Acts of Love (30 page)

Arianne leaned back against the cushions, hardly even aware of his hand. She was lost for a brief moment in the past, thinking of the first time she had caressed the lovely Art Deco ivory lady. They had at that time been a sexual trio, her husband and Ahmad and herself, for a mere three months. Even now she felt the same sexual excitement she had then when she had given herself up sexually to them to do with her what they wanted. Jason and later
Ahmad had taught her the ways of erotic love that few women would know. Would she ever have learned them without those two lovers who had honed her sexual drives to match their own? And now there was Ben. Thanks to them she was a sexual being that Ben not only appreciated but loved and adored for being the woman they had helped to make.

She broke her concentration to look at Ahmad. Her skirt had parted and he was still caressing her thighs. She looked down at herself and thought, How raunchy to see oneself being made love to like this, as he bent his head down to place a kiss just above the edge of her lace-topped stocking, to further part her skirt, to place a kiss upon her triangle of silky-soft pubic hair. She could see the passion for her on his face, his delight that she continued still to wear no panties, wanting to remain naked and free, always ready to receive an instant caress, a kiss, to be penetrated by cock on demand. Little had husband or lover realised that her obedience had come to dominate them, these men who thought that they had enslaved her. Her readiness for them, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, was so seductive. They were indeed each other’s sexual slaves. Only now, in this lovely Art Deco room, had Ahmad come to realise that. Was it possible that he hated her as much as he loved her, and that was the reason?

‘They were some of the best days of my life,’ she told him, her voice heavy with the sound that women sometimes produce when sexually stimulated, thinking of orgasm. ‘I don’t regret one minute of them. I will always love you for them.’

Ahmad covered her nakedness neatly with the skirt of her wrap-around dress. ‘I should hope so. And now, there is now.’

‘Yes, there is now.’

Arianne was thinking, there is no other way but to just tell him. ‘Ahmad, I’m in love with Ben.’

‘You mean you have fallen in love with Ben, too?’

‘Too?’

‘Yes, too. You told me only minutes ago that you love me.’

‘I do, very much.’ She was about to elaborate on that. To add, ‘But in a different way.’ And then to tell him she was going to be Mrs Johnson in a matter of weeks. But she was, yet again, too slow.

He was already telling her, ‘Then Ben and I, we’re both lucky men.’

They were interrupted by the doorbell. Ahmad rose from the settee to answer it. Room service arrived with their lunch – two tables on wheels resplendent with crisp, white damask and flowers: one, a serving table, the other set for luncheon for two with beautiful Art Deco silver and dinner-service, and crystal of the same period. A chef and two waiters were in attendance. Muhammad supervised where things were to be set up. Ahmad took Arianne by the hand and led her to a small sitting room off the drawing room. There he poured her a glass of champagne, and told her, ‘I have something to show you.’

Arianne was completely captivated by his latest acquisition:
A Traveller’s Tale of Egypt
, an Italian edition with fifteen plates, printed in 1696. He sat down in a wing chair and opened the book. She sat on the arm so that they looked at it together. It was a thrilling book to own. He thought she looked uncomfortable, and he manoeuvred her from the arm of the chair to sit on his lap, she holding the book. They looked at it together until they went in to dine.

Arianne was ravenous. She ate her meal with gusto. A mound of long, plump, fresh asparagus, cooked to perfection, and served with a light hollandaise sauce, formed the first course. That was followed by quail’s eggs dipped in celery salt and eaten with hot toasted brown bread cut in slender strips and rolled in melted butter. For their main course, they had pan-fried Dover sole in a champagne sauce served with succulent white grapes, and paper-thin slices of potato baked in cream, which had gone all crisp and crunchy on the top layer. Then came a salad of endive. After tiny pots of rich, dark, chocolate mousse and Cornish double cream, dribbled thickly over it from individual jugs, they retreated to the settee while the remnants of their meal were cleared away.

The food and marvellous wines, the service and the ambience might in themselves have made an especially good luncheon date, but there had been more. Arianne’s sense of being so very much alive again, so full of happiness. Her feeling that the bad and lonely times were over for her. Ahmad’s enchanting good company and reminiscences of their voyage up the Nile. Sensuous
innuendoes that were imperceptibly drawing them closer together, and held in check only by the presence of waiters and chef.

