Ambition (15 page)

Warren walked to the trolley. ‘Oh, champers, lovely.’

Pope looked at him, amused. ‘Don’t wait to be asked, do you?’

‘Ask and you shall get, sir. That’s the Bible.’

‘It sounds more like Dale Carnegie. Damn, no glasses.’ Pope looked around the room, and a sly smile crossed his face when he looked at Susan. ‘Miss Street, can you stand on
your head?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said dubiously.

‘Right, go and stand on your head over there – you can use the wall as support.’

‘But I want my champagne!’ She’d been drunk and she’d been sober; drunk was better.

‘You’ll get your champagne, madam, and sooner than you think.’ He popped the first cork expertly and handed the bottle to Warren, who raised it to his lips. Pope put a hand
gently on his bare, glossy arm.

‘Warren. How do you ever hope to find the lifestyle you seek, which was no doubt inspired by bad American soap operas, while you still lap from the bottle like a kitchen toto? Use a
vessel, for goodness sake.’

‘But there are no glasses . . .’ Warren looked yearningly at the Krug, beginning to suspect that it had only been brought up here to torment him.

Pope gestured towards Susan; Warren turned to look at her and smiled. He found the combination of comedy and eroticism – her narrow, luminous body with her dark hair fanning out over the
red carpet and her breasts falling into her wide-eyed, determined face as she watched them solemnly – lovable rather than arousing. ‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey you.’

Tobias Pope leaned close to him. ‘One thing you must learn, dear boy, is that champagne tastes best with fish. That’s why it’s synonymous with smoked salmon. And what do we
have here?’ He pointed at Susan. ‘A living, breathing side of the stuff.’ He put his mouth so near Warren’s ear that he could taste his tangerine-scented pomade.
‘Champagne tastes best out of cunt. That’s the most essential thing you’ve got to learn about life. That, and the sayings of Karl Marx.’

Warren laughed and spoke to his brother who took hold of Susan’s feet and spread them. Opening her with one hand, his tongue fitting into the gap between his front teeth as he concentrated
on the delicate task, Warren poured.

She closed her eyes against the slight burning sensation. It made as much sense as anything else that had happened since that death in the Brighton bedroom. She felt liquid trickle icily down
her stomach and visualized it forming stalagmites – stalactites? – on her nipples. She was full, and the twin held her firmly as Warren bent down to drink.

Pope stood smirking at them as Warren straightened up. ‘A pretentious little bouquet?’

‘Delicious!’ He courteously grabbed Susan’s feet and gestured to his brother. More Krug was poured, more lips sucked at her.

‘A bold little vintage, I should think,’ said Pope. ‘Stroppy, assertive, with just a hint of . . . subservience.’

‘You wish some, sir?’

‘I’m allergic.’

‘Oh, how dreadful,’ Warren said happily, taking a swig from a fresh bottle while confidently supporting her with one hand.

‘I don’t think much of your brother’s table manners. Look at him, going at the poor girl like a piglet coming off a hunger strike at its trough. You can drop her now – I
think we’ve all had enough.’

Warren carefully let go of her feet, propping her against the wall; she slid down it, collapsing inelegantly and causing champagne to spray out of her. The three men looked at her as she lay
there: the twins still had their erections and Pope still had his smirk. Which was probably as near as he ever got to having an erection, she thought moodily.

‘Do you fancy another dip, gentlemen?’

Warren spoke to his brother and then to Susan with a smile. ‘Kneel, please.’

The silent twin knelt behind her, entering her champagne-drenched insides easily this time. Warren held her by the hair and guided her mouth to him.

She gagged and spat. ‘Yeucch! The lubricant on it – it’s like fish oil!’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d object to that after that little performance you gave in Rio, my dear.’

‘Mr Pope, I really can’t—’ She screwed up her face in disgust.

‘Look at this, you boys, will you? This is a real comment on the morals of the modern girl. They don’t mind putting a foot of throbbing meat in their throats even if they did only
shake hands with its owner half an hour ago and have never been formally introduced. But a little bit of aesthetically displeasing rubber and – oh! How could you ask this of me?’ He
looked at Warren. ‘OK, I’m speaking to you man to man now. Well, man to boy. You have a clean bill of health in your public parts?’

