Carrion: A Story of Passion (3 page)

We eat, we drink, we talk, we laugh, we flirt - I take another step into love. At half past eleven we ask the waitress to organise a cab to take us home.

Alexander pours shots of almond liquor over ice. I light the candles. We sit on the Chesterfield and I do not think of work, or clients, or projects - or of the confrontation I had with the new intern, Marcia that will need sorting out tomorrow. I am soft with alcohol, with love, with desire.

"Would you like to watch something?" Alexander asks, pulling the MacBook onto his lap and flipping it open. I nod, curious to know what it is that he should want to bring into this moment. The sounds of moaning and pleasure are the first things I translate, then the images on the screen. I realise that Alexander filmed us last night – with Celia. I should be appalled. I should be ashamed, but it's all far too sublime: it's like watching fallen angels fuck. We are young and we are free, and we are screwing the world. I am captivated. We are a mixture of white cottons, and masks, of black lace and bones. We are a mound of undulating flesh and eyes and hands and mouths.

"So?" he asks. I glance at him quickly, unwilling to take my eyes from the animated Titian in front of me.

My voice is surprisingly hard to bring forward, I have to think about breathing. "Did you get Celia's number?" I ask.

Instantly he’s over me, his hands running over my thigh, his lips pressed hard to my mouth, bruising my lips until they are plump, like ripened cherries. I inhale the scent of his skin, the smell of his cologne and my head swims. His fingers graze the lace of my stockings and tease the silk edges of my knickers. All evening, my body has been waiting for his arrival. His fingers are urgent and quickly become slick. He slips them in and I push myself against them hungrily, wanting more, desiring more. His knuckles pound against my sex and waves of pleasure mount. Just as I’m about to go over the precipice, he stops. The loss is almost painful. He grabs my hair, pulling my head back, exposing my neck. His breath is hot. His hand folds around my throat, pushing my chin up until all I can see are the candlelight dancing across the ceiling. With his hand clasped, I think how easily he could close his fist and how the darkness would come for me. I wonder if he is thinking of killing me. I twist my head, testing his intentions. He tightens his grip and I gasp.

“Don’t move,” he whispers. “Do you trust me?”

My immediate response is, ‘No’ but I lie. The word, “Yes” comes out tight and hardly formed.

“With your life?” His grip tightens slightly. A tear seeps from my eye; its trail is cold and betrays the powerful cocktail of desire and fear coursing through my blood.

Before I can respond, his fingers are moving back and forwards over my swollen bud; he is rocking me towards oblivion. I can barely breathe. I am a rising phoenix full of light and fire, heading towards the dark. His grip tightens. My head swims, and the sensations of falling collide with the sensations of rising, and the world explodes in a shower of light and shade until all that is left is – nothing.

I stir in the grey dawn. I am still on the sofa, and dressed except for my underwear. With an unusual sense of tenderness, Alexander has thought to cover me with a blanket. Memories of the previous evening are misty, but there are painful remains and I fear having to confront my reflection in the mirror. I stand, adjusting my limbs and bones, checking the extent of the damage. It is not as bad as I first feared. I pad, bare foot to the door of our bedroom and I watch Alexander sleeping. My fingers trace the bruises on my neck and my head cannot equate them with the nephilim creature laid out on the bed. I tiptoe past the bed and head towards the shower room. It does not matter if I wake him; the alarm will go off soon anyway.

I avoid the mirror.

The shower is hot and needles the skin pleasurably. Memories of last night swim back and ripple through my stomach and into my thighs. My hand presses against the cold ceramic tiles and my muscles contort until I’m gasping for breath and fighting off the unexpected orgasm ripping through my body. I feel a sense of ugly betrayal as my body responds hungrily to the rough and dangerous treatment Alexander has inflicted on me.

