Fools for Lust (18 page)

‘It feels so sexy,' she whispered to me as we sat at a café sipping citron pressé and an exotic liqueur she had been speculating about earlier.

Her bare arse pressed against the metal of the seat, as her skirt spread across her legs, concealing her unusual nudity from the many passersby.

‘Makes me feel so horny, you know, Conrad.' She had wanted to fuck after I'd trimmed her pussy hair earlier, but I'd turned her down. Later, I'd promised. There was no rush. First I wanted to go out and eat. ‘Fatten me,' she'd joked. ‘Absolutely, and more,' I'd answered enigmatically, a crazy plan taking root in my feverish mind.

The restaurant we finally chose was beyond the port area and specialised in Spanish cuisine and served enormous portions of food. It was crowded. The service was slow. Time enough for her mind to wander as the itch below took hold of her senses. I'd never seen Luba in such a state of febrile agitation before. I would never have guessed that the feeling of being impudently exposed below would have such an effect. I was turned on too. Cause and effect. The meal took ages, even though the food was delicious, just spicy enough but lacking aggression.

Luba wiped a faint trail of tomato sauce from the corner of her lips as the waitress took the plates away. ‘Any dessert?' the young woman, who walked with a limp, asked us. I looked to Luba.

‘No,' she declined. ‘I'm just too full.'

The waitress moved away. ‘Isn't she pretty?' Luba queried me.

I had in fact found her plain and unappealing. ‘Not really,' I answered. ‘Anyway, didn't you once tell me that you weren't into other women?'

Luba grinned back at me mischievously. ‘Tonight,' she said, lowering her voice, although we were speaking English, ‘I'd do anything. Just the way I feel.' Her hand moved under the table to her lap. She was touching herself.

All I could do was smile. ‘Anything?'

Luba lowered her eyes. ‘Yes. Anything.'

I recalled earlier idle post-coital conversations of mutual fantasies.

‘Are you absolutely sure?'

She nodded approvingly. The waitress brought the bill. I looked her up and down. No. Not what I had in mind.

There was a small bar facing the Grand Hotel on the other side of the canal. Not a tourist haunt, more of a faded joint for local regulars. There were half a dozen men at the bar and others in a backroom noisily playing pool. The place had a familiar smell of stale cigarette smoke and alcohol. We ordered a couple of espressos. I looked Luba in the eyes, determining that she was still willing to go through with any sort of madness I felt fit to inflict upon her.

‘Look around and choose one,' I told Luba.

‘Any man?'

‘Anyone.'

She turned and perused the small crowd at the bar. One of the men drank on his own, not part of a group or any conversation, nursing a half-empty glass of red wine. He looked slightly familiar and I thought I recognised him as the watching fisherman from the other day. Middle-aged, stocky, florid. I couldn't be sure, but it could well be him. He noticed our gaze, held our eye contact and smiled enigmatically. Him being here would make sense; it was just a few yards from the spot where he had been fishing and it would be natural for this to be his café of choice.

Luba couldn't decide.

‘Him?' I discreetly pointed him out to her.

‘OK,' she accepted.

‘This is what I want you to do, then,' I commanded her, providing her with specific instructions to follow. I handed her the key to our hotel room and she walked off towards the stone bridge that led across the canal, leaving me to settle the bill. All the while, the man at the bar had been watching us with quiet intent. I moved over to him, negligently dropping a 10€ note on the counter.

‘You recognise her, don't you?' I asked him.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Impossible not to. That was quite a show you two put on the other day.'

‘Do you find her attractive?'

‘Of course,' he answered.

‘You can have her, if you wish.'

‘You're joking,' he responded.

‘I'm not,' I replied. ‘For free. We enjoy variety, you understand. You can be her holiday present from me. Interested?'

‘When?'

‘Now. But I stay to watch. That's not negotiable.'

He put his glass down.

‘Let's do it,' he said.

The door to the room had been left unlocked and the only lights left on were by the side of the bed. Luba was on all fours on the bed, just wearing a T-shirt, her rear facing the door. Obscene and innocent. Her legs were held apart and both her cunt and anus invited the steady gaze of lust, exposed, raw, available. The Frenchman stood on the threshold, as if hypnotised by the pornographic spectacle of the offering. I asked him to wait for an instant and walked over to the bed. Quickly delving into my own suitcase, I pulled out a tie and a black leather belt which I used to bind Luba's hands to the top corner of the bed. She had to adjust her position, her back arching to maintain her equilibrium and comfort, and I spread her legs further. Her cunt now gaped. I found a silk scarf in her handbag and tied it around her head, denying her any kind of vision.

