Eighty Days Yellow (26 page)

She saw Charlotte lower her head to Dominik’s lips and kiss him. Jasper crowded in closer, began nibbling on Charlotte’s ear lobe. The sound of an unseen couple making love on the carpet right behind her reverberated across the room.

Alerted by the soft sounds, Dominik broke from Charlotte’s embrace and walked across to Summer and, without a word, untied her hands. She lowered her arms, grateful he had finally remembered her before cramp could set in. He kissed her forehead with all the delicacy in the world and then Charlotte was with them.

‘You were beautiful, my dear,’ her friend said, stroking her cheek. ‘Just wonderful.’

Summer hoped Dominik would now devote himself to her, but Charlotte, trailed by the ever-erect Jasper in all his splendour, took Dominik by the hand as if to lead him away.

Standing there naked, normal circulation returning to her arms, Summer felt a pang of jealousy at the way her friend wouldn’t let go of Dominik, wouldn’t leave him alone. Didn’t she know that in a curious way she couldn’t quite explain that Dominik was hers? Summer’s? Why couldn’t she leave them alone? It was none of Charlotte’s business after all.

Finally, Dominik said, ‘I think I need another drink. Anyone else need a refill? Summer, some water maybe?’ Summer nodded and Dominik left them to make his way to the kitchen, stepping across bodies in motion, slaloming between the various carnal activities in process.

As he disappeared, Charlotte whispered in Summer’s ears, ‘I do like your guy, sweet Summer. May I borrow him?’

Shocked by the request, Summer fell silent, anger bubbling beneath the surface. Had the circumstances been different, in a bar, at a normal party, anything but in this room full of couples fucking and fondling and rutting wildly as a result of her enforced exhibition and ceremonial shaving, she would have objected loudly, but the twisted nature of this environment of excess somehow forbade it. The curious etiquette of orgies, perhaps?

Inside, however, she was boiling. With anger. How could Charlotte? Wasn’t she supposed to be her friend?

Summer was still seething when Dominik returned and gingerly made his way towards them holding a set of glasses.

He handed Summer her water, which she gulped down, past her dry lips. Charlotte, still shadowed by Jasper, put her hands in a proprietorial fashion round Dominik’s waist.

‘Isn’t this fun, guys?’ Charlotte said.

Which triggered Summer’s moment of madness.

Or spite.

Handing the empty glass to Dominik, she swivelled round to face Jasper and deliberately lowered her left hand and brazenly took hold of his cock.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said, ‘and all among friends, no?’

‘So cosy,’ Charlotte remarked, noting Summer’s gesture, an amused smile painted on her face. Somewhere in the room, someone came with a soft sigh of abandon.

In Summer’s hand Jasper’s warm cock was incredibly hard. Firmer than any penis she’d ever had the opportunity to handle before, she thought. As she gripped it, she saw the shadow of a grin spread across his features and felt a rush of warmth and desire. Summer refused to look at Dominik to observe his reaction.

She slipped down onto her knees, took Jasper’s long, thick and velvety cock into her mouth and felt its girth increase even further.

‘Go, girl,’ she heard Charlotte say, and felt Dominik’s eyes drilling into her from above.

For a brief moment, Summer wondered how Dominik’s cock might taste. She had not gone down on him yet and wondered why this hadn’t come about. She focused her attentions back on the job at hand, her tongue and lips playing with the escort’s cock, sucking, licking, nibbling delicately, according the rhythm of her attentions to the remote pulse driving down from his heart to the very edge of his stem, like a muted drum in some exotic jungle. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Charlotte moving her hands to Dominik’s belt, no doubt with a view to emulate her.

Summer felt a sharp pang of jealousy. She was determined to bring Jasper to climax. But the best of plans are so easily thwarted and just as Summer felt a faint tremor begin to course through Jasper’s athletic body in a journey that was likely to end inside her mouth, the escort gently detached himself from her, leaving her mouth open in an O of interrogation and disappointment, pulled her up by the hand and delicately set her down on the nearby now-abandoned sofa. Unlike Dominik and Charlotte, who stood nearby in a semi-state of disarray, she in her corset and stockings, he with his trousers down but his undershorts still on, both Jasper and Summer were naked, their bodies mirror images of desire and pallor. Summer kneeled down, displaying herself to everyone. Summer heard the sound of a wrapper rustling and being expertly peeled over Jasper’s jutting member, and then he spread her legs open and positioned himself behind her, his cock dancing teasingly at the gates of her barer-than-bare entrance.

