She lay sprawled, naked and shameless, on his bed while he smoked. She drank sharp red wine poured from a five-litre box.
He stroked her hair and whispered, ‘You’re incredible.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘If only you knew,’ she said, how boring and ordinary I really am. All the time they’d talked, she’d hidden the true tedium of her reality away, letting fragments and sketches fill in the seeming of a much more interesting glamorous life, of a more entrancing her. And now he’d fucked away all possibility of pretence.
A single splash glitters in the light, the water flung up by the force of her body, now unseen beneath the smooth rolls. For an invisible moment, everything hangs: the elongated, shattered sheets of water; the sparkle of light on the smooth tense surface; the living person one can only imagine beneath, suspended in liquid.
Even though it was lovely beneath, even though sand rose like gold dust around her feet and strange little caverns were formed between the rocks, she swam to the surface to breathe. The tide had filled the rock pool to capacity, and was now turning. No more waves disturbed its surface, and the rocks held their cup of water a little higher than sea level, at least for now. Little by little, it would leak away, but the moment of the water being washed back and forth was perfect. She floated, buoyed up by the salt of long-since evaporated water, watching the dreaming sky and listening to the sound of the waves rushing back and forth against the barrier of rocks. Shhh, shhh, whispered the ocean as it cradled her.
She lay on the rocks by the side, their shallow hollows making room for her, while the sun dried her. Her hand dangled down towards the still water below. One tiny fish hovered by a pebble. After observing closely for several minutes, she realised the slight blurs on its sides were fins, flicking too fast to be seen by a casual glance. A cool breeze rolled over her still-damp skin and she was glad to be out of the water, in the air of the beating sun again. I wonder if you get cold? she thought to the fish. Do you ever want to get out? … No, I suppose you couldn’t breathe then …
The fish darted, spinning itself around, and in an instant was standing guard on the other side of the pebble, fins still fluttering, as intent as ever. Nothing else moved. Now why did you do that? For a brief vertiginous moment she felt herself inside the fish’s mind, and reeled. She pulled away before she drowned in its aquatic thoughts and sat up, shading her eyes. There he came, walking down the thin yellow footpath which feet had barely eroded from the dry grass around it. From a distance, in shorts, a daypack slung over his bare chest, he wasn’t the fearful figure who had stripped her bare last night.
He jumped confidently from boulder to boulder, slowing where black and green patches betrayed slime, and sat next to her. She looked down, but his shadow had scared the fish away.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
They didn’t have a repertoire to fill the meeting-moment – How was your day? How did this or that go? – or an established habit that dictated a kiss. Instead, he unzipped the daypack and pulled out wine, two glasses she recognised from his room, wrapped in a little blanket, a packet of crackers and some supermarket tubs of hummus, sundried tomatoes, olives: no sandwiches for lovers, so perhaps there was a repertoire to draw on after all.
‘I thought you might be hungry,’ he said, almost apologising.
Then they looked at each other. The skin on his neck was still as burnt red, gold brown as it had been in the dim alcohol haze of the coffee shop late at night. His chest still looked as sweet to the taste, its small nipples crinkled into tiny pebbles.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he whispered breathily. He reached out one hand to touch her sea-dreadlocked hair where it curled in her neck. ‘I thought maybe you’d have run away before I got here.’
She shook her head, her throat shuttered with delight.
He leant forwards hesitantly. Despite everything they’d done the night before, he was unsure whether he had permission to kiss her. She met him halfway, their dry lips touching lightly, brushing back and forth. Their hearts and lungs stopped for that moment so they had to pull away just to breathe, just to let their blood continue flowing. He uncorked the wine and that was something to do, although eating was more awkward and embarrassing.