At last they were gone. Everyone, even Muhammad, had been sent away. Sitting next to Ahmad on the settee, Arianne was feeling utterly relaxed, seduced by his warmth, charm and generosity, and by his erotic presence. She was silent, savouring a certain togetherness that was familiar and important to both of them. The world outside that room vanished. Ahmad enfolded her with his arm and his powerful gaze. He grazed her lips with his fingers. He could sense ease, that the mind and heart were quiescent, and that her body was open and ready for him. The woman next to him was no more than a sensual being, holding back nothing of herself, a woman making a gift to him of her complete trust.

‘A little music.’ He removed his arm, kissed her on the top of her head, and left her. When he returned it was to the sound of Verdi’s
La Traviata
playing softly in the background. After placing her legs up on the settee, he sat down next to her again, and laid her down in his lap, her head crooked in his arm. They let the music confirm their togetherness in its own way.

Ahmad petted her as one would a favourite cat, kissed her as one might a quiet, half-sleeping child. He knew his Arianne well – how easily he could release in her the exciting sexual animal she was beneath that calm beauty of hers. He cautiously untied the soft bow that held her wrap-around dress, not wanting to jolt her out of her dreamy meditations. She was naked to the waist, wearing only a black half-slip of open-work lace. With equal caution, he slipped her arms from the long sleeves of her dress and, holding her away from him, drew it off her shoulders. She shifted in his arms, and resting on one hip placed her arms around his neck and kissed him sensuously with open lips and a tongue moist and warm that licked his lips. Then she slid back to where she had been in his arms.

He knew that she was half there, in that state where her libido was taking over, that he could have been himself, or Jason, and now even Ben for that matter, until she came out of the reverie she was for the moment indulging. Arianne in that state was always an exciting prospect for Ahmad. She was putty in his hands. He could mould their fucking any way he chose. That was
part of the excitement of Arianne’s sexuality. Along with her passivity came also that moment when her sexually aggressive side took over, and she became as exciting a female libertine as he would ever know. He and Jason had been responsible for that.

He lowered his mouth to her breast and, cradling it in the palm of his hands, took the nipple and the soft dark area around it wholly in his mouth. He knew well how to suck and lick her to excite sexual passion. First one breast, then the other, again and again. She began to squirm in his arms. She raised her knees and placed her feet flat on the sofa, then opened her legs wide. Her lace slip fell back. There she lay naked except for the diaphanous lace lying askew around her waist. It was sheer provocation. His lips never left her breasts, while his hand found its way between her legs, and, his thumb on her clitoris, his fingers parted the soft, voluptuous cunt lips. He inserted caressing fingers there at the very opening of her vagina and along the channel between her vaginal lips. It gave her immense pleasure. The teasing of those outer and inner cunt lips between his fingers, and the toying with the soft, sweet flesh of the slit beneath, made her ready for his easing them slowly into her cunt. It was already moist and warm in that place where he so wanted to be, and softer and more silky than the finest velvet or satin. Ahmad excited her with his fingers and watched her.

He was moved by the serene beauty of her face, the way she bit into her lower lip, trying to hold back lust just a little bit longer. She opened her eyes and the trust was there as clear as could be. She sighed, reached up and placed her arms around his neck yet again. Her head resting on his chest, she clung on to him. He felt the tiny movements she was making with her pelvis, a gentle rocking. He knew that motion: it was Arianne yearning for a man’s penis to penetrate her, to move in and out of her. He revelled in her need.

Ahmad had something for her. As he had put on the music, he had removed her gift from a velvet box and slipped it down the side of the settee where he was sitting. He had been waiting for a moment like this. He had commissioned it to be made to his specifications for Arianne. No vulgar plastic vibrator for her, but one encased in amber and carved by a Japanese sculptor: a penis
with a large circumcised head, of a semi-precious material, and just the right size. He withdrew his fingers, and finally his mouth from her breast. Deftly using both hands now, he stretched open her cunt lips as wide as he could to insert slowly the magnificent, translucent, honey-coloured dildo. A gasp of pleasure escaped her and she fell back in his arms. He turned the switch, increasing the power for her pleasure.