I flick the shower off and wait for it to pass. My face is contorted with shame and confusion and I’m swallowing down the screams that want to surge from my mouth. I pad the tiles with my clenched fist. I think about leaving him. Walking out. It would be easy. Like severing…

“Good morning, Charlotte,” he says from the door. “Is everything okay?”

Hurriedly, I flick the shower back on, hoping that it will disguise the state I am in. I turn to look at him through the glass and I know that I cannot leave him because I have never loved as much as I love Alexander Bloom.

Chapter Two: Reality

The first challenge of the day had been drowning out the monumental hangover with a serious amount of Starbucks coffee. The counter girl had smiled sympathetically when I asked for a triple shot. It's not how I choose to normally have my coffee, preferring it mostly drowned in milk and sugar.

There had been delays on the Northern line, making me late for the Monday morning meeting. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one affected. I fell into the awkwardly designed office chair, almost tipping over my paper cup and tried to make camp as inconspicuously as possible - which wasn't possible in the slightest. Lucy, our line-manager tutted at me and shook her head before turning to her manager, David, (who sat at the head of the oval table) and rolling her eyes. I didn't need to be psychic to know that there would be a passive aggressive e-mail full of over-used exclamation marks in my in-box later.

The shiny new intern sat in an aura of smugness that would have suffocated newly born kittens. I forced myself to listen to the drivel coming out of David's mouth. It was mainly a monotonous list of tasks and inadequacies, before finally he found some modulation of voice in the hope of motivating us towards heading out there and proving to the Chinese office that London wasn't full of complete "Muppets!" Internally I sighed. If David was in this ball-breaking mood then it meant that Lucy would skip the breaking and go straight to the biting off.

If you’d asked me what I did, I wouldn't have really been able to tell you. It mainly involved talking on the phone, wooing rich company owning clients in order to get them to invest their financial portfolios with Frederick Moore PLC. (The Blue-chip financial house that took me on after gaining my University Degree in Drama – Thank goodness for the subsid business modules.) The best way to describe it would be glorified sales; only I've never been a great a saleswoman. Apparently, according to Lucy, this was my USP (Unique Success Point.) I continually failed to realise how, "…totally charming and disarming" my complete lack of sales skills were to fat, balding, geriatric capitalists. Sometimes Lucy talked about me as if I was one of her working girls and my work more akin to a sex-chat service; several times she tried to get me to invite a client out for lunch in a bid to seal the deal; only I wasn’t entirely sure to what lengths she expected me to go in order to secure those multi-million pounds investments. I couldn’t completely trust that she hadn’t put me on some kind of promise. I swear her red-lipsticked mouth had an autonomy of its own that didn’t ever feel the need to communicate with her conscience – if she had a conscience.

Lucy talked a lot of shit that I'm not even sure she really believed. At least I hope she didn’t for the sake of her soul. The meeting ended and I missed the conclusion - it was probably something along the lines of "Try harder, score faster, team!" One of David's particularly annoying phrases. I packed up my things, took a swig of my coffee and winced against the bitterness before re-camping to my workstation. I slouched down low enough in my chair so that I could block out the sight of Marcia, the intern. I couldn’t actually define what it was that sprang my venom with that girl, but it might have been her hyper energy that caused her to constantly smile and widen her eyes like a crazed bull-frog looking for a shag, or it could have been that I could hear her constantly giggling on the phone with clients like some giddy cheerleader, or that I had to watch her flirt with every man, woman and mirror in the office - or maybe it was that everyone just thought she was so “great!”

I sighed heavily and thought about doing a bit of retail therapy online before facing my e-mails, one of which was bound to be from Lucy. I scanned the first page of ASOS, but soon realised my newfound heart is not in it. I clicked off the page and started to flit around the web, looking for sites that sold silk gowns, lace underskirts and boned bodices. Someone walked behind me and my heart skipped a beat, instinctively my fingers clicked down my screen; it wasn’t because I was surfing the web when I should be working (everybody did that - mostly when talking to clients) but it's more because of what I'm looking at.