‘Now,' I turned back to the stranger. He was already slipping his trousers down and pulling his cock out. It was a majestic specimen. Uncut, thick and veined like a delicately carved sculpture. He was already rock hard. He shot me a final glance, as if seeking my approval. I nodded. He positioned himself at her lips and, with one quick thrust, entered her. Despite his girth I was fascinated to see how easily he penetrated her and filled her, stretching her engorged lips to wondrous effect. Luba caught her breath, either surprised by his sheer size or momentarily seized by a brief moment of pain as he forced his way deep into unknown recesses within her innards.

He attacked her with unceasing force, burying himself inside her flesh with every in and out piston movement, metronomically regular and untiring, his large, heavy balls slapping against her pale arse cheeks. For a second or so, I had an abominable thought of that monster of a cock breaching her other, delicate opening and dilating it to unthought-of dimensions like the aftermath of sodomies in some particularly revolting hardcore movies I'd sometimes seen.

The Frenchman put me to shame in the energy stakes I had to admit. He stayed hard, never losing his repetitive rhythm, systematically drilling into Luba's cunt with ferocious ardour long beyond the time I knew I could myself sustain. I moved to the side of the bed and wiped sweat from Luba's glistening forehead. She was feverish, burning, but I knew it was from sheer pleasure, and the secret knowledge that what we were doing was off the map and wicked. This was the epitome of anonymous indulgence. We were using each other, just as she was being thoroughly used by the stranger.

He was now swearing under his breath as his attack on Luba increased yet in intensity, calling her a slut, a foreign whore. But she couldn't understand French and I was in no mood or position to contradict him. Then, with a roar, the man came. Luba shrieked. I held my breath, closed my eyes, imagining his mighty flow flooding her womb. Finally, total silence again. He was still deep inside her, his head bent forward, almost resting on her frail shoulders. I could see the overflow of his come pearling down her thighs. I wiped her face again and freed her eyes.

She looked up to me, still impaled on his cock.

‘You OK?' I asked her.

‘Yes,' she sighed softly, attempting a feeble smile. The front of her T-shirt was soaking wet and her nipples scraped downwards against the material, denting the grey fabric.

I felt guilty now. We had crossed the border from fantasy into reality and it felt awkward.

‘We did agree anything ...' I said, almost as an excuse.

The Frenchman stood silently behind us. Luba inched her way forward and his thick cock slipped out of her. He was still half hard and sizable.

Her eyes shone as they always did after she had come. She looked at me as she straightened herself out. Asked:

‘Anything?'

‘Yes,' I agreed, somehow guessing already what she would now require of me. Too many late-night conversations over soft pillows during the course of previous encounters.

‘Want to be sucked clean?' she asked the French guy.

He looked nonplussed. Failed to answer.

‘By him?' she pointed in my direction.

He shrugged his shoulders. I moved to the back of the bed, dropped to my knees and took his still dripping cock into my mouth and proceeded to suck and lick him clean. It tasted of her, of course. How could it not? His seed just didn't count. It was the least I could do for her now. Eventually, the man retreated, just as he was about to get fully hard again, no doubt nervous of the fact that another man was now sucking his cock and initiating the same feelings a woman's mouth would evince. He muttered his apologies, pulled his trousers up and made for the door.

Luba and I slept fitfully after that's night encounter, with our conversation at a lower ebb than usual. The next morning, shortly after breakfast, we drove to Montpellier Airport to catch our flight to Paris where we parted and moved on to our respective countries and homes. We kept in touch for some months, halfheartedly assuring each other we'd try and meet up again, but somehow our calendars and hearts never quite got it together. She met the guy from Korea. I fucked someone in New York. And, monogamous adulterers that we were by habit and tradition, mutually decided our affair had come to its logical term.

We still talk on the phone every few months and when we are in the mood for jokes both agree we'd had a most interesting holiday together.

The camera pans across the room. A slow, steady but almost languorous movement. Noting every feature, every detail, methodically scrutinizing all angles, colours and shapes as it glides along. Every single sign of absence.

This is a room where we made love.

Me and her. Me and she. She and I. I and her. The two of us.

She who has left. Whose name I must no longer mention.

Furniture, walls, standard issue prints (sailing ships, landscapes after Napoleonic battles, Audubon birds), bedspreads, windows, floral-patterned curtains, heavy wooden doors, a bed.

Does a bed have memories? Of the million fucks, of the endless embraces, the sighs, the despair, the words said and unsaid? Like an imprint in a pillow after heads have followed bodies and moved on. To the hotel corridor outside, to the lobby, the road outside, to the rest of their lives?

