Eighty Days Yellow (22 page)

‘Do what you must, but tell me all when I return. Assume your nature. Consider that a piece of advice rather than an order. D.’

He swept past the floating curtains shielding the balcony as he returned to the room. Alessandra was waiting for him and had poured two glasses. Hers appeared to contain white wine, his mineral water.

She had loosened the top two buttons of her white blouse, revealing the plump hillocks of her substantial cleavage, and was sat on a narrow chair. The bedroom door to her immediate right was half open, its darkness a beckoning cavern. Dominik moved over to her level, stood behind the chair and took her hair in his hands, gripping the jungle of unkempt curls. As he tightened his hold on her and the hair began to pull at her scalp, Alessandra groaned quietly in response. Dominik let go, bent over and kissed the back of her neck while his hands circled her neck.

‘
Sì
,’ Alessandra said, with a distinct breathlessness.

Still standing behind her, he could feel the heat rising from her body.

‘
Sì?
Meaning?’ he asked.

‘Is meaning we fuck, no?’

‘Indeed,’ Dominik confirmed, and his hands moved further down and slipped under the fabric of her blouse and seized her breasts. Her heart was pumping away, its rhythm a drum tattoo across the surface of her skin.

His thumb rubbed against the volcanic texture of her nipples. He guessed they would be dark-brown, from her colouring, and remembered the delicate symphony of beige and pink that had delineated the contour of Kathryn’s nipples and the fact they seldom got hard, and then the light-brown, coarser nature of Summer’s tips, and then the breasts of yet another and another of the women who populated his past, those who had come, those who had gone, those he had loved, lusted after, abandoned, betrayed, hurt even.

He tore Alessandra’s blouse off rather violently, as if now consumed by anger that she was the one now in this room with him, and not another. That her skin was the wrong shade and not consumed by pallor. That her voice expressed itself with a quaint, foreign accent that only served to remind him of Summer’s Antipodean lilt. He knew he should not reproach Alessandra because her body was voluptuous and didn’t have a tiny waist juxtaposing her wide hips. She was just the wrong body at the right time, he felt, but this didn’t make her the enemy. She held out a hand to reach his trousers and extract his semi-hard cock from his underwear, then took it into her warm, humid mouth. Damn, he realised, Summer had still not sucked his cock. Did this mean anything, or was it just that he’d never invited her to do so? Alessandra’s tongue began to play with his glans, slipping and sliding in a clever dance of arousal round it, teasing, deliberately grazing his most delicate skin with her sharp teeth. With one swift movement he pushed hard into her mouth, forcing himself as deep as she could manage to host him, lodging within her. For a brief moment, Dominik felt he was going to make her choke, and the look of fear and disapproval in Alessandra’s eyes as she looked up to him from her submissive vantage point froze him, but he did not stop. He knew it was merely anger speaking, dictating the roughness of his gestures. Profound irritation at the fact she was not the woman he wanted to be with right now: Summer.

Dominik relaxed, undressed, as Alessandra silently did likewise and, divorcing her mouth from his cock, lay back on the bed to await their coming together. From the look in her eyes, they both knew this was going to be a rough fuck, a hard one, a mechanical coming together with no elements of romanticism or gentility. This was fine with both of them. It would be their only fuck. A mistake maybe. Strangers holding on to some buoy in the night. Maybe she also yearned for the arms and the cock of another, Dominik speculated, which was why their coming together tonight meant nothing.

They would part in the morning with few words or endearments, going their own way again. Dominik had no plans to return to Rome in the near future. Once they were both fully naked, he threw himself against her, skin against skin, sweat against sheen of sweat, pulled her legs apart and entered her. Without a word.

In the background, Dominik’s mobile phone buzzed again, but he would not read the message from Summer until the following morning.

‘So be it. S.’

Summer was worried about her finances. Now that she had stopped playing in the tube, the meagre wages and tips from the part-time gig at the restaurant were stretched thin. The band were on a hiatus, with Chris improvising some new material in a cheap home studio outside of London at a friend’s country cottage, and she’d recorded her brief violin parts some weeks ago and wouldn’t be paid for that work anyway until the recordings actually made any money. She was having to dip into her minimal savings. Too many cabs to distant locations: Hampstead, fetish clubs and so on. Assignations and destinations that she just couldn’t travel to by public transport without feeling much too self-conscious. And no way was she about to ask Dominik to help her out. Or anyone else for that matter.

