A Love Game

by Nicole Dere

  I felt bad. I wanted to point out, I didn’tactually shag her, you know. It wasn’t true!But I didn’t have the guts and instead revelled in this pale shade of repute, though my newly resurgent ego was pricked by a grinning remark from one of the crowd. ‘I’d keep an eye out for her old man! I hear Patrick wasn’t too chuffed seeing you groping his missus like that! He’s a big bugger too – mean with it!’ I must admit, rather like Clio, he had shown no interest in the drama group, and had not accompanied Jan on the two weekends away when we performed at other venues. He had of course watched our home performance, but apparently had glowered in a corner at the late-night party afterwards, and dragged Jan away as soon as he could. I remember feeling bitterly disappointed at his boorishness, and its effect on Jan, who had reverted to her shy, blushing introverted mode before her disappearance. I wondered gloomily if we’d see anything more of her. Mags, too, was looking thoughtful, and I had a strong feeling she was as dismayed as I was at the prospect of losing our delightful fellow thespian.

  But, as I said, I was shamefully determined to cash in on my entirely spurious elevation in our enclosed little community, and so accompanied Clio to the club that fateful Saturday night, and thus saw for myself the first entrance of the man who was to have such a shattering effect on my life – and that of others, near and dear.

  That first appearance was dramatic enough. He caused a buzz right from the start. He was tall – six foot-two – and dressed in black leather, pants and short jacket, in spite of the heat – and heeled boots of the same colour. Hair black, too, and swept back from its smooth peak at the centre of his forehead. His complexion was brown, with a hint of dark stubble about his strong jaw.

  There was a distinct rustle, a kind of frisson, an undercurrent of excitement, at his entrance. Most hadn’t seen this imposing figure before, but several seemed to know of him, and his name was passed quickly around, especially among the women. ‘It’s Anton Van Reis. He’s taken over the stock farm, and the transport company out on the Kundi road. He’s from down south. Pots of money, they say.’

  There was a magnetism about him. It couldn’t be denied. I felt it, a kind of shiver, a prickling at the back of my neck, the fine hairs on my arms, and a sense of his power which made me oddly afraid and, even more weirdly, attracted. I’ve tried, and failed, many times since to deny that initial shock, to put it down to hindsight, in view of what happened. And I’m absolutely certain that Clio felt it too. Maybe not the fear, though I wouldn’t bet on it – it would be part of the excitement which I know beyond doubt struck her – a sensation from deep within her, in the very centre of her sex: a quickening, spreading through her, through every nerve and sinew, and up through her belly, to bring her small nipples to tingling erection.

  Some time later I saw their eyes lock. He was at the other end of the small, crowded bar, but a message flashed like electricity across the space between them. I saw how she received it, saw the attraction, and the acceptance, in her animated face. She didn’t even glance at me as she pushed past and moved into his waiting arms. By this stage in the evening, the slow, sensual music was playing, and the hall was only dimly lit, the floor sparsely occupied by couples wrapped inseparably together. Within seconds, he and Clio were coiled together, swaying; I saw his black arm down over her bare shoulder, and his long, brown hand spread with firm possession over the curves of her bottom, drawing her in to his loins. I felt weak, as though I too was caught in his aura, its strength which would suck us both inescapably into his power.

  Chapter Five

  ‘PLEASE, CLIO! DON’T GO with him tonight! I beg you!’ My last plea hung obscenely between us, in its raw subservience. I felt every iota of its shame, of myshame, as it escaped from my lips. My eyes blurred with tears, my voice choked. I was within an ace of flinging myself at her feet, to make my grovelling physical, and she paused in her efforts at applying her make-up. She withdrew her eyes from my reflection in the dressing table mirror and twisted round on the low stool, to gaze at the real me. I saw a flash of fastidious disgust at my weak subservience, but also the gleam of excitement, her thrill at the knowledge of her power, never before so nakedly demonstrated.

  ‘Don’t be stupid! You know how much you’d hate it, spending a night out in the bush, the shooting and everything. It’s not your scene at all, you know it isn’t.’ Again the scorn. It showed in the instinctive curl of her vividly painted lips. ‘He would have asked you otherwise. We won’t be alone, for God’s sake! There’s a gang of his mates coming along. All hunters. Not yoursort. You’d be like a nun in a brothel!’ She laughed dismissively, turned back to the mirror and her make-up.

