The Blue Guide (18 page)

He's got the message, is sitting in his favourite chair, face turned up to the sun like a heliotrope. I throw him a glance, then turn away and am just reaching for a wedge of melon and thinking that I really need to have
a shower and get ready to go and meet Carlotta when my mobile goes. I run indoors, pick it up, standing nude in the window. It's Carlotta's voice I hear on the other end.

‘. . . lie-in . . .' she's saying ‘. . . really tired . . . meet a little later?'

I try to focus, pull myself together. ‘You're not feeling well?' I say eventually.

‘I'm fine, 'Licia. I just feeling a little bit lazy. So I thought we can have late lunch and go to Hoxton this afternoon?'

‘Sure,' I say. ‘I'll call The Zetter now, and see you at, say, two o'clock?'

‘Fine,' she says, ‘I go my own way, you no need to fetch me. See you later.'

She hangs up, a little abruptly for my liking, but I reason that Paco may have come in and made her feel self-conscious. Not that there's any reason we shouldn't be talking to each other, of course, but perhaps she's worried she can't keep her nascent affection for me out of her voice. I snigger, am tempted to call her back and remind her that if she wants to be an actress, she needs all the practice she can get in faking it.

And then I think, more seriously, about Paco, and make up my mind to get that little problem out of the way now, make it clear to him where I stand. I dial his mobile, but it goes through to voicemail and I don't leave a message, just in case Carlotta should somehow get access to it. I'll catch him later, I think.

It's lunchtime, and I'm watching Carlotta pile into a plate of pasta with asparagus, egg and parmagiano.

‘I so hungry,' she explains through a mouthful. ‘Mmmm, you try this.' She winds me a forkful, passes it over and feeds me. ‘Divine, no?'

I pick at my own food, a clam and chilli risotto. I'm feeling a little odd, a little wrong-footed. Carlotta got here late, after already having put the kibosh on our morning together. It's hardly the behaviour of someone who wants me as badly as she told me she did yesterday. And now all she can think about is food and how ravenous she is. When I asked her, on arriving, what she'd actually been doing all morning, she noticeably changed the subject, started rambling on about some inane conversation she'd had with her cab driver about pole-dancing, of all things.

Now, as she polishes off her pasta, I decide to push it.

‘So,' I say, fingering the stem of my wine glass. ‘How come you were so tired this morning?'

She shrugs, smiles knowingly. ‘Busy girl,' she says, and her little nose wrinkles winsomely. Under the table I feel her leg brush against mine, then a naked foot insinuate itself between my knees and start inching its way between my legs. My pussy melts, my whole body melts. I force myself to sit up straight, clamp my thighs together before her foot reaches my knickers, although inside I'm screaming out for her to pull them aside and give me a damn good toe-ing.

‘How was your evening?' I say, fixing my face into what, I hope, resembles a sweet, mildly interested smile. ‘What did you do?'

‘I read,' says Carlotta, and her face is just as bland. ‘Look at art books.'

I want to ask her if she thought of me at all, want to ask her what time Paco came home and what they did together, but the words are stuck in my throat, almost choking me.

‘But you said you were tired,' I persist. There's a slight whininess, a need, insinuating itself into my
voice. The need to know. The green-eyed monster has struck.

She sighs, pats at her mouth with her napkin and then lays it down, smoothing it out. Then she leans in towards me over the table.

‘He come back later,' she says huskily. ‘He been in rehearsals, was still sweaty. We order room service and he go for shower.' She raises her hand to her throat, keeps staring into my eyes. I'm like a rabbit in her headlights.

‘I follow him in,' she says. ‘And I watch him, for a while. He like that guy in the painting – the
académie
. So fit and slim, so perfect. He running his hands up and down, massaging the gel into his skin. And then he see me watching him, and he turn to me and he start soaping his cock, his big beautiful cock.' She closes her eyes for a minute, shifts a little on her chair.

