Her own copy of
Lolita
lay, as always, beside the couch: her favourite book in all the world. She had picked it up, an old annotated edition with the smell of an antiquarian bookshop, the smell of childhood, hidden away in the corner of a musty shop. She had been with her mother, diaphanous and gauzily sunlit by the window, deep in silent flirtation with the man who owned the place, the slow creep of his hand onto her thigh, the pleasures of a nymphet. Susanna was sure that she was still one of Humbert Humbert’s nymphets although she had already stumbled into an awkward puberty, not yet blossomed into the beauty that she would become.
She stood and checked her dress, acceptably pretty, and picked up her keys from their place in the fruit bowl by the
door. She locked it and tucked the key into a pocket. Ninth floor. There was no reason for her to be nervous but her palms were sweating anyway. A casual and perfectly explicable stroll, nothing more. She walked down the empty corridor. Her feet made barely a sound on the faded carpet. The light was misfiring, flicking on and off. She would let the caretaker know when she saw him next.
I was just coming up here to check the light
—
I noticed it was misbehaving.
Misbehaving. Such a word. Not a word to describe a light bulb, but quite appropriate for the thing that Susanna did next.
His door was open. He was nowhere about. She stood in the corridor and negotiated an ethical warren of possibilities, until two possibilities emerged from the chaos. She could turn and go back to her own flat or she could walk into James Bacon’s apartment: the same position as hers, but one floor above.
She crept inside. No sign of him in the livingroom that was an exact mirror of her own. Like her, he had a bookcase beside the couch. She glanced at it, recognising several volumes that she owned herself. Steinbeck, Eugenides, Nin, Salinger, Canin and, surprisingly, Fitzgerald.
A sound. Footsteps and voices, or at least one voice. The sound came from the corridor, her only path of escape. She knew the way to his bedroom, of course, down a hall and to the left. His wardrobe, like hers, was recessed and, like hers, unrenovated. It smelled of his caramel aftershave and shoe
polish. Male smells. She hadn’t smelled anything quite so masculine since she last saw David. The astringent reek of a male armpit, the strong, thick fug of a man’s shoe. She took a deep breath and held it as she heard the sound of the front door closing. A little bell of laughter.
His voice: ‘I should get that fixed.’
Her voice, whoever she might be: ‘I do think it’s romantic that you came downstairs to meet me. Escort me, so to speak’
More laughter.
‘I know you’re going to think I’m lying, but I’ve never, you know…’
‘Hired a woman for sex before? I believe you.’ Her voice was high and slightly grating. ‘Someone good looking as you doesn’t need to buy a girl.’
‘Treating myself tonight.’
‘Well let’s get straight to sweets, then.’
The sound of their voices getting louder as they moved down the little corridor towards the bedroom. Susanna crouched back as far as she could. She was surrounded by trousers. Pinstriped ones, black ones, fine soft cotton, the rough scrape of denim jeans.
The cupboard door was of slatted wood. It was dark inside but the lines of light draped themselves across her face and neck. Through the gaps she could see James and the woman, her short skirt tight around her hips, the low sweep of her singlet top. She was wearing stockings and when she turned to rest her hands on his shoulders, Susanna could see
the straight black seams running up her shapely calves. Her hips swayed. She took his hands in hers and slid them onto those shapely hips and suddenly it was a dance.
Susanna’s late-night adventures were so numerous now that she had quite forgotten the limited extent of her experience. One man, the silent language of their bodies fused together, a soundless gesture of the hand, an inclination of the head, an arching of the hips, the communication of the deaf.
She had never seen another woman seduce a man. Never watched the slow unveiling of another woman’s breasts, the stretch of the cotton, the thumb looped under the shoestring strap.
The woman peeled her shirt from her chest and there was a bra, a black one made almost entirely of lace, more ornate than any of Susanna’s, red thread snaking through a flower pattern. When the woman slipped the tight stretchy skirt from her hips, there was a tiny scrap of fabric covering her pubic area. A matching flower pattern in a triangle barely large enough to cover her sex at all.
