The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (16 page)

A figure rounded the corner. A woman. Holly noted her stylish heeled boots, red fur
sprouting from the leather at her ankles. She shivered. God, she needed a hat.

Holly hurried into a clothing shop. A row of hats. A French beret, perhaps? A beanie?
She touched the edge of a blood-pink fedora; steeled herself for a transaction in
a strange, opaque
language. She stepped up to the counter, held out her credit card.

To her relief the shop assistant nodded and said just one word. ‘Oui.'

With the warm felt of the hat perched on her head, Holly strode more confidently
out of the shop. She reached the end of the street and turned a corner and there
the world opened up to an unexpected vision of wonder. A square spread out before
her, an otherwise empty space filled with tourists pointing cameras up towards the
gothic turrets of a cathedral.

Notre Dame.

Holly gasped. Her mouth fell open. It was something wondrous, a miracle of stone
and effort, a truly awe-inspiring stretch towards perfection. Small creatures crouched
at the top of each reach of stone.

Holly stood staring up towards the highest turrets of the cathedral until her neck
began to ache. She waited for traffic, crossed over into the square.

Paris
. She was here in Paris. Holly felt a sudden ache in her stomach. The crouching
gargoyles gazed down at her. Again she paused; the minutes slowed. Time made no sense
in the presence of such great beauty. A long black car pulled up at the edge of the
square. The rear door opened and a figure stepped out. She saw the neat, dark suit,
the cuffs and collar a blinding white. He walked directly towards her and she saw
as he approached his soft, sallow skin, his dark, almond-shaped eyes. The face flattened,
moon-shaped, skin so soft that it seemed he must be carved out of butter. A Chinese
man with perfect hair parted on one side and slicked back around his face like freshly
poured tar.

Here it was. The moment of seduction. She could feel it in
the way he moved steadily
towards her, crowds receding, pigeons taking flight clearing a path for him to stride
through.

As he walked towards Holly she practised her words.
Hello
, she would say,
I have
been waiting for you
. She imagined him taking her hand and leading her back through
the parting waves of tourists, back to the black limousine. The seats would be finished
in soft calf. She would feel the silkiness as he pushed her back and lay her down.
Her hymen would tear, the blood would stain the pale seats but it wouldn't matter.
He was rich, much richer probably than her parents, he would replace the seat covers.
Or keep them as a trophy.

He was in front of her. Two more steps and she would be in his embrace. She knew
how she would appear to him, her coat, her hat, her ill-advised shoes. She knew the
power of her own beauty, too. She was ripe, low-hanging fruit. He reached out to
her.

She stepped towards him and he pushed her to one side.

The Chinese man joined the growing queue waiting to climb to the top turrets and
the gargoyles grinned down at Holly, laughing. For a moment she had touched the skin
on the back of his hand. She felt a wave of disappointment. His skin felt like a
new kitten, soft and sweet as custard.

She felt a flush of relief and bereavement. She would never touch the naked skin
under his expensive suit. She would never discover the secret of his anatomy, the
gentle uncurl of his penis, the smell of his sweat as he laboured above her. For
a moment she contemplated hiding herself in the back of his limousine. He would climb
the cathedral and find his way back to the vehicle, elated by the wondrous view of
Paris spreading out beneath him. He would find another kind of wonder spread
behind
the tinted windows. She started to move towards the big black car but just as she
reached it the limousine pulled quietly away, disappearing into the crowded streets
of the 4th Arrondissement.

She was defeated. She had failed the first test. She was vanquished as surely as
if he had turned and plunged a knife in her heart and laughed as she bled out onto
the ancient paving.

Holly looked quickly around, then up at the mocking sprites carved in stone and perched
in the ornate alcoves of the cathedral. They alone were witness to her humiliation.
They alone had seen her first stumble. She turned and walked away, back into the
quiet anonymity of the narrow alleys.

It was not enough, then, to place herself in plain view. She would need to harvest
her own meal. She would need to recast herself as hunter, not prey. Back in Brisbane
she had learnt that a man should pick a woman. That was the natural order of things.
And yet in the pages of Anaïs Nin's book women prowled the Parisian streets. Girls
took their boys, women lunged towards hesitant men. There was a lesson to be learnt
from story after story of female wantonness.

Holly tripped on a cobblestone, and felt her ankle twist beneath her. If she were
to become a huntress of men she would need substantially sturdier shoes.

The Delta of Venus

by
ANAÏS NIN

She saw a man at a nearby table. She was alone. He was alone. They had this in common.
He was a little older than her, not unappealing, his hair fashionably disarranged.
She saw him stare at the waitress with a naked hunger. So he and Holly had something
else in common. He ate his sliced beef rather theatrically, smearing the sauce around
his plate as if he were slaughtering the beast with his own hands. His French, what
she could overhear, was sonorous and beautiful, as if he were performing opera. She
listened as he engaged the waitress. Their banter seemed flirtatious. He spoke, and
she tutted and skipped away from him with a giggle.

Holly ordered a second glass of wine. She said the words in English, too nervous
to experiment with her phrasebook French.

The fairly attractive man had noticed her. He let his gaze linger on the stretch
of her legs, crossed one over the other under the table. Perhaps he would not be
able to read her
English, but this was a risk she would have to take. She wrote the
words carefully on the napkin. Simple words:

Behind the restaurant there is a phone booth. I will meet you there. 5 mins. I want
to have sex.

Anaïs Nin would have been appalled. Her note was quite without poetry; if this was
an Anaïs Nin story there would be words of lust and longing. But Holly was afraid
that any poetry would be lost in translation. How could he misunderstand
I want to
have sex?
Perhaps she should have told him she was a virgin. Should a hymen come
with a warning? So many things for her to discover. She rubbed at the pale band of
skin on her ring finger.

She stood and walked past his table, placing the folded napkin on his empty plate.

It was dark back here behind the restaurant. Holly wished she was a smoker. A character
in one of Nin's pornographic stories would light a cigarette. She fidgeted, her shoes
crunching on a scatter of broken glass. The lowest panel of the phone booth was shattered.
The phone itself was crusted with black spray paint. The word
merde
sprayed across
the upper glass panel. She picked at the edge of a theatre flier stuck crookedly
on the metal behind the phone. She remembered the first time she had stepped into
the phone booth that would turn out to be the bookshop. Here she was, stepping into
yet another phone booth. For a moment she imagined that if she picked up the handset,
she would hear Mandy's comforting voice, but there was only the dull tone of a dead
line. She set it back gently into its cradle.

She would give him his five minutes, no more. There would be other men. She wouldn't
wait for this one.

Holly saw his shadow before he rounded the corner. His hair, elongated by the streetlight,
seemed like the head of a wild beast. His fingers were claws. But the person who
rounded the corner was a pale parody of the bestial shadow, just an arrogant middle-aged
man with a swagger. He leaned on the door of the phone booth. He smiled with one
side of his mouth but the other side was frowning as if he couldn't make up his mind
if this was a good idea. Was Holly worth the effort, he seemed to be wondering. He
assessed the length of her from her new high-heeled boots to her neatly styled hair.

Holly didn't really care what he thought of her. It was time. She had to act now
or she would lose her nerve completely. She reached out to his crotch and pressed
the palm of her hand there. Yes, a definite pressure. A growing hardness. She could
feel her own sex filling with blood, the lips beginning to pulse with the beat of
her heart. She was excited. She was ready. It would be here, now, with this stranger.
She unzipped his fly. She felt all the blood rush away from her head, flowering between
her legs; the petals down there were opening, yearning towards the brightness of
the moon. She let herself fall to her knees, felt the sharp tearing of her stockings
on the broken glass. But the pain was just another delicious sensation. A sudden
jet of saliva wet her mouth. She was hungry. Her mouth seemed obscenely empty. She
reached out towards his open fly, snaking her fingers in between the metal teeth.

‘Formidable!'

His hands tangled in her hair. He pushed her head forward and she was already inclining
in that direction.