She’d heard that there was a board advertising jobs or one-off studio session work or teaching possibilities at the College of Music in Kensington. When she arrived, the main entrance hall was almost deserted and she realised it was half-term. Damn. Whatever was likely to be posted on the board would be old and out-of-date prospects!

She made her way to the far wall to peruse the pinned-up notes and rectangular cards scattered across the surface of the noticeboard, took out a small notebook from her handbag and scribbled down a few numbers, checking on the dates they had been initially posted to avoid wasting time on anything too ancient and out of date.

Between the requests for violin lessons for suburban kids and a dearth of well-remunerated calls for string ensembles (bring your own black dress and make-up) to fiddle along in the background for TV recordings with rock groups in search of classical credibility, she caught sight of a card with a familiar ring and realised how Dominik had found the three musicians who had accompanied her in the crypt. She smiled. All roads certainly led to Rome . . . Then she experienced a moment of doubt when she noticed that the phone number listed was not in fact Dominik’s. Maybe he used another number depending on the occasion or need. She filed the information away.

‘Looking for a gig?’ a girl’s mellifluous voice said in her ear. Summer turned round to face her interlocutor.

‘Yes, but there’s not much to choose from, is there?’

The young woman was uncommonly tall, almost Amazonian, bottle blonde and rather spectacular in a dark leather bomber jacket and black skinny jeans ending in shiny boots with perilous heels. There was something familiar about her. It was the wry smile at the corner of her lips, the way she contemplated Summer with detached amusement and an assumed sense of superiority.

‘That one is interesting, isn’t it?’ the newcomer said, pointing to the card that had already caught Summer’s attention.

‘It is. All a bit mysterious and hush-hush,’ Summer remarked.

‘I think it might be out of date by now,’ the other said, ‘but someone’s forgotten to unpin it from the board.’

‘Maybe,’ Summer said.

‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ the blonde said.

Then it all came rushing back and Summer felt herself blushing. It was the cello player from the first session in the crypt.

‘Oh, Laura, is it?’

‘Lauralynn, actually. I’m sorry I made so little impression on you, but then I suppose your mind was on other things. The music, no doubt?’

The mischief in her voice was evident and Summer remembered the day and how she had briefly thought that Lauralynn had been witness to her nudity beneath her blindfold somehow.

‘We played well together, I thought. Even though we couldn’t see you,’ Lauralynn emphasised provocatively.

‘That’s true,’ Summer confirmed. They had quickly established a solid musical rapport despite the quirky nature of the performance required.

‘So what are you in search of?’ Lauralynn asked.

‘A job. Jobs. Anything really. In music preferably. Funds right now happen to be in short supply,’ Summer admitted.

‘I see. Well, some of the better ones are not advertised here. You don’t study here, do you? The better gigs are usually word-of-mouth stuff.’

‘Oh.’

‘Shall we have a coffee maybe?’ Lauralynn proposed. ‘There’s a nice cafeteria on the first floor, and as it’s half-term, it won’t be crowded. We can talk in private.’

Summer agreed and followed her up the circular staircase Lauralynn made a beeline for. The contours of her arse were wedded to the fabric of her jeans like a second skin. Summer had never been attracted to women per se, but there was an undeniable aura about this blonde woman, an air of authority and self-confidence that she had seldom come across even in men.

They quickly bonded, discovering they had spent a few years in Australia at the same time, albeit in different cities, and knew a lot of places, musical haunts in common. Summer felt herself relaxing and warming to Lauralynn, despite the ambiguous overtones of manipulation she could instinctively sense in her. They’d agreed after two rounds of coffee to tone down the caffeine rush and had moved on to Prosecco. Lauralynn had insisted on paying for the bottle of sparkling wine.

‘How flexible are you?’ Lauralynn asked her, all of a sudden, following on from an idle conversation about the acoustics of Sydney venues.