The woman stepped away from her dance partner, she swayed on her red stilettos, her garter straps caressed the cheeks of her arse. Tight smooth skin, round like two ripe fruits divided by the dark line of her g-string. She turned so that her back was to James Bacon, bent forward. Her breasts falling towards Susanna, pale as peaches in the dark lace cups. She saw him reach out and cradle them in the palms of his hands. The woman began to hum, a pretty tune, she rocked
her body to the beat of it and he stepped towards her, pulled her hips back against his crotch.
He moved his hips to the rhythm she had started, the strange breathy notes tripping from her mouth. He reached out then and his fingers settled on her bra. Susanna remembered this inexpert fumbling. It was a game she often played with her former lover. New bra, new clips, new twists and tugs to be mastered. David had been good with his hands. His hands spoke to her and almost always it was only a momentary pause for him to find the clips and snaps and tug her breasts free. James Bacon was not so dexterous, and after a minute of tugging the woman stood and reached behind her and undid the clasps herself.
There were her breasts. Wondrous things suddenly revealed. Breasts like Susanna’s only heavier, pink tipped where hers were brown, the nipples long and almost like fingers, straws for men to suck on. He turned her around then and took one of those nipples between his lips. Susanna had never before seen a man suckling, the act so tender, his head held gently between her fingers, the red nails tangled in his hair.
As she watched his hand reach out to cup the other breast, the fingers encircling the engorged nipple, her own nipples clenched in sympathy. Her body was there, crouched in the darkness of the cupboard, and yet it was her own breasts being touched—caressed and gentled between his lips. She arched forward, her chest brushed against the slats of the
door, her nipples snagged on the edge of the wood, she traced them quietly up and down.
She tasted saliva in her mouth. She could feel the hard little finger between her teeth, a phantom of course, because her mouth was empty, but like a teething child she felt her back teeth ache to chew on something.
Susanna watched as his hands slid around behind the woman. He gripped the cheeks of her arse in his palms as if he were weighing this part of her against the heavy breasts he had just relinquished. His fingers slipped into the crevasse between them, toyed with the tiny scrap of black cotton resting there. She noticed one of his fingers slip under the g-string, testing the position and shape of the opening there.
Susanna wanted to join them, she wanted to take his finger and press until it entered the woman, to add her spit to the scene, to ease the passage of his finger up to the knuckle. If this were really Aaron she would do just this. She stared at his fingers. Nothing special about his fingers, nothing out of the ordinary, no moles or liver spots or errant tufts of hair. Fingers like Aaron’s, or like any of her neighbours’. Hands like anybody’s hands.
She watched those hands creep lower, spreading the woman’s cheeks, the fingers testing. She saw the little unself-conscious gesture, the little rubbing, feeling the viscosity, the wetness there.
These things, these little human things that she had not known she was missing. Her time with the torsos now seemed
simple and repetitive. It was mostly men who logged on to chat and when she had lucked on a rare session with a woman and her webcam, the fingers bringing forth the juices for her to
view
were the fingers of the woman herself. This flesh on flesh, she had been craving it; this intimacy. Even in the arms of a whore, this man seemed glorious in his pleasure.
And now she felt her heart skip a little as she watched the rouged fingernails take hold of his zipper and creep it down. The prostitute reached slowly, and there was a glimpse of flesh before she dipped her head towards his crotch and slid her crimson lips around his penis.
Susanna watched the dipping of her head. She saw the man hook his fingers through her hair, blonde, straight, tied prettily back in a ponytail. She saw his fingers (anybody’s fingers) wrap around the elastic band, a circle of thumb and forefinger around a slick chunk of her hair. Perhaps he was using her hair to control the rhythm of her mouth. It was difficult to tell how much pressure his fingers were exerting. She wanted the woman to take breath, move to one side so that Susanna could see the size and shape of the penis.
This could be Aaron. There was no reason to imagine this wasn’t Aaron, the books, the Nabokov and the Fitzgerald, the subscriptions to her favourite magazines. This was a kindred spirit with an appetite for sex in tune with her own. She watched him tilt his head back, moan gently. With one hand wrapped around the pigtail, the other now gentling against the woman’s chin, she watched him ease her
head forward and back repeatedly, and she could only imagine the pleasure that this warm, wet caress would give him.
