My heart was a little boat that had broken its moorings. My breath was trapped in my throat. I rolled to one side and slid across his body. I took his cock back into my mouth, completing the circle, his tongue pushing back into my vagina, my tongue wrapped about his shaft. We rocked to and fro like sunflowers in a field, deeper and deeper while the tree branch tapped like a metronome against the windowpane and we found perfect harmony.
My pussy continued to leak nectar into his mouth. Our bodies were slippery with perspiration. I could have remained in that position for the rest of my life, but the tempo changed, his body tensed and my throat filled with warm sperm that tasted like coconut milk. I gobbled it down, greedy for more. He kept pushing into me, I kept drawing at his cock and, as the last drips drained into my mouth, I grew rigid. I released his cock and gasped as his meaty tongue ignited an orgasm that made me scream. I cried out as if in pain but the pain was an intense, all-consuming pleasure.
My body was trembling as if in fever. I rolled to one side, arms wrapped around his legs, our bodies drenched, throbbing, electric. I was dizzy. He pulled me up and pushed his cock back inside me as if it were a jewel being placed back in a velvet box. We rocked gently like waves on an outgoing tide and, on that tide, the ship would soon be sailing.
We slept for an hour. We made love again and he slept again, staying hard inside me while I lay awake enjoying the feel of his weight pinning me down. Sometimes you have to picture what you wish for. I had pictured the stranger and willed him into being.
I must have drifted into sleep. I remember my eyes blinking open, a smile on my lips. There was dull light around the unclosed blinds. Morning had come. It was the first day of a New Year – a new beginning. He was dressing. He leaned over, kissed my forehead, and I watched as he left my bedroom. I heard the click of the front door. Then there was silence.
2
What Girls Really Think
Three times a week I go to the gym. I swim whenever I can and fast walk around the park listening to Bach. Coupled with flamenco, or rather cante hondo, which I also love, Bach inspired the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca when he was writing Blood Wedding, his most poetic and best-loved stage play.
Cyril Connolly, a biographer of George Orwell, said whenever you start writing a book you must set out to write a masterpiece. This counsel, both wise and haunting, is written out on a strip of card pinned to my cork board. There was a time when I read a lot of erotic writers, but not anymore. I don't want to be 'tainted' by styles other than my own and feel certain that you only find success writing when you are 100% you, original, identifiable, unique, on the edge of the crowd.
Writers I admire include Milan Kundera, Nikos Kuzanzakis, Camus, of course, Bret Easton Ellis, early Martin Amis, Stieg Larsson and Emily Brontë, who first caught my attention when I discovered the umlaut over the ë and fell in love at thirteen with Heathcliff, the archetypal romantic hero, beast and schoolgirl fantasy.
If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.
Thus spake Miss Brontë and I underscored those words in pencil.
At school, my skill at hockey and tennis was based on pace and anxiety more than talent. Reading was an escape; sex sublimation for girls trapped behind the walls of a convent clinging to the wuthering heights of the cliffs around the Kent coast. Writing I abhorred because it was formalised, regulated, imprisoned.
I was introduced at university to Anaïs Nin by Oliver Masters, my tutor, a lanky Heathcliff character who seduced my mind and encouraged me to write and submit a short story to an erotic magazine edited by a beautiful woman who had once been his student. All life is incestuous. The story was published. I was thrilled, terrified and at the beginning of a journey that has no end and no precise direction.
'Why erotica?' my friends ask; my mother, too.
And I tell them: erotica is an untapped well of human mystery and potential, the seam of gold hidden below the fault lines of a culture that imposes limitations on our true nature. If erotic writing is to be regarded as literature, the taste and cadence of the words must embrace the senses, ignite the passions. The emotion is integral to the story. Readers must be stripped naked and led to a warm bath perfumed by sex. They must feel as they dress the softness of silk and the chafe of leather. Each description is a portrait so fresh and vivid they can hear the adagio slap of flesh against flesh, the rattle of chains, the snap of the whip, the sound of one hand clapping against willing buttocks. Readers should be inspired to seek in their lovers new erogenous places, the enchantment of role play, masks, ball-gags and bonds. In the heat of the night, when you allow the brain to rest, the body lives a life of its own.
