Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel

Katie In Love

CHLOE THURLOW

Copyright © 2015 Chloe Thurlow

All rights reserved.

Cover image: ©iStock.com/Gruizza

- for illustrative purposes only -

Cover design: Polly Playford

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Elizabeth W. for her suggestions and encouragement through the writing of this novel; and thank you Brian Rouley, surely one of the best editors in the business

1

Midnight Kiss

If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being. Pleasure and pain, sex and death,
yin
and
yang
are mismatched twins, two fish each containing the eye of its opposite.

I wrote that sentence before my morning appointment with the doctor. It means nothing in isolation but I awoke with those words in my head and committed them to paper – the keyboard, the monitor. The winter is cold, bleak, colourless. There are no clouds, no sky, just a grey blanket like a shroud lowering over London.

The little finger on my right hand has a fracture. It is painful. The doctor spent a long time with my hand like a song bird nursed in his palm, his shirt cuff clipped with an onyx link, the gold face of his watch gripped by the strap nesting in a hairy wrist. Broken fingers are oddly intimate.

'You do look pale,' he said.

'Yes, I noticed in the mirror.'

'Are you sick?'

'Yes...'

He squeezed my good fingers. 'Do you want to tell me?'

I sighed. 'I write, you know, books...'

'Ah,' he replied.

He nodded wisely. He understood. Writing is a sickness, an ailment, an addiction. When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about what I have written that day and, when I do go to bed, I lie sleeplessly thinking about what I am going to write when I get up and start again the following day.

I am a night person, an insomniac, the girl at the bar who looks like she should have gone home and maybe has no home to go to. A false image I cultivate. I am thin, theoretically attractive, in an abstract sort of way. I have hollow cheeks, high cheekbones, long legs, perhaps too thin, lips dry with cold, clotted with gloss. I have stopped being promiscuous and compose my work in the dead hours between two and six while London sleeps and the night planes follow the Thames into Heathrow carrying businessmen and migrants hoping to make it in the greatest city on earth. When you are bored with London you are bored with life. That's what it says along the side of the number 19 bus Mother takes to Peter Jones.

When I do sleep, I sleep badly, in spite of the magnets under my mattress that are supposed to orientate my body north to south so the lay lines and dragon lines pass through the invisible portal at the top of my skull and down to my feet, my best feature, I would soon be told.

I have worked as a tutor, in marketing, and for a women's magazine, which involved writing captions for interiors and combat with photographers fixated on depