The Gift of Shame (22 page)

‘I meant being here with me,’ he insisted. ‘With a lover this place could be paradise for a young woman. Unfortunately, when I work, I am impotent with everything but my paints, so I cannot fill that role for you even had you wanted me to.’

Uncomfortable with the thought that he might be reading her mind, she sought to divert him. ‘Carla did warn me.’

Qito nodded. ‘Carla is extremely possessive of me, but she earned that right.’

‘Aren’t you jealous of her?’

This question was greeted with a scornful laugh. ‘Any man who marries a beautiful woman and imagines she cannot be tempted by other admirers is a fool. Jealousy is a total waste of energies which can be better employed in seeking redemption.’

Helen found the word ‘redemption’ laying heavily on the
table
. Big philosophical concepts had always made her uneasy since she suspected she would never understand them. ‘Are you a religious man?’ she asked.

Shaking his head, Qito reached out to refill her glass. ‘I believe in the soul. That is my perception of what life is – a striving to find a soul. When we have that, we have redemption. Not in the eyes of some prescient, all-seeing deity, but for ourselves. A simple self-justification for having lived.’

‘You’ve found it then,’ smiled Helen. ‘In your art, I mean.’

‘In the eyes of others, perhaps. I have yet to find it in myself. Redemption calls for discipline; gratification is much more accessible so we take the easier path and, in the struggle, lose purity, without which, all is lost.’

‘Your philosophy sounds almost monastic.’

Roaring with laughter, Qito rose from the table. ‘The monks wouldn’t have me!’ he cried and, reaching for a bottle of brandy, poured himself a generous draught. ‘Which of them was it prayed: “God grant me chastity – but not yet!”? That is my downfall, you see?’

Helen shrugged off the question as Qito came round the table, cupped his hands about her face and lifted her bodily to her feet. ‘You are a very beautiful woman,’ he told her, ‘but I am a tired old man and must now go to my rest. We shall meet again at dawn.’ Planting a chaste kiss to each of her cheeks, he wished her goodnight and disappeared into the tent.

Helen watched the tent flap drop back into place behind him and couldn’t escape a feeling of rejection. Perversely, she felt he might at least have tried something with her if only to give her the virtue of rejecting him. Now, instead, she found herself, revitalised by food, facing a long empty evening.

A stir of the palm fronds reminded her that a night breeze had sprung up, so, finding a blanket, she wrapped it around herself and was drawn towards the brilliantly moonlit beach.

There, watching the liquid silver ocean rippling under the full moon, she thought of herself as standing on the edge of eternity. Qito had said life was a quest for the soul and here, she decided, was as good a place to look for it as any other.

She spread the blanket, lay down on the still, warm sands and looked into the immense sky above her. The combination of wine and sun and Qito’s philosophising – not to mention his working ‘impotence’ – had induced in her a warm glow of relaxation which, for Helen, always brought about a sensual awareness. Qito had been right in one thing. This was a place to be shared with a lover but where was he to come from? With one hand trailing over her groin and another cupping her breasts, she was reminded of Qito’s words: ‘Gratification is much more accessible,’ and that, her questing fingers reminded her, was certainly true but she lacked the fantasy to stimulate herself. Carla? The pilots? Both conjured up a background of sophisticated technology which was far from her mood.

Closing her eyes, she sought out her old favourite. The regiment of sex-starved men, but even they were out of ear-shot, and she was left with nothing but the physical stimulation of herself.

It was then that some sixth sense, or, perhaps, some tiny sound, caused her to open her eyes. There, rearing above her, the whites of his eyes bright in the moonlight, stood a man. Curiously Helen felt no fear and was, only afterwards, to understand why. In the moment of opening her eyes and registering the man’s presence she had imagined him a manifestation of her own longings.

After a moment of stilled surprise Helen found herself smiling a welcome. The man said nothing. His body, bare to the rope that supported his baggy sailcloth trousers, was athletically dark and polished, with the moonlight bright enough to shadow the deep contours of a powerful chest. Feeling that to speak would
break
the magical moment, she instead spread her thighs and arms in invitation. The man’s expression barely flickered and she saw that more was demanded of her.

