A Fine Profession (The Chambermaid's Tales Part One) (37 page)

And with my feet, I raped his cock so that he erupted like
Mount Vesuvius all over himself and the bathroom floor. He spewed his misspent spunk more than once. Many times. He was ripe and it anguished me that his cock was so wasted. I wanted it inside me but that could not happen. I got up and angrily asked, “Why no wife or girlfriend?”

“
I could ask you the same thing.”

“
You're a fuck, you know that?”

“
Yeah and you're an idiot for letting him string you along. Any man who does that to a beauty like you must be a knob-jockey.”

I sensed this reprobate was unhappy about his treatment at work perhaps, or lacking a promotion he felt he deserved. He didn't know the intricacies of my love affair with Noah.

“Noah at least knows when to shut the fuck up and get his cock out, not spew some sob story.”

I turned on my heel and dressed quicker than I ever had before, simply pulling on jeans and t-shirt, gathering my underwear and bolting out of there. I was furious and had words for
my Master.

Later, as I relayed the story to Noah, he asked that he be given a demonstration of how I raped the milky white cock with my feet. Then, for my insolence (in having let the buck lick me), Noah forced me to rim him while I pumped his cock again, with my palm clamped around him. I was forced to sleep that night tied up, blindfolded and gagged, and every few hours, he woke to touch my clit with his tongue, but never to bring me to a head. When I cursed him, he slapped me. Then, in the morning, anguished from unfulfilled longing, he pressed his cock in me and fucked me wildly, while I was still tied and gagged. I adored his possession and ownership of me. I furiously orgasmed until his cock buckled under my command. I squirted several times and my orgasm made me prostrate for minutes afterward. He untied me and lavished me with kisses and declarations.

Soon after, in the shower, he was inside me again.

“Why did you send the young buck to me?” I asked, as he moved slowly inside me.

“
As a treat.” He kissed my nose.

“
For whom?”

“
Me,” he brazenly admitted.

“
You meant to infuriate me? You meant to…”

“
Yes, I meant for all this. It gets better every time you're naughty with those men.”

I had to admit, it did.

“What about…” I trailed off, but thought better of asking him if he feared I may one day have my head turned. What if I had actually been so tempted that I let the man have his way with my pussy?

No
ah smiled and kissed my mouth. “Nobody can touch us,” he said, arrogantly.

I did not know whether that was true.

That was before the miscarriage…

Noah and I took
a holiday to the Maldives after my miscarriage but it might have been the worst thing we ever did. No matter how much we tried to enjoy our remote little island hut surrounded by truly ethereal landscape, we couldn't. We both tried to hold in our emotions but it was no use. Stuck together, and feeling blue, we couldn't hide our feelings. I shut down completely and refused to talk, but he tried to agitate a reaction. In the end, we couldn't bear to be in the same room together, unless to paint on smiles for the attentive waiters who speed-boated huge buffets of food across to our little pad. We never said the words but we blamed one another for the situation we were now in and we each felt unable to cope with our emotions. I thought all for the best, imagining such a place might give us the return to happiness we each so desperately needed. The purest blues that blurred the scorching sky and Indian Ocean into one were no solace whatsoever. Sweet breezes sweeping through the terrace doors were negligible. The food taunted us. The bed tortured us though its saving grace was its size, so we didn't have to sleep squashed together.

Little things, such as his tendency to leave mess everywhere, started driving me insane. So, I started doing the same. He looked at me like I was shit on his shoe and tried to hold back the snarling quips he had about my childishness. My love of order and cleanliness had always been a joke of ours but became a weapon of his to try and force me into an argument.
I knew he wanted an excuse to make me hate him; to make him feel easier. Neither could say what we actually felt – that we hadn't asked to fall in love and now found ourselves in this situation. We did anything to avoid the real issue and the more dirty underwear he left strewn, the more I did. The more teabags he left on the side, the more I did. The more I slammed doors, the more he did. It was so stupid and the flight home was awful. I spent it pretending to sleep and he spent it getting drunk and being rude to the aircrew.

I knew that the things were we avoiding – that we had been suppressing for so long – were
threatening to undo us (the us that was convinced we were content with our relationship being all about the sex). Up until that point, all we had ever worried about was what underwear I'd wear on his next visit, what food I would buy, what positions we would try next or how much I had wanted my recent clients but had declined because I loved him. I was totally aware of how much this was ruining my ability to keep the low self-esteem at bay, but he had no idea. I also knew there were things he was hiding, still.

He would say,
“Why do you love me?”

I would respond,
“Because I do.”

My response never satisfied him.
It did not matter how many orgasms I endured. I did not know how to transform our relationship into the real thing. Those weekend visits and the distance between us that made “our hearts grow fonder” were all part of the fantasy binding us. I wished I had the ability to make him see inside my mind and see what I felt; feel how he made my skin tingle and my heart race. I had chosen him over everyone else but that still did not seem enough.

We returned home and agreed to have a break from one another. I was adamant about returning to work and even if my boss had told me to go home, I think she knew I simply wouldn't listen. I believed work would give me purpose and help me clear my head.