They lay on the blanket on the rock, side by side. In the swathes of goose-pimpled flesh around her bikini and his shorts, their skin touched warmly. Her head rested on the muscle where his arm met his chest. They had nothing to do but stare at the sky and exchange talk – not facts and personal details, but the flimsy soaring ideas that can pretend to be fully formed and so thrive and be born. He had become not just a stranger against whom she could reflect herself, but a person in contrast to whom she could explore herself. His hand ran lightly up and down her arm. The tide was receding, the rock pool sinking slowly, the tiny shadows of the granite lengthening. She told him about the fish, and he pulled her to him for a long slow kiss. He ran his hand up the ever-goldening side of her breast, brushing the sticky plastic tensile fabric of her bikini. Beneath it, her nipples rose. Just his hand, brushing back and forth over the mounded flesh, made her dream her way into the ocean and its everlasting textures of sand. Under the water, in the places where his exploratory hand took her, light was texture – the different depths of water, lit in pale grainy turquoise, aquamarine, cerulean and Prussian blue; the sandy floor rising in clouds and falling in drifts; the fragments of sparkling shell falling through the gloom …
She cried out as his fingers found her nipple. He was so slow and shy now.
‘Yes, please, yes,’ she whispered, as he peeled the bikini cup away and lowered his mouth.
He tasted sea salt and felt shell textures with his tongue. She moaned, feeling the flow of her body rise like the tide for him. Now he was a person – already known and barely grasped. Hands, behind which stood a fully fledged mind, a history, an identity and a myriad of thoughts, were sliding down her thighs while his mouth sucked at her. He found the curve of her waist, which made her stretch and elongate. He found the sensitive space just above her knee, inside her thigh, and moved to kiss it as her legs made way for him.
‘I think we should move,’ he said, raising his head from the honey of her flesh.
He guided her, over the boulders and shards of shattered rock, to the crescent of cove below and to the side. The sand was still damp from the receding water, and he spread the blanket out again. Now, they could see no paths or hillside or distant houses, just the overhang of cliff, the rock where they had been and the sea stretching out ahead of them.
He drew her bikini bottoms off slowly and bent his head again to that small patch of skin on the inside of her knee. His tongue brought alive skin she hadn’t noticed since she was sixteen. All she could say, again and again, to his touches, was ‘Yes’. His silky hair nudged her thighs apart as he kissed his way upwards. Her thighs were a country he mapped with traces of saliva, discovering that here, at this inch, she sank back into the pleasure, but there, just a quarter-inch further, she rose up and cried out softly. As patient as a teenager who doesn’t dare believe he’s allowed to do even as much as he’s doing, he licked upwards.
When a new, deft dart of his tongue set off springs in her back, and her body leapt involuntarily forwards in shudders of joy, she saw the horizon of sea and sky, the sun making low pathways of gold. He held her wide open and delved. She wept. She clutched his hair in her hands while shimmers of sun gold scattered through her. His tongue tip found her clitoris, at last, and began to circle it lovingly. Once upon a time, far far away, she’d found it difficult to come from this. Now, there was no difficulty, because there was no trying – only grainy sand, which yielded to her clutching fingers, a setting sun, which painted her secret bliss across the ocean, and his tongue, which seemed to have found out all her secrets. Her sudden wails bounced this way and that around the cavern and floated off, across the water. She was left, basking in the glow of joy, her pussy still tantalisingly responsive, him still kneeling between h
er legs.
‘Look!’ he whispered.
On the rock where they had started making love, a woman stood, her pale skin catching the light of the dying sun.
‘It’s my dress,’ she said with a giggle. It was identical – probably mass-produced in China, certainly distributed to and sold in branches all over England in tasteful displays of holiday fantasy, created for the illusion of places just like this. The same floating white hem skirted the woman’s ankles, fluttered by sea breezes. Her face was hidden by a floppy hat and sunglasses, although the sun was now just shards of red scattered on the horizon. After all, it’s the holiday look that counts. She was leaning far over the rock, as if peering at her own reflection in the water.
