Black Lipstick Kisses (5 page)

I could sense her ghost screaming disapproval of my naked body, of the sacrilege I had committed, but most of all of the joy I took in everything she had fought so hard to repress. It was good, dark and dirty at the same time, just like what Stephen was doing to me, his tongue now on my clit, licking hard, the tip flicking over my taut bud, faster and faster. A thumb slid into my pussy, a fingertip began to tickle my bottom hole and my muscles were contracting, my orgasm rising up, and bursting in my head and sex.

As I came I screamed out loud. He kept on licking and teasing, to give me a wonderful long orgasm, pure bliss as I held the image of my naked body over the tomb with him kneeling behind me. Only when I at last went limp did he stop and pull back. I stayed where I was, quite content to be spread so blatantly in front of him after what he had given me. He gave my bum a slap as he stood up, hard enough to make me squeak and bring me out of my daze. I put a hand back to the sore spot as I pulled myself up. He laughed.

‘You are well dirty, Mr Byrne.'

‘Well, that makes two, Miss McKie. Now I really am going to drive you back, I insist, and I could do with that coffee.'

‘You don't have to. I live here.'

I DID SLEEP
with Stephen Byrne in the end. He left in the early hours of the morning after several strong coffees and another bout of sex. It was a lot more conventional, not as much fun, but still good, and he didn't seem to be able to get enough of my bottom. Again he let me go on top first and come first, but in return insisted on me kneeling for him and going doggy. We kissed as he left, and he made me promise to call, leaving me to go to bed feeling well pleased with myself. The sex had been good, much better than I'd expected, I hadn't had to compromise my principles by threatening him, and the church looked like being safe.

His behaviour showed just how wrong it was possible to be about a man. I'd initially imagined him as cold and grey, then as conventional. To find that he was obsessed with girls' bottoms came as no great surprise, but I was taken aback by just how rude he'd been. I was going to be back for more, but I had no illusions whatever about him. What he wanted was a convenient Mistress on tap for sex. That was fine, but he was married and I wasn't going to start getting guilty about seeing other men, especially Michael Merrick. Call me a slut, but I don't get hung up on this ‘finding the single perfect partner' bullshit. I like sex, and anyone who can't handle that knows where they can stick it.

I took the weekend easy. Having suffered the threat of All Angels being developed, it had become more special to me than ever, every stone, every carving, every piece of glass. The graves too, and I began to catalogue them in a lazy way, and the effect each had on my emotions, starting with Eliza Dobson. I thought about Michael Merrick too, but I was determined not to seem over-eager and didn't phone. Instead I skated round to his address on the Monday, as if I'd just been passing.

It was in a big warehouse conversion down by the docks, all old red brick and new plastic. I took off my blades in the doorway and buzzed for him. He let the catch off without bothering to ask who it was, and when I got up to his floor I found the door a touch open. I pushed in to a big, airy flat, one big room with an elevated section at the far end and a tiny bathroom and kitchen at either side of the door. A huge drawing desk occupied the long wall, with shelves, cabinets and a great litter of paper around it. On the far side was a moth-eaten settee, a stack stereo, chairs and a table under slanting windows let into the roof. There were also books, hundreds of them, some on shelves, more piled any old how on the floor. He was standing by the desk, unshaven in a black silk dressing-gown looking at a piece of artwork with an expression of brooding dissatisfaction. As the door clicked shut behind me he turned.

‘What do you think?'

That was it. No greeting, no offer of a coffee, no remark on the dark, spiritual look I had spent two hours getting right. I bit down a trace of irritation as I dumped my skates on the settee and crossed to stand beside him. He continued to stare at the paper, which
showed a creature half-way between a pelican and a pterodactyl apparently in earnest conversation with a man in a bizarre multi-tiered hat. It was beautifully drawn, but I had no idea what it was about and couldn't think of anything to say beyond simple flattery. He saved me the trouble.

‘Fantasy art, for a calendar. Not really my thing but it sells well. When nobody had heard of me I used to try everything I could, and nine times out of ten I'd be rejected. Now I get people asking for all sorts of stuff, album covers, portraits, even adverts.'