Hotel rooms don't belong to this world. They can be anywhere. A Trust House Forte shaped like the Pentagon building, close to Heathrow Airport, frayed carpets. Adobe walls and Indian rugs draped across the floor in Scottsdale, Arizona, close to Phoenix and the John Ford desert of orange horizons and countless cacti. A modern tower overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle, rain crashing in gusts against the bay windows. Or a room in a small bed and breakfast chalet in the Italian Alps facing Mont Blanc, the nearby peaks crested with snow, the early morning sky bluer than blue and a healthy chill lingering in the air. Or again a hotel for students in Paris' Quartier Latin, where the bed can extend upwards, bunk-like, in times of necessity, last floor reached by a thin lift cage that can barely accommodate two bodies without an added single piece of luggage. Let's not even evoke New York hotel rooms: the Plaza, the Algonquin, the Chelsea, the Iroquois, the Gershwin. Take your pick.

Like Gene Hackman in
The Conversation
listening to the silent sound of lovers in a distant place. Eavesdropping on the memories abandoned by the wayside.

‘Is this where it happens?' A woman's voice, hushed, shy. Hers.

‘Yes.' A man's voice. Darker. Mine.

‘Kiss me, then.'

The sound, electric, charged with emotion, of lips meeting.

An echo of lust imprinted through the memory layers of the room. A further memento of the lost past.

‘Undress. I want to see your cock.'

‘And I want to see your body. Now. Badly. Every square inch of your skin. Watch my fingers map the territory, my fingers roam your intimacy.'

‘Yes.'

The voices of several fucks, the awful sound of a togetherness which was too shocking to envisage just a few weeks before when we were strangers to each other, business acquaintances no more, respectively married to others by the virtue and authority of a magistrate or a priest.

The now empty room bears witness.

To the way she shifted across the bed as we lay there so lazily, in no hurry to rush the inevitable first penetration and lowered her lips towards my cock and took me inside her mouth. The heat. The moistness. One of my fingers lingering on the edge of her puckered sphincter, the moving forward, pressing against the closed ring of darker flesh and slowly inserting myself into her most private, aromatic warmth.

Sounds: breath held back, gentle moans, the velvet friction of white flesh against flesh.

And right now: utter silence as she walks down a south London street to greet another man, a husband with a look of innocence on her face and guilt in her mind, her skin still tingling from lips, her cunt still full of my juices. But infidelity cannot be read on the horizon of a face, or fingermarks long faded away on the panorama of her nude body. Maybe only, the sole clue to the mystery of lust that might betray us, the smell of sex. In her breath, despite the Polo mints.

On my fingers, as in an empty hotel room I bring them closer to my nose and inhale the fragrance that still lingers there of her juices and nacreous innards. On my shrivelled cock which I haven't yet washed – the room is booked until late afternoon; I am in no hurry – where her strong fragrance still seeps deep into the flesh, bathing its roots, reminding me of how well we fitted together genitally, as if engineered for each other.

Outside, a jumbo jet takes off for parts unknown, a shadow against the insulated window which no outside noise penetrates.

So, this is it. We met, we flirted, we hesitated, we took a conscious decision to be selfish, we fucked.

Just a room.

A stain on a white sheet, some secretion or another, hers or mine; stray hairs on the cushion which look more like a punchbag after the battle, lighter, curly pubic ones lower down the bed.

‘You don't have to do it, you know ... It's our first time, there's no rush ...'

‘But I want to,'

‘Love you.'

A look of amusement in her eyes as she interrupts the delicious activity in progress.

‘Am I a bad girl because I suck a guy's cock on the first date?'

Mischief.

‘Who said I was looking for a good girl?'

‘So you were actively looking, were you? And I just came along at the right moment?'

‘Well, I was the one who made the initial approach ...'

‘Your letter to my office?'

‘Yes.'

‘I knew I wanted you since that day in Manchester.'

‘Did you really?'

‘You bet.'

‘Come to think of it, you did give me a strange look while I was there reading my paper.'

‘That's what you think ... I'm shortsighted, so you shouldn't attach too much importance to the look in my eyes ...'

‘Is this our first argument – already?'

‘I'm not arguing.'

‘OK. Keep on sucking ...'

Watching her head bob up and down in his lap. Her curls wild, uncountable. The almost invisible scar on her right earlobe, highlighted by the sepia light peering through the orange regulation curtains. The whiteness of her skin, porcelain. Her large arse paler than pale close to his cheeks. A moan. A gasp.