Summer took a deep breath, looked behind Jasper and saw the deep darkness of Dominik’s eyes as he stared at the spectacle she and Jasper were providing, and then felt Jasper’s thick cock breach her in a single forward thrust, stretching her unexpectedly wide and investing her with his manhood. Fuck, he was big. Summer exhaled, as if all the air had been forced out of her lungs by the sheer power and determination of Jasper’s initial push. As he began his movements in and out of her, Summer switched off, allowing her body to float again in a sea of nothingness, surrendering herself to the moment, shedding all shreds of defence, mindless, open to whatever might now happen, purposefully defenceless, a willing toy on the waves of desire unbound.

She closed her eyes. Flesh as a super-conductor, thoughts like evanescent clouds, her grey cells relocating below for the duration, abdicating all willpower to the mighty fire of desire.

In a hidden compartment of her mind (or was it her soul?) Summer imagined she was now in Dominik’s body, not to observe the way Charlotte was possibly giving him an expert blowjob but to witness how his eyes were hypnotically fixed on her being fucked by Jasper. Oh, how he must be watching as the escort’s cock plumbed her depths, splashed against her, causing sweat to rise to the surface above her lips and her breath to become halting. Watch, Dominik, watch – this is how another man fucks me, and fucks me well, and wouldn’t you want to be him, wouldn’t you? Oh, how hard he is. Oh, how he owns me. Oh, how he makes me tremble, shiver, shudder. Oh, how he fucks me hard. And harder. On and on. Never stopping. Like a machine. Like a warrior.

She let out a hoarse cry of pleasure, and realised that it wasn’t just the rigorous clockwork movements of Jasper inside her that she found so arousing, but the knowledge that Dominik was watching.

And then she came.

Screamed.

In a moment she finally felt Jasper come in turn, flooding her insides, the warmth of his hot seed inside the thin latex sheath he had slipped into, and a sudden mad thought tortured her mind, appearing out of nowhere – Am I mad? Am I sick? – as she wondered what Dominik’s come would taste of had she sucked him to completion, or whether she ever would. Absurd thoughts have a habit of peering over the horizon of one’s mind at the most inopportune moments, Summer realised.

She breathed heavily as Jasper withdrew from her, rising above her, his penis now limp but still imposing in both girth and length. She closed her eyes, felt a wave of regret mingle with her pleasure. She no longer wanted to know or see what Dominik and Charlotte were up to.

She was tired, very tired.

She swivelled her spent body, dug her face into the odorous leather of the sofa and began sobbing quietly.

In the room, all around her as Summer lay there as its centre of gravity, the orgy was coming to an end.

‘I’m disappointed,’ Dominik said.

‘Isn’t it what you wanted?’ Summer asked. It was the following day and they were sitting in the cafe where they had first met, in St Katharine Docks. It was evening and straggling commuters fought the rush hour and cars roared across the nearby bridge. ‘Didn’t you want to see me fucked by another man and—’

‘No.’ Dominik interrupted the angry flow of her words. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘So what
did
you want?’ she almost screamed at him, pain and confusion written on her face. Before he could reply, she continued, the devil inside her spurring her on a tide of wrath and hurt, ‘I’m sure it turned you on, though, didn’t it?’

He looked away briefly. ‘Yes,’ he admitted in a low voice, as if pleading guilty to a minor charge.

‘See,’ Summer said, with just a hint of triumphalism, her point made.

‘I no longer know what I want,’ Dominik said.

‘I don’t believe that,’ Summer responded, her mind still journeying through a storm of anger.

‘I thought we had an understanding.’

‘Did you really?’

‘For my sins, yes.’

‘And a multitude of sins they must no doubt be. A veritable herd of them.’

‘Why are you so aggressive?’ he asked Summer, sensing their conversation was taking a wrong turn, a very bad one.

‘So I’m the one who is guilty of taking a step too far, am I?’

‘That’s not what I was saying.’