How exciting it was for him to control her like this, to watch the vibrating amber dildo drive her further and further towards sexual ecstasy. He used it on her now as he would his own penis, virtually fucked her with it. How exciting to see it vanish inside her, to taunt her by withdrawing it. Then in again, creating a rhythm to excite her need for more, always more. The crazed excitement and hunger for whatever was sexual, whether base or exalted, was there in her eyes. The way she held her breath, the way her body tensed for him, caused him to seize her roughly by the hair, pull her head back and impose his wildest kisses. Gazing into her eyes, his kisses became more urgent as did his need to hear her call out for him to stop this rapid and now rough penetration by the amber.

He saw tears brimming in her eyes. They meant nothing to him. He stopped his kisses only long enough to ask her, ‘How does it feel, my darling, my love, my whore? It was made just for you. Because I love your hunger for cock.’

‘Wonderful, an incredible sensation, sublime! Have you had it, have you felt it? I want you to. It’s the most amazing sensation. You’ve set me alight; you’re torching me with an erotic flame, Ahmad, Ahmad, help me!’ All this between gasps, reaching for a moment of calm while lost in lust.

He lowered his head to her mound and bit hard into it, then pinched her nipple, rolled it between his fingers and pulled it. He wanted her to feel controlled by him, to realise how alive he and only he could make her feel, and for her to know that he was ready for her.

She pulled his hand away from her breast and stiffened in his arms, and in a husky whisper told him, ‘Please, don’t. No more. I didn’t mean this to happen.’ He had heard those protests before from her and other women. Such words and sentiments only drove him on to possess them. He withdrew the amber halfway,
then gave it a violent thrust. She let out a cry, and he continued fucking her with the amber-covered vibrator, that long, thick shaft sculpted with tiny raised flowers. It was a fine piece of pornographic art. He turned it, twisted it from side to side inside her now with every penetration. He knew well what he was doing to her, how he was rubbing her vagina raw with passion, pressing as hard as he could against the opening of her cervix, how this artificial penis throbbing inside her filled her more tightly than she had ever been filled. The exquisite pain and pleasure she was experiencing was only the beginning for her this afternoon. There was copious sex to come for them.

Ahmad watched her bite her knuckles, close her eyes. He withdrew the amber one more time, then with one last deep thrust, he left it there and closed her legs together. He picked her up in his arms. He could feel just slightly the vibrator inside her doing its work. He was carrying her now to the bedroom. She was behaving as if drugged by sex. He kicked the pair of doors open and walked, with her still in a half-world of sexual ecstasy, to the bed.

The covers had been turned down. The bedside lamps were on. She recognised the pots of salve, the small bottles of aromatic oils, the silk cords he liked, on occasion, to tie her up with. The ice-bucket containing a bottle of champagne was there to quench their thirst, and so was the box he kept his cocaine in, the phials and poppers he liked to break for them both to take when they were coming together. The chemical played tricks on the blood and the mind and the nervous system. An orgasm endured an eternity.

A glimpse of those things on the bedside table instantly sobered Arianne. He had planned it. And why not? Any other time it would have been the norm for them. But this was not the norm. Much as she wanted him, wanted to experience anything and everything sexual with him as she had been doing for so many years, and despite the strong attraction and love she still felt for him, it had already gone much too far. There was Ben. Being in love again. She wanted nothing that was not a part of his life, their life together. She had relapsed dangerously into the past. Had caught herself only just in time. This was not what she wanted – fantastic sex but no feeling beyond an erotic love. That
was all that was happening here, what she had always had with Ahmad. Good as it still was, as it could always be, it was simply no longer enough.

‘Put me down, Ahmad. It’s over.’

Chapter 20

Ahmad smiled down at her. It was a wicked smile, amused at her resistance. A smile that told her he didn’t for one minute believe her. He intended to take possession of her in as many sexual ways as he pleased, even against her will.

