The Pleasure Quartet (2 page)

He kissed her, the plush softness of her lips an experience that renewed his faith in their closeness every time he did so, warm silk cushions with the sweet aftertaste of her fading lipstick.

Holding her tight, he could feel the beat of her heart through the thin fabric of her dress as she hugged him, her hands circling his back, pulling his body against hers as the kiss lengthened, tips of tongues touching each other in an unpredictable dance, breaths growing short, almost a battle of wills as to who would disengage first and both refusing to be the one who did so.

The rhythm of her heart was growing more frantic, like a distant drum, settling into a regular, steady pattern, like a song taking flight, unformed tides of desire spreading through her bloodstream.

Noah’s hand moved towards her waist, their lips still locked, took a firm hold of her dress, twisting the material between two fingers to get a grip on it and began pulling the garment upwards, baring her thighs and then her white lace panties. The back of his hand brushing against her stomach, he pulled aside the elastic of her knickers and delved deeper until his nails grazed the forest of curls shielding her intimacy. The heat radiating from her crux immediately washed across his intruding fingers. He slipped inside.

‘You’re so wet . . .’

‘Yes.’

Their lips parted. April moved. He pulled his hand out of her panties and raised it to her hair, running his fingers through her silken curtain, parting its smooth waves, relishing the sensation. He swivelled slightly and gently bit the lobe of her ear. April shivered, a faint shudder animating her body, endangering her balance and almost causing her to stumble. Noah’s hand on her shoulder steadied her.

‘Come,’ Noah said.

They walked to the bedroom, fingers interlocked, throwing off their shoes as they passed its threshold.

Out of instinct, April moved to the window and pulled the net curtains tidily together. Noah couldn’t help feeling a touch of irritation. She always did that. Just couldn’t let caution go to the wind, even though they were on a high floor and there was no taller building across the street towards Battery Park and anyone wishing to spy on them from below would require strong binoculars, a camera drone or supernatural voyeur powers. Even about to trip into sex, April always thought of other things, unnecessary precautions. Yet again the magic of the moment had been spoiled. A spell had been broken.

April turned back towards him, an enigmatic smile drawn across her lips. And began to undress.

Noah was taken aback; he had expected, hoped to undress her himself. Slowly, stretching time, baring, revealing her an inch or so at a time, lingering, fingers wandering lazily across her skin, building his desire in infinite increments, each breath a sigh, teasing, playing with the minutes.

April looked up at him. With a note of reproach, seeing him standing motionless and in no rush to disrobe.

‘Why are you waiting?’ she asked, her hands stretching behind her back to unhook her bra.

She had no sense of ritual, he realised.

For her, sex was just another element of life, one to enjoy and indulge in, like you did a good meal or a pleasant conversation. A condiment like salt and pepper or sweet words of endearment whispered in one’s ear at the right moment, even if neither partner actually believed in them. An ingredient that would serve to enhance the quiet pleasure of a long-term relationship, smoothing its rough edges, filling the unspoken gaps of intimacy, nothing more.

Noah was beckoned by roughness. Not in bed; April always bristled slightly whenever he deviated from the well-worn path of their embraces. But in life he found an unexpressed thrill in danger, magic.

Which was probably what made him so receptive to music and good at his job in spotting bands and singers who could prove innovative and with whom he could work to mine their unpredictability, leave the surface of things behind and reach a new level.

April set her bra to the side and revealed her breasts.

She bent over to pull her panties down to her ankles and then imperceptibly shimmied and allowed them to slip all the way to the bedroom floor where she stepped out of them.

Her pubic hair was a darker shade of blonde, tightly woven, but so soft to the touch, Noah knew. She had never allowed him to shave it or responded to his suggestions.

Rooted to the spot and unwilling to do anything quite yet, he kept on gazing at her. Fuck, she was beautiful. It was as if every time he saw her nude anew was the first time again. A revelation. Even her minute flaws seemed to serve as a frame for her perfection. An ever so slightly crooked top tooth only visible when she laughed aloud, a thin scar across her right eyebrow, a slight discoloration of the skin on the inside of her right thigh in the shape of an island on a map of the world, just a nail’s length across. April was terribly self-conscious about the stain, and Noah had once been in the habit of annoying her when he insisted that the mark was shaped like Sardinia, or it could have been Sicily or Malta or Tuvalu for all he knew. Geographical accuracy had not been the object of the exercise. And then there was the dark, harmless mole on her back, equidistant from each shoulder.