Warren drew himself up to his full height and gave Pope a look which expressed all the wisdom, sorrow and indignation of his people. ‘Sir. How can you ask me that? I would rather you had
cut off my right hand.’

‘OK, I take it back.’

‘Cut off my right hand and thrown it to the dogs—’

‘Don’t pile it on, boy. Well – I like you and I trust your boss; take the damn thing off. What Susan wants Susan must have.’

While Susan couldn’t exactly say she
wanted
the best part of a foot of African cock rammed down her throat, Warren was a sweet kid and she might as well make the best of it. His
brother knelt up to get a better look, holding her firmly and pumping professionally, and she felt pleasure stir and build.

Considering how difficult it is for just two people to achieve a simultaneous orgasm, it was either true love or a tribute to the twins’ expertise that the three of them began to climax at
the same moment.

‘Good, good!’ Tobias Pope over the three-part harmony of their groans. ‘Now pull it out, boy! Shoot! Shoot in her face!’

As champagne trickled out of her insides, and sperm trickled out of her mouth, Susan Street couldn’t help reflecting, even as she arched and throbbed in the throes of her orgasm, that the
world was turning upside down.

‘Sorry about the time, Bryan,’ said Susan automatically as she stepped calmly into the editorial meeting three-quarters of an hour late. ‘Only Zero needed a
little pep talk.’

‘Say no more, Sue. We’re only happy to have you back from a taxi ride with Zero Blondell in one piece.’

‘She thinks we don’t—’ she said, and gasped as she looked at the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It wore a dark grey business suit, and she was about to register
its skin as olive when she realized that olives were either black or green and this skin was the palest beige. Its hair was black, a very Seventies cut which had once been seriously long and still
didn’t have the heart to be short, curling over the collar of its white shirt. It wore a black knitted tie, which she immediately visualized gagging her.

Insomuch as the beautiful thing resembled anything it was Michael Douglas, though the Michael Douglas of the small screen rather than Cinemascope, being no older than thirty-three. When it
smiled its teeth were discoloured and cracked; she wanted to run her tongue over them, read their secrets like Braille.

‘Sue, this is David Weiss. At long last.’

It was obvious from Bryan’s tone that she should know who David Weiss was. The name rang a bell; was he some hotshot financial hack, perhaps? He held out his hand and said
‘Hi’
in a low voice. Weiss, as in Vice Squad: how appropriate. He was American; he had to be financial.
Best
readers were very big on being advised what to do with
their money; David Weiss was obviously Bryan O’Brien’s answer to Bob Beckman.

‘Hello.’ She shook his hand. ‘Nice to have you with us.’

‘It’s nice to be here.’ He was looking at her in a way that made her stomach do things it could have got an Olympic gold medal for if it had been doing them on a high
board.

The editorial went by in a blur. She kept looking at him; not his face, she knew that now, but his body, his thighs, his groin. She had to know what he had in there, then she could think about
something else. But right now it was impossible. Looking at his groin for the nth time she felt his eyes on her and looked up. He wasn’t even smiling, just staring at her in a way that made
her saliva glands flood as if she had just smelled a steak after a six-week diet.

When Bryan O’Brien announced, ‘It’s a wrap,’ she was on her feet and out of his office in a shot, almost running until she came out on to the second-floor landing of the
Best
building. She leaned against the wall for a moment before starting down the steps to the toilets. Her clitoris was going to burn a hole in her Norma Kamali bodysuit if she
didn’t detonate it soon.

As she put her hand on the door, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘Excuse me – Susan?’

She looked up into the face of David Weiss. ‘Do you want something?’

‘Yes. The same thing as you.’

With a sharp intake of breath she caught him by the tie and literally dragged him into the toilets. They were empty. ‘Quick, quick,’ she gasped, and they staggered like drunks into
the nearest cubicle, locking the door.

Pressing against each other they kissed frantically. Then she freed her hands to undo her bodysuit between her legs. She ripped off her tights, kicked off her shoes and stood looking at him,
panting.

‘Susan, will you do me a favour?’

‘Anything.’ She meant it.

‘Take my cock out. I’ve had an erection ever since you walked in that door, and it’s killing me.’

‘I’d much rather it was killing me,’ she said, and they kissed bluntly and impatiently as she opened his trousers and took it out inch by inch – not believing that there
could be yet more and more of it. It must be a trick, like those long strings of coloured kerchiefs conjurers kid children with; she felt the same wonder now as she handled it. It was like a cosh
wrapped in plush pink velvet: ten inches easily rising from thin, furry thighs. She bent to kiss it.

‘There’s no room for that. There’s no time.’ His voice was husky. ‘Get over that toilet.’

It was, as Susan told a sulky and disgusted Zero later that week, the way all those surreptitious whispers tell you sex is meant to be, before you get old enough to know better and expect less.
You know those mash books where women turn into wild animals because they love fucking so much, and go off their heads if they have to go without it? It was like that. (Zero had groaned.) Whereas
we know that, in reality, most men are so useless (Zero had brightened considerably here) that most women find sex marginally less pleasurable than waxing their legs. But this was back to those
adolescent basics; back to heat and lust, before the romance industry gets its claws into you and makes you think you want sweet words and soft lighting. The lighting here was fluorescent and
terminally unflattering, and the words were ‘You cunt’, ‘You whore’ and ‘I’m coming, you bitch, squeeze it!’ but it was perfect sex: the beauty of the man,
the intensity of the desire, the purity of the act. It was, Susan said later, the Big Thing at last. And she wasn’t just talking about his cock.

They separated and stood panting against opposite walls of the cubicle. They looked at each other and laughed and David Weiss said, ‘Gee, whoever thought up the name casual sex for sex
between strangers was way off. I can’t remember sex that uncasual.’

‘Me neither. And there’s nothing more casual than the type of sex you get in a long relationship that’s gone bad that take it or leave it, like it or lump it sex.’

‘Say, you’re wise as well as beautiful. As John Wayne was always saying to those Tartar princesses.’

Again they laughed, darting glances of shy and amazed delight at each other as they got back into their clothes. When she was dressed he took her face in his hands, looked into her eyes and
smiled. ‘Isn’t this weird, us hitting it off like this? I thought you wouldn’t give me the time of day.’

She laughed ‘To be honest, I didn’t even know Bryan had hired you. I’m hopeless on that side of things.’

He wrinkled his brow. ‘Say what?’

‘Numbers. I get vertigo.’

‘Susan – sorry, who do you think I am?’

‘A financial journalist.’

He shook his head. ‘Susan – I’m David Weiss.’

‘I know. I think I’ve heard of you.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I use my mother’s name. Because I fell out with my father. He brought me here by way of patching things up. My father is Tobias Pope.’

The rest of the afternoon passed in a daze, like when you get drunk at lunchtime. She even had that coppery taste in her mouth, the one that doubles for both fear and hangover
and now, it would seem, love. She kept sending Kathy out for Crest, Amplex and Listerine, but nothing could budge it. The novelists told you about lack of sleep and appetite, but that was
acceptable because they made you look and feel so dramatic, consumptive,
romantic.
What the novelists didn’t tell you was that love gave you halitosis, just when you least needed
it.

He had the office next to hers, with the same glass partitioned door; she kept finding excuses to walk past it. He had the staff in one by one – Bryan, Oliver, Max, the subs, the
reporters. But not her.

Around five-thirty she passed his door yet again and this time he had Zero with him. The atmosphere of ill-will that radiated from the girl was so strong that it seemed to seep under the door
like a camp dry-ice dangerous chemical in a Fifties sci-fi film. Zero sat bolt upright, her tail pushed comically to one side sticking straight out from her chair, staring at David Weiss solemnly.
Susan could see from her profile that she wasn’t even pouting. What on earth could he be saying to make Zero lose her pout?

Susan was furiously and furtively flossing her teeth when the door swung open and there stood Zero, staring at her accusingly.
‘Bora da,
baby doll,’ she said quietly.

‘Come in, Zero. Shut the door. Why don’t you put your feet up and tell me a few lies about people?’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’ She closed the door and leaned against it.

‘Why did you tell me David Weiss was a dog, Zero?’

‘Because I knew you’d want to fuck him the minute you saw him. I was just trying to put off the awful hour of reckoning, wasn’t I? Have you to myself a bit longer.’