‘Don’t do this.
Please
, don’t do this, Ahmad,’ she begged. ‘Listen to me, Ahmad. This part of our life together is over.’

‘Over’. That word rang hollow in his hearing. With Arianne still in his arms, he turned from the bed to walk to a chest of drawers standing against a wall of Art Deco mirror. ‘Over.’ His voice was icy cool. ‘Open your eyes,’ he commanded, a sharpness in his tone that made her obey instantly. ‘Just look at yourself, just feel your own lust at work, those little orgasms coming still, with the aid of a piece of amber filling your cunt, vibrating pleasure even now as you tell me, “over”. All that and your reflection. A magnificent lasciviousness there, wouldn’t you say?’

The way he mocked her word sent a shiver of fear through Arianne. His grip tightened. He was holding her to him with one arm now, using the other to sweep everything on top of the chest of drawers angrily off it. Sounds of splintering glass. Flowers and water, chocolates and books, a decanter of brandy and glasses, tumbled everywhere.

He sat her on the top of the chest of drawers, facing the mirror, but still held her in his grip. ‘Tell me, does this look to you like a woman who believes it’s over?’

Arianne averted her eyes, not wanting even a glimpse of their reflection. It was quick and it was sharp, the slap across her face. She caught her breath, it was nearly a sob. She obeyed him, and looked in the mirror. ‘And what do you see?’ he asked, one arm still holding her prisoner by the waist. She squirmed, hardly knowing what to do with her legs as he pushed her closer to the
mirrored wall. She was obliged to open them, spread them wide. She could feel his heart pounding against her naked back. ‘Relax,’ he told her, in a whisper to her ear. He kissed the side of her cheek. She covered her eyes with her hand. He was so very gentle with her now as he took her by the wrist and removed her hand from her eyes. ‘Look, how magnificently sexy you are. I love looking at your cunt,’ his voice syrup-smooth. He held her captive now, not with his hands, but with his body. She was trapped between him and the mirror. His hands between her thighs were caressing the soft, succulent flesh, her mound of Venus, and pulling back the lips that hugged tight the amber vibrator that was still in place, and was felt even more deeply because of her sitting position, the angle of her legs. She was fearful of denying what he knew to be true: he was still able to do things to her that were unimaginably erotic. Unwilling to lead him on more than she already had, she kept silent.

Raunchy, base, but also voluptuous and exciting: all that she saw reflected in the mirror. It was mesmerising, the sight of her naked but for the slim strip of black lace rolled up around her waist. Breasts tender and pink from his sucking, nipples erect, a tiny bead of blood on the nimbus of one where his teeth had broken the skin. Her genitals, open and exposed from her clitoris to her anus, being caressed by fingers intended to excite. Several inches of the golden amber protruded. She watched as he now wrapped his fingers around it to twist and turn it for her pleasure, while he kissed her passionately on the side of her neck, her shoulders, her back.

She watched the movement of the amber penis, riveted by the sight of the alluring object vanishing again and again inside her. It was as if her cunt were swallowing this honey-golden penis. She caught a glimpse of Ahmad’s handsome, decadent face, the eyes brimming with erotic hunger for her, the lips she knew so well yearning to devour her. She was seduced by the aroma of his skin, fresh as if he had sprung from the sea, with still a hint of sandalwood as if he had passed through a forest of it. He continued his attempt to take possession of her. ‘Does this look like a woman,’ he asked her again, ‘who believes our sexual life together is over?’

He was not waiting for an answer. He inserted the amber deep
inside her for one last time and turned the power down. Now she felt only a faint tremor, the merest shiver. Ahmad turned her around to face him and then raised her from the commode into his arms. There he cradled her for several minutes, kissing her lips and her breasts, and carried her thus to lay her gently on the bed.

He was removing his clothes now. She watched him, wondering what she could do or say to make him understand that she had meant it. It was over for them. She wanted him to let her go, but for them to remain friends. She knew now that this was a naive dream. But she had not realised that when she had made their lunch date, nor when she had entered the suite, nor even when she had allowed herself to slip under his charismatic charm, nor when he had trapped her in the erotic web he spun around her. She bit the side of her lip. She would try one more time to make him understand. She simply could not bear to see all those happy years end like this, for him, too, to vanish as Jason had from her life.