I clicked onto my client list and picked up the phone. I needed to return a missed call to Chuck Harrington, my Texan oil-king and see if he wanted to move his portfolio to a "new exciting share related investment."

He greeted me with, "Hey, Charlie, my favourite money gal!" (I had never invited him to bastardise my name.)

I rolled my eyes and wondered if the man was as much of a cliché as he sounded.

"When you gonna get around to making this a face to face business agreement, Charlie – you sure as hell sound a lot more interesting than my finance boys.”

I laughed because it was what was expected. "Well now, Mr Harrington, you never know – make a big enough investment and I may just need me to come over and sign those papers with you." I force myself to giggle and think how pleased Lucy would be.

"That's my gal - always think about the size of the investment package first." He barrel-laughs. "So tell me more about it, only make it quick, I've got a site walk in ten." I get the impression that he invests with Frederick Moore purely so he can tell the guys at the country club that he has 'London' Investments. I'm on the phone with Chuck for more than half an hour (clearly his site visit can wait) but in the end he says,

"Yep, just send over the papers to whatever you think and I'll get the boys to take a look." By boys, he means his own finance team. I find it strange that he should not get 'his boys' to talk to me directly, seeing as he clearly has no real interest in the ins and outs of investment portfolios.

When the call ended, I was sure to make a noticeable thing of walking up to the client board and putting a large tick through Chuck Harrington's name. I wrote the figure of £12M next to it and drew the customary smiley face – something Marcia started a week into her internship and which all the team adopted. I'd just secured the company a twelve million pound deal that Frederick Moore would magically turn into a six million pound profit in the first few weeks of owning it. I never investigated too far into what exactly Frederick Moore invested in – I was afraid of what I might discover, and then I’d have been forced to make some kind of ethical decision that would have probably ended up in me becoming homeless and starving.

I smiled inwardly as Marcia looked over at the board and forced herself to mouth a strangled congratulation. Less than ten minutes later, she headed over to the board and put a tick through the name William Green, writing £13M next to his name and drawing a smiley face, which I swear was winking. She stood for a moment, scanning the office to check it had been noted and then she caught me looking at the board. She grinned, awaiting her congratulations. She was left waiting. I slid back down into my chair and flicked through my paperwork, making myself look busy and then I opened my e-mail. There as expected was an e-mail from Lucy that consisted of nothing other than a subject line. It read, 'MY OFFICE. SOON AS!!!!!'

I stood. I wasn’t invited to sit. All at once, I’m back in the headmistress’ office. I imagine Lucy with a cane, and the image isn't entirely displeasing. She sat forward with her fingers laced together.

"I hear you've just closed the Chuck Harrington deal," she said, flicking a smile of plastic Parisian Red. I took a small pleasure in noting it had smudged one of her front teeth, making her look vaguely ridiculous and clown-like.

I nodded my head.

"You do know that he'll only deal with you!"

I raised my eyebrows, genuinely surprised. I had guessed that the old guy had a bit of a soft spot for me, but I hadn’t realised how deeply his cross Atlantic fantasy ran.

"It's a bloody good job that you can close a deal, Charlotte, because god knows, I don't get it!" She screwed up her mouth and I saw that her face is truly ugly.

I folded my hands across my chest, protecting myself from the monster in front of me. Silently I cursed my obvious display of cowardice. I knew that I should be approaching the table and slamming my palms down, telling her to get the fuck off my back and to let me get on with it in my own way. I should have told her to go and screw herself because clearly nobody else was doing the job - but I didn’t. I forced myself to unfold my hands and part my legs in a slightly pathetic attempt at making myself seem less subordinate.

"I don't know how you do it, Charlotte, but your one of our best profit performers. David says I should leave you to it – but that's not my style: I like to nurture potential, to kick a dead horse until it decides it wants to live."

My brow furrowed at her clumsy, and to be frank, absurd analogy. She prated on about coaching and guidance, and motivation and blah de blah de blah de blah...

