The Pleasure Seekers (4 page)

That English reserve! He was only as free as it would allow him to be. He had not the freedom D’Arcy possessed, something she was born with, that was innate in her and she had been brought up with, that allowed her to submit totally to a lover. That was what he had demanded of her and received from her in exchange for the love he could give her. Only for brief moments in their sex life did he fly free as a bird, soar to heights he had only dreamed of. She smiled to herself, thinking of those moments and of how marvellous they were, how much she loved him for at least being able to achieve those.

‘I don’t smell anything delicious coming out of the kitchen.’

‘I think I’ve created enough delicious for you for one day.’

‘Oh? And not for you?’

‘There were benefits. Blissful ones actually,’ he told her in one of his English understatements. They smiled at each other, the sort of smiles that come from love, contentment, a deep regard for one another.

‘You’re hungry and I’m famished, and there’s no food in the house. Your fault not mine, you never let me out of bed long enough to do the shopping . . .’ She was amused. Sex, most especially when he was out of control and lost in lust, had always to be seen as her fault. This time she had to admit he was right. ‘So no eccentric meal for you tonight. Pity, because I was looking forward to cooking
for you. Instead I will buy you the best meal we can find and a bottle of wine fit for the goddess of my bed.’

‘I think I’ll rush home, bathe and change, and meet you – where?’

‘Pasiphae’s.’

That was the restaurant with the best food and where one could sit in an enclosed courtyard to dine. Often the local musicians would go there to play. But the owner of Pasiphae’s was temperamental; one never knew until one arrived there whether he had been in the mood to cook or not. If he had been, the place would be open. If he hadn’t, he too, like Laurence and D’Arcy, would be dining at the Kavouria on the port overlooking the water.

‘Pasiphae’s then,’ agreed D’Arcy.

Laurence smiled. He slid off the sill and walked towards the bed. Never taking his eyes from D’Arcy’s, he said, ‘Legend has it that Pasiphae was the wife of King Minos. She was said to have had a degenerate love for a white bull. Do you think you have a degenerate love for me?’

‘Yes, if you think I’m a degenerate,’ was her clever answer.

Still naked, and looking to him as luscious and lascivious as she had been since he had removed her dress hours ago, he watched her as she slid lazily across the bed to rise and dress. D’Arcy was not quick enough. He was on the bed next to her, pulling her back. ‘One last look at you, one last lick, one last taste.’

She knew what he wanted. He adored looking at her genitals, fondling them, licking and sucking on them. She had never known a man as accomplished at the sexual
act he was about to perform as he was. To be loved and adored like that was thrilling. Few men loved the sex of a woman as Laurence did. He knew how to make her flower, feel her worth in bed.

Another thing he loved nearly as much was to watch D’Arcy being penetrated by him with his own flesh or by one of his beautifully made sexual toys. She saw him reach for a pale lavender object, an elegant work of art shaped like a man’s penis and studded with minute carved flowers, an object of pleasure from a collection of Japanese pornographic art of the Edo period. He used his tongue and his long slender fingers and then, when she was silky and moist with come, together they watched as he made the jade vanish, take possession of D’Arcy, and slowly reappear again as he drew it from her. Once, twice, and then he stopped, removed it, and lay on his side next to her to hold her in his arms and give her a tender kiss. To wield a wand of pleasure and power over D’Arcy in any form had become an important part of Laurence’s life.

They used an array of such sexual toys to enhance their sex life, an extravagant gift from Max de Bonn, the libertine
par excellence
of all the foreigners living in Livakia. Before Laurence began a serious affair with D’Arcy, he and Max had reputations for being great studs and lovers, friends who shared their extravagant sex lives and women with each other. Some claimed they still did in very discreet orgies behind D’Arcy’s back.

She watched her lover lick the jade. It was as if he didn’t want to miss a drop of her. She was his honey, his elixir of life, his champagne. She was taken by surprise:
a vision of Max licking that piece of pornographic jade flashed before her and was gone. She knew that Laurence had wanted a sex scene for the three of them. In the heat of lust he had several times asked her if she would allow Max to join them some time. She had always rejected the idea, knowing there were no limits to what might happen if Max became involved in their sex life. He was much more of a devil with women, a greater adventurer, a true libertine down to the marrow of his bones. That flash of Max’s handsome virile good looks prompted her to say, ‘Laurence, are you not sure it isn’t you who has a degenerate love for me?’ With that she kissed him lightly on the cheek and slid from his arms and off the bed.