‘He lean with one arm against shower door,' she resumes after a moment, ‘and with the other hand he masturbating, and I just standing, watching, wanting him inside me. But I can't move, can't take my eyes off this beautiful thing, my husband. And he comes – comes all over the shower door. And then he open the door and he pull me in, and after I sucked him for a few minutes he bend me over his arm and fuck me like a madman, from behind.'

I'm sitting on my hands now, afraid that if I free them I won't be able to keep them away from my cunt. I've been presented with the image of Carlotta, splayed for Paco in the shower, his undeniably superb cock sawing in and out of her, his long slender hands pulling open her buttocks to reveal that rosebud hole. Embellishing the story from what she's told me, I see her leaning forwards, palms against the tiles, breasts
against the tiles, eyes half-closed in a swoon, the tip of her tongue between her teeth.

‘After . . .' she says, and I'm thinking, Christ, I can't take any more of this, I really can't. Just give me a break, Carlotta.

‘After, we go to bed, closed ourselves behind the curtains, make ourselves a nest, and carry on fucking for hours.' She shakes her head, tosses her blonde locks over her shoulders, smiles. ‘That why I can't get up this morning,' she says. ‘We need lie-in.'

I smile bravely. I'm jealous, but I don't have any right to be. I pushed Carlotta, and now I'm suffering because of what she told me. I need to back off. Paco and Carlotta fuck, like most married couples, and I can't be surprised by that. I just don't have to know the details.

Carlotta's getting up, excusing herself to go to the loo, and while she's gone I try to get my head together. I won't pry again, won't open myself up to these feelings. If I can't keep my emotions out of it, then I will have to step back.

As I'm telling myself this, a message beeps through and I open it to read a text from Paco to the effect that I am to meet him after his show tonight at the Royal Albert Hall.

FINE,
I shoot back. I was going to phone him, but I may as well talk to him in person, take him to a bar and civilly explain that I can't do what we've been doing anymore.

As I'm putting my phone back in my bag, a waiter comes over and hands me a piece of paper. ‘From your friend,' he says.

I crease my brow as I unfold it: has Carlotta done a runner on me, I wonder? Is it all over so quickly?

But it's quite the opposite.

‘Room 411,' it says simply.

I gather up my possessions with unseemly haste, make my way out of the restaurant and back into the atrium lobby, with its red spiral staircase winding its way up to the glass roof of the former Victorian warehouse. It's raindrop sensitive, so the waiter told us, and opens and closes automatically.

Then I take the lift to the relevant floor, follow a walkway overlooking the skylit atrium, and knock on the door of Room 411.

‘Come in,' I hear her call, voice like dripping honey.

I obey, and when I walk in she's already naked on the bed, in the Olympia pose but without the haughtiness. In fact, she's grinning at me, giggling a little, urging me in with a wave of the hand.

I step up to the edge of the bed, and she reaches up and tugs me down towards her, slipping off my jacket, then pulling up my top and pushing my bra over my tits and taking them in her mouth, one at a time, and sucking and nibbling and tonguing them until they're steel-hard.

I push off my skirt and knickers, push her back onto the bed and straddle her. I'm still wet from what she told me in the restaurant, and I'm sliding on her naked belly, coating her like a snail leaving its trail. Then I pull away and down, and bring my mouth to her pussy. She arches her back as I start to flick at her clit with my tongue, gently at first, then more forcefully, clutching the sides of my head with her hands as if she never wants me to stop. And I never want to stop.

A few minutes later, she brings her hands down and spreads herself further for me, as if inviting me into her, and I let myself get lost in her folds and creases for a moment, inhaling and tasting her, getting drunk on her sweet, slightly musky liquor. Then I dart my tongue
inside her and it's as if she's sucking me up as she arches again, raises her hips slightly as she applies two fingertips to her clit and loses herself to her climax.

As she does so, I can't help but bring my hand down to my own sopping pussy and, with the heel of my hand, vibrate myself until I share Carlotta's paroxysm, my cries like echoes of hers.

