Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  He strums her clit, making her legs shake with intense pleasure.

  “Statistics. Height?”

  “Six foot, five inches.”

  “Bust?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “What cup? What cup!?”

  “D cup.”

  “Waist?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She is close to coming. The innocent in her cannot believe that a man would know how to pleasure a woman with his hands.

  She feels as if she is completely under his power, his relent-less fingers, the strength in his broad muscular shoulders, the black hair curling around his nipples.

  She leans forward and tastes him, licking the skin of his chest. He smells delicious, feral, musky. The rogue male.

  “Waist approximately?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “Hips?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Shoe size?”

  “You know it.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  He removes his hand and pushes his cock into her, filling her. He is a perfect fit. Skin on skin. A hot ember that spreads up through her freezing limbs.

  “Say it!”

  “Size twelve.”

  He groans and thrusts vigorously into her, then pulls back, hovering tantalizingly close to her outer lips, teasing her, before plunging in again. And out. And in, again and again. She wants him deeper. She wants to swallow him up. He pauses for a moment and throws his legs over hers so that he is actually sitting on her. The end of his shaft, now bent, rubs hard against her clitoris. She moans. He buries his hand into her hair, and pulls her head away from him, wanting to watch her come.

  “Does that feel good? Does it?”

  “Yes.”

  She drops her legs so that he is clamped between her thighs. He fastens his mouth to her breast and bites sharply. The pain intermingles with the intense pleasure of him moving hard inside her. The faint echo of some Negro spiritual resounds in her head. She thinks she is experiencing a spiritual revelation.

  “How good? Say it.”

  “Good.”

  “Just good?”

  “Ahh…ahh!” She screams as her first orgasm ripples through her and the Negro spiritual breaks into a chorus of demented angels, all of them under five foot three.

  Somewhere in the vague distance she can feel herself contracting, the echo of her cry still bouncing off the walls of the huge meat freezer.

  He smiles, still hard, still wanting more.

  “What are your feelings on tripe?”

  Before Jock’s next major shipment she had packed up her small bedsit with its one-bar heater, poster of Phar Lap, her hardback edition of Black Beauty, single narrow bed and dress rack with her four standard outfits. Under a pile of magazines she found the ankle binders, wrapped carefully in plastic. She threw them out, triumphant.

  Jock’s mock-Palladian mansion was built conveniently close to his main warehouse. The swimming pool was designed in the shape of a lamb chop. She had never seen that much wealth, that much brazen luxury screaming look at me, I’m rich, I’ve made it!

  She tiptoed around the first week, holding her breath, not quite believing that she was part of this lush landscape of thick carpets and quilted antique chairs. Jock teased her, renaming her his great silent Stance. At night in his emperor-sized bed he took to clinging to her like a child, his small torso tucked comfortably between her hips and breasts. She loved this contradiction, this utterly masculine man who was so much smaller than her. She loved looping her long arms around his belly, the fruit of his sex curled up, vulnerable, sheltered in her large hand. The smell of him sleeping made her feel safe for the first time in her life.

  At the end of the first week, after a particularly vigorous love making session, she told him in a small voice about the ankle binders. He listened intently while stroking her long flanks, his piercing blue eyes clouding over in empathy.

  “It was stretching machines for me. Johnson’s height extenders, then the illegal growth hormones. God, did Dad give me a hiding when he found out about those.

  “‘Son,’ he said. ‘It’s not how much you’ve got but what you do with it.’”

  He buried his head in her hair and whispered into her ear. “And look at us now, eh? King and Queen.” She pulled him closer, wanting to be inside him, wanting a fusion of their two bodies, spirits and hearts.

  It was as if her subconscious had been waiting for this opportunity to submit, to relinquish the martyrdom of her earlier years. She knew this was love.

  The habits of their lives began to fall in with each other. Every morning Jock would get up at five thirty, work out on his home gym for half an hour, then meditate in the pool, floating on his back with his eyes closed, wearing only a pair of sun-glasses while his collection of inflated plastic pigs bobbed up and down around him. Stacey, on hearing the familiar sound of the water filter, would press her face into his pillow, his scent comforting her as she drifted back off to dream until seven. Then she would get up, and check the Dow Jones faxed in by Jock’s stockbroker, Deidre.

  Deidre had become a great friend, advising Stacey on her dress sense and on how to manage Jock, who was one of Deidre’s more challenging clients. Secretly, Deidre was thankful that she had found a way of influencing him. Jock was renowned for playing the stock market as fiercely as he played the horses and he usually lost. Stacey, by contrast, was naturally cautious and Jock had discovered that she had an innate gift when it came to the share market. He arranged for her to leave the TAB and put her in charge of stocktaking at his main branch.

  Slowly, as the weeks passed, they both began to open up to each other. As weeks turned into months Jock’s vulnerabilities and fears revealed him to her not as a diminutive god but as a fallible equal. The complexity that lay beneath the cocky bravado endeared her further. If anything it was his energy, the essence of his ego, that began to swamp her. She was constantly swept up by his desires, his career. She felt like a planet in orbit. And, although she was falling deeper in love, she began to feel the strength of his personality hijack her own fragile persona, as if he was seeping into her through a process of strange osmosis.

