Reversing Over Liberace (32 page)

I didn't even know who Jessica Alba was.

 

 

 

I set out for the hotel at ten. I'd booked the suite from lunchtime, but I wanted to get to the place early to spy out the land, wander round a bit, settle in. I wanted to be in control, confident and relaxed, when Luke arrived. I had to play perfect girlfriend a while longer. Accordingly, under my plain slip dress I was wearing the tightest black lace basque that I'd been able to find. The “God's gift to Men” picture was completed by sheer stockings, a pair of lace knickers which obviously weren't meant ever to be walked in and the highest heels this side of a transvestite's cocktail party. My hair was piled up on my head and secured with a few indolent pins which let random swathes tumble onto my shoulders, and when I walked into the hotel reception they clearly thought I was a hooker.

Having reassured them with my credit card, I found my way to the honeymoon suite and began laying out the first stage of my plan, although I had to take my shoes off to do it. The carpet pile was so thick that my heels kept snagging. The alluring knickers, which had looked so sexy on the rail, kept riding up between my buttocks, and the boning in the basque meant that I couldn't bend down without being suffocated by my own breasts. Obviously I hadn't missed my vocation as a top-class prostitute. Although, looking around the room at the velvet blindfold beside the bed, the serious handcuffs and silk restraints, the scented massage oils, maybe I had.

I'd finished and it was still only twelve thirty. Luke wasn't due until two. Somewhere, elsewhere in the hotel, Cal was hopefully putting the rest of the plan into action. I was slightly disturbed that I hadn't heard from him, nor seen any sign of his presence. The Metro definitely wasn't parked at the front. Maybe they'd worried about their profile and made him park around the back. Maybe he'd got a lift. Maybe the whole thing had fallen through and I was here alone. I shuddered. Don't even think it. Trust him.

I ought to have been hungry. Maybe I should eat something. If nothing else it would pass the time.

No. No room. My stomach was caught in the pincer movement of anticipation and fear, boiling and rolling with something that fell between both emotions and might even have been guilt. Was it fair to do what I was going to do? Was it right? Was it my place to deal out justice? Maybe those other women hadn't cared that he'd taken their money, maybe they'd shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives?

Maybe this was wrong.

But then I thought of Nadine. He'd conceived a child with her, a woman he was planning to abandon. Brought another innocent person into his filthy schemes without caring that Nadine was going to find herself a single mother, without a penny.

A tap at the door and my heart nearly fell out through my mouth. “It's okay. It's only me.” Cal put his head inside the room. “Just wanted you to know that I'm here. Everything is fine.”

I ran over and grabbed him, hiding my face against his chest, feeling his warmth and the press of his bones against me. “God, Cal, I am
so
scared.”

“Hey.” And then he caught sight of the arrangement on the bed. “Hey. Whoo, where'd you get
this
from?” He held up the silk restraint. “Don't tell me, Ash.”

I gave a shaky giggle. “How did you guess?”

“Well, I hope you washed it, is all. I'd better go, just in case. See you later.”

“Yes,” I whispered as he closed the door. Strangely, the fact that I knew Cal was here made me relax and I lay down on the bed, adjusting my underwear so that I could lie comfortably.

Bleeurgh. I woke up, blearily aware that one leg had gone dead because my suspenders were pressing against a nerve, and checked my watch. It was ten to two! I leaped up, rearranging myself, tweaking stockings straight and repinning bits of hair, fighting my cleavage back into the containment vessel of the basque. I felt smeared, distant, as though I hadn't properly woken up yet. My reflection reassured me that I didn't look quite as dislocated as I felt, although my makeup had fallen into my skin and my lipstick was nonexistent. I was reapplying the lipstick when the door to the suite opened, framing Luke.

“Hello,” he said, his voice dropping down the register as he noted my appearance. “You look absolutely bloody
amazing
, Willow.”

“Thank you,” I sparkled at him, smoothing my skirt over my thighs so the bulges of the suspender belt stood out and the low neck of the dress pulled even lower over my chest. “There's a bottle of champagne in the fridge. Would you like to open it?”

“Not as much as I'd like to open you.”