  Damn you! I screamed impotently, in my mind. If it’s a night roughing it in some bush camp, why do you need that outfit? She was wearing one of her most sexy sets of underwear, a bra and pants of mainly black lace, infinitesimal in size, just about covering her nipples and her vulva. I felt the strength draining from me; I wanted just to fold up on the floor. My voice was breaking, and the tears started to fall as I stumbled on. ‘It’s no good. I can’t – go on, like this. Pretending. I’ve known – guessed’ (was I chickening out even now, trying to hedge my bets?) – ‘there’ve been others – but this! With Ant Van Reis. It’s so ... blatant! Everybodyknows, Clio. You’re with him all the time, day and night. They’re all talking–’

  ‘Yes, I know! Biggest fucking thrill some of these bitches have had in years.’ She turned again, and the stool gave an ugly snarling scrape against the polished cement floor as she stood and stepped across to close the gap. Even in my distress, my eyes were drawn to those breasts, their upper slopes bare, cupped offeringly under my nose, and to the tiny triangle that snuggled the pout of her sex. The rest of her was tormentingly bare, down to those vividly painted toenails.

  And then I wasdown, on my bare knees on the hard coldness of the polished floor, my brow nestling at the base of that exquisite belly, below the little eye of her navel, just above the low line of her mini-briefs and the fragrant fissure of her cunt. The room seemed to lurch, swam along with my reeling mind as I suddenly visualised the dimness of the Evans’s living room, the more generous curves of that other belly, the meaty thighs.

  I squealed at the fierce grip of Clio’s hand in my hair, the pain as she dragged me up off the floor, and literally hauled me over to the bed, and flung me down on the thin counterpane. She knelt astride me as I lay on my back, her grip still lifting my scalp. Her face was contorted, her eyes blazing again. ‘Yes!’ she hissed. ‘We’re fucking, you’re absolutely right! And yes, there’s been others. I’ve never denied it – and you’venever had the guts to ask! Have you?’ She shook my head vigorously, like a ventriloquist working his dummy. ‘But this is different!’ she stormed on. ‘Different to anything I’ve ever had before! This is glorious, once in a lifetime! I’m crazy about him. I’d run off with him anytime, anywhere, if he asked me. Which he won’t, worse luck! So you’ll either have to lump it, or fuck off. It’s up to you. I don’t mind. I wouldn’t blame you if you choose to leave. Most men would!’

  Was there an extra stress on that word men? If so, I deserved it – every bit.

  Suddenly the rage was gone. I felt it, felt the slump, the weight of her beautiful bare thighs, the snugly hidden loins, pressing down on my own groin.

  ‘I can’t do anything about the way I feel, Marty.’ Her voice was quiet, and all at once I could sense her own helplessness, as great in its way as mine. ‘And neither, my old love, can you.’

  She gave a regretful little smile, and moved, sliding down my outstretched limbs until she was kneeling over my ankles. Her hands deftly unbuckled and unzipped my shorts, and briskly hauled them down off my hips. I was powerless to resist or protest as she seized my underbriefs and pulled them down until they clung with my shorts below my knees. I gave a whimper of embarrassed shame. My hands moved to cover my genitals, already exposed as my shirt fell away, and she caught my wrists, pushed them aside. ‘No,’ she said, gentle but firm,
and laid them by my naked hips. ‘See what I mean, Marty?’

  Her fingers lifted my limp prick, whose folds of foreskin were already liberally greased with the discharge which indicated my arousal, in spite of all my distress. I shivered, my muscles tightened, and my haunches lifted in response to the electric spasms of excitement she was initiating. I felt the awakening throbbing, the swelling that caused the glans to emerge, a blushing pink, the tiny aperture of its mouth dewy with its discharge.

  Then she laid her palm along its still insignificant length, and even her delicate span was enough to conceal it almost entirely. She pressed again, harder, enough to make me grunt. I felt the springs beneath me yielding, felt the cheeks of my buttocks nipping as I pressed back against her pressure. The heel of her palm responded, even harder, and I whimpered at the pain of the stretched foreskin, the throb of the suddenly expanding helm under her painful, stimulating hold. I moaned softly, my hips undulating rhythmically now to the strokes of her massage. Then the palm was gone, and her fingers were looped around the thickened stem of the penis. A thumb stroked the silky texture of the underside of the glans, at its most sensitive spot, and I felt the surge of sensation, my body arched and I cried aloud. ‘Please, Clio!’

