps because I felt an affinity with the American style; it was influenced by the sound of faraway places, coloured by the infinite variation in cultural backgrounds of composers who emigrated to America to pursue a new life, filled with optimism and collecting the rhythms of new cities along the way, jazz and folk sounds blending with old European traditions.
I had not been sorry to see the old conductor go. He’d had an academic approach that I felt lacked nuance. Under his control, the string section had been a little wooden. Simón was younger, and his methods were a radical departure from what we had been used to. Orchestral gossip discussed little else.
He had a bit of a bohemian look about him, and at least in rehearsals, he could have passed as the lead guitarist in a rock band, dressing in jeans and loose T-shirts. He was vibrant all the way from his shoes, which varied from comfortable Converse to pointed snakeskin ankle boots, shined to gleaming, up to his hair, which sprouted from his head in a mass of thick, dark curls and bounced with a flourish with his more manic movements. He led the orchestra as if possessed by music, beating time with his hands snapping like the jaws of a crocodile. Every adjustment of his facial muscles responded to internal cues seemingly without thought: a lift of the eyebrow or pursing of the lips signalled an infinitesimal change of mood or tempo.
I hoped that under his direction the string section might be encouraged to display more passion. If our last few concerts were anything to go by, his influence was just what we needed.
Baldo and Marija, my Croatian flatmates, who played trumpet and flute respectively, were ambivalent about the change. They had recently got engaged, and the happiness that they found in each other reflected onto every aspect of their lives so that it would have taken a bolt from the sky of portentous doom to bring down their mood.
Following the success of her own romance, Marija had become intent on setting me up, and she interrogated me regularly about the status of my relationship with Dominik with the rigour and cunning of a private eye.
That morning, I had told her about the whole affair, if for no other reason than to explain why I had been so short-tempered at home.
‘You know that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,’ she said prosaically, as we met in the kitchen over a late breakfast, before assembling our instruments and heading off for the concert.
She’d just had a fringe cut into her dead-straight dark hair and the severe line across her forehead lent an authoritative tone to her words.
‘But I don’t need to get over him. We’re still seeing each other.’
‘You’re not really, though, are you, with you stuck here and him all the way over there?’
‘It’s not exactly a relationship. We’re friends. With benefits.’
‘But you’re not getting any benefits.’
I had left out the details of our sexual exploits, but had told Marija that we had agreed, considering our natures and the distance between us, that we were both free to explore casual relationships with other people.
‘Of course,’ she’d said in response to that information, ‘if he’s not around, that’s his problem. A girl has needs.’
She invited me to join her and Baldo that night for a drink at 230 Fifth, the sort of stereotypical pick-up joint that was filled to bursting at weekends with young Manhattanites on the prowl. I really wasn’t in the mood for it, but agreed anyway. I couldn’t spend all of my evenings locked in my bedroom and strapped up in Dominik’s corset, even if I found the company of the two lovebirds bearable only in small doses, and the bar was exactly the kind of pretentious place that I went out of my way to avoid.
When I arrived, I discovered that they’d invited another member of the brass section along, a trombone player called Alex, who had joined the Gramercy Symphonia a year earlier after quitting his job as a divorce lawyer in Wisconsin to move to New York and pursue his dream of making a living from music. Marija had set me up on a double date, and I wasn’t thrilled about it.
Alex was pleasant enough, but dull, and he wore a purple shirt that might have suited another, taller, less plump man, but on him, tucked up as he was against one of the bar’s mauve suede sofas, just made me think of blueberry pie.
I left them all together on the couches, Marija with her long legs entwined like pipe cleaners round Baldo’s shorter pair and Alex glancing up at me wistfully on occasion, and took my drink out to the rooftop garden bar.
The cocktail was average, and the music wasn’t my style, but the view of Midtown was magnificent, the Empire State Building looming so close I felt as though I could almost reach out and touch it, leap onto the side and climb up into the sky like King Kong, or a modern-day Jack on his beanstalk.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said a voice to my left, with a Southern twang to it.
The voice belonged to a blond man in a navy pinstriped suit and a thin tie, with a short glass in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. He had pulled one of the tables up to the side of the bar and was standing up on it, leaning all of his weight against the railing and looking out into the night with the confidence of a person who believes either that he is impervious to the occasional freak accident that results in people plunging off the sides of verandas to their death, or that gravity didn’t apply to him.
