Dead Sexy

by Linda Jaivin

  Nicola didn’t want to waste either time or resolve. First thing Monday, she phoned Johnny at his office and asked him to meet her at lunchtime at a cafe not far from either of their workplaces. Being in the centre of town, it was more of a coffee shop than a cafe, but Nicola was glad of the lack of a more intimate atmosphere.

  ‘We’re going to be married,’ she informed him, her voice resolute.

  ‘Why?’ Johnny asked. He poured one spoonful of sugar after another into his espresso.

  Nicola rolled her eyes. ‘Because we love each other?’

  ‘George Bernard Shaw said that it is most unwise for people in love to marry. Besides, I note a querulous inflection in your voice. Maybe you’re not so sure as you think you are.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Our species wasn’t designed for monogamy. Men, as is well documented, have a natural hankering to spread their seed around. Interestingly, I believe I read under your very own byline that women have a similar, built-in urge towards promiscuity, something about selecting the best sperm. It’s only after conception that your sort opts for fidelity, which, in biological terms, is purely for the sprog’s benefit.’

  ‘You’re infuriating.’ He was also right. Nicola had researched the article while trying to cope with her fantasies about Johnny, seeking some sort of justification for her wayward impulses.

  He shrugged and then looked at her from under his eyelashes. ‘Hey, Nic,’ he purred. ‘What do you say we go back to my place and you exorcise all those harmful, pent-up feelings of hostility you seem to have for me by slipping into your stilettos and pissing on me in the bath?’

  ‘Yuk.’ Nicola started to laugh but caught herself. ‘Johnny. Read my lips. I. Am. In. A. Serious. Relationship.’

  ‘Nic, you know that old bra ad? “Lift and separate”? Well, that’s what you’ve gotta learn to do with sex and relationships. Lift’—he gestured as if raising imaginary breasts towards his chin—‘and separate.’ He pulled them out to the sides. ‘Hey, Nic.’ He winked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you’re wearing entirely too many clothes.’

  Nicola bit her bottom lip and sighed. ‘Give me your hands, Johnny.’

  He held them out, wearing his best bad-boy grin.

  ‘Huh,’ she commented, turning them over and examining them.

  ‘What is it, my little palm reader?’

  ‘You do have opposable thumbs, after all.’

  ‘Of course I have opposable thumbs. What are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s just that you seem to have such difficulty grasping anything I’m saying.’

  ‘Perhaps I overestimated your adventurousness,’ Johnny replied petulantly, pulling his hands out of her grip and lighting a cigarette. ‘Maybe you should just stay with your fireman.’

  ‘Maybe I should. Maybe I never should have done otherwise. He’s a real man, Johnny, and the measure of a real man, I can tell you now, is not just defined by the dimensions of his penis.’ She’d written that line recently in an answer to one of her readers’ letters. She was quite proud of it. ‘But Johnny. Two things. You’re taking back these shoes. And you’re giving me back my scarf.’

  ‘Yes, mistress.’ The mischievous gleam had returned to his eyes.

  ‘Johnny.’

  ‘Sorry. But you’re very sexy when you order me around. You should do it more often.’

  Nicola shook her head, yet she couldn’t stop the corners of her lips from curling into a smile. ‘So where’s the scarf?’

  ‘Up in Bent Towers. I have to meet someone after work, but I’ll be free by nine. I’ll meet you at the bar and we can have a drink, then we’ll go and fetch it together and I’ll give you a tour while we’re at it. At least you can see what I do before you drop me out of your life forever.’

  ‘All right.’

  It only occurred to Johnny then that he’d already arranged a rendezvous a little later with Liz. He’d have to call her and cancel.

  For Damien Mann, the night had started with several lines of Bolivian marching powder and then cocktails with Johnny at that flash bar he liked, the one full of posh chicks in Prada. They watched the ferries plugging in and out of Circular Quay as the setting sun scattered gold over the harbour.

  ‘We should probably hoof it,’ Mann said, looking at his watch, ‘if you’re going to set me up in the security roomage and get back here in time to meet your shookie.’

  ‘Shookie?’

  ‘Slut. It’s slangage.’

  Johnny shook his head in wonder. ‘Where do you pick this stuff up?’