Nadine, think of Nadine. “Plenty of time for that in a minute. Let's have a drink first.”

Luke's eyes were almost red-hot with friction, running up and down over my body, taking in my wasp waist and the way the high heels made my legs look forever and slender, veering back towards my breasts every time they got bored. “Yeah. Good idea.”

Carefully I poured the champagne, watching in the mirror as Luke took in my back view and then glanced around the room. There was a noticeable flicker as he saw my bag with the cheque book right on top. “I thought”—I turned around slowly to give him plenty of time to change his field of vision—“that we might test out the bed before we do anything else.” Now he looked at the bed and his eyes flickered again, seeing the props I'd laid out. It wasn't like me to instigate sex quite so blatantly. Had I panicked him? “Of course, if you don't want to…”

“Oh, it's not that, I'm just a bit… You always seem so
proper
about sex. I didn't think you were really into all the tying up and that, and now, here you are.” He waved a hand at the blindfold I'd left on the bedside table.

“I thought you'd like it.” Demurely I turned away, letting one shoulder drop so that my dress fell away to reveal the tight-fitting black underwear, making my skin look extra pale where my breasts spilled out over the top. “If it's too much, that's fine.”

“Shit, Willow, I didn't mean that.” Luke drained his glass and stood up. “It's a real turn-on knowing that you got off on it all the time. All that time you laid there, you were really getting kicks from it.”

“Oh yes.” I backed towards the bed. “Absolutely.” Another shrug and my dress fell clear of my body, leaving me standing in black lace underwear and high heels, fingering the silk cords which tied the velvet blindfold. Honest to God,
Graham Norton
would have got a hard-on. “Now, come here.”

Now, for reasons of good taste, decency and suchlike, I'm not going into what happened in the next half-hour. But for those of you shuddering and thinking of Cal,
sex never took place
, all right?

However. Time passed, and now Luke was beginning to fret for some sort of conclusion. He lay, naked and coated in aromatic oil, spread-eagled across the huge bed with his arms handcuffed to the bedhead and legs loosely tied to the foot, a purple blindfold across his eyes and a most impressive erection on his lower quarters. As I continued to massage the oil into his torso, he bucked and thrust beneath my hands trying to bring his groin into contact, moaning slightly and biting his lower lip. “Aw, Will, if you don't sit on me soon, I swear I'm going to coat the ceiling.”

I smiled, although he couldn't see it. “Don't worry, the longer you have to wait, the more spectacular it'll be. I'm going to go and take this basque off in the bathroom, and then I'll come and attend to you properly.”

“Christ.” He shuddered and for a second I wondered if I'd misjudged. But he lay back and a lazy look came over his face. “Okay, but don't be too long.”

“I'll just be a moment.” I went into the bathroom and hastily climbed back into my dress, tweaking it down so that the whorish nature of my underthings was more-or-less concealed. Then I tiptoed out. Crept across the thick, plush carpet with half an eye on Luke in case he'd managed to escape his bonds, and turned the door handle to release the lock. “Hey Luke, I'm on my way,” I murmured in my most seductive tones to cover the sound of the door inching open. I don't really think I needed to bother. He was so far gone in his own exotic fantasy that I could have driven a herd of wildebeest through and he wouldn't have noticed, straining his weight against the ties that bound him, jabbing his hardness ineffectually into the air.

“Come…
on
…bitch…”

“Would you like me to show you something, Luke?” I asked, teasingly. “Something that'll really
really
shock you?” Just another few seconds.

“Oh, God…yeah…”

The door closed again and my mouth went dry. Shit, come on, Willow.

“Okay.” I climbed onto the bed and pulled the blindfold free. For a second Luke blinked, seeing me fully dressed again, then his eyes focussed and he glanced over my shoulder.

“Shit! You fucking
fucking
bitch!”

Behind me, the room was nearly full. To my left stood a young woman with an acne-scarred face and a blank expression, beside her a middle-aged lady in an unfetching pleated skirt and seventies perm. On the other side of the bed a girl who didn't look much out of her teens hoisted a child higher on her hip, two more women flanked her, both with equally pinched faces.