‘You don't have to accept them.'

‘I don't. Not all the time, but it's hard to turn the money down.'

‘I bet. This place must cost a packet.'

He shrugged.

‘It has a good north light, and it's quiet. Not very inspiring though, not like All Angels. Coffee?'

‘Sure. Black, two sugars.'

He nodded and moved off towards the kitchen, leaving me to look around. I'd been expecting a sort of shrine to Gothicism, black witchcraft, diabolism and all the other things he expressed so well in his drawings. Instead it was very much a work space, simple and functional. It was in his pictures that his personality and imagination were expressed, and stared from every wall. I went to look, first admiring the haunting beauty he'd projected into a picture of a black-skinned demoness crouching naked among twisted and thorny roses. Next to it was a landscape that could just have been real, with the crumbling ruins of a monastery rising above a valley shrouded in mist, the tendrils of which hinted at ghostly shapes. I was still admiring it when he came out with the coffee.

‘The cover for my graphic novel version of
Nightmare Abbey
.'

‘Neat. I'm not surprised you get plenty of work.'

I took a coffee and went to sit on the settee, curling my legs up to leave enough thigh bare to pique his interest, hopefully. Not that I was up for anything then and there, but his offhand attitude got me, making me determined to get his attention. He simply went back to studying the fantasy art piece, sipping his coffee with the same brooding expression as before. It was a very different reaction to Stephen Byrne's openly lecherous approach, and I found myself wondering if he had taken my rejection to heart. More likely he was just an egotist. After maybe five minutes of complete silence I broke into his reverie.

‘So how's the Goat of Mendes going?'

‘Fair. I just wish I could put more into it.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I'm contracted to twenty episodes, each one a double-page spread, so I can only do so much in the way of plot.'

‘Oh, right. So you can't just do as you like?'

‘Not entirely. I can do what I like, write what I like, but that only goes so far. It still has to be a certain length and a certain format, and there are subjects I can't touch. That means I have to keep it simple.'

‘So how does it go?'

‘I haven't worked out all the details yet, but essentially the modern cabal believes that the Regency one were in possession of important knowledge and are trying to summon their spirits. What they don't know is that the leader of the Regency cabal, who styles himself the Goat of Mendes, was in fact an incarnation of the Devil. As I said, it's primarily a vehicle for visual
effect. I open with the modern cabal meeting, a ritual, then the group drinking and talking afterwards, that's to ground it, bring the unreal closer to what's real for the reader.'

‘What's the ritual?'

‘I'm not certain. I thought a sacrifice, but I've done that several times. Besides, you get complaints. One time I did this scene with a black cockerel being sacrificed in an attempt to summon Satan. The editor got 47 letters of complaint about cruelty to animals. Forty-seven! Daft really, 'cause it's only a drawing, and in the same story I had a military type eaten by a demon. Nobody complained about that, not one.'

I laughed and arranged myself more comfortably on the settee, more languidly too.

‘So not a sacrifice, what then? How about some exotic sex ritual?'

‘No deflowering virgins. It says so in the guidelines.'

‘How about male virgins?'

His morose expression vanished and he gave me a big smile.

‘Now that's a thought! Different anyway. PC in a way, but still with some shock value. Hey, I think you've hit on it, and that way I can have a great closing spread. I'll make the leader of the modern cabal a Priestess, not a Priest, and finish with her having sex with the Devil while the rest of them cower back in terror. Great!'

Suddenly he was all energy, taking a moment to put the drawing he'd been working on carefully between two boards and fixing a new piece of paper into place. I watched, pleased to have him react so well to my input, but still feeling a touch short of attention. With Michael it was plain that his art came first.