He turned to her again. He’d abandoned his shorts. Sometimes, when you’re not looking, not thinking, even men’s clothes melt away. His cock rose above her soft belly, firm and fresh and young. It said, let me bring you delight. So she reached her hand down and guided him slowly into the passages he’d made so wet and welcoming. As she helped him, her spine arched again, her legs lifted, spread further and wrapped around his hips to draw him closer. She felt him sliding in, no inch-by-inch forcing but a smooth, tight welcome. When he pressed his open mouth against hers, she met it gladly.
They rocked each other, in and out, back and forth, tender and ecstatic. She felt the whole column of him inside her, not just the jutting tip or grinding shaft, and made suckering starfish on his back with her hands. No postures, no angles, no posing, no impressing, no trying – just the rhythmic roll of unthinking perfect bliss inside each other. So he glided, she shuddered, it didn’t matter if he came, if she came, or when they did, only the clasping ecstasy was all. She came, repeatedly, finding towers of coral peaks in their underwater world of sex, no orgasm final, just a constant well of clenching and shuddering around his flowing cock. She was herself, then. When she screamed, loud and clear and untrammelled through the night, he lost all words and rushed into her, blissfully, and so neither saw the waters break open, or saw the splash frozen in its moonlight moment, or how the surface rocked and settled and wasn’t broken again, or knew what might have been. They lay in each other’s arms forever, that night.
Behind the Masque
Sophie Mouette
THIS WAS IT. Tonight. The biggest job of our short but so far quite illustrious career.
The Lucchese Star. Sixty carats of sapphire, as big as your fist. Makes your mouth water just looking at it. Makes you think of Caribbean seas, the summer you were ten, the eyes of the lover that got away.
Inside my turquoise doeskin gloves, my palms itched. They didn’t sweat, not a drop; I wasn’t nervous. It was all about the anticipation, baby. The lead-up. The foreplay.
George and I made a good team. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was the brawn and I was the brain, but it shook down kind of like that. He had the most amazing hands – steady, delicate. He knew exactly how, when and where to touch, to coax out the exact response he wanted. No safe, no security system, no alarm could resist his ministrations. Powerless beneath his touch.
Kind of like a woman.
Oh, yes, George could use those hands to work magic on me. Bring me to helpless, shuddering orgasms long into the night.
Problem was, when we were getting ready for a job, George eschewed sex. Distracted him, he said. Put him off his game. He needed to be focused.
Which left me more than a little on edge, if you know what I mean.
My outfit tonight didn’t help that one bit. The custom-made corset fitted me like a lover’s hands, moulding against my waist, urging my breasts up to pillow enticingly. My hard nipples rubbed against my fine silk underdress just at the line of my corset. Teasing. Taunting.
George might have been the one to cajole the secrets from a coded alarm system, but I was the one who got us in place. He always said I could talk my way into, or out of, anything.
I glanced down at my enticingly displayed décolletage. I could talk the talk, but the girls helped, too.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been pulled over for speeding, only to drive away without a ticket. I can convince the proprietor of a swanky shop that I really did buy this item, but I lost the receipt, and I honestly do deserve a refund. I can charm the fur off a mountain lion, as they say.
Getting George and me invitations to this very swanky, very private reception at The Venetian was child’s play.
Ah, The Venetian. An only-in-America fusion of Italian Renaissance decadent beauty, glittering luxury skyscraper and the edgy 24-hour liveliness for which Las Vegas was famous. A huge casino, an in-house wax museum and gondola rides along a faux canal. Talk about gaudy.
But tonight the gaudy was the sort a Venetian doge in his ornate ceremonial robes would have approved. The Venetian also housed the Vegas branch of the world-renowned Guggenheim Museum. Tonight, it played host to a grand Carnivale-themed charity ball, celebrating the opening of its latest exhibit ‘Jewels of Venice’. Museum supporters, art lovers and high-society types were crowded into the hotel’s largest ballroom, all dressed in top designers’ quirky takes on Renaissance dress or some equally elaborate and fanciful get-up.
And masks.
Which would make our job – absconding with the Lucchese Star – that much easier.