“Hello, Luke,” said the girl with the child. “Say hello, Hugo.” The child obediently removed the thumb from its mouth and burbled something. It had Luke's violet eyes and blond nearly-curls. “Looks just like you, doesn't he?”

I was impressed by her cool. And also, grudgingly impressed that Luke hadn't instantly lost his erection, although flaccidity was beginning to arrive, his willy drooping like a sulking Dalek.

“Smile.”

Neil leaped forward from the throng and pushed between the women, clicking his camera over Luke's body.

“You
fucker
.”

“And another one, for the dailies. Can you pop it up a bit for me, give me the full-frontal look? Ah, perhaps not, all right, dahlin'?” Neil gave me a wink. “Will that do, love?”

“Perfect, thanks, Neil.”

And there, in the second rank, stood Cal, with Ash, Katie, Jazz and Clive, all grinning fit to bust. “He ain't all that big in the bathroom regions, is he?” Clive nodded towards Luke's rapidly drooping appendage. “Wouldn't need a wide angle lens to get that one in.”

“Nah, perfectly normal aperture, mate.” Neil chuckled. “I 'ad to use a flash though, geddit! Flash?”

For some reason I found this hysterical. The tension which had been holding us all broke. One woman burst into tears and ran out of the door, clutching a handkerchief to her eyes. The acne-marked girl let out a sudden scream and launched herself at Luke with a nail file in her hand and had to be escorted out by Clive.

“I suppose you think you're so fucking clever, don't you?” Luke addressed the crowd, propping his naked body up on his elbows. “What
is
this, get-back-at-Luke day? You're bitches, all of you. None of you worth a fuck in bed.
You're
ugly, you're fat, you're too fucking old. I used to have to close my eyes to poke you…and
you
…” Now his attention was back on me. “If it hadn't been for the money, I couldn't even have got it up for you.”

“Funny,
I
don't have that problem.” Cal came and put his arm around me. “But then, I don't have difficulties in that department. I hear that you sometimes have a bit of a case of Mr. Floppy.”

Luke looked as though he'd been hit. “Who?”

“Me.” Nadine. I hadn't seen her. She'd been at the back of the room, behind Cal.

“Dee-Dee? Oh Christ, look love, I can explain.”

“No, I really think you can't.” She looked frail, greenish-pale with huge dark circles under her eyes. “But I've been listening to these other women,
they've
all explained things to me. Charlotte told me how you tried to accuse her of having an affair so that you didn't have to pay for Hugo. Melanie says you stole the money she'd saved to buy a house. Anna and Jemima said you were going to marry them, and you took their money. You swindled all of them.”

“No, I…”

But it was hard to listen to any kind of rationale from a naked man tied to a bed. “Do you know what we're going to do, Luke?” Now I had his attention.

“Oh, let me guess.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Tell me to go away and never do it again?”

“Well, no.” Katie stepped forward. “We're going to put all this in the paper on Tuesday, and Neil's got contacts in the National Press, so we reckon we'll be able to sell the story to
all
the dailies. Fraud Exposed—they'll love it—and the pictures, oh, obviously we'll have to have some fuzzy pixels over your fuzzy pixels.” Katie started to giggle but managed to carry on. “So, we think, by the time you hit the tabloids, your name and, er,
face
, will be well enough known that you won't be
able
to do anything like this again.”

“Probably get offered a deal presenting on Channel 4.” Trust Ash to stick his oar in. “I hear ‘Gay Guys Talk Sex' is looking for a front man. You'd be ideal. Every boy's wet dream.” And he licked his lips, making Luke widen his eyes in shock and turn his head away.

“And, as a rather nice little by-blow, we should all come out of it with a bit of cash. Plus the
York Echo
is going to be the name on everyone's lips for at least a week. Not exactly cutting-edge journalism, but good on the CV.”

Apart from the girl with the baby and Nadine, the women surrounding Luke hadn't said anything. They stood, as though modelling for Easter Island statues, grim-faced and totally still, staring down at him as dispassionately as women staring at the moon. Eventually the older lady with the bad perm spoke:

“Did you ever love any of us?”