‘Yes, it is,’ I replied, inhaling the slight waft of cigar smoke that surrounded him.
He jumped down from his vantage point with surprising grace and stood alongside me.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘New Zealand originally, London after that, Australia in between the two.’
‘You get around, huh?’
‘I guess you could say that.’
I watched his eyes flicker at my response, and I leaned a little closer to him, just in case the flirtation in my words wasn’t signal enough.
‘Can I get you another drink?’
I looked down at the remains of my sub-par mojito.
‘Maybe someplace else. Wanna get out of here?’
He didn’t need asking twice. Forty-five minutes later, we were back at his apartment on the Upper East Side, the sort of chic, minimally furnished place that I had thought Dominik might favour before I got to know him better and realised that wealth doesn’t necessarily equal sophistication, although I still wasn’t really sure whether Dominik had money or not. Maybe he’d spent his life savings on buying me the Bailly and lived the rest of his existence on the ordinary wage of a university professor.
The man whom I had pulled introduced himself as Derek, a native New Yorker with a job in insurance. I told him that my name was Helen and that I was a legal secretary. Experience had taught me that most men respond well to secretaries and nurses, and it saved me worrying that they might track down my musical connections and turn up at a concert.
Derek really was called Derek, I noted, glancing at a pile of mail resting on his countertop.
His apartment screamed of money but smelled of recently fried salmon mixed with nicotine. I noticed that most of the windows didn’t open. He probably smoked indoors, to save himself the trouble of going out onto the balcony.
‘How do you like it?’ he asked.
At first, I thought he was offering me a drink, but then realised, as he had made no move to turn on a kettle or get any bottles out of the fridge, that he was referring to how I liked to have sex. The bluntness of the question caught me off guard.
‘Er . . .’
He moved forward and broke the ice with a kiss. He wasn’t at all a bad kisser, but I couldn’t banish the smell of his recent fish dinner.
I barely suppressed a wince as Derek probed my mouth with his tongue, using the sort of deeply exploratory manoeuvres that might be better placed further down.
These thoughts reminded me of Dominik, who did have quite a knack for it, and I wondered if his skill had been dormant since he left New York or if he was having a tête-à-tête of his own back in London. The thought of Dominik with another woman spurred me on. I pushed Derek out of the kitchen and into the living room, where the air was fresher.
‘Ooh,’ he said, ‘a woman who wants to take charge. I like that.’
This was not turning out at all how I hoped.
Derek cautiously slipped the spaghetti straps of my dress over my shoulders and ran his fingertips over my skin as if he were stroking a kitten. Every touch was soft, delicate. Probably the result of reading myriad books about how women prefer liberal doses of foreplay before sex, ideally dipped in chocolate and followed by a warm bath, the sort of nonsense perpetuated in media of all sorts, as ridiculous as assuming that all men want porn, blowjobs and a hot dinner.
I had hoped that Derek might rip the dress off me, push me up against the glass and take me from behind, in Hollywood-movie billionaire style, but the reality was far less exciting. After some wrestling, I managed to unbuckle his belt and his trousers pooled round his ankles inelegantly. I should have taken his shoes off first, as his legs were now locked together, rendering him virtually immobile from the knees down.
We shuffled backwards into his bedroom, and he eased me tenderly down onto the bed and kissed his way softly from my neck down to my navel, looking up and grinning before he buried his head between my legs, oral sex likely his party piece, the trick that he saved for women he wanted to impress. He was eager but gentle. I tried to muster a vision of Dominik in my mind engaged in the same act, but along with his tongue, he’d have four fingers inside me exploring roughly, occasionally probing my sphincter and promising in an ironically polite tone that soon his cock would follow. Dominik and I hadn’t yet had anal sex, and I wondered why he didn’t just do it, not that I was averse to the anticipation. He seemed to think that it was one of the kinkiest items on the bedroom menu, whereas I thought of anal sex as the type of thing to save for a second date. I took his view on the subject to be sweetly old-fashioned and was looking forward to the moment when he decided the time was right.