Faking IDs is so much easier when you don’t have to show your whole face. Masks weren’t just requested, they were required for this soirée. My own was a confection of peacock feathers and pearls, made to match the dress I’d commissioned. Because I had to look the part of the filthy rich patron.
To go along with the masquerade, attendees were asked to pick personas to further ‘disguise’ themselves. We were announced as Count Giovanni Belli and his wife Francesca, and we swept in as if we owned the place. Give yourself a suitably impressive title and the bearing and outfits to go with it, and people will assume you should be on the guest list.
The ballroom looked like it belonged in another century, or possibly in another world. Women in boned and beaded gowns; men in velvet doublets and tights. People dressed as satyrs, nymphs, gods and goddesses, and other fantastic creatures as depicted in Renaissance art. People in ordinary evening dress (all right, Vogue’s very expensive idea of ordinary) but still sporting elaborate masks.
A silver-haired woman, tall and elegant in silver-embroidered black velvet with a severe silver mask blanking out her face, led an amazingly costumed anthropomorphic leopard on a leash. A couple I’d swear were Brad and Angelina, dressed like Bacchus and Artemis, chatted with a Renaissance lady whose emerald necklace made my fingers itch, even with the Lucchese Star almost in my grasp.
So close. So fucking close.
We’d timed our arrival for half an hour before the viewing, giving us time to mingle and become anonymous, part of the greater crowd. Afterwards, nobody would remember us; we hadn’t stood out, looked or sounded different than anyone else there.
The whole purpose of this bash was to celebrate The Venetian Guggenheim’s borrowing of the Lucchese Star from the Guggenheim in Venice. (Yeah. Don’t think about that too hard.) Everyone here (well, everyone except us, obviously) had donated scads of money to help with the acquisition. As such, tonight we’d get to view it first, before it was put into the museum proper.
They announced the viewing and we filled our champagne glasses in anticipation. The door (looked like wood, but was lined with steel) opened, and we surged forwards. In a polite, societally appropriate kind of way, of course.
I didn’t have to restrain my reaction, because everyone gasped and murmured at the sight of the Star. I kept just enough attention on myself (making unremarkable comments to those around me) so that no one would notice that George was stealing glances at the Star’s prison of a display case, assessing whether the way it was set up deviated from our research.
All too soon, we were ushered back into the main ballroom. I spared a wistful glance over my shoulder.
Soon. Soon, baby.
&
nbsp; I set down my untouched champagne (no mind-altering substances until after we were safely away) and nibbled a tidbit that involved beluga caviar, eyeing one that seemed to combine lobster and Kobe beef carpaccio. Definite perks to this gig.
George seemed cool and collected behind his full-face Harlequin mask, diamonded in rich tones of copper, gold and an emerald green which brought out the colour of his eyes. Typical. He contained all that sexual energy, internalised it, transformed it into single-minded intent.
Whereas my job was to exude as much sex appeal as humanly possible.
Just before we’d headed to the party, George had sent off the coding that would send dummy images (the ones I’d sweet-talked out of a museum staffer for a magazine article I said I was writing) to the security cameras and disable a few critical systems, just long enough for him to swipe the Star.
My job now was to distract the guard. I admired my abundant cleavage again, stroking the creamy flesh with a fingertip. I shouldn’t have a problem with strategic flirting. Unless the male security guard I was expecting had traded shifts with the happily married female ex-Marine. In that case, I’d be faking a seizure and hoping for the best.
I flipped open the pocket watch cunningly disguised as a pendant. It was time.
I touched George on the arm, whispered in his ear as if I were about to head to the ladies’ room.
Then I walked right past the ladies’ room, headed down the service stairs to the casino level, and up another set that led up to the far side of the ballroom, into a deserted, blocked-off hallway.
The service entrance to the anteroom where the Lucchese Star was displayed was down that hallway.
A security guard was stationed at the hallway entrance. I made no move to evade him. Instead, I approached him, one hand extended, the other gracefully over my heart, calling attention to my cleavage.
Sex with Strangers Page 8