'Let go,' I tell my friends. 'Just let go.'
Erotica holds up the mirror to a society where those things damned and outlawed are secretly desired. The erotic explores human extremes, lost love, impossible love, innocence and purity mingled with decadence and debauchery. All human fears and hungers become clearer analysed under the microscope of erotica. As I keep telling Mother, erotica is about feeling, not fucking.
My head throbs. I swallow two Nurofen Plus with my Starbucks House Blend and stare across the rooftops at the fey grey watery sky. The night is still with me. I am wearing big comfy socks, a long tee-shirt, no knickers and a woolly cardigan with sleeves that swamp my hands. My finger hurts. My body is sticky and smells of the stranger. I don't want to wash away the smell. Not yet. My laptop is open but I can't focus on the little black words on the screen.
Daddy is home from his job in the Far East 'lying for England,' as Mother tells her friends. They are snug in their Chelsea terrace and will go out this New Year's Day to have lunch at the Hurlingham Club. Perhaps I'll go, too. I haven't seen much of my father this holiday. I miss him when he's not there and rarely see him when he is. 'Daddy's little viper,' Mother said once, and I've never forgotten it.
I place my coffee cup beside the man standing under the Victorian lamppost and leaned over the laptop. I start typing out my thoughts on erotica for some future blog and my fingers freeze, all nine fractured like the tenth as if in solidarity. I hear the classic ring of my iPhone, but when I reach for the machine, it remains silent while the ringing continues.
Is this an Apple trick? Is my whisky-addled brain playing games with me? Is the codeine in the Nurofen finally working? I shook the thing. Nothing.
The time reads 11:47 and the weather app highlights a depressing minus two degrees, cloud and snow.
I call a friend to make sure the phone was working.
She answers immediately.
'Hi, Minnie, Happy New Year.'
'I don't like being Minnie any more. Anyway, I'm fat,' I said.
'I can't bear it when thin people say they're fat, it makes normal people feel obese.'
'I'm in love, Lizzie.'
'You've always been in love. With yourself.'
'I want to be coddled, not...not castigated.'
'I love that word. Who with?' she asked.
'I don't know.'
'Typical.'
I sniffed. 'I've got a headache as well.'
'Don't we all, dear. You're so spoiled.'
'No I'm not. You're not being very nice today.'
'Ah, poor Skinny Minnie, tell me everything.'
Lizzie is an old friend, someone I trust, a good ear to hear my New Year's Eve tale of love and woe. I told her everything.
'Then,' I said and sighed, 'he kissed me on the forehead and just left...'
'That's a good sign.'
'You think so?'
'It's a lovely story, really romantic. I'm going to write it down...'
'You'd better not.'
'I'm going to call it The Little Red Kilt and publish it with that picture of you in a mask, you know the one...'
'Elizabeth Elmwood, I'll murder you if you do.'
'According to Georges Bataille, even murder
can be erotic.'
'I'm fed up with him, he ruined my life.'
'How's the writing going?'
'Slowly. You?'
'I am totally inspired by your story, in fact, I might turn you into a series.'
'I'm never going to tell you any of my secrets again,' I said and she laughed.
'And who else is going to listen?'
Again, I heard the ringing phone. I shook my machine.
'Can you hear that?'
'What?'
'Lizzie, gotta go.'
The sound was coming from the bedroom. I raced in, but the moment I crossed the threshold the ringing stopped. I searched through the bedclothes, under the pillows, under the bed.
There: an iPhone in a sensible black case.
So, the stranger had left behind something other than his smell on my skin, the stains on my bed sheets. I searched through the phone's settings and found his name. I looked at messages, search history, notes. I was tempted to check 'recents' and call back, but stopped myself.
I made fresh coffee. My headache was tapping away like an unlatched door in a far off room. A slice of light crossed my desk and I could see a helicopter, a giant insect against the sky, the roar making the windowpanes rattle.
Since giving Julian Rhodes the 'I don't think we should see each other for a while…' speech, I'd been boyfriendless, and that's not a wise place to be. Far better to be with a man you don't like, than to be setting off on New Year's Eve with another girl. Being single is an admission of failure, a lack of something. Was I too fussy, too demanding, too spoiled, as Lizzie always says?
No, I don't think so.
Most of the men I meet are more concerned with the picture than the meaning of the picture. They see the world as if from inside a camera obscura, a darkened box with a single hole letting in the light. They shoot snapshots that lack depth of field and capture a realism devoid of the surreal or sublime. They have an idealised view of glamour and beauty based on the air-brushed perfections of Marie-Claire and Vogue.
All girls compare themselves with every other girl. It is our nature; our tragedy. I can, with little effort, appear highbrow, with my hair in a pleat, demure at the country club in Barbour and tweed, a louche tart, who looks as if she has just thrown on her clothes and can't wait to tear them off again. The closet holds a cast of characters we explore every time we go out and sometimes it feels right to get it wrong, a subconscious signal that something else is wrong.
'You just don't bother do you?' as Julian remarked that night after he'd appeared in a fringe play at the King's Head and come off stage high on adrenaline to find me in jeans, All-Stars and a blue cagoule. It was the production's closing show. We went to The Ivy for dinner, a table booked, the girls in the gang dressed like butterflies. I was dressed like me.
Julian, when we got home, stripped off my jacket and jeans like wallpaper from the wall. He wasn't reaching for the me inside my clothes, but the me he had created in his mind, the shop store mannequin that he banged away at like he's hammering a nail, releasing the adrenaline and replacing it with the frail hope that the pub play would lead to the West End, a TV part, his photograph in the Evening Standard arriving at a premiere.
It was all about his needs. Men have so many. What he saw in me, was the girl behind him, in that photograph, stepping out of the back of a cab in a short skirt that showed her knickers. I was the accessory, the prize, the adjunct to his career. Julian always looked at me as if I were standing with my back to a mirror and what he saw was a reflection of himself. He had never bothered to read my books.
I finished my coffee and wandered through to the bathroom to comb the tangles from my hair. I could still smell him.
Tom, Tom, the Piper's son stole my heart and away did run.
I liked the stranger and liked him just as much now that he had a name. I liked the way he had danced at the ball, boldly, rhythmically, without showing off. I had felt a sudden rush of pleasure as we joined hands to sing in the New Year. 'Should auld acquaintance be forgot.' It is such wise counsel. When he said 'your place,' the way he had touched my elbow was with the confidence that anticipated my saying yes. A pact had been made by our bodies and we acted quickly enough not to allow our brains to step in and ruin everything.
Fireworks exploded in the sky as the taxi curved along the Thames. His kiss was a rare bird – the first sip of champagne. I loved the way he moved my body this way and that way, shaping me, turning me like a tailor with a bolt of cloth, lifting me by the hips so I could take him into my mouth while he sipped from my cup. He manoeuvred me on to my hands and knees so he could enter me from behind, his fingers gripping the handles of my hip bones, my breasts swinging like church bells, like udders, the position animal, feminine, deeply sensual.
I closed my eyes. I pretended there was a film crew in the shadows and now, in my morning memory, I watched the video, backside wriggling, mouth gaping as I gasped for air. He had been too polite to pierce my bottom, although he did in my fantasy footage, his long tongue oiling that inscrutable passage with my own juices before he pushed up into my core. I quivered with pleasure as he pumped out great gushes of hot sperm that filled my belly with a deep and abiding satisfaction.
My mouth had gone dry. I was holding on to the side of the sink panting and a faint moistness seeped from my sex.
Was it more exciting making love with a stranger? Without names, with our heads in the early hours drumming with music and our veins hot with whisky, we were lost to our primitive senses. We made love through the night like sun worshippers struck by the mystery of an eclipse. He was a considerate lover, a patient lover. You get by giving, you take through sharing. Men often see sex as combat, a battle to be won; a race to the finishing tape where the prize is orgasm. Tom wasn't like that.