  ‘Cleo. “Shookie” was in a report on, get this, the teen sex gangs of New York.’

  ‘Hold on. You’re saying you read women’s magazines?’

  ‘Mate. They’re better ‘n porn. It’s like peeping into the dressing-room in one of them posh bootiques and listening in on the conversationage. Lotsa young chicks in their undies too. Speaking a shookies.’

  Johnny winced. ‘Look, Nicola isn’t…’ He took a breath and began again. ‘I was thinking that we might kill the cameras tonight. I’m feeling…’ Johnny toyed with the idea of confiding in Mann. ‘I’m actually not feeling too good about it.’

  ‘I am,’ Mann shot back. ‘I’m feeling real good. In fact, I’m getting hard just thinking about all that boofage. You ain’t getting all wussy on me, are ya? Jeez. I thought ya had more ticker than that, Wright.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Johnny rejoined defensively.

  ‘I bet,’ Da Mann drawled, as though it had just occurred to him, ‘those sheilas at Cleo would be real interested in the Johnny and Nicola bondage video. Bachelor of the Year gets down and dirty.’ Mann snickered. ‘Even if they never wrote a word about it, it’d circulate faster than smack up a junkie’s veins.’

  Johnny’s face darkened. He said nothing for a long moment, then he drained his glass. ‘All right, Dazza,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s go while you can still walk.’

  When Nicola arrived at the bar, Johnny wasn’t there. She looked around uncertainly, and started to walk out when he came racing down the quay. He greeted her with an ardent embrace and eyes so bedroom they might have been furnished on the sixth floor of Grace Brothers.

  ‘Stop it,’ she whispered, embarrassed.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. I told you before. It’s over.’

  ‘What’s over?’

  ‘You know very well what I’m talking about.’

  ‘You break my heart, Nicola.’

  ‘Didn’t know you had one.’

  Johnny’s face fell like a soufflé after an oven door had slammed. ‘Nicola,’ he pleaded, ‘please don’t torture me.’

  She’d never heard him sound so hurt. ‘Are you…are you OK?’ she asked, softening. Chastened, she strolled with him up the hill from the bar to the soaring, still empty edifice halfway down Bent Street. The first corporate clients and millionaire residents would be moving in the following week; as of now it was but a sparkling shell. When he pushed on the revolving door and beckoned for her to go first, it struck her as odd that the building was unlocked, but she was too preoccupied to dwell on this anomaly.

  Johnny pulled her by the hand into the lift. Inside, he backed her against the mirrored wall and, after declaring, ‘I need you, Nicola,’ began to rub his body against hers with such intensity Nicola felt like she was being exfoliated.

  ‘I told you, no!’ she protested as they soared towards the twenty-sixth floor. With a grunt, she pushed him off her just as the doors opened. He held out his hand but she kept her distance. They stood staring at each other in the dimly lit corridor.

  ‘Nicola,’ Johnny said in a quiet voice. ‘What if I told you that you remind me of the only woman I’ve ever loved?’

  ‘Johnny!’ For a moment Nicola believed him. Then she shook her head. ‘Give me some credit. That line’s as old as flares.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘What if I told you t
hat you remind me of the fact that I am engaged? You know, as in engaged to be married?’

  ‘Nicola. Marriage is for life, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nicola’s voice quavered. ‘That’s the theory.’

  Johnny dropped to his knees. Men seemed to be making this a habit around her, she thought. ‘Fox gets you for life. All I want is one night.’ He took her hands in his and gently pulled her down towards him. ‘Please?’

  Even as she thrust her tongue between his lips, Nicola was well aware that the only thing that ought to be coming out of hers was the word ‘No’. Lip had recently run an article called ‘Smartypants!’ that claimed a sign of intelligence was to be able to hold two contradictory notions in one’s head at the same time. Nicola consoled herself with the thought that she had to be a bloody genius.

  ‘Come into my board-oir,’ he said, leading her into a large room dominated by a heavy wooden conference table. Producing candles and candleholders from his briefcase, he lit them and placed them around the room. As he did this, Nicola undressed, her sense of her own suitability for marriage dropping off a little with each additional item of clothing. ‘This is the absolute last time, Johnny,’ she said as her knickers hit the carpet.