‘And who was it who was allowing himself to be groped by Charlotte as if I didn’t even exist and happened to be standing there like a fool, as naked as the day I was born, shaved like a common slave?’ she continued.

‘I have never thought of you as a slave, whether past, present or future,’ he remarked.

‘But you have no problem treating me like one.’ She almost choked on the words. ‘I am
not
a slave and I never will be.’

Dominik, in a forlorn attempt at regaining the initiative, interrupted Summer. ‘I just thought that by demeaning yourself with that . . . gigolo, you were letting both of us down, that’s all.’

Summer fell silent, tears of shame and anger pricking her eyes. She briefly felt like throwing the glass of water she was gripping over his face, then thought better of it.

‘I never made you any promises,’ she finally said to Dominik.

‘I never asked for any.’

‘It was an . . . urge. I just couldn’t control myself,’ she said by way of apology, but then turned against him again. ‘You placed me in that situation and abandoned me. It was as if you’d triggered my demons and moved miles away, leaving me alone with . . . God knows what. I just don’t know how to explain it, Dominik.’

‘I know. It was partly my fault too. I can only apologise.’

‘Apology accepted.’

She drank from the glass. The ice had long melted and the water was tepid. Silence fell again between them.

‘So . . .’ Dominik finally said.

‘So.’

‘Do you wish to continue?’

‘Continue what?’ Summer asked.

‘Seeing me.’

‘As what?’

‘A lover, a friend, an accomplice in pleasure. You choose.’

Summer hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘I understand.’ Dominik nodded with resignation. ‘I really do.’

‘It’s so complicated,’ Summer remarked.

‘It is. On the one hand, I want you. Badly, Summer. Not just as a lover, or a plaything, as something more. On the other, I find it difficult to explain that attraction and the way it’s become twisted so quickly.’

‘Hmm,’ Summer said. ‘So not a marriage proposal, eh?’ She grinned from ear to ear.

‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘Maybe some form of arrangement?’

‘I thought that’s what we already had.’

‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘And it visibly doesn’t work, does it? So many unknown factors at play.’

They both sighed in unison, which made them smile. At least they could see the humour in the situation.

‘Maybe we should stay apart for a while?’

It didn’t matter which one of them actually said the words; it was on the tip of the other’s tongue anyway.

‘Do you want the violin back?’ Summer asked.

‘Of course not. It was always yours. Unconditionally.’

‘Thank you. Truly. It is the most magnificent gift I have ever been given.’

‘You deserve it a hundred times over. The music you created for me was unforgettable.’

‘Both clothed and unclothed?’

‘Yes, clothed and unclothed.’

‘So?’

‘So we wait; we think; we see what comes next and when, if ever.’

‘No promises?’

‘No promises.’

Dominik left a five-pound note on the table and with a heavy heart watched Summer walk out of the cafe and her silhouette gradually melt into the night.

He looked at his watch, the silver Tag Heuer he had bought himself years ago to celebrate getting his tenure.

He looked not at the time, which was at the imprecise, blurry junction between evening and night, but at the day. It had been forty days since he had seen Summer for the very first time, as she performed in Tottenham Court Road station with her old violin, a date to remember.

The appointment with the headhunter who was filling the vacancies for the orchestra in America went particularly well, and barely a week later, Summer landed at JFK airport, having unceremoniously given up her room in the Whitechapel bedsit and deliberately foregone her deposit. She had not said goodbye to Charlotte or her other acquaintances. Only Chris, whom she had briefly explained herself to as best she could, as she wanted his blessing.

She hadn’t called Dominik, though the temptation to have the last word had been strong, among other reasons.

The agency had arranged for temporary accommodation in a shared apartment with other foreign members of the orchestra just off the Bowery. She had been warned they were all from the brass section, as if their instruments somehow determined their personality. The remark – or was it a warning? – had amused her.

It was Summer’s first time in New York, and as the yellow cab approached the Midtown Tunnel, she caught her first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, as impressive as in virtually every movie she had ever seen. It quite literally took her breath away.

This was certainly the way to begin a new life, Summer thought. Her slow early passage through the traffic jams of Queens and Jamaica following the departure from the airport had only offered suburban ordinariness, but now, through the dirty cab windows, her eyes fixed on the distant skyline of tall buildings and recognisable landmarks and she felt filled with joy and hope.