The phone rang. His phone. I had taken it with me into the bathroom and sat on the loo to take a pee as I answered.
'Hello, Tom.'
'You found my phone?'
'Did you leave it behind as a device?'
'Subconsciously, I'm sure,' he replied. 'So, what about lunch?'
I thought for a moment. 'Is this an invitation for lunch or a need to retrieve your mobile? I can send it in a taxi.'
'How do you know my name?'
'I know everything about you, Doctor Bridge. Why didn't you look at my finger?'
'Not my field, I'm afraid, and I wouldn't want to interfere.'
This man named Tom who worked in Sri Lanka and sent messages that were never frivolous knew me as intimately as a man can know a woman and yet now, in the daylight, across the invisible wires, he sounded shy, sweet, a nice man in a world where girls, some girls, me, always fall in love with bastards.
'Do you remember the address?' I asked.
'Indelibly.'
'One o'clock.'
'I'm always on time.'
'I'm always late.'
We disconnected. I put my fingers to my lips. I do declare: I was smiling. The pulse of my headache ran slower. I flushed the loo, grabbed my own phone and called my parents. In turn I wished them a Happy New Year. I couldn't make the Hurlingham, I explained. Something had come up.
'Something interesting?' Daddy asked.
'Potentially.'
'Good. You deserve it.'
'Do you think so?'
'Absolutely, Katie, absolutely. How's your new flat?'
'A bit squalid. I stole the rug from the attic, the one from Tibet.'
'You're welcome to it, you know that.'
'Thank you, Daddy. When are you going back?'
'In a week or so. Will I see you before then?'
'Absolutely,' I replied; he loved that word. He lived in a world without absolutes and sought them wherever he could find them.
After taking off my clothes in the bedroom, I ambled back to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. I leaned forward and shook my head. Misty green eyes above pale blue half-moons tender to the touch. Cheeks hollow. Nose winter red. I sniffed. Thr
ee glasses of champagne, a big glass of red wine, two shots. Never again, I whispered. Never. New Year. New Regime. A New Year's Resolution.
'Work harder, worry less, be nice to Mother.'
There, I'd said it.
I stood back and continued the examination. Shoulders? Wide, clavicles defined above wells deep enough to gather coins in exchange for wishes. Breasts? Small but perky, fans of the uplift bra. I squeezed my nipples and a tingle raced up my spine that pressed boldly through the soft skin. Likewise my ribs, the keys of a harpsichord that tinkled with Bach's Concerto No. 1 in D Minor. I quite liked my hips, the way they jut out, the faint bulge of my belly that I stroked, wondering what it would be like to be pregnant. Long legs good for running away and revealing in short skirts; long feet with toes unembellished with varnish, long hands with a damaged finger. My pubes were matted. I stroked the hair and sniffed my fingertips. I adored being a girl.
I spent ages under the scorching spikes of the shower, ridding myself of those lovely smells, turning myself back into a virgin. I then stood in the window willing unseen eyes to be looking back. I brushed my hair, a long dark drape, brittle as kindling, in spite of the orange blossom conditioner. I stroked my tattoo. It has no depth, no response to my touch. But it is there, like a shadow, a memory.
When I was in my first year at university, I went one break with a friend to a tattoo parlour in Wardour Street, where she had two black butterflies engraved on the soft skin just above her left hip.
'Why do you want them?' I asked her.
'I don't know; it's just a bit of fun.'
She shrugged and looked away. There is something sad about England on spring days with the rain beating against the window and the people in the street hurrying by with umbrellas turned inside out. Alice went with the tattooist into the clinic and I studied the display as the electric needle buzzed through the open door.
It had never occurred to me to mark my body, but I suddenly understood why a tattoo made people feel as if they belonged to something they would find hard to explain or identify, a tribe, a mindset, a new era in which social media and marketing has sucked the marrow from our individuality.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 2