  I wasn’t aware what I was begging for, cessation or continuation of this sweet torture, but Clio was certain, and I felt the short, thickened column hardening, in that last, brief but fearfully thrilling stage before ejaculation. Then I felt the warm breath fan over my sensitive flesh, and the final excitement of those glistening vivid lips kissing, nibbling at my throbbing prick. I was shuddering, sensation fired like thrills of electricity right through me, and then the ultimate, the curl of that narrow tongue lapping at the absolute centre of all my desire, and I gave a wild cry and exploded, in consuming ejaculation, and I vaguely heard her half delighted, half disgusted exclamation as she jerked back, while the thick rush of pale semen erupted over my lifting belly, coating the dark wisps of pubic hair, flowing up onto the quivering skin, trickling over the pronounced jut of hip bone.

  I felt the pressing weight of her lifted from my lower limbs, the rise of the bed springs. I lay there, my ankles still ridiculously bound by shorts and underpants, my feet still decked in sandals and short socks. Meanwhile, Clio had returned with a hand towel, which she dropped over my loins. I gazed up through my tears at her exquisite, scantily clad form.

  ‘See what I mean, Marty?’ she said softly, with a gentle smile, and turned back to continue her interrupted efforts. I lay there, watched her, in silence, my shorts and knickers still ludicrously draped round my feet, my loins covered by the small towel. She pulled on a short-sleeved safari shirt, crisply new, in cotton of a pale khaki shade, and a pair of matching slacks, with knife-edge creases. Was this to convince me she really was going off into the bush on a hunting expedition? And if she was, so what? They could fornicate around the campfire, or in the back of that damned Land Rover thing of his. Her next words crushed any faint hope of illusion I might have had. She didn’t glance at me as she spoke. ‘Don’t wait up for me. I won’t be back till morning.’ And all the while I lay there, genitalia covered with that wisp of a towel, pants round my ankles, as though she had tethered me to the bed. I remained motionless a long time after she’d gone, until the room was briefly dim in the short tropic gloom before full darkness fell. Eventually the tears stopped trickling down the sides of my face, and the pillow beneath me dried.

  I just couldn’t bear the ignominy any more, knowing that everyone was aware of Clio and Ant’s passionate affair. She spent every available hour of the day or night with him. They were a couple, they appeared just about everywhere in public together – club dos, private parties. At first I tagged along, but it was absolute torture for me, ghastly rictus of a smile plastered on my face, painfully aware of the scarcely concealed sniggers, and the contempt. I felt a total outcast. It was made worse by the familiarity with which Anton Van Reis treated me, like a dim relative, of no account, whom he tolerated with admirable good humour. I kept trying to steel myself to the point of speaking out. Look. Let’s not pretend, Ant. I know you’re shagging my wife, and it’s got to stop. I’m not going to stand for it any more. Right? In my dreams! The only person I spoke to was Clio, in several scenes of petty, tearful rage that made even mesick. I always ended up crushed, futile in my weakness, crawling in defeat.

  ‘Look,’ she said one evening at one of my outbursts. ‘You either put up with things this way, or I walk out. Leave you for good. Would that be better?’

  ‘No!’ I croaked miserably, beyond shame now in my degradation.

  But she was in a merciless mood, determined to punish me to the full. Her tone changed to one of cruel reason. ‘I’m even prepared to let you fuck me once in a while. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d put up with it.’ She twisted the knife with a little laugh. ‘After all, it wouldn’t last long, would it? Not exactly thrillsville for me, is it?’

  ‘I canmake love to you!’ I cried. ‘Not like ... you used to love it, you said!’

  ‘Ha! Good old Martina! The fastest tongue on the equator! If I wanted that, I could go across to Fat Mags – or that prissy cunt Jan Thoroughgood. Oh yes! Don’t tell me you don’t know about Mags and your little heartthrob. They’re at it every chance they get, apparently. Everybody knows about it. Except that oaf of a husband – and I don’t mean Dave! I guess Mags lets him have the odd screw just to keep him sweet. You should get in there, Marty. Your little lovebird Jan sounds perfect for your style of passion. But as for me, kiddo, I need the real thing!’

  Mags Evans and Jan Thoroughgood – lovers! The names, and the images, stuck like a tick in my sordid, fertile imagination, fed on it like one of those tiny parasites until it was swollen with vividly erotic scenarios. If nothing else, it served for a time to distract me from my own impotent misery. Indeed, I began to wonder if that was Clio’s intention in planting the idea in my brain. She knew to what extent I had romanticised my feelings for Jan, who had no real idea how much I admired her, in spite of those passionate love scenes we had played together – and whom I had scarcely seen in the months since the play had finished.

  Also, I wondered (and tried to half believe) if Clio’s disclosure was simply malevolent fiction to add to my private woes; another mental cut from the whip of her cruelty.

  Whatever her reason it was successful on both counts. And I had lots of time to indulge my fetid fancies in my new, self-imposed isolation. The school year began in January, and the School Certificate and Advanced Level examinations were held in November. The long vacation began in early December, and lasted until almost the end of the following month. It also marked the start of the hot dry season, after the end of the “short rains”. The school compound was virtually deserted, bereft of students, and with most of the staff taking their own lengthy breaks, either at the distant coast or on safari in the game parks. I rarely visited the club now, either alone or with my wife and her shadow, Anton. Though it was more like the other way around. Ant was nobody’s shadow; rather the sun, whose splendid light delineated the lesser shades about him. And I, increasingly, was not one of their number.

  While the Evans were at home, I lurked like a furtive spy about the environs of their bungalow, keeping watch in the hope (or dread) of seeing some evidence of Clio’s assertion, which had me visualising Mags’s statuesque frame and Jan’s slender loveliness locked in all kinds of amatory entanglements. I felt like some weird pervert, crouching at a distance among the trees and bushes of their large garden, afraid of being seen by one of the servants, or a passing local, or, heaven forbid, by Dave or Mags. Peeping Marty, caught in the act! Would they even be surprised? I wondered, filled with self-disgust, yet unable to break off from my lonely vigils. Do you actually wantto discover that someone as sweet and beautiful and wholesome as Janet Thoroughgood is really a raging lez? I asked myself disgustedly. It was my own debased inclination, at its most rampant (unfortunate and inappropriate word!) that drove me to admit my guil
t in the solitary darkness of my own bed, or screened in the dusk behind the thick bushes as my fist flew and my fevered brain rioted and I spilt my seed like the ancient Biblical sinner on the ground.

  * * *

  ‘I don’t think you’re really happy here any longer, Martin.’ The headmaster’s eyes shifted momentarily from my wild-eyed gaze. The gesture said far more than his stiff, almost stumbling words, and I felt the burning wave of shame and disgrace flow upwards through me until I was transfixed in the chair like a helpless specimen. ‘I think it might be better if you moved on. A transfer ... maybe to the capital, eh? New places, new faces. New start, eh?’ He gave a bluff, encouraging laugh, actually patted me on the shoulder as he rose to indicate our brief interview was over.

  I was in shock as I walked slowly back through the dazzling brightness of the morning, stumbling a little, my thoughts a chaotic whirl. I was being given the boot. Transferred, over 200 miles away. And all because of Clio’s outrageous behaviour with her paramour, her Sun-King, her fancy man! The scandal of all scandals, too much even for this hot-gossipy environment. Why did she have to tear the arse out of everything, so blatantly flaunting her affair with Van Reis, thrusting it down everyone’s throat, practically living with him night and day, and making me the most ridiculously cuckolded fool of all time, cap and bells and horns and all?

  Well, serve her and her Ant fucking well right! I thought viciously. My eyes blurred with tears, so that the tall, waving eucalyptus trees and the red dusty path and the spiky grass swam surreally, in fitting accompaniment to my whirling thoughts. So much for your lover and his fornicating prowess. It’s all over for you now, the pair of you. Then my worm-that-didn’t turn, mean little pleasure withered, died away completely, and I stopped dead. In its place came a much more typical and recognised sensation: one of fear, of ice-cold dread.