‘Send him up, ’ Evie said, and disconnected. She used to be all polite with Henry and the other doormen and the cleaning staff and the delivery men and everyone else she had working for her since Benny had established her here, high in the air at the bottom tip of Manhattan, where all the action was. Only, after a few weeks, she’d started realising that everyone else in this building, where one-bed apartments went for millions of dollars, was short with the staff, if not downright rude. And that the staff seemed to give them a hell of a lot more respect than they gave Evie.
Evie was a fast learner. From that moment on, she cut the staff dead if she didn’t have anything to say to them, and was curt with them when she did. And guess what? Way more deference and politeness now than before, when she was all nice and friendly. It sucked, but that was New York for you. She should have known already. Be nice to people, they’ll kick you in the face and laugh at you. Be rude to them, they’ll take you seriously.
She’d once seen a girl knocked over at a newsstand by a guy pushing past her to get cigarettes. The girl was a tourist: you could tell by the fact that she had been approaching the newsstand slowly, getting her purse out, rather than marching up to it, money already out, good to go. The guy who’d bumped into her didn’t even look down to see her sprawled on the big stacks of newspapers piled up by the side – lucky for her they’d broken her fall. Another guy leaned over to help her up, and she smiled at him gratefully, till he snapped at her brusquely: ‘This is New York, baby. You better toughen up if you wanna stick it out here, ’ and the girl’s expression went from grateful to appalled in a single beat.
Only in New York. But what could you say? It was Evie’s town, she was born and bred here, it was in her blood. You had to hustle to get along. And yeah, that guy had given the girl good advice, if she’d only had the sense to listen. You did need to toughen up to stick it out here.
The elevator pinged, announcing Lawrence’s arrival. The doors opened at the base of the long, long room, and there he was, smiling at her, his pale brown hair loose around his face, slightly damp from the heat of the street, a small kitbag over one shoulder, wearing a shabby T-shirt and a pair of sweats hanging off his narrow hipbones.
‘Hey, ’ he said.
‘Hey.’
Evie smiled back at him. She had all these work smiles, running the gamut from bright innocence to full-on sultry seductress, but with Lawrence her smile was so natural she didn’t even think about it. Lawrence was as clear as water in a glass. His eyes were the colour of a lake in winter, pale grey, and when she looked into them she saw nothing but sweetness and clarity and straightforwardness. Total oddball. It was a miracle he survived in this town.
‘Been doing some pole work?’ he asked, walking across the floor towards her.
He had the sexiest walk, and he didn’t even realise it. Evie had read, in the kind of bosom-heaving, princesses-and-pirates kind of book Evie’s sister was literally addicted to, descriptions of heroes who ‘walked like a panther’, and she’d always thought it was just a dumb cliché. But Lawrence really did walk like a big cat. He was so in tune with his body that he moved like the big animal that he was, that all humans were, only they forgot it when they put on clothes and stood upright and started cutting their hair. Lawrence’s DNA hadn’t forgotten, though. He moved so lightly, so effortlessly, the slight roll to his shoulders like a cat’s when it puts down one paw after another, his feet padding the ground rather than hitting it, that Evie had taken one look at him the first time she met him and thought, if he makes walking look that easy, I bet he makes everything else look that easy too, and then her mind was on sex with him and she couldn’t get it off again.
‘Uh-huh, ’ Evie said, reaching her arms up to the ceiling and taking a long stretch, partly because she felt like it, partly to make completely sure that Lawrence couldn’t take his eyes off her.
‘So you’re nice and sweaty already?’
She nodded, her lips slightly parted. And she reached one hand down behind her back to massage her shoulderblades, which had the effect of making her breasts swell under the sports bra.
Lawrence was in front of her now, smiling down at her. She could smell him, a light musky, manly scent, fresh sweat from the street. Lawrence never wore aftershave, not even scented soap: it was all him and his Tom’s of Maine natural deodorant. Mmm. She got what they’d called at the Midnight Lounge a girl hard-on: her nipples tightened. And he hadn’t even touched her yet. She wanted to reach up and push back his hair, stroke along those high cheekbones that he’d got from his Russian mom.