People stayed out of my way, fearful of the mood they might find me in. I became surplus to requirements really, so much so that I spent most of the day shining up old pennies with brown sauce. I beca
me convinced the hotel needed cleansing of this filthy infestation and I went around emptying all the tills in the building, making it my sole purpose in life to simply clean dirty old coins.

Someone must have called or emailed Noah and he turned up one day. We hadn't seen one another for around four weeks. He walked into my office and locked the door. He saw all the thousands of one and two penny coins across my desk, piled up neatly, waiting to be sorted into neat little parcels for the bank. On my top tray was a bunch of invoices and order forms waiting to be dealt with.

“Let's get to work,” he said, and hung up his coat, sitting down in a chair to ask me where to begin.

“
Those bags,” I said.

“
Okay. And then I shall do the paperwork for you. I may need a little help from you though.”

“
Okay,” I stuttered, and started crying.

I walked toward him and he wr
apped his arms around me.

“
The doctor warned me this might happen,” he said.

“
Who called you?”

“
Rochelle. Nice girl. Only friend you seem to have here.”

“
I know. She is nice. What did the doctor say?”

“
Given your history, he said you might become depressed.”

“
I don't feel right, that's true. I don't.”

“
We'll go to the doctors. Together.”

“
Okay.”

We did indeed visit my trusted GP back home in Epworth and I was prescribed some medication and advised to speak to a counsellor. Noah met all the family. My sister flirted with him outrageously but he was unperturbed. He moved toward me and held my hand, kissing it, while everyone looked on gobsmacked.

I think he was nothing like they expected. He was polite and a lot older than me, well-dressed and handsome, not really debonair but definitely of sufficient character.
I was frightened to leave him with them in a room in case they told him things about me I did not want him to know. In the end, I was too exhausted to fight back. I went to bed and no doubt they stayed up all night discussing my condition. That was the first time I felt the urge to run away from all my problems. Everyone was in on it then. I had decided to take the pills the doctor gave me but I had also decided not to trust anyone I knew ever again. Noah was encroaching on the life I thought I had left behind. I felt like that lesser person with him then and it was unbearable.

The fantasy was dying.

Being with someone was a daily battle for me because I had spent almost 30 years looking after myself before he came along. That was a struggle. Thinking about someone else's feelings too was terrifying. I sometimes felt that I was better off alone, unless we could maintain the great fucking we had been doing. Unless we could pretend that I wasn't depressed and hadn't suffered a miscarriage, not to mention everything else, the extreme orgasms we were used to enjoying would no doubt die.

Noah crept into my room at around
2am and got under the covers with me, threading his cold arms and hands around me. I was wearing one of my old threadbare nighties. I jolted out of sleep.

“
Jesus, you're freezing!”

“
Your dad and I shared a few cigars.”

“
Oh. He plied you with the cognac?”

“
A little,” he sniggered, and nuzzled my neck.

“
I'm sure they've told you how awful a daughter I am?”

“
Yes, they have. And I still love you.”

I turned and glared at him, and he grabbed me between his arms
in his bear grip.

“
They love you, Charlotte. We all do.”

That was the worst thing about it all. I felt I didn't deserve their love or their constant ne
ed to help me with my “problems”. With every day I spent with Noah, I had grown unwittingly and increasingly dependent. I hated the feeling of being needy or weak and it made me jittery. I felt sure that leaving everything behind might prove easier. I also felt like I had lost sight of myself with my constant need to please. Sometimes, the only comfort I had was to remember my darling Alex and the peace he had given me, but even then, who knew how that might have turned out.

I rolled on top of Noah and kissed him. He was a little reluctant but when I lifted up my nightdress and pulled his boxers away, he couldn't help but become aroused.

He rolled on top of me and kissed me deeply. I enjoyed the tastes in his mouth, it made me feel as though I had hooked myself a gentleman.

“
Are you back on the pill?” he asked.

“
No,” I said.

“
Hold on then,” he said, fiddling with his wallet.

My orgasm was dead and buried already
right then, but I'd allow him to carry on.

“
We don't want to risk anything. We have plenty of time.”

H
e crawled back into bed with me, laying his body on top of mine. In my childhood bedroom, he was careful to be quiet and I enjoyed the meeting of our bodies, though I couldn't quite allow myself to forget his eagerness to prevent another pregnancy. When he was finished, he cuddled me up and fell asleep directly.

“
I love you, Charley,” he said, in a drunken, dreamy haze.

“
Ditto,” I said, despite knowing full well that I was growing anxious about how everything was turning out. I was thinking about running. I really was.

It was as he said before,
Is love enough?
Noah and I had swapped roles throughout our relationship, switching between dominant and submissive. I didn't really know where the boundaries lay anymore. Sometimes, I felt sure, he had sent some of his colleagues to the Chambermaid's door as a test. He always maintained he simply wanted me to enjoy myself as much as possible, as though these men were gifts. I knew, however, he was constantly seeking out my strengths and weaknesses, pressing me for a reaction, almost as if to reassure himself that I would undoubtedly hurt him in the end.

From then
on, I decided, I would do things my way. I'd go back to wearing scruffy clothes by day and being the Chambermaid by night. I'd not only be her, but, a better version of her. I'd wait for the right candidate to come along and I'd ensure Noah was sent a test of his own. It was easier if he left me. That was better.