D’Arcy stopped to speak to half a dozen people in the lanes and along the port and corniche that led round to the narrow street and the climb to her house. She held the unique position among all the foreign women who lived in Livakia of being liked and respected by the Cretan women in the village. They had a special place in their hearts for her as they had done for her mother. They talked to D’Arcy about anything and everything, these women who still lived by the old Cretan ways and stayed in the background of family life, for the most part at home. It helped that she could speak with them in their own tongue, and that most of them had known her since she was a child.

She was talking to one such woman, Aliki, who had called to her from the small wooden balcony of her house, when Melina Philopopolos, a young Greek girl who had one day appeared in Livakia and never left, stopped to
ask D’Arcy if she could speak to her. Having been told she could walk along with her when D’Arcy had finished her chat, the girl leaned against the whitewashed wall and waited.

Immediately upon the girl’s arrival, the tone of Aliki’s voice changed. An atmosphere, a cloud of something unpleasant, seemed to darken their conversation. Not for long though. Aliki cut it short and abruptly walked from the balcony into her house, but only after warning: ‘You never look the evil eye in the face, D’Arcy.’ And raising the hem of her skirt and unpinning from her slip a blue glass bead in the shape of an eye, she tossed it down to her. The amulet was worn to ward off the evil eye in which the Greeks so fervently believed. Aliki’s quite clear insinuation that D’Arcy needed protection from Melina caused the girl to shrug her shoulders and laugh.

The Livakians, like most Cretans, were suspicious and superstitious about strangers and had not taken well to a Cretan girl they knew nothing about landing in their village with a couple of ruffians from Iraklion. They had seen her as a tramp, without family, a loose creature with no money, nothing in fact save for the thin dress she wore on her back and shoes that would not last a winter. After Melina’s friends left, to see her scrounging food from the tavernas and sleeping out in the open, actually begging money from the foreigners, had done nothing to endear her to the villagers. They were embarrassed by her – Cretan pride does not allow for such bad behaviour. Poverty should be worn with dignity if it had to be worn at all.

Short-legged and chunky-looking, she was dark-skinned
with black hair. Her features were common, almost crude, there was something slovenly, almost dirty about her that came from being rock bottom poor. And yet there was a certain animalistic raunchiness about her that was for some interesting and provocative. She was not literate, and there was a sort of inner darkness in her eyes. But whatever she was, she had been clever enough to find a deserted cave in which to take on the donkey men and several of the other young studs for a few drachma and never be found out. The men kept her secret among themselves because that sort of behaviour, once made public, would have had the women running her out of town, if not something much worse. But all that stopped when Mark Obermann found her, in rather bad shape, in one of the deserted ruins where she sometimes slept. D’Arcy knew about her sexual activities only because she had inadvertently discovered the cave and an incredibly sexy yet sordid scene while on one of the solitary walks she so enjoyed.

Melina taunting five, big, handsome, virile men, with her raunchy talk and a crude strip-tease; exposing one shoulder and then both her breasts, raising her skirt and tucking it into her belt to offer herself from the waist down with suggestive bumps and grinds. She ran her hands over her breasts, rendering them as a gift to one of the men. He lunged for them and sucked hard on the nipple of one while pulling roughly and slapping the other. Fired up by his hunger for her, her whole body took on a lustful glow.

Melina shoved the man away from her and shouted to them all, ‘You can have me in ways you never dreamed
of, but at my bidding. It has to be the way I want it, when I want it. I’m going to take you all on and we’ll see if you really are as sexy as you claim to be.’

D’Arcy wanted to run away, leave them to it, but she was too mesmerised by the girl’s performance.

The men seemed sexually enslaved by her even before she arched her back and shoved her pelvis forward, ran her fingers seductively through her own pubic hair and separated her most intimate lips with her fingers. ‘Now, let me see who shall be the first to warm themselves in my fire,’ she chided, her own lust echoing in her voice. Not one of the men answered.