‘Well, now let’s really work up a sweat, ’ Lawrence said, taking off his bag and putting it on the floor. Evie watched him bend over. His bottom was small, but round, and the sweats slid down it an inch or so as he leaned over, revealing a tantalising glimpse of pale skin lightly dusted with soft blond hair. Lawrence straightened up, produced an elastic from his pocket, and pulled his hair back into a scrappy little ponytail.
‘Rolling sit-ups and obliques first, ’ he said firmly. ‘Lots of them. We’re trying to sculpt your waist, remember? And then leg pushes for here.’
He reached round her and touched her lightly just above her bottom, an area she had to target like a sniper to make sure she didn’t build up a tiny roll on it. And then he opened one of the built-in cupboards and extracted an exercise mat, unrolling it and flipping it down on the wooden floor. With a theatrical sigh, she lay down on it, reached back for her pole, gripped it firmly and started pulling her lower body up into a ball. Knees to chest. Roll up, roll down, as slowly as she could. It hurt like hell. It also, as Lawrence knew perfectly well, was the best thing for putting her back into alignment again after the extreme arches of her pole work. Plus, it made her abs strong and flat and flexible. Win-win.
Evie loved to work out. It was her hobby, her profession, her vocation. If Lawrence hadn’t been her trainer, she would be lying down right now doing sit-ups on her own. But Evie’s life had been so much about self-discipline, about driving herself to higher and higher heights of physical excellence, that it was the biggest treat she could imagine to give over that discipline for an hour to someone whose job it was to take responsibility for her exercise. It was the supreme pleasure to be able to whine and protest and have Lawrence make her do a hundred sit-ups anyway.
Well, maybe not her supreme pleasure. That would come afterwards, when he massaged out all her kinks.
Evie did sit-ups for twenty minutes. Then Lawrence supported her on the pull-up bar, his hands steady at her waist, taking only the bare minimum amount of weight that he needed to, letting her struggle with the effort of chinning herself up and down. Then she lay down again, this time on her stomach, with her legs in what Lawrence called a figure 4 – the right one straight out, the left one bent to the side, foot back in, touching the knee of the right leg – and then she bent her right leg so her foot was parallel with the ceiling and pushed it up and down, hard and fast, with Lawrence kneeling next to her and holding down her lower back in just the right place, so all the painful muscle work focused into one exact spot above the right buttock, targeting that infinitesimal swelling which she needed to punish with regular leg pushes . . .
She did two hundred on each side and then collapsed, face down, puffing into the mat. This was another luxury she only allowed herself with Lawrence present, this theatrically exaggerated exhaustion. On your own you had to suck it up and keep going. When Benny watched her on the pole, she had to make everything look easy, as if she were floating, as if she were a fairy made of tinsel and moonshine, and then she had to float down off the pole and come over to him and go to work and make that all look easy too. But with Lawrence, she could let go and show the effort: he was a trainer, for God’s sake, he knew how hard this shit was. So she lay there, groaning, and he knelt there, laughing at her, and finally said:
‘I guess all this puffing and panting means you want your massage now?’
And she nodded, pretending she
didn’t even have the energy to talk any more. She heard him stand up and go over to his kit-bag for the massage cream, and all the breath really did go out of her in one long delicious exhale of release, because there was nothing more for her to do now, Lawrence was going to put his clever hands on her and work out every single knot and leave her all loose and stretched and happy.
He started with the stretches, folding one of her legs over the other and pressing down, down, leaning right into her, till her bottom was off the floor and she was folded up into a tight parcel like a contortionist, her glutes stretching till she bit her lip with it, strands of his hair coming loose from the ponytail and falling over his face.
‘Hurts?’ he said, those slanting grey eyes watching her, serious, making sure he didn’t go too far.
‘Hurts so good, ’ she gasped.
‘Another inch?’
‘Just one.’
‘OK.’