When I wake, I don't know how long afterwards, she's waiting for me, perched regal as a Siamese at the end of the bed. She's wearing her bathrobe, but it's not done up, and her breasts are spilling forth, brown and shiny as chestnuts. With her hands she's twisting the tie of the robe around and around, and I think I know what's coming next. But is it to be me or her?

I watch with bated breath as she crawls up the bed towards me, shuffling off the robe. The lighting in the room has changed to pink, I suddenly realise – Carlotta must have been playing around with the gadgetry while I was asleep. As if all of this was orchestrated, some music is being piped in from the vicinity of the TV set – the Grace Jones' version of ‘La vie en rose'.

She hands me the tie, then backs away down the bed and climbs off. Over in the corner is a Louis XV armchair that I hadn't noticed, covered with a modern fabric and co-ordinating with the flowery wallpaper art that adorns the walls and the pearlised pastel leather of the headboard of the bed. I follow Carlotta over to it, watch as she climbs aboard, holding her arms out in front of her. She's positioned in front of a huge sash window, overlooking a calm square, with the sun pouring in on her in an amber slick. Anyone strolling by who happens to look up is in for a treat.

As she waits for me, she looks over her shoulder, not directly at me, but out of the corner of her eye,
surreptitiously, tauntingly, and as the chorus of the song returns she begins to hum, then sing huskily.

A lump appears in my throat. I step up to her, drape myself over her from behind, feeling my bush against the satin skin of her buttocks, my breasts against her slender back. I reach around her and fumble for a moment, secure her hands together then pull out the ends of the tie and wind each around an arm of the chair, knot it. When I'm done, I stand back up, waiting for her command. She seems to have some pretty definite ideas about what she wants.

‘Over there,' she says, turning her head over her shoulder and jerking her chin. ‘My bag.'

I go back over to the bed, open her capacious Balenciaga hobo handbag. Inside are all the accoutrements the modern girl needs for her day-to-day life – mobile, hairbrush, cigarettes, tampons, Chanel sunglasses, lipstick. And amidst them all is a pink strap-on.

‘I guess this is what you meant?' I say, holding it up. The harness is basically composed of a pair of thong knickers with a ring on the front through which you insert the dildo, although at present the two are already attached. I've never seen one of these before but I guess that they're designed so you can wear the harness under your clothing like normal knickers and just whip the dildo out of your bag or pocket as required, for an impromptu shag. Ingenious.

Carlotta smiles impishly, raises her bum up a fraction in anticipation. I look at the apparatus a bit nervously, then sit down and slip it up over me. She's still looking over her shoulder, running her tongue over her lips, eyes glittering. ‘Fuck me,' she mouths.

I clamber over the bed, finger her to make sure she's wet enough then mount her. Plunging in and out, I squeeze her hard, one hand on each buttock. She's threaded her own arms back between her legs and flattened one hand to squirrel it into my cunt. With the other she's massaging my clit, my lips, frenziedly. There's a slapping noise as our flesh meets and separates, meets and separates, my lower belly catching the top of her bum cleft, her cheeks ramming back against my upper thighs. A rhythm takes hold of us, and we ride on and on, moaning and wailing until we reach fever pitch, and come, once again, at the same time.

It's not a cold night, but afterwards Carlotta insists on us having the handknitted hotwater bottles filled and cuddling up in bed with some trashy TV – it happens to be reruns of
Dynasty
that we find, but we don't really mind. Our brains have turned to bubblegum with all the fucking we've been doing, our bodies are limp and sated – for the moment. It would be nice to just stay here, folded in Carlotta's arms, and then cleanse myself in the walk-in raindance shower and
climb back into bed and sit reading one of the classic paperbacks that are dotted around out loud to her. Then fuck her again.

Carlotta's clearly having similar thoughts, for a few moments later she rolls over to face me from where I've been spooning her, kisses me, and suggests spending the night together.

‘We can always,' she says, ‘tell Paco we go out of town, to a gallery someplace, and have a long dinner and miss our last train back and decide to stay in a hotel rather than take long taxi ride. He performing until late anyway.'