They watched in silence as she then turned round, bent over and offered her bottom, spread the cheeks and gyrated seductively. Melina had the men in her power and she was playing with them for her own pleasure. She swung round and then went to one of the them and unzipped his jeans. He was fully erect and large, she was generous with praise for his sex as she fondled it and demanded the others expose themselves.

D’Arcy was amazed at how Melina controlled the men with her lust, ordering one man to suck on her breasts, another to caress her bottom, while another fondled her genitals and she gave oral sex to yet another. That didn’t last long only because Melina didn’t want it to. ‘I want your cocks, and your come, now you do as I tell you,’ she shouted at them. One of the men seemed too eager, tried to take over the orgy, she slapped him hard, he held her tight by the wrist but it was he who finally backed down from the confrontation when she kissed him wildly on the lips and
used her hands and her mouth to convince him to stay in line.

D’Arcy watched Melina crawl on to a large boulder lying on the stony floor of the cave. She spread a sheepskin rug under her knees and leaning on her elbows raised her naked bottom. Laughingly, she called out her instructions.

It was a scene of several men taking her in turn, powerful men fucking for lust, and a young girl clearly lost in her own sexual pleasure, but remaining always in command. D’Arcy slipped away stunned by what she had seen and quite overwhelmed by the debauchery that Melina had so skilfully generated. D’Arcy had not been observed. She had kept the secret and had never told a soul.

Mark had taken Melina in, offered her room and board in exchange for cleaning his house, and proceeded to lobby for her acceptance into the community. He could be very convincing and knew well the Cretan mind and heart and how to win them over, at least enough for Melina to live in peace and try and make some sort of a life for herself. He began with the chief of police, Manoussos Stavrolakis, his friend, and by far the most influential man in Livakia after the priest whom Mark had then won over. The schoolmaster was his next target and the most difficult of the three because Melina had no desire to go to school and he had no desire to teach her. But few could say no to Mark Obermann when he went after something and used his all-American charm. The three men’s tolerance was taken as example and the villagers fell into step and in time became civil to her.

That had been nearly a year ago, and now only a few of them were still leery of her. Most had grudgingly to admit that she had come a long way since Mark had taken her in. They admired him for that, and Melina for the visible changes in her life.

The foreigners all knew that Mark was playing Svengali, writing his own version of
Pygmalion
with her as the heroine, and each one of them was, in their own way, secretly worried about it. They could see vestiges of the old Melina just barely under the surface of her new life. However, whatever Mark was doing with Melina, she did at least appear to be a changed girl from the one who had first arrived in Livakia.

Mark had taken her into Iraklion and Chania and bought her jeans and shirts and shoes and a dress, had taken her to a hairdresser who had trimmed her long curly hair, and though she was no great beauty she was now attractive, and had a sensuous quality about her that both Mark and she kept as hidden from everyone as much as possible.
He
found this malleable young girl strangely exciting and was devoted to her,
she
was obsessed with pleasing him.

Since Mark could barely keep himself with what he earned, right from the outset he had hustled for her in the village, and still did, asking everyone to hire her for odd jobs so that she could have, at the very least, survival money and a degree of independence. He was dictating the work ethic as against the beg ethic. The foreigners had been reluctant at first; they disliked the tension she created with the Cretans who were less forthcoming with odd jobs for her. And they were concerned about the company she
kept. Where did she vanish to when Mark was on a trip to the far end of the island or in Athens for long periods of time, and she was meant to stay in Livakia and care for his house? But Mark won his friends over and they and the other villagers, though still unsure of their feelings for her, now accepted Melina as part of the Livakian scene.

The changes in her were so evident, people had nearly forgotten how bad-tempered and crude she could be. They knew her now as diligent, devoted to Mark, listening to every word he said, believing it to be gospel. Her adoration of Mark, learning to read and write at his behest, working on speaking a more educated Greek, trying to speak English, all these things were impressive enough for people to forgive Melina her lapses: the occasional burst of rudeness, disrespect to her elders, embarrassing Arnold with little digs that might have come from Mark’s mouth. People now made excuses for such behaviour, believing that for a poor, unfortunate child she had already come a long way in a short time.