Sex in the City--London Page 16

  Andrew kept on eating me, his tongue occasionally straying down to lap at my arsehole, till I was bucking my hips into his face, half-crazed and on the verge of coming. That was when he stopped, rising to his feet so he could strip off the T-shirt and torn, paint-spattered jeans he was still wearing. When his underwear came off, his cock stood up from his groin, hard and tempting. I tried to reach out a hand and touch it, but he slapped it away with a grin, telling me not to be so greedy. I watched, fingers idly dipping into my pussy to keep my arousal gently stoked, as he fished a condom from his wallet, rolling it down over his erection. Once he was safely sheathed, he turned me over forcefully, placing me on all fours with my rump sticking out towards him. I clung on to the arm of the sofa as he played his cockhead along the length of my slit. For a moment I felt it pressing against the entrance to my arse, and I trembled at the thought that he might be planning to fuck me there. And then his cock slipped lower, butting at the entrance to my cunt, and I reached down underneath myself and helped to guide him in.

  This was a moment which should be captured on canvas, I decided. The glorious moment when the tight muscles of your pussy willingly cede possession to a thick, probing cock. I could only imagine how Andrew’s talented brush work would capture the expression on my face, eyes closed and head thrown back to expose the pale length of my throat, as that big shaft thrust into me.

  His hands gripped my hips, pulling me back so he was almost completely inside me. It was a long time since I had felt so full, so overflowing with hot male flesh, and I was glorying in the sensation. My fingers found my clit again, rubbing frenetically as he pushed and withdrew, pushed and withdrew. Andrew’s breath was harsh in my ear, his movements more forceful, and I knew he was as close as I was. He stuffed a couple of his fingers into my mouth and I sucked on them, vaguely tasting linseed oil and my own juices. All too soon, he held me tight as he shot his seed into the condom and then I felt my own pleasure crest, colours dancing behind my eyes as vivid as those on the canvases which hung round the room.

  It took another couple of sessions before the painting was finished to Andrew’s satisfaction. Every time I visited his flat, we would end the afternoon having wild, uninhibited sex. He took me into the bathroom so we could watch ourselves in the big mirror as I rode him, and to celebrate the completion of my portrait, he fucked my arse in the studio. I glowed with the satisfaction of good sex as I went about my job, and with Papa in an elated mood as it appeared his wife was going to make a complete recovery, I felt happier at Vettori’s than I had in a long time. Even the art school know-it-alls seemed to have lost their power to annoy me.

  Andrew submitted his collection of paintings and drawings of Soho for his final coursework assignment. Entitled Rain And Neon,it was displayed alongside all the work submitted by the other students on his course at a special viewing for family and friends. It seemed as though he was going to pass with one of the top marks in his year, and the reaction to his paintings and drawings from college staff and invited guests was suitably enthusiastic. From the comments I heard as I mingled with everyone there, it seemed as though he had succeeded in his ambition of getting people to look at the area with fresh eyes. I had been taken along by Andrew even though my contribution to his project was conspicuous by its absence. That was because the painting was hanging proudly on my bedroom wall, where Andrew and I could see it every time we fucked – and as far as he was concerned, that was the only audience it needed.

  About the Story

  LIVING IN A RATHER unexciting area of East London, I knew if I was going to write about any part of the city which really interests me, it was going to be Soho. It’s one of those places everyone has an image of in their head, but the reality is so different from when I first moved to London, over twenty years ago. Then, it still seemed quite seedy but, like the area round King’s Cross, it’s turned into somewhere much safer, but it’s also lost a lot of the individuality it had. The characters and the quirky little shops and pubs are still there, but you really have to seek them out. Like Geri, the narrator of the story, I walk round there and I’ll notice a new branch of Starbucks or a noodle bar, and not be able to remember quite what it replaced, and that’s where the idea of trying to capture the spirit of a place before it disappears came from.

  The café is based on a real greasy spoon in the area, as is the derelict pub Andrew is sketching, which people who know Soho might realise was the Intrepid Fox. Geri is very much part of this old Soho, not entirely sure how she’d fit into the new, homogenised version, while Andrew has the idealism and vision of the young newcomer. I’m writing quite a lot of older woman, younger man fiction at the moment – perhaps it’s just the age I’ve reached! – but I didn’t want Geri to be the stereotype predatory cougar; I felt she needed to be as unsure about the relationship and the changes it would bring as she was about the changes in her immediate environment to make the story work.

  Rain And Neon is the title of a track by Bill Nelson, and it just seemed to fit the mood I was trying to create – late-night Soho in the rain, like an English version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, with the feeling that anything could be about to happen and you just have to trust yourself enough to let it …

  The Tourist

  by Clarice Clique

  I WALKED PAST THE air hostess, ignoring whatever standard processed words she spoke to me. I walked down the clanging metal steps and into the English rain, across the puddled grey concrete and down the never-ending corridors. I queued to present my passport, waited for my black case to spew around to me and then I walked through customs and out into the main airport as I had done countless times before and would do countless times again until the day I finally retired. I walked past the drivers with their bored faces and lazily held up signs, past the families with their expectant smiles, past the tired travellers sipping at badly made coffee, and then I stopped walking.

  She was leaning against the wall, her hair looked as if at one point it had been scraped back into a perfect pony tail but now dark curls had escaped and rested against the pale skin of her face. She was dressed casually, a long brown skirt, some sort of blue top with lace edging round the bust, a dark coat hanging open. Either she was so aware of her youth and beauty she knew she didn’t need clothes and cosmetics to enhance it, or she was trying not to draw any more attention to the curves of her body. The only concession she had made to the Boots beauty counter was long dark crimson nails.

  I knew it was her. The pain deep in my stomach told me it was her. It had been years, no, not years. It had been twenty-one months since I received that last e-mail from her, when she finally accepted I was a happily married man and I wouldn’t carry on corresponding with her. She was married too and had children, but she never made any claims to happiness.

  She’d sent me one photo; I had never sent her any. In the midst of the time when we were e-mailing each other ten or twenty times a day she blessed me with one image of her. She was naked apart from a pair of black stockings. At the edge of the photo lay a pair of discarded stiletto heels; metal handcuffs rested by her outstretched hands. I’d stared as much at those handcuffs as at the curves of her breasts hidden under the waves of her hair. Now the woman from that photo stood mere feet away from me.

  ‘Catherine?’ My voice betrayed nerves I didn’t realise I was feeling until I spoke.

  She didn’t reply and I was fully aware of myself as a middle-aged man approaching a beautiful young woman on the basis that she resembled a photo an e-mail flirtation had once sent me. But it was more than a resemblance. And it had been more than an e-mail flirtation, so much more. Then she looked me up and down and laughed.

  ‘If you like,’ she said, her brown eyes sparkling in a way that separated her from the weary atmosphere of the airport, as if everything surrounding her was just a video playing in the background.

  I wanted to think about her answer, digest what each of the three words could mean but her long legs were already striding away f
rom me. I trotted after her, more puppy than man.

  ‘I want to see everything,’ she said in a low husky voice.

  The heat rose to my cheeks, the first time I was conscious of blushing in my life.

  ‘I want to be a tourist,’ she breathed into my ear. ‘Find a hotel, then show me everything.’

  She didn’t say another word on the tube journey into central London and I had no idea how to ask her if she was the woman I thought she was, it somehow felt rude seeing we were already travelling together. I noticed that she was not wearing the wedding or engagement rings that had graced her long slender fingers in the photo and there were no marks betraying that she had worn any rings recently on her naked fingers. I gazed at our almost invisible reflections in the window opposite and the more logical part of my mind questioned what I was doing sitting so naturally next to this woman, but the majority of my mind was too busy acting out mini porn movies. Every time the movement of the train pushed her knee or arm against my body a thousand nerve endings responded and pulsed straight to my groin. I was a teenage boy again unable to control my excitement, getting a hard-on at the slightest stimulation. I imagined bending her over the seat, pulling her skirt up and fucking her roughly regardless of the other passengers. I visualised sharing her with the other men, varying gang bangs and orgies with being the only man allowed near her while the others looked on in envy with their hands fumbling in their pockets.

  When we reached the hotel I had mentally fucked her dozens of times and was too aware that it was only in my mind that she’d permitted me to touch her. The hotel itself was part of one of those generic characterless chains, which was the main reason I selected it, no chance of bumping into anyone I knew. To be entirely certain I took her to the one in Southwark muttering something about it being a good location for tourist attractions as we walked into one of the blandest red-brick buildings it was possible to build. She didn’t say anything, staring at a nondescript painting in the reception as I booked us into a double room.

  The room was everything you’d expect and nothing more, but it didn’t matter, my whole body was shaking as if it had reached a place where I could no longer control it. I sat on the bed in an attempt to steady my nerves. She was standing by the door, about as far away from me as she could be in this small room. All the things Catherine had written in those e-mails flashed through my mind, I remembered words and images I had once vowed to forget.

  I will suck every drop of cum from your body

  I want to ride your big fat cock until I collapse with exhaustion

  Say the word, or click your fingers, and I will be on my knees in front of you spreading my ass cheeks for you

  Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me. I am begging you to fuck me. Please Fuck me

  I have fallen in love with you. I am in love with you. Please love me

  I took a deep breath and walked towards her. I raised my hands to caress her face, she grabbed my wrists and held them an inch away from her skin.

  ‘I want to see London,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a lot of London to see,’ I said when we were again outside. ‘Where in particular do you want to go?’

  No answer.

  Catherine had never mentioned anything about London, or about cities in general, she wrote of country walks; fingers sticky with blackberry juice; trying not to scratch her nettle stings; her favourite dog who never came back to her no matter how long she spent calling and searching for him. I would read her words and look out of my apartment window at the traffic and noise and imagine rolling around with her in some country field with only the rain covering our skin.

  I took her to the London Eye, queuing to buy a combined ticket with a river cruise, while she stood staring into the green brown darkness of the Thames.

  The pods moved slowly. I chatted constantly to dispel her silence, pointing out the landmarks that she must know as well as I did; trying to be a bit more risqué by mentioning it was possible to hire a private night time trip on the Eye (although I left unspoken my desire to penetrate her while looking down on the bright lights of the unknowing city); finally, I resorted to the most clichéd topic of all, and began to discuss the weather.

  ‘It’s still very grey but at least the rain has stopped,’ I said.

  ‘I like the rain,’ she said, ‘it washes everything away.’

  My heart stopped. I’d said that to her once. Not quite the same but close. I’d said that London suited clouds and rain, if Paris was springtime then London belonged to winter with all the sins of summer hidden and forgotten under a barrage of constant rain. Was it similar enough? Was she giving me a sign?

  I moved to put my arm around her waist, she walked away to stare at London from a viewpoint furthest away from me. I sat down on the hard wooden bench and waited for the pod to finish its circular journey.

  The boat trip was filled with the same tension, although the tension was only on my side. She appeared perfectly calm, staring out at the drops of rains disappearing into the mass of the Thames, oblivious to both the commentary from a depressingly cheery guide and to my presence at her side.

  Catherine’s e-mails had always been so unique, so chatty, she could and would talk about anything and everything. It was the first thing that struck me when we first encountered each other so innocently on a chess internet site. She was the only person I knew who could entwine topics as diverse as world economics, blow jobs and gardening. The woman sitting next to me sat in silence.

  ‘That was nice,’ I said when we stepped off the boat onto the damp London pavement. My own voice was chalk scratching a blackboard. If she had asked I wouldn’t be able to recount a single thing about the trip, I could have described in detail the subtle hints of jasmine in her perfume, or the beauty of her naked face devoid of all make-up, or the way her slightly parted lips made me want to tenderly kiss her, and how when her tongue darted out over them I yearned to pull her head down onto my cock.

  ‘Train stations are nice,’ she said.

  She pronounced ‘nice’ mimicking my voice. The colour rose to my cheeks for the second time in the day, but it was also a rush of pleasure to think that she was at least listening to me however distant she appeared.

  I’d been thinking whether she might want to go to either the nearby London Aquarium or the Dali place but instead I followed her to Waterloo Station. She stood underneath the big clock for one hour. I stayed by her side for a little while before going to buy her a cup of tea and a sandwich overflowing with Mediterranean filling. She took them both off me but only sipped the tea when it had grown cold and she dropped the sandwich into a bin.

  ‘Soho,’ she said drawing out the two syllables so they sounded like two different words.

  I took her to Piccadilly Circus, she didn’t even glance at the bright signs but she paused by Eros.

  ‘When he was first constructed there was controversy about having a nude statue on public display,’ I said with a smile.

  She walked off without looking at me. Catherine in her e-mails had loved facts, always asking questions, always wanting to know more.

  It was now me following her as she led the way up the grand London streets to Soho. She looked straight ahead even when she crossed roads. Soho looked the same as any other district in the daylight, not how I remembered it from late-night stag nights when I was a younger man. She walked straight into a shop and I went after her. The staff looked as bored as they do in so many shops in London but my eyes were wide as I took in the array of sexual paraphernalia lined up so casually on the shelves; whips, dildos, blow-up dolls, repulsive-looking plastic pussies boasting on their packaging of their teenage tightness.

  She was caressing the ersatz cocks as if they were real flesh; my own body ached as I watched her. For the first time she showed an awareness of people around her, smiling at the female shop assistant, winking at a male customer furtively fingering the sealed magazines on a rack in the corner. And she turned to me, laughing at me as she had done when I firs
t approached her. She took my hand and led me up black metal stairs.

  ‘Men tell me they prefer me in heels, what do you prefer me in?’

  I remembered the pair of heels laying at the edge of the photo Catherine sent me, my voice caught in my throat as if it was a physical object I could choke on. ‘I … you … haven’t … didn’t … don’t.’

  She walked away from my mumblings and ran her thumb down a red stiletto heel. She slipped out of one of her flat black pumps and stepped into the shoe like an erotic version of Cinderella. A male shop assistant brought over the other shoe without her having to ask. Then my phone rang. Some classical tune that had seemed right at the time, but blaring through the hush of this shop I realised how wrong it had always been. She looked at me with a raised eyebrow and that one gesture from her gave me no choice but to answer it.

  ‘Hello, darling, where are you?’

  Hearing Heather’s matter-of-fact, straight-to-the-point, voice, there was no guilt in me, just extraordinary pity. How could Heather, who would find even the suggestion of going to a sex shop together shocking, compete with this woman twenty years her junior who I couldn’t keep my eyes off? Not that there was any competition going on, if Catherine wanted me, she could have me, it was as simple as that.

  ‘Just got caught up a little bit, nothing serious.’

  ‘What happened? Your flight arrived on time.’

  So she was already checking up on me; somehow that was a relief, it was less of a betrayal if she didn’t completely trust me.