  Yet at the same time she was delighted to discover a kind of silent resourcefulness within herself.

  Every day Jock would get her to chauffeur him to his main office, preferring to finalize deals on the mobile phone while Stacey, an excellent driver, maneuvered the Mercedes through peak-hour traffic.

  “Two thousand sheep, direct to the port of Dubai. You heard me, mate…Dubai, Saudi Arabia. Ahmed el Hassam, yeah, that’s the bloke.”

  He started taking her to the society events he engineered invitations to. He was determined to legitimize both his money and his status. They caused quite a sensation: Stacey, tottering along in her high heels, with her quaint old-fashioned English and demure manner, escorted by Jock, overdressed in pink silk and linen, striding along beside her. When a photo of Jock grinning broadly, his face practically buried in Stacey’s cleavage, appeared in the social pages, he was thrilled, and had the photo blown up and sent to all his clients. To him, this was the pinnacle of success and he reveled in it.

  He made love to her every night; his sexual energy seemed linked to his generally hyper state. She noticed that his body temperature was always higher than her own, as if his whole metabolism operated in a different time frame from the world around him. She was secretly frightened that he might burn out one day, stop suddenly and drop like an insect.

  His sexual imagination was limitless. He taught her how to clench her muscles so that she could pick him up, even when he was limp, and make him hard inside her. He taught her how to pleasure him with her mouth. He would pry open every orifice, every part of her body with his butcher’s hands. He would describe the individual beauty and function of each part as if it were an act of God. She grew to love her own body through his eyes. She began to see the long stretches of white freckled flesh as a genetic lux
ury, a largesse of opulence. She started to exercise and lost the characteristic stoop she’d used to make herself smaller. With Jock’s help she discovered the waisted outfits that accentuated her bosom and hips, exploiting the shape she was born with. Stacey was transformed.

  She became responsible for running Jock’s social functions, held to promote both his business and public profile. Under her guidance, Motherwell’s rapidly became more of a public institution, renowned not only for its meat but also for its benevolence. With Deidre’s help she would coordinate the catering, the guest lists, the tip-offs to the local papers and decide which charity would hold the greatest publicity potential. Stacey was careful to exploit Jock’s own humble beginnings as a means of transforming the company’s image. It worked.

  Soon Jock was called on to open sports centers and visit dying children to distribute Motherwell’s Christmas hampers. Stacey even organized a Jock Motherwell scholarship for educationally and economically deprived children. That landed Jock a fifteen-minute interview on prime-time television. Sales went up sixty percent overnight. Jock was initially overjoyed, but as Stacey’s confidence grew and she became more and more assertive at board meetings, Jock found himself secretly threatened. Behind her back he hired himself a new assistant, then redefined Stacey’s position, limiting her duties to stocktaking and social-diary coordinator. Stacey accepted his decision without question, but blamed herself, suffering silently as she searched through her actions to discover what had caused Jock’s change of heart.

  It happened the day Jock had insisted that she entertain their Arab contact Ahmed el Hassam, who was visiting from Saudi Arabia.

  “He’s our main man there. Has heaps of cash, brings in over two mil worth of business. So we’d better put on a decent spread. I’ve organized the caterers; all you’ve got to do is smile a lot and look like a blond princess. He collects racing horses, so you two have something in common.”

  It was hot, one of those days when the sun beats mercilessly down on everything. Jock had asked her to take the Mercedes for a service. Before she left the garage she decided to check the glove box. She flicked it open. Something glimmered inside. She pulled a tiny shoe out into the light—a miniature version of her own shiny red shoes. She turned the shoe over slowly. Size four, Charles Jourdan, exactly the same style, only smaller, much smaller. Everything around her receded. All she could hear was the pumping of her own heart, drumming loudly in her ears. The shoe sat in her hand comfortably. In fact, it was smaller than her hand.

  “Excuse me, Miss, but we need to put the car on the blocks.” The mechanic’s voice dragged her back to reality. She slammed the door shut, hiding the shoe in her handbag, and hailed a cab amid a rain of wolf whistles from the building site opposite.

  The trip back to the house was a blur. Stacey gazed out at the passing suburbia, numb. His duplicity burned hard; the weight of the shoe in her handbag was like a millstone.

  Back at the house they had already erected a huge marquee in the garden. Inside were tables spread with the most extraordinary collection of cold meats, shellfish, salads and dips. In the center of each was a curious display of long sausages and meat bones, arranged to look like macabre flowers—Jock’s idea of a joke. Dazed, Stacey checked that the right number of plates had been laid out.

  Tiny, shining, beautiful. She locks the bathroom door behind her and looks at the shoe. She sniffs along the shimmering patent leather. Jock’s distinctive aftershave intermingled with something else—jissom and a heavier perfume? She wants to slash the shoe, as images of impaling Jock through the eye with the heel flood up behind her retina. She wants revenge. She looks at herself. Her external appearance remains deceptively composed. Grimly she reaches for her lipstick. She puts on the same Chanel suit Jock bought her that first day and goes down to welcome the guests, the perfect hostess.