He was naked now, erect, and exuding a powerful sexuality. He would have her, and they both knew it. He bent over her and placed a tender kiss on her lips. He licked them with his tongue, and touched the deep, pink marks on her breasts. He licked the now dried droplet of blood from her nimbus and opened her legs, slowly removed the amber and placed it on the bedside table. Sitting on the edge of the bed next to her, he filled the two bowl-shaped champagne glasses with the chilled Bollinger. She sat up against the pillows and drank from the glass he held to her lips.

Her mouth was dry with a fearful determination. She drank the glass empty. She watched Ahmad open the silver lid of one of the small crystal pots on the table. She knew from experience what that ointment would do when he rubbed it on her clitoris and applied it to her cunt lips, and the rift between them. She closed her eyes and a tear appeared from beneath her long, dark lashes to moisten them. ‘Don’t do this, I beg you, Ahmad. You must listen to me. In spite of what you may want, it is over. That’s what I came here today to tell you.’

He replaced the pot on the table and turned to gaze into her eyes. ‘But you couldn’t.’ He refilled their glasses, drank his own
dry in one swallow and set it down once more on the table. His gaze was steady.

‘My feelings got all mixed up.’

‘Shouldn’t that tell you something? At the very least that our sex life is still driven by love, a love you are unable to give up.’ He went on his knees next to her. She sensed his next step would be to caress her lips with his rampant penis, to drape his balls over her lips. He wanted her to take him in her mouth, something she had always enjoyed in the past. But now, tempting as it might be, it seemed out of the question. She held up her hands, palms outward, to stop him before he made his move. ‘I’m going to marry Ben some time in the next few weeks. I know a new kind of happiness, different from any I have ever felt before. It doesn’t deny how I feel about you. It just puts it firmly in the past.’

He sat back on his haunches to listen to her; then he rose from the bed. If he had heard her, it seemingly meant nothing to him. He was going to fuck her whether she wanted it or not. ‘Mark my words,’ he was very calm, quiet even, very steady, as he told her, ‘you are not going to marry Ben Johnson. You can be sure that I am right about that.’

If his voice and demeanour were calm, the look in his eye was certainly not – hard, nasty. He gripped her by the arm and pulled her to the edge of the mattress, turned her around with her back to him, and forced her down on her knees. She felt the hardness of his penis, the softness of its skin, between the cheeks of her bottom. At this she began to fight back. She scrambled away from him. Still on her knees, she turned to confront him. ‘Oh no, Ahmad, you’ll not do this to me. Never once did you or Jason ever force me to have sex when I didn’t want it. It was always when I was open and ready and hungry for you. I am not any longer there for you like that now. So, please don’t do this to us. I would never be able to see you again. I couldn’t remember you with love. I couldn’t bear that. Rape me now and you’ll destroy all those good years. No, not rape at this time of our lives. I gave you everything of myself, I trusted you to use me sexually for our pleasures. I died hundreds of little deaths in orgasm with you, denied you nothing to slake our thirst for sexual oblivion. Is rape going to be my reward?’

Brave words. Formidable implications. Arianne had no idea
how long they faced each other. She had never been so frightened of anyone in her life as she was of Ahmad during that time. The spasm of hatred for her in his eyes shocked her. She gasped, ‘You hate me.’

‘Yes. I do. Nearly as much as I love you.’ Was that sadness in his voice, or resignation? He froze her with the ice in his tone.

She raised her hand to her mouth, curled it into a fist and bit into it. He reached out to her; she shied away from him. But he had her and pulled her forward on her knees towards him, unrolled the black lace slip from around her waist and covered her nakedness with it. A dry sob escaped her lips, she was trembling. He poured her a glass of champagne and ordered, ‘Drink this, you’ll feel better for it.’ Then he turned his back to her, walked to the chaise longue and picked up his black silk damask dressing-gown and put it on. He left the room momentarily, only to return with her dress. He threw it at her, sat on the end of the bed and watched her put it on.