He began by sketching out a faint grid, then adding figures. They were just in outline, vague, asexual things without faces. They grew quickly, bony hands, faces shadowed by hoods, the sharp contrast of candlelight, a set of scenes both forceful and disturbing as the sinister cabalists prepared a louche young man for his fate. It was wonderfully done too, and satisfying. The virgin was a drunken stag expecting sex with the beautiful, poised priestess, allowing himself to be stripped, spread on the altar and teased to erection. His face was set in idiot, drink-sodden lust right up to the moment she penetrated his anus with the monstrous dildo she'd had concealed beneath her robes. It was pretty graphic, much more so than I'd expected, and he was taking such relish in the detail I began to wonder if he was gay, or rather, bisexual. I also couldn't help but wonder which magazine he expected it to be published in. I held back the question until Michael was actually drawing in the hapless young man's straining bottom hole.

‘Are they going to let you get away with that?'

‘No. The one I send in will have convenient bits of shadow, hands, edges of robes, just enough to make it clear what's happening without risking an accusation of obscenity. The full version I'll have published in Belgium. Do you know about
bandes dessinées?
'

‘No.'

He stepped a little to the side, reached up to a shelf for a handful of magazines and tossed them to me. I picked up the top one as he went back to his work and my mouth came open in shock. Right on the first page a beautiful girl in old-fashioned costume was having sex with two men, one from behind and one, a coachman, in her mouth. No detail had been spared, and it
got worse, or better. There were orgies, lesbian and gay sex, scenes of flagellation and bondage, even a seriously weird one with a girl making love to an octopus. I could only stare, my emotions flicking between shock and arousal, disgust and delight. Some of the images were pretty gross, but I could not stop myself from turning the pages, every one, until I was left feeling seriously flustered and seriously horny.

Michael had kept working all the time I was reading, barely sparing me a glance. I wondered if he'd given me the cartoons on purpose, to turn me on, but his attitude was no different from before. The drawing had evolved though, with the seduction and buggery of the young man now in full detail, as dramatic and sexual as anything I'd just seen and considerably better drawn than most of it. He'd even managed to capture the mixture of shame and helpless ecstasy on the man's face as he came, his erect penis in the priestess's hand even as she buggered him.

It was great, and it felt good that he could be so open in front of me, but I wanted his attention, and his cock. He went on working, oblivious to me and to my feelings. I was just going to have to take him in hand, literally. He was a tempting target too. His buttocks looked firm and tight beneath the thin black silk of his robe, and while it was tied at the front I could see that it would be so, so easy to slip a hand in, to take hold of him, to tease him slowly erect.

He turned around just as I was swinging my feet off the settee.

‘Would you like to model? I know I used you for the cover picture, but your face would be great for my priestess.'

‘Yeah, sure.'

It came out in a croak, my plans for seduction abruptly cut off. I should have carried on, of course, offering to model for him even as I began to caress him, but the question was just too sudden. Besides, if the last occasion I had posed for him was anything to go by, the outcome would be the same. This time I had all day.

In the last few pictures the priestess had her robe open, displaying not just her breasts and belly, but the elaborate system of leather straps that held her dildo in place. It was an invitation if ever there was one, and I wasn't entirely joking as I made my suggestion.

‘I suppose you've got a cowled robe and one of those strap-on things?'

‘Not a strap-on, no. You'll find a robe in the third drawer down, next to my bed.'

He wasn't joking at all. I went up the stairs, wondering just exactly why he kept a cowled robe in his bedside drawer. Possibly it was just a prop, because they featured in a good many of his drawings, but then again . . .

It was black, and heavy cotton, also too big for me, the hem still spread out on the floor as I lifted it to shoulder level. He wasn't even looking as I began to undress, or not directly, but he turned me a glance and a smile as I peeled my dress off over my head. I didn't need to strip, but I was going to. It felt right. My stockings stayed, but my knickers came off, which made him lift one black eyebrow just a fraction as my pussy came bare. It felt good to get a reaction out of him, but I didn't show it, trotting down the stairs with the robe in my hand as if undressing in front of men I hardly knew was of no consequence whatsoever.

He was cool about it, inevitably, simply waiting
until I'd put the robe on and asking me to stand in a certain way. As he adjusted the front to make the folds of cotton hang the way he wanted his hand brushed my nipple, sending a little shock through me and bringing him to instant erection. If he noticed, he didn't give it away, simply finished what he was doing to leave me with the robe half-open at the front, the inner curves of my breasts, my belly and one thigh bare.