  ‘Don’t lose the shoes,’ he replied.

  Johnny folded each item of his own clothing, placing them in a neat stack on the table. He then lay down on his back on the floor and held out his hands to her.

  Liz had gone from work straight to the gym for her boxercise class. She loved her gym. It was full of the most buff and delightful gay boys. As she’d once written, ‘Forget Diamonds! Gay Men Are a Woman’s Real Best Friend!’ And the nice couple who managed the place, Micky and Mikey, had even forgiven her for the time she accidentally hurled a dumbbell through the gym’s plate-glass window, though the guy whose car it landed on proved less accommodating.

  As she towel-dried her hair in the gym’s changeroom, she noticed a sign on the mirror: ‘Look after your valuables!’ Liz contemplated the message. What exactly were her valuables? Her job, of course, and her friends—including Nicola—were high on the list. Where did Johnny fit in? She’d been dating him for nearly two months now, ever since that wild night following the office party in December. Yet he remained irritatingly cagey about commitment. He even made her swear that she wouldn’t tell anyone she was seeing him. She’d only broken her promise once, that day when she told Nicola what a ‘tiger’ he was. He told her if she couldn’t be discreet, he couldn’t be with her. ‘What’s the big deal?’ she’d asked.

  ‘No big deal, doll,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s just that I’m too well known in this town. I cherish my privacy. You wouldn’t like it if our photos were splattered all over magazines like your own, would you?’

  Liz would have liked that quite a lot, but she held her tongue. Johnny’s concerns for his privacy, she figured, were fair enough. Still, she reflected, as she smoothed away the clumps of foundation from the corners of her nostrils, half the fun of a relationship was talking to your girlfriends about it. What great conversations she could have been having with Nicola!

  Liz realised she’d been daydreaming when she noticed that she was rouging her cheeks with lip gloss. Looking up at the clock on the wall, she cried, ‘Shit!’ threw on the rest of her clothes and stuffed her towel and exercise gear into her gym bag. She was going to be late for her date with Johnny if she didn’t hurry.

  Barging into her flat, she chucked her gym bag in one corner and hoed straightaway into her takeaway burger and chips (‘Bad Fat! But Do You Really Care?’) without even sitting down. The light on her answering machine was blinking. It was probably her mother. She couldn’t handle another conversation about when she was going to find a nice man and settle down. Wiping the tomato sauce off her chin with the back of her hand, Liz burped, patted her tummy and flung open her wardrobe. After three changes of frock, a quick brush of teeth and re-application of lippy, she was out the door and on her way to Bent Towers.

  Da Mann leaned back in the brown swivel chair. He found Nicola most entertaining with her Apache dance of protest and surrender. He pondered Johnny’s strange behaviour earlier in the evening. What the fuck was all that procrastinage about? Johnny had never lost his nerve in all the time Da Mann had known him, ever since they’d met at the semi-covert X parties held every month or so at that warehouse. They’d struck up a perfect partnership based on the compatibility of the exhibitionist and the voyeur.

  But what was going on now? He peered curiously at the grainy image on Monitor 13. Kinkage!

  If she was perfectly happy to ‘Be a Porn Star in Bed!’, Nicola was nonetheless shocked by Johnny’s next request. This potentially lethal sexual practice had enjoyed some notoriety a few years earlier in connection with the death of a famous rock star. Conservative politicians were also notoriously fond of it. None of Anabelle’s readers ever asked her about it, perhaps because it was primarily a male fetish, and Nicola, who was having enough trouble keeping on top of latex fashion and menstruation etiquette, had only the vaguest notion of what it involved. What it involved, in this case, was her scarf.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘It’s perverse.’

  ‘You making value judgments, Nic? Would it make you happier to know it’s considered perfectly normal among certain Oriental and South American native cultures, as well as the Celts? It’s got literary cred too. It appears in the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Melville’s Billy Budd among other classics.’

  Nicola pondered this information. ‘Don’t people die from it all the time?’

  ‘No one’s going to die tonight. Please?’

  Nicola, following Johnny’s instructions, and despite a growing sense of foreboding, pulled her own scarf and a pair of polished steel handcuffs from his briefcase. They were solid. She felt how heavy they were in her hands as she knelt down by Johnny’s side.