‘Flexible how?’ Summer queried, not quite sure what Lauralynn was referring to, if any double meaning should be ascribed to her question.

‘In terms of where you live.’

‘Reasonably flexible, I suppose,’ Summer replied. ‘Why?’

‘I know there is a position going in a second-division classical ensemble. I think you’re good enough. You’d pass the audition for it with flying colours, I have no doubt. Even blindfolded,’ she laughed.

‘Sounds great.’

‘It’s in New York, though. And they want someone who can agree to a minimum one-year contract.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m in touch with the headhunter in Bishopsgate who’s handling this. She’s also from New Zealand, so you’d have something in common. I would have loved to spend time in New York myself, but there’s no demand right now for a cello.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it because of him that you’re hesitant?’

‘Him?’

‘Your guy, your benefactor, shall we put it? Or is he your master?’

‘No way,’ Summer protested. ‘It’s doesn’t work that way at all.’

‘You don’t have to pretend, you know. I guessed what was happening, what the two of you were up to, in the crypt. He wanted you starkers, didn’t he? Gave him a thrill to see you performing like that while we were all still clothed, no?’

Summer swallowed hard.

‘Gave you a thrill too, eh?’ Lauralynn continued.

Summer found refuge in silence. She took a further sip of the sparkling wine, which was going flat by now.

‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t,’ Lauralynn replied. ‘I guessed. But a friend of mine with a good background in kink posted the ad on behalf of your man – they’re friends – so I had a reasonable idea the whole episode was on the left wing of kosher. Mind you, no way do I disapprove. I’m into the scene myself.’ She smiled conspiratorially.

‘Tell me more,’ Summer asked.

9

A Girl and Her New Friend

‘I can do better than that,’ said Lauralynn. ‘I’ll show you.’

We were still in the university cafeteria, discussing Lauralynn’s involvement with the kink scene.

She reached over the table with one of her long, thin arms and took my hand, running her nails softly up the back of my wrist.

I gulped.

I wasn’t quite sure if she was stating a fact or making an invitation, and for what?

‘Have you ever seen a domme in action?’ she asked.

Her emphasis on the double ‘m’ made it very clear that she was referring to the female variety, more commonly termed a ‘dominatrix’ outside of kink circles.

‘A couple of times,’ I replied, ‘but just at clubs. Not, er . . . privately.’

We were on to our second bottle of Prosecco now, and I was fairly sure that I had consumed most of it. Either that or Lauralynn had an extraordinary tolerance for alcohol, as I was, by now, on the downhill side of tipsy, while she still seemed stone-cold sober.

‘You should round out your education by having a taste of the other side. It’s not all about the men, you know.’

She raised an eyebrow as she said ‘taste’ and I blushed in response. I wasn’t used to flirting with women and felt decidedly out of my depth. The whole situation reminded me of my first meeting with Dominik, in the cafe at St Katharine Docks. Sitting across the table, surveying each other, an unspoken battle raging between dominance and submission, attraction and pride.

‘Uh, what would that involve?’

‘That would be for me to know and you to find out. I wouldn’t want to ruin it by spoiling the surprise.’

She had removed her hand from mine and was now resting her forearm on the table and running her index finger round the rim of her wine glass in slow, deliberate circles. She noticed me watching the path of her fingertip, its pressure firm, unyielding against the glass, and grinned wickedly.

‘Thinking about your man,’ she asked, ‘or about me?’

I considered Dominik. True, we had agreed that we were both free to explore our desires, and I had been keeping him filled in on the details of my explorations, as he had requested, but I wasn’t sure how he would feel about me being deliberately dominated by another, rather than just casual fucking, or playing around in a club. It seemed different, somehow. Particularly since the instigator was Lauralynn, who had not so long ago been in Dominik’s employ, and technically probably still was, I supposed, as she must still be carrying out the task of keeping details of our recital secret.

In fact, I wouldn’t be able to tell Dominik about this. There was no way to inform him of my meeting with Lauralynn without dropping her in it. He had intended for us never to have contact after the event, I was sure of that. I would have to disobey his instruction if I wanted to accept Lauralynn’s offer.