He put slightly more weight on her, leaning into it, his eyes even more intent now, his hands feeling out exactly how far he could push to give her maximum stretch without ripping or tearing. Lawrence would never go too far, never over-work her. You could see that from his own body, which wasn’t pumped-up like that of most muscle-crazed trainers going for the burn, but long and lean and endlessly flexible from three hours of yoga a day, from five to eight every morning. Lawrence treated his body as though it was his most precious possession, and when he told you that was his philosophy you found yourself wondering why everyone else didn’t do that too.
And after the stretches, he turned her over, and she reached up and pulled off her sports bra, and he sat on her buttocks and worked on her shoulders and back and upper arms, smoothing in a cream that smelt of mint and geraniums, his clever fingers seeking out and undoing every tangle of muscle and cramp, digging all the way around her shoulderblades, finding areas of tension she hadn’t even realised existed, and rolling them away with his fingertips and his knuckles and even, sometimes, his elbows. Pain burned through her and was gone as if it had never existed. Her eyes were closed, her breath was slow and, honestly, she was drooling a little, though she’d have died before she let him know.
By the time he moved lower and worked on her buttocks and all the way down her strong, tight hamstrings, she was in a trance, even though it always hurt so bad when he massaged her calves. They were so pulled up from all the dancing in heels that he had to hurt her to get into them and do any good. And by the time he turned her over again and straddled her and started smoothing the cream into her upper body – long, slow strokes to get to the hard pectoral muscles under her soft little breasts – she felt, as she always did at this stage, as if she were in another dimension, where time had slowed down with Lawrence’s firm palms moving in small circles around her chest, easing out the muscles under her arms, which worked so hard to pull her up the pole and hold her there that they had always been tight till Lawrence started work on them.
She was in water. She was floating on the sea, buoyed up by gentle waves, totally safe. The water was blood-warm, and it would taste like her own salt skin, or Lawrence’s, the moisture she could see collecting between his pecs as he bent over her, so close that all she could smell was him, his warm strong scent, the faint trace of shampoo on his hair from his morning shower. He rubbed cream into her stomach, and now she smelled geraniums again, soft and faintly peppery, and he was running his fingers round the waistband of her shorts, and she lifted her hips to help him slip them off, and he pulled them down and sat back and took hold of his T-shirt and pulled that off too in one smooth movement, and reached down for his sweats and, half-sitting, half kneeling, dragged them off, so he was naked.
The kitbag was close by; he had a condom out and on in a few seconds, and then he was back, pulling her up so she was sitting, pulling her up and down onto him and rocking them back and forth, knowing that Evie was in such a trance right now he couldn’t expect much muscular effort from her. Sometimes the massages took her like that, and they would sit there, her on his lap, her legs wrapped round him, and he would rock them both, slowly, with huge care and control, for what felt like hours and hours, Evie clinging on to him, damp face against his damp shoulder, his cock hitting the exact spot inside her that made her shudder in spasms again and again, Lawrence holding on, moving her where he wanted, where he could sense she wanted it, his face the most serious she ever saw it, utterly concentrated so that his eyes and his cheekbones seemed to be slanting even more than usual with the effort.
Finally she roused herself, coming back a few stages towards full consciousness, reached round to sit so she was completely facing him, and took his face in her hand and kissed him: long slow druggy kisses. She was sitting harder on his lap now, pushing down more, feeling him higher and higher inside her, making him take more of her weight, rubbing her whole body against him, using those whip-strong thighs of hers to raise and lower herself till he started moaning.
‘Evie, no—’
‘Come on, ’ Evie whispered in his ear. ‘I want you to, I want to feel you come—’
‘No, Evie, wait, I’m holding on for it, it’ll come when it’s ready—’
Evie circled his ear with her tongue till he moaned even harder.
‘Fuck that Tantric shit, Lawrence, ’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to make you come so hard you’ll feel your head’s going to blow off.’
And she lifted herself slightly off him, reached down and slid her hand into the space she’d made, and, looking straight into his eyes, she made herself come as hard as she’d promised Lawrence he would, and as she screamed he did too, tightening his grasp on her hips and pulling her down on him so hard she screamed even louder and he shot himself up into her like a bullet, so that Evie felt it even through the condom, and they collapsed against each other, staying upright only because of the balance of their two bodies propped together.