She laid a hand on the man’s groin and, feeling him already hardening, reached for the knotted rope that supported his trousers. The man brushed aside her feebly questing fingers to quickly dispose of the knot himself. The baggy trousers slid from his taut, muscular stomach and Helen, now more fervent, took him fully into her fist, thrilled to find that her fingers could barely meet about the thickness of the still-growing penis. She drew him down to kneel beside her in the sand. Unwilling to lose her daring initiative she guided the intimidating size of him down over her belly to where her readied sheath awaited his sword.

It was then, inevitably, that she ceded all control. Now the man, his body tangy with salt, lay above her, staring directly into her widened expectant eyes, seeming to ask if she had enough courage to take him. Gathering both her wrists in one huge, roughly textured hand, he effortlessly pulled them rigidly above her head, pinning her helplessly under his body, which now bore down on her with threatening weight and slab-like solidity. Searching the man’s eyes, she could see no sign of curiosity about who she might be and, more worryingly, no sign of mercy. Helen wanted to speak – to give consent, reassure him that her reaction was that he paid her homage rather than rape, but his intense, set expression muted her, and made her know that what was about to happen would be devoid of tenderness and that pain and pleasure would be mixed in equal parts.

When he moved to gently probe at the outermost sides of her pubis she could not suppress the gasp of welcome that escaped her tight lips. Urgently she rose to meet him, swallow him, but he paused, teasing her to the point of
torture
. Shuddering with expectation, she tried tearing her hands from his indomitable grasp to wind them round him and use her nails to goad him into her, but still he waited, his face expressionless. As her body begged, he ended the agony of expectation. And so it was with relief and apprehension that she felt him pressing gently forward, opening her up to penetrate, with deliberate slowness, deep into the centre of her soul, until she writhed, her body pleading, even as her fear mounted that she could never accommodate him. Just when she was certain she would be split in two he began to withdraw – so slowly and with such deliberation that she feared he meant to drive her to distraction.

Shamelessly, fearing that he meant to abandon her, she pressed herself against him, her legs around his broad hips, until she was all but lifted from the blanket. It was then, when she was at her most vulnerable, that he plunged with surprising accuracy deep into her to rub against the tender flesh inside her. He brought forth a gasp which ripped through the silence of the night as, having shown her the worst, he once more withdrew with tantalising slowness to hover at the gate.

There his solid cock rested, teasing and threatening before, when she least expected it, it again plunged deep into her, ravaging her senses to be immediately followed by another, even more hearty thrust, causing her to voice yet another scream of triumphant pleasure.

His movements became a mix of slow withdrawals and inward thrusts. There was no tender smile, no brush of his lips to reassure a vulnerable Helen. Instead, he held himself away from her upwardly arching body, creating a space of intense heat between them, making her skin as liquid as the fire he stoked in her loins. Not one word had passed between them as he plunged himself, huge and vibrating, inside her. The sheer strength of this assault excited her as she strained to
intensify
her own pain by squeezing her stretched, outer lips, vainly attempting to trap his huge, pulsating cock.

The only sounds between them had been her alternating cries and sighs, lending an almost ritual air to her exquisite torment. When she felt the helpless embrace of her own orgasm rushing through her, it seemed almost impertinent. He, this man, this stranger, this totally unknown lover, gave no sign that he felt anything other than a delight in assailing the willing flesh laid open to his mercy.

Consciously aware that this was animal savagery, she cried out in the certainty that this was right. To couple without preliminary, without even a word, was totally in tune with the primaeval setting and her own mood. Waves of orgasm swept through her, as she abandoned every doubt and restraint imposed by hundreds and thousands of years of social pretensions. Qito had spoken of redemption and now, naked and savage, she felt she was close to knowing it – red in tooth and claw!