‘Please, don’t be angry – be happy for me. Life goes on.’ She spoke hardly above a whisper.

‘Nothing stays the same, that’s quite true. You wanted me in the beginning, and then always while Jason was alive. You do remember that?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’

‘Whenever I was in the same room with you, or came near you, whenever I touched you, it was more important than anything else in the world, wasn’t it?’ He raised his voice when her answer didn’t come quick enough. ‘
Wasn’t it?
’

She felt fright in the pit of her stomach. But answered at once, ‘Yes, yes, it was.’

‘We planned it that way, Jason and I – right from the beginning when he fell in love with you – that you should become as debauched and depraved a libertine as we were. We made a bet that within three months we would be sharing you. We chained you to us with sex, erotic love.’

‘I don’t think I want to hear any more of what you’re telling me, Ahmad.’

‘Ah, but why not? It’s very interesting. Love. You were in love with Jason, and then me, and now Ben.’

‘Let’s just leave Ben out of this, Ahmad.’

‘All right, we’ll leave Ben out of it for the moment. We’ll get back to erotic love and the eternal triangle. You loved me then, and now you don’t any more.’

‘Oh, Ahmad, what’s the use?’

‘Answer me. Before Ben came along, did you still love me as much as you did when Jason, you and I were a marriage? You cannot deny we were a marriage?’ She acknowledged it with a nod of her head. ‘Ah, now we are getting somewhere. Then, answer me, when we made our journey up the Nile, did you still love me as you had before Jason’s death?’

‘No.’

‘At last.’ He all but spat the words: they seemed full of venom. Bitterness.

‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The truth. Well that’s the truth, Ahmad.’

‘Then you have been lying. All those days on the river. And for nearly three years after Jason vanished – you didn’t love me then as you did when he was alive? Well, never mind, I knew that. I waited, bided my time, stayed away from you and waited for the day that was bound to come when you would love me as you once loved Jason, utterly and completely – that day when you would give me that last fraction of love that you had always withheld from me. I knew what you were going through, the humiliations, poverty, your aloneness. And still you preferred living and making love to the ghost of Jason to giving yourself up to me. How could you lie to me on that voyage?’

‘I did love you then, Ahmad, but not the way you wanted me to. I wanted to love you, more than anything in the world; I wanted to love you as I had once loved Jason. But it didn’t happen.’

‘Why, Arianne? Why didn’t it happen?’

‘Because it simply wasn’t there to happen. I cannot control love. Love chooses. I follow.’

‘Then love chose Jason?’

‘Yes.’

‘So our love, yours and mine, was a frayed sort of love. When did it die, this poor, shabby love of yours for me?’

‘Stop.’ Now there was anger in Arianne’s voice. ‘What I felt for you was never poor or shabby. I won’t let you denigrate
something as special as what we once had. I loved you from the first time you took me on that beach by the Indian Ocean, and I loved you as well as I could. The same way you loved me. Not wholly or completely, because neither of us was capable of that. It wasn’t because of Jason. It was because of you, because of your voracious appetite for other women. Because love for you is always a game. Because you never wanted the real thing, and you don’t now. If you did, I would have sensed it. It might have made all the difference in the world to us. I was an erotic game for you, and – you would have me believe – for Jason. When did my love for you die? A long time ago with Jason’s death. And now here you are killing whatever love still lingers with your insane jealousies and childish cruelties. After today I won’t even be able to relive my memories of us without finding you there shutting them off for me.’ Arianne stopped there. So many home truths had come tumbling out with her anger, fear and anguish, she could face no more.

‘A wounded look does not become you, Arianne. You swim with the sharks. You’re bound sooner or later to get bitten.’

‘I think I was swallowed up whole.’

Arianne was appalled when Ahmad raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that confirmed to her that that was exactly what she had allowed to happen to her. She had been devoured by her marriage, by the
ménage à trois
. Till now she had not fully known it. All the anger she had felt was suddenly gone. Sheer exhaustion took over, as if she was emerging from the worst beating of her life.

‘Then what if Jason were still alive?’