Outside, on the window-ledge was a magpie. It tapped on the glass, bewitched by the glitter of the glass in the sun, but Lucy was too far into her own ego to notice it. My eyes ran over its form, noting how one of its feathers stuck out at an odd angle: broken. It turned the creature into something damaged and misshapen.

I wondered what it was going to be like to cut through the flesh and into the body of a once living thing; to lift out its innards and to turn the skin inside out. I imagined the feel of holding the eyes between my fingers and I contemplated what the dead see. Do the eyes turn inwards to look at the soul? I turned my attention back to Lucy and found myself studying her sculptural form, exploring the bones under her skin. I looked into her eyes and imagined them as shiny glass buttons.

Lucy’s mouth clacked open and shut and it took me a few moments to catch up with what she is saying.

"... over the last couple of weeks. Is there anything I should know about a change of circumstances?"

I shook my head and she mistook it at first for an answer to her question.

"The last couple of weeks?" I repeated, furrowing my brow.

She nodded and attempted a facial expression of caring and understanding. It looked like she was in pain. "It's just that you've seemed a little preoccupied. I was wondering if you'd been under the weather?"

"Have I given you concern about meeting my monthly target?" I asked, knowing that it is only the twentieth of the month and I have already surpassed my target.

"It's not that. It's the way that you are... presenting yourself."

I glanced in one of the mirrored panels of her cupboards. I was standing straight on black Kurt Geiger stilettos, dressed in a black Austin Reed skirt suit and a Ralph Lauren white shirt. My hair was cropped short and textured. My stockings were not laddered and I had showered that morning. Admittedly, I looked a little tired. Under the harsh fluorescent lights I could see that the pale violet petals under my eyes had been poorly covered by Touch Éclat, but I hardly warranted the,
'you look a mess, get your act together'
conversation. I smoothed my hands over my skirt and my fingers caught on the suspender belt underneath. I pressed my lips together to prevent a smile at the thought of my life outside of the office.

"Well, I'm sorry if I have given a poor impression of late, I'll do my best to ensure that you are more satisfied with my presentation in the future," I said in my most neutral voice.

She looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t quite read but I got the feeling that somehow our conversation had not been the kind of sadistic pleasure she’d hoped for. Bullying was obviously her fuck replacement, and I had left her sadly disappointed.

The altercation between Lucy and me were as exciting as it ever got at work. The rest of the day was spent doing what needed to be done, broken by a trip to the deli across the road for lunch and a mid afternoon walk down to Starbucks on the ground floor when the thought of anymore crappy vending machine coffee made me want to puke. On the way, I ordered a box of doughnuts from the bakery next door and asked them to deliver them to the office on the sixth floor. It was my birthday after all. I watched the clock and as soon as it hit five-thirty, I packed up and left.

It was already dark outside. It was still raining. I watched the number 5 bus go by. The number 5 was the bus I used to catch to get home when I couldn’t face the tube. It was over a month since I had caught that bus. I stood under the glass canopy, taking shelter from the rain. The most natural thing in the world would have been to walk up to the bus stop, travel the fifteen minutes across town and unlock my own door with my own keys; the same as I’d done for first eighteen months of my glittering graduate career. I thought about my flat and how the spider plant on the kitchen windowsill would be dying, prompting a strange pang of guilt. The washing in the machine would have gone mouldy and God knows what I'd left in the fridge. I looked up at the megalithic steel and glass building in front of me and wondered where Alexander’s office was. He'd been there for less than two years and already he had his own office, and knowing him, a brass plaque on the door. My phone went. It was Alexander. He informed me that he was going to be on a late call to the States and that I should go on home. He left the key to the flat in reception. It struck me that I had not been given my own key before now. He said not to worry about supper, that he'd bring something home with him.

Home. He meant his.

"There's wine in the fridge. I'm hoping to be away by seven."

"Okay, I'll see you then."