  Johnny reached up and cupped her breasts in his hands, squeezing her nipples and then running one hand down over her tummy to the curly tuft of hair on her mons. He rotated his hand till it was palm up, and insinuated one finger between her legs. He smiled as he slowly withdrew his finger, brought it to his lips and sucked on it. ‘See, Nic, you’re enjoying yourself.’ He rolled onto his side, facing away from the table. With both hands behind his back, he gripped a table leg.

  Breathing unevenly, Nicola closed the steel rings around his wrists, locking his hands behind the heavy table leg.

  ‘Scarf.’

  She tied one end of her scarf around his neck. He was already so hard that she could see the veins throbbing in his cock.

  ‘OK, baby, pull the scarf tight, but not too tight. Make my eyes bulge.’

  ‘Yuk,’ she blurted. She scrambled to her feet and looked down at him.

  From where she stood, naked, in her high heels, with her hands on her hips and a grimace on her face, Johnny B. Wright suddenly looked less sex god than sadster. Nicola felt like Dorothy on discovering that the Wizard of Oz was just a pathetic little man whose magic boiled down to a few mechanical bells and whistles. She wanted to tap the heels of her ruby slippers together three times and go back to Kansas or, more accurately, Potts Point and her faithful fireman.

  There was something else, too, a realisation that made Nicola’s brain light up like a roomful of makeup mirrors: she was not Anabelle. Or rather, she may have been all of Anabelle, but Anabelle was not all of Nicola. Anabelle may have come up with the equivalence ‘Xtreme Sex—Xtremely Sexy!’ and given some thought to ‘When It’s Neat to Cheat!’ But Nicola, while not denying that Johnny had revealed aspects of her own sexuality she’d never known and which deeply thrilled her, wanted, at this moment, nothing more than to be with her Foxy. It didn’t matter that Fox was a bit slow on the sexual take. They were going to be together a long, long time—long enough that one day she could hope he might even let her stick her finger up his arse.

  Nicola took the other end of the scarf and walked over to the inward-opening door of the boardroom. T
he scarf was just long enough that she could secure it on the designer handle and, with the other door open, still leave a fair bit of slack.

  ‘There you go, Johnny. Please yourself.’

  ‘Nicola. You’re my fantasy, girl. You know, I…I love you.’

  ‘Puh-lease. Spare me.’ Nicola shook her head as she put her clothes back on. ‘Catch you in another life.’

  Johnny, speechless, tilted his head back as far as it would go and watched her sashay out to the lift.

  Mann watched as Nicola descended in Lift One while Liz ascended in Lift Two. The lifts passed around Floor 12. Liz bared her teeth at the mirror, behind which the camera was concealed. Mann jumped. For one disconcerting moment he thought she was leering at him. Then she raised an index finger and rubbed some lipstick off her front teeth.

  Mann was sure Johnny hadn’t mentioned anything about Liz being on for tonight. What a stud.

  Nicola crossed the lobby and exited the building, her heels tattooing across the slate floor. But when she got outside, she seemed to deflate. She leaned against the front of the building, arms crossed, wrapped in her thoughts.

  When he was sure that Nicola couldn’t see him, Fox, who’d been standing in the shadows across the street, strode off towards Macquarie Street.

  Fox had seen all he needed to see. The most important detail was Liz’s arrival at the building. Fox thought of himself as a blokey sort of bloke. He didn’t claim to know much about women. But one thing he did know was that if Nicola and Liz found out that Johnny B. Wright was shagging both of them, he’d be dead meat. Johnny B. Wright didn’t have a hope in hell.

  With a grim but satisfied smile on his face, Fox hurried across the Domain and home to wait for Nicola’s return.

  Nicola started for home soon afterwards as well. She wasn’t, however, keen to walk across the Domain at this hour on her own. After a fruitless wait for taxis on Bent Street, she strode in the direction of the Quay. The one cab that pulled up was hijacked by a group of people who’d strolled over from the Basement, drunkenly bellowing the chorus of an Ed Kuepper song. Fuck it, Nicola thought. I’m going back, I’m getting my scarf and I’ll use Johnny’s mobile to call a cab.