All these made her real.

And even more attractive to him.

April, now fully nude, walked over to their bed and pulled the cream cover away and dived under it.

Noah finally set to and pulled his grey T-shirt above his head, disturbing the even cushion of his dark curls, and began to unbuckle his jeans, tugging on the worn leather belt.

As he joined April between the covers, her body warm and soft against his, he found that she had placed herself at the centre of the bed, so he had no choice but to position himself above her. She had already opened her legs wide. Her wetness greeted him. He nestled his lips in the crook of her neck and breathed in the barely fragrant aftersmell of the perfume she had sprayed on before lunch and their walk through Greenwich Village, L’Eau by Issey Miyake. He knew because she had asked him to buy it for her for last year’s Christmas gift. They rarely surprised each other.

He slid inside her.

With ease.

Comfortable weekend sex.

Predictable. Pleasant. Silent.

He was hard, but tender and attuned to April’s inner rhythms, riding her with care and energy, expertly surfing across the inner waves of her lust, ever trying to match his movements to the currents of their respective desires, equalising the ebb and flow and intensity of the hidden seas that controlled their sexuality.

Soon, April was beginning to gasp and he knew she was close to coming and he accelerated his thrusts.

‘Jeeezussss . . .’

Her triumphant cry punctured the room’s peace.

Noah closed his eyes, now fixed on releasing his own pleasure. She was one of the few women he had known who came easily. There was no challenge in it.

A thought intruded in his mind as he kept on burying himself inside her pliant softness: the next time they fucked, he wanted to play loud music as an accompaniment. Whoever had said that you shouldn’t mix work and pleasure?

He had met April just a few months after he arrived in the city. The now ex-girlfriend he had initially followed from London to New York, Bridget, had quickly failed in her attempt to conquer the Big Apple, and had soon come to the conclusion that she didn’t have it in her to navigate the course. Bridget had enjoyed a modicum of success on the university and club circuit back in England as a folk singer with a dusky voice and clever phrasing, but on Bleecker Street, she was just one of a handful of moderately talented singers and, despite a few gigs at Kenny’s Castaways and The Bitter End, she did not get enough favourable reviews or repeat bookings.

He’d been freelancing for a handful of music magazines, which was how they’d met. He’d championed Bridget with a positive review, in a successful attempt to bed her, and with a laptop reckoned he could work from anywhere, so following her to Manhattan had not been too much of a dilemma.

When a discouraged Bridget summarily gave up on her dream and decided to return to the UK to complete her law studies, Noah had opted to stay put. He’d always loved the excitement of New York and, half-American by birth, he didn’t need to worry about obtaining a work visa. Thanks to a book advance he had pocketed to write a warts and all biography of a popular boy band with whose manager he had been to university, he had found himself an affordable rental in Brooklyn where the rock scene was burgeoning.

Within half a year, he had been offered an A&R job by a mainstream record company with a brief to nurture further local bands. He had a good ear, a distinctive taste for the original, and a British no-bullshit attitude which quickly made him popular with the musicians with whom he had to work and seduce into the corporate fold without any of them feeling they were compromising their ideals and principles in the process. Unlike other record business types, he would not pretend to be their friend and was careful not to interfere too openly with their music, opting for gentle hints and subtle production recommendations once he had managed to get the bands into the studios, an attitude they and their often inexperienced and wary managers appreciated.

Noah had found a life he enjoyed. Although not essentially creative himself, he was nevertheless involved in the creation of powerful music. It was the best of all possible worlds and yet something was missing. Sex, women.

A string of harmless one-night stands around the networks of clubs and venues he now haunted for his job had proved unfulfilling, and then he met April.