‘God, ’ Evie said eventually.
Lawrence sighed into her hair.
‘I have to come out of you . . . I so don’t want to . . .’
He lifted her as if she weighed nothing, and Evie made a small protesting noise as he slid out of her. They fell to the ground together, still touching at most points, and lay back down on the mat, breathing hard, facing each other. Lawrence pulled off the condom and wiped himself with Evie’s sweat towel, hardly taking his eyes off her face through the whole process.
‘You look like the cat that’s got the cream, ’ he said, smiling at her.
‘I am. I did, ’ Evie said smugly.
His smile faded.
‘Don’t do that again, Evie.’
‘What, make you come like a train?’ Evie ran her tongue around her lips, remembering him exploding inside her.
‘Evie, I’ve told you.’ Lawrence’s brow furrowed, which it only did when the subject was of vital importance to him. ‘When you have a Tantric orgasm, it’s transcendent. It’s worth the wait. And it’s not like you didn’t have tons of orgasms along the way. I’m not making you wait with me. I can’t believe we have to go through this every single time.’
Evie rolled her eyes. How ironic was it that of the two men in her life, one was really tough to make come (God, the things she had to do for Benny sometimes!) and one was really easy, but bitched and moaned about it afterwards?
Men. The thing she was best at. Her specialist subject: men, and what men wanted. And still, they could be so fucking perverse that sometimes they made her want to slap them round the head till they rang like a bell.
Evie was showering, one of her favourite ways to pass the time ever since Benny had moved her into this penthouse apartment. The shower was about as big as her mom’s living room, and had probably cost ten times as much to do up. It had a rainforest shower head, plus surround jets, and was lined in travertine marble; the dark blue ceiling was set with a series of tiny glittering lights that dimmed and dipped in endless permutations. Stars in the night sky, Benny had called them. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen this
place: that, and the fact that the shower was big enough for Benny and Evie to fit in it together, which was no small achievement, considering Benny’s bulk.
Benny only took showers. He was scared one day he’d take a bath and not be able to get himself out of the tub again.
Being in the shower with Benny wasn’t so bad, because the stars-in-the-night-sky lighting meant that she couldn’t see Benny all that clearly, which was always a blessing. But being in the shower by herself was bliss. Lawrence had taken a quick one, but he’d had another training appointment across town and had to run. So now Evie was all alone, turning slowly to get every single jet on every single part of herself, slicking herself at intervals with honey shower gel from Diptyque. In the main bathroom she had honey Diptyque candles burning in the built-in niches, and when she eventually came out of the shower she was going to slather herself in more of their honey body lotion. Scent layering, the guy at Barneys had called it. It was amazing to have so much money that you could just walk into a store and pretty much buy whatever you wanted. In addition to her credit cards, Benny had given her charge accounts at Henri Bendel and Barneys and Bloomingdale’s, which pretty much covered everything. She was shopping in places she hadn’t even known existed till she met Benny. Shit, she’d have thought she was lucky to get a Macy’s charge card till she met him.
And she didn’t even have to look at the bills. They went straight to one of Benny’s many secretaries. Which, of course, meant she spent even more, because she had no idea how much she was racking up.
Though, considering all she had to do was shop, work out and maybe pop to an afternoon movie if she was sure Benny wouldn’t be coming by, at least he’d given her plenty of resources. One thing she wasn’t short of was time. These twenty-minute showers, if she was honest, were partly a way to kill the time before she turned on the TV and flicked through some gossip magazines.
But just then, Evie’s ears pricked up. Even through the pounding jets of water, she thought she’d heard something. Growing up in the projects made you alert even when you were sleeping, always on the lookout for something that might be a threat to you. The urban jungle trained its kids well. Benny might have taken her away from the slums, but you couldn’t take the slums out of the girl. So Evie stuck one hand out to whip off the water jets, and with the other she pushed open the heavy glass shower door and stepped out onto the plush bath mat, reaching for a bath sheet.
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