One Final Night (7 page)

I lie flat with my cheek on Patrick’s chest and he strokes my hair. I have a passing thought about that day in the stables, when his shirt was undone at the top showing the hairs on his chest, yet now he is smooth. My other lover grips my behind. I feel his tip at my little place and I suck my breath in. Then he is pressing forward and I am opening. There is a flash, maybe of pain, maybe euphoria. The bliss is now impossible to quantify. The joy of his slow slide while I am already filled is unmatchable. These are new pleasure zones I wasn’t aware of possessing, ones of startling sensitivity. It might be too much for me. Even if he just stays still I may not be able to stop the sweep from blacking me out, but he is already moving back in readiness for another slide forward.

Patrick holds me tight and together they fuck me. It is so wonderful it has to be a dream – I’m certainly not far from unconsciousness. Before I go under I realise why her ladyship was a slave to this feeling, why she would have sacrificed all for one more time of it. I am vaguely aware of the spurt of hot seed in my rear. I don’t know if Patrick got his just rewards – maybe his companion kindly saw to that himself. I hope so.

Epilogue

Sometime in the night, the maid comes for me. She has a fresh gown to ensure I am covered. She takes me by torchlight to my changing room to help dress me. Then I am lead on sluggish legs through the black corridors. He will be sleeping somewhere here, with someone else. I am taken back through the secret passages and out into the night, where the car is ready to take me home.

I am so exhausted it is hard to think. Doubtless a little part of me has died tonight because I have lost him. I still don’t know how my body will compensate for that addiction, but I cannot think of that now. He has given the potential for so much more to be born. Over the months, he has revealed a part of me I barely knew existed. It is up to me now whether I think hedonism should continue to defeat my notions of decency and respectability. It is up to me now to dare to seek the same pleasures again.

The lesson he always wanted me to learn was not to be dependent on the expectation of love. I thought I loved him and allowed jealousy to get the better of me, and so now I cannot have him at all. I have no right to be bitter about it. He gave me fair warning. He wanted nothing more than to share pleasures with me, to take pleasure from my own. He knows I always mistake infatuation for love and so he made this obvious tonight. For large parts of the evening, despite everything I thought I felt for him,
he
wasn’t the one filling my mind. It wasn’t even anyone I knew filling my mind. So in that sense he has liberated me. He knows I don’t love him; I am merely besotted.

So I must not wallow in self-pity. I must celebrate our time and see last night as its crowning glory. There is no point clinging on, holding out for something we could never have. In the end, what is better, what will one cherish most: one golden summer or a thousand dreary days? I doubt I can give up my belief in true love. I’m not sure I could ever cheat with impunity like he does, share hearts and not feel disloyalty or betrayal. But he has shown me that life can be an equal quest for pleasure as well as love, and so now I will be better able to protect my heart.

It was beautiful to be the focus of lust for so many, rather than just the one. I know it was wonderful to feel so free, to want to gorge and be plundered and feel those anonymous hot splashes on my skin in the dark. I know if I never have this again I will indeed miss it like the sun. Maybe this one night will be enough. Somehow, though, as greater, more beautiful ladies than me have found out in the past, it is difficult to see how it can possibly be.

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