His expression didn’t alter one iota as he continued orchestrating one unstoppable wave after another – his heavy sac banging into her until, without warning, he pulled completely out of her. His grip still firm on her wrists, he raised himself until she could feel the dead weight of him between her breasts. With his free hand he took both her breasts to squeeze them tight about his huge erection so that she felt his throbbing climax long before the first gouts of his heated offering spurted forth to lay a sticky trail across her throat and lips. With this came the first sign of humanity in the man as his body relaxed and his weight came down, threatening to crush her as her freed hands forced themselves between their sweat-streaked bodies, to seek out the precious fluid that lay there.

Smearing her breasts and belly, as if anxious to coat herself in the memory of him, she reached up and tried, with the other
arm
, to draw him down to her, shamelessly seeking some moderating tenderness in which she could express her thanks in the only language her fevered mind could recall.

The man seemed puzzled by this gesture and, despite her protest, levered himself out of her attempted embrace to stand over her. Muted by the immensity of him, she continued to work the rapidly cooling semen in a vain attempt to soothe her aching breasts. Unable to summon the will to move, she lay, her eyes filled with the still half-erected hugeness of him, and passively watched him reach for his discarded trousers. With eyes that never left her, he put them on, tied the rope and, still expressionless, turned away.

Only then did she find the strength to move. Scrambling to her feet she saw that he was walking down the beach to where – she saw for the first time – a small dinghy-like boat, a bright lamp hung over its stern, was drawn up onto the beach.

She stood silently watching as he pushed the boat into the water and athletically leapt aboard. The rasp of rope on the pulley signalled the raising of the one triangular sail which, filling immediately, with the light night breeze, brought silent life to the boat as it arced its way seawards, leaving a phosphorescent trail in its wake.

As the boat gathered pace, Helen felt filled with something akin to awe. This stranger had appeared, full-fledged as if from a fantasy, and now was, it seemed to her inflamed imagination, returning to the mythical Valhalla from which he had sprung.

Breathless, she watched the bobbing bright light which marked his boat’s passage and began, even then, to wonder if it had really happened. The tingling ache in her sex reassured her that it had, but it was still difficult to believe that anything that fierce and animalistic could be so satisfying. Drawn to the water’s edge, she scooped up water to wash herself down in its warm saltiness while her eyes remained fixed on the
lighted
boat until it was lost in the vastness of the ocean beyond the reef.

When she did turn away she was filled, not with sadness at something lost, but a certainty that she had lived a day which would be fixed forever in her memory. Had she perhaps, she wondered, found the first strand of what Qito had called her quest for a soul?

While certain that such a momentous experience must have more significance than mere gratification, the stranger had left no room for her to take refuge in any delusion of romance.

He had come out of the night and delivered precisely what she had craved. More than enough, and certainly nothing less. If he had been a messenger from the prescient deity that Qito denied, he had left in her a soaring confidence which filled her with joy.

As she came into the tent and saw that Qito slept on undisturbed by the activities, the sounds of which must surely have carried to the campsite, she felt even greater pleasure in knowing that the experience was hers alone with no need to explain or account to anyone.

Hugging the memory of the night close to her breasts, as she might have done with a favourite teddy bear, she summoned up the image that had lodged most firmly in her mind – the moment when, satiated, he had stood over her, his still half-hardened cock standing proudly out from his muscular stomach. Her groin went into spasm as she regretted that he had not allowed her the pleasure of re-arousal – nor the wanton abandoning of self that taking him into her mouth would have given.

Had the stranger even understood how completely he had been welcomed? Demanding only her submission, he had not even allowed her the pleasure of acquiescence, but, once more safe, she acknowledged that he had been right.

They had coupled as two animals meeting in the night. No words had been used and, what words were needed, she wondered, to communicate the most basic of needs?

In the dark stillness of her desert island tent, with only Qito’s nasal snorts for company, she felt herself in communion with thousands of past generations of women. Tonight she had known what it was to be truly, consentingly,
taken
. Not romanced, not seduced, with no pretence at anything other than an urgent response to a mutual need.