His underwear was a frustrating barrier. She wanted to feel flesh in her fingers
but instead she seemed to be confronted by
nothing but tangles of white cotton. She
struggled with it, plucking at the fabric, and finally found a little slit in the
cotton through which she was able to pull the stiff dart of a penis from his pants.
Her mouth descended on it almost as soon as she had seen it, like an albatross nipping
up bait fish. She liked the way it sat on her tongue, the fat lozenge of flesh twitching
as she lapped at it inexpertly but with enough desire to make up for any lack of
skill.

Her world narrowed to a kind of tunnel vision. Her eyes were closed and the world
contracted to the very specific scent of him, a warm damp smell of baking bread,
coffee beans, port, and just a hint of urine. Now a slightly acid slipperiness on
her tongue as a drop squeezed from the tip of his penis and slipped easily down the
back of her throat. He was pumping her onto his cock, pushing her head with his palms
so that her lips rubbed against the cotton of his underwear. She had heard of people
gagging; since his penis barely reached the back of her tongue she concluded it was
of modest dimensions in the scheme of things. That didn't trouble her. The feel of
it slipping in and out of her lips seemed to be wetting her other lips. She was not
wearing underwear herself, and the juices slid easily down the inside of her thigh.
It would be glowing down there, Holly knew. She remembered the bubble of bright desire
that had escaped her cunt when she tried to touch herself. It made her pause for
breath.

She pulled her head back to gulp air and slapped his hands away from the back of
her head. She must not lose heart. Holly dragged at the denim of his faded jeans
till he stumbled and fell hard against the edge of the phone booth, then climbed
him like a playground toy, scrambling up over his knees, soaking his
clothing with
her juices. She knew she would be leaving a glowing trail like a radioactive snail,
and she reached into the plunging neckline of her dress and pulled out her breasts
to distract him. He dutifully locked eyes with first one and then the other nipple.
His hands clamped around them, squeezed the firm round globes. In a second his face
was obscured by her breasts, which he hungrily stuffed into his mouth. She remembered
the way he'd attacked his bloodied beef and thought her breasts might be like another
offering, a third course for him to gorge on.

‘Saperlipopette!' he mumbled through a mouth full of mammaries. ‘Merde!'

Holly had no idea what he was saying and not much interest. She was, however, enjoying
the feel of his breath on the clenched buds of her nipples. She liked the slide of
his tongue hot against her flesh. She felt as if her breasts were swelling every
time he latched onto them with his teeth, as if they were flesh-coloured balloons
and his breath was somehow inflating them. They seemed to have grown in her imagination
till they took up most of her body.

She shifted higher, pausing to find the condom that she had slipped into her garter
belt. She lifted it to her mouth and tore open the plastic packet. She needed to
hurry. She could feel the throbbing of her cunt, gnashing at empty air like a hungry
mouth. She slipped the condom onto his discreet cock. She had practised on a banana
in her hotel room and was satisfied that she'd got quite good at it—now she didn't
even need to look to know that she had unrolled the sheath all the way down to his
balls. His balls—she hadn't seen them at all. She slid her fingers back inside his
underwear and felt them tight and high and
hairy, two succulent lychees in their
skins. She hovered above the rubbered protuberance and felt her cunt dripping bright
juices down onto the head of it. She reached down and lubricated his cock with her
own juices, slipping her fingers up and down until his penis was slicked all the
way to the base. Then she lowered herself, spreading her own lips with her fingers,
felt the head of his cock butt up against the narrow opening.

‘Baise-moi!' he grunted into the pillows of flesh pressing up against his lips. She
bounced down onto his cock and gasped. Even this small nub of flesh seemed too big
for her. She shifted her knees on the grit of the floor. She lifted her hips and
slammed them down onto him.

The fortress of her vulva seemed bolted, the door shut tight. She tried a third thrust
of her hips and felt a sharp pain. She screamed, a high little yelp. Now, finally.
Holly reached down between her legs to feel the head of his cock lodged just inside
her cunt. She wriggled her hips, trying to get a better purchase on the thing but
it seemed there was no room left inside her for more than just the tip. She panted,
grunted, pressed down, and then, when she had almost despaired of making any more
headway, the man began to thrust up into her, his hips trembling, his teeth nipping
at her tits. She knew, somehow, that he was close to coming, which meant he would
be useless to her in a matter of minutes.