  Many of the visitors are there mingling already: the stock farmers who supply the livestock, bureaucrats from the agricultural department who are unofficially on the payroll, the odd socialite determined to ingratiate herself with the nouveau riche. Stacey murmurs greetings and propels them gently in the direction of the most appropriate circle of chatting people. Fragments of conversation drift by.

  “Jock has really trained her well.”

  “Lucky to have her. I mean he’s not exactly a paragon of virtue himself, is he?”

  She floats by, superficially tranquil, as brittle as glass. She hates him for this public humiliation.

  At last he arrives, surrounded by his henchmen. They part like worker bees harboring their queen when Jock steps forward to show off his associate from the Middle East.

  “Stacey, this is Ahmed el Hassam.” She realizes that she is staring directly into the stranger’s eyes. Ahmed el Hassam—dark-skinned, high cheekboned, handsome in a gaunt way—is exactly her height.

  “Stacey is my partner in crime, aren’t yer, doll?” Jock pinches her bottom. She smiles and extends a long cool hand toward Ahmed. He squeezes it warmly.

  “At last, a woman I can see eye to eye with,” he murmurs in perfect English.

  “It’s not often that I see eye to eye with anyone.” Did I say that? she thought. How can I sound so calm? She smiles back at him. The novelty of feeling equal, of feeling that this man could physically overpower her, intrigues her. It does more than that. Jock steps possessively between them.

  “And there’s someone else I’d like you to meet, Stacey. June Thistlewaite, meet the great Stance.” Stacey freezes as Jock’s new assistant, June Thistlewaite, steps forward. She is under five foot with heels, which, according to Stacey’s calculations, makes her at least four inches shorter than Jock.

  “Hi, Jock’s told me so much about you.” A saccharine, high-pitched voice, a tiny triangular face, dark eyes and jet-black hair, pretty in a doll-like way, the exact opposite of herself.

  Stacey pulls her aside. “What size shoes do you take?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  In a flash Jock separates the two women. He steers them both to the buffet table, talking all the time about the export business, tax tariffs, how Ahmed has offered to extend their business further into the Arab countries. She knows she is drinking too much, conscious only of the other woman, her natural grace, the dainty way her tiny hands handle the knife and fork.

  She can feel the eyes of Ahmed catching her as she stumbles on the dance floor, bending over to pick up the broken heel of her shoe.

  “Come, you need to sit down.” They walk past Jock holding court over a group of cattle farmers, their loud laughter exploding obediently after each of his jokes.

  “You are married?”

  “Not yet.”

  “This is bad. He should marry you. You are worth it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “An instinct.”

  “The same one you use for choosing horses?”

  “Perhaps.”

  He refuses to be insulted. This excites her further, the champagne rendering her fearless. Behind him she can see June bringing Jock another bottle; there is something intimate about the way she touches his arm. Stacey turns back to Ahmed. Close up he smells of a sweet, musky aftershave and soap, as if under the Italian suit he is as well scrubbed as his English accent.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Upstairs. There is a collection of photos of racehorses, the ones Jock owns.”

  She takes him by the hand and drags him across the dance floor, past the buffet table, past the frantic caterers, past the drunken farmers whirling crazily around them. As they leave the tent she catches a glimpse of Jock staring at her.

  Up in Jock’s study they stand before a photo of Jock’s favorite racehorse, a mare called Prime Cut.

  “She has long, slender legs like yourself,” says Ahmed, running his hands up under her skirt as if to confirm his theory. His large hands span her easily.

  “Good breeding stock, with a strong broad back and firm flanks.” She allows
herself the luxury of being able to rest her head against a standing man. He squeezes the cheeks of her ass. She can feel his erection.

  “I have never made love to a woman my own height.”

  “Me neither.” They both laugh at her statement, at the sudden awkward intensity between strangers. He turns her around suddenly and plunges his tongue into her mouth, tasting the sweetness of her, while slipping a foot between hers, catching her as she falls onto the carpet.

  The room is spinning. It is all wrong, as if the decor fits into the irrationality of her act, of surrendering to a man she doesn’t love in revenge for her lover’s infidelity. She is intoxicated with the smell and feel of him. She resigns herself to his caresses, and throws her head back as he lifts her skirt and buries his mouth into her sex. She moans as he sucks on her—now she is the conqueror, the one being served.

  Her hand curls around something under the couch. She realizes she is clutching the twin of the tiny red stiletto. How could he? Here, in the house.

  Ahmed emerges from under her skirt, his face flushed, eyes bright, and tears off his shirt, jacket and tie in one motion. His chest is huge, broader than her own, hairless; his coffee-colored skin seems far younger on his body than on his face. Kneeling on the floor, he unzips his trousers and pulls his penis out. He is longer and thinner than Jock. Uncircumcised, something gold glimmers at the tip. She takes him into her hands, his size and weight unfamiliar to her. Close up, she sees that he has a pierced foreskin. A small gold bead sits at the top of his glans.