A photo session had been set up for one of his groups, a trip hop trio from Philadelphia, whose female singer’s deep, sensual tones always managed to move him inside from the moment she began to sing, although her everyday non-performing voice was a bit strident and oh so American. She was part of a long-standing couple with the bass player in the group, but despite that, the temptation to get to know her more had, against Noah’s best judgement, skirted his thoughts more than once.

The record company’s art department had signed up a fairly well-known fashion photographer whose studio was on the Lower East Side and Noah had agreed to meet up with the guys there after the shoot, to pick up some test recordings of a couple of new songs they were working on. He was waiting in the studio’s anteroom for the session to end. Leafing through a fashion magazine left open on a low glass table, he was smiling at the incongruous thought that he could just as well have been sitting in a dentist’s waiting room when a young woman, a blonde with short hair, walked through, a pile of cellophane-wrapped clothes on hangers looped over her arm.

Their eyes met.

She noticed the ironic smile on his lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked him.

‘Not you, I assure you. Just something that was passing through my mind before you entered.’

‘You’re English.’

‘Indeed.’

She smiled back at him.

By then he’d been in America long enough to recognise her own accent was also not local. He took a guess.

‘You’re Canadian?’

She nodded and laid out her cumbersome bundle of clothes onto a nearby sofa.

‘I’m April.’

‘Noah.’

‘Are you waiting for Hutch, or are you one of his assistants?’

‘Neither. He’s finishing a shoot.’ He indicated the door that separated the waiting room from the loft studio where the work was taking place. ‘I’m with the group, musicians being shot. The band.’

‘Their manager? Minder? You don’t look like the rock type.’

Noah appreciated her attitude. And he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, her looks, too. She had a quality of self-assurance that appealed to him greatly, as if she knew what she wanted and nothing would change her aim or direction.

‘Is there a typical rock type?’

‘I don’t know. You look normal . . .’ Her sentence halted in full flow, as if she thought she had said something wrong, was maybe insulting him. She lowered her eyes.

‘I don’t mind in the slightest being normal,’ Noah countered. ‘Feel no need to conform to popular expectations.’

‘It’s not what I meant,’ April said. ‘I expressed myself badly. I do that sometimes.’

‘It’s fine. What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘What brings you here, April? Do you work for a dry cleaner, maybe?’

She laughed. ‘No.’

He laughed along with her.

‘So what’s all the clothes about?’

‘They’re for a fashion shoot tomorrow. I brought them ahead of time. I work for a magazine.’ She looked down at the one he had dropped back on the glass table. ‘Actually, the same one you were reading.’

‘How fortuitous.’

‘Wow, big words!’ Her eyes were a pale shade of green and he couldn’t help but stare at them. Not that the rest of April didn’t call for much closer attention, but you could only admire a woman one step at a time, he reckoned. His attention was drawn to a thin, almost invisible line, a scar, he realised, that partly bisected one of her eyebrows. A terribly minor imperfection that made her seem less plastic, he felt. He liked the girl. A lot.

‘No one’s perfect. Even more so with a British university education.’

‘So I see.’

‘And what about Canada? Where do you come from?’

‘Vancouver.’

‘Never been,’ Noah said, ‘but got close. I was visiting Seattle a couple of years ago, and was tempted to hire a car and drive up. Never got round to it, though.’

‘You should have. Gastown is a gas.’

‘Would you have been there, or already in New York?’

‘If I’d known you were coming, maybe I would have stayed on . . .’

He enjoyed the way she could playfully sustain a conversation, spar with him, tease, seduce him already.

Right then, the studio door opened and the band poured out, all in an ebullient mood, still high from the photo shoot.

Noah and April exchanged phone numbers.

She’d arrived in the city at almost the same time he had, they later discovered, leaving a small local publishing house where she’d found a placement following art school studies, and now worked in Manhattan as a production assistant for a mid-level magazine group. She wasn’t actually involved with the fashion department, and the errand at the photographer Hutch Lea’s studio, had been a favour she was doing for a colleague whose child was down with flu. Normally, she wouldn’t ever have set foot there. Her job was assisting the art department to complete their layouts in readiness for the printers.