The room records it all. Testimony for a further trial, record of evidence for the day of reckoning, filthy reasons for impeachment, actions that might one day bar them from the portals of paradise and plunge them into flames eternal. A mouth, thin-lipped, greedily gobbling a thick, heavily veined penis, a finger twisting inside her rear, manual sodomy, unhygienic, wonderful. The way their bodies relax into twisted postures that no other couple could imitate for fear of cramp or worse. But then, disappointingly, the room also knows that in just a few days, another visiting couple, older, darker-skinned, will succeed in even more extreme sexual gymnastics. The room knows.

Rooms always know. Like shadows.

And do not judge.

And keep their secrets.

Our secrets.

In another room, before I knew her, long before I could even justify any morbid jealousy, she made love to another. Was it even her husband? Dublin? Scarborough? Paris, near the Gare du Nord? But I guess it was more vanilla, less pornographic. In between yet another four indifferent walls, antique furniture, sounds of a Chinese matron being fucked to high heaven on the other side of the thin partition, police sirens piercing the rhythm of orgasm, I melted Suchard white chocolate squares inside an Australian woman's cunt and later watched her lick the sticky residue and her own juices clean off me.

Ah, the strange etiquette of hotel room sex when the person you are doing it with is new! Allowing the water tap to run as noisily as possible as you sit on the toilet while your new partner waits for you in bed, just a few metres away, to stop her hearing the pee splash against the water, or the turd unroll out of you with extravagant farting noises. Waving arms in air to disperse the foul, personal smell. Listening to her pee and getting a hard-on and wanting to ask her if you can watch ...

Preliminary inventory.

A bedside table where she leaves her wedding ring and contact lens solution. The rumpled stockings at the foot of the bed, her lace-up resoled boots, her bunched-up knickers (when she moves to the bathroom and you get up and tidy the mess, you can't help but raise them to your nose, to smell the crease, slightly stained, soiled, through which you had earlier fingered her when you were both still partly dressed), her handbag (make-up kit, two separate shades of lipstick - before and after the fuck? - a pair of tweezers, a wallet with just £20 in cash and her credit cards – her second name is Edwina, she'd never told you that, an orange, tissues). The carpet has cigarette holes. If you peer closer to examine the blanket all concertinaed up at the end of the bed, you can make out the hieroglyphic, faded patterns of previous come stains from past generations of adulterers and lovers. The bedside lamp sheds a flickering light, distorting the colour of skin, the hidden darkness of sexual organs.

‘Jeez ... I'm so damn sensitive there. Every time you touch it, it's like a flash of electricity coursing through me in overdrive.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes. My husband' she carefully refrains from mentioning his name, naked as she is in the embrace of another man, ‘seldom touches me there, but somehow it doesn't have the same affect, you know.'

‘You're wonderful. Many other women wouldn't have dared admit that.'

‘Just the way I feel.'

He kisses her. I kiss her. I kissed her.

Time loses all its meaning.

Never have we been so alone, in our forgotten island of lust.

‘One day, would you ...'

‘Yes, I would like you to fuck me there. Very much ...'

His mind races. Butter. Extra lubrication. Genuine fear of harming her. The madness of this intimacy they have so quickly reached.

His heart breaks. Straight through the middle, where it hurts the most.

She walks out into the corridor. Time for the train back to the conjugal bed. He follows her silhouette as her characteristic gait takes her down the endless hotel road, just like the one in the Coen Brothers'
Barton Fink
. He distractedly thinks this would be a perfect image, a fade-away to end a wonderful story, the camera raising itself on a crane as she moves away, long legs, tousled hair, from him. But in life, things don't end that simplistically.

He is no longer part of the room. He closes the door. Without her. Smells. The imprint of her tattooed deep into his flesh. Dresses. Leaves. Settles the bill with one of his credit cards. Makes his way to the car park, an empty black promotional tote bag swinging from his shoulder, no longer carrying the bottle of white wine he'd brought earlier. Car keys. Ignition. Motorway. The room after she has left: empty, lonely too but still inhabited by her presence, a pervasive feeling of her.

The silence.

The cold.

Soon, the floor maid enters. Her electronic pass affords her entry to all rooms. In her closet, a red light had lit up, indicating 404 was now ready for cleaning. A day let only.

She pulls the cart behind her. Looks ahead at the relative untidiness, bed spread open, towels on the bathrobe marble floor, tap still dripping in the shower, a half-empty bottle of wine by the bed. Clean ashtrays. Curtains still drawn,

The maid sniffs the air. A smell she is all too familiar with.

‘Fuckers,' she says.