Susanna could smell her own sex, musky and damp. The scent of it mingled with the scent of his clothes. This is what they would smell like if they were together, she and he. This earthy moss was the union of two strangers, a strange and pungent alchemy. She shifted uneasily, careful not to make a sound.
He raised the woman gently, lifted her to standing. Her body obscured his. When Susanna tried to peer around her, she heard the rattle of a belt hanging close to her ear. She stopped, still as a statue, but the sound of her shifting had not carried. The woman undid James Bacon’s belt. The jeans dropped to his feet, his shirt was unbuttoned and abandoned to the floor. He stood naked to his socks and the frustrating obstacle of the prostitute’s almost-naked body hid the crucial part of the puzzle from Susanna.
They moved together to the bed, the woman pushing, the man stepping tentatively backwards. The woman abandoned her g-string, leaving her suspenders and stockings to hug her curves. He sat on the edge of the bed and she slipped into his lap like a gymnast. Susanna couldn’t be sure how long the woman had been holding the condom in her hand, but she produced it now like a rabbit from an empty hat. She slipped off him and here for the first time Susanna was treated to an unimpeded
view.
His penis was completely erect, the foreskin stretched
back but clearly present. The chest—yes, it could be Aaron’s chest. She crossed her fingers, held them against her breasts. She wished for this to be Aaron, her Aaron, her partner in sexual intrigue, her angel of the internet.
The woman put the condom on with her lips, dipping her head and taking him into her mouth, a slippery little inch at a time. When it was sheathed she shifted her weight and settled down onto him. Susanna peered through the slats at the vision of the woman’s body perched above him, sliding up and down on the sheathed cock. Susanna could see the pink lips of her vagina gripping the pale rubber stretched over the shaft.
Curious. Such a natural act, the same scene played out behind almost every door in their building, the same easy physical connection. His scrotum faced towards Susanna. She could study it, neat and high and tight, the pale scatter of hairs, the way the flesh shifted slightly with his rising excitement. She watched as he interrupted the woman’s rhythm, lifting her off his cock. When he laid her down on the bed her breasts remained pertly upright, the nipples still startlingly erect and pointing directly towards his face. He dipped his head to suck first one then another before pulling her thighs towards his hips and slipping his cock inside her as he stood at the edge of the bed.
Before his hips got in the way of her view, Susanna saw the woman spread wide, the secret core of her glistening wet, and open. The lips of her cunt a deep crimson from the
friction of his penis, thinner than her own, but neater. All this was visible because the prostitute had not a single strand of pubic hair. Her vagina was clean as a teenage girl’s and Susanna wondered whether, with such a smooth expanse of skin, she could feel the little hairs on his balls tickle.
He groaned again and Susanna felt it in her own groin. Her thighs had begun to ache and there was an exquisite pressure in her bladder, the growing demand of several glasses of wine making their presence known. She slipped her fist between her thighs to ease the pressure, but she could not be sure if it was having any effect on her bladder or just further inflaming her swollen labia.
Hers were thicker than this woman’s, she thought. She had noticed, in the many evenings shared with Aaron and their various lovers, that the blood was quick to rush into the flesh around her vagina. She noticed how quickly her thighs blushed, her clitoris becoming engorged, a sudden burst of her own juices dripping out onto the quickly thickening lips.
There was, of course, no one to notice how swiftly she responded. Until this moment she’d had no one to compare herself with. She felt that under her pale cotton knickers there was a thick sheen spilling out and covering her fist. She pressed it harder against her crotch, her hips searching for the friction, her body quickly opening to the possibility of her fingers so close at hand. She almost lost balance and arrested her forward lurch only at the last moment, removing her left hand from its slow creep inside her frock and around her
nipple; pressing it quickly against the wooden slats.
She was in a state, finding it impossible to settle, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, fretting that her movements would alert them to her presence. She pulled the damp fabric of her pants to one side and slid two fingers between her lips much as a mother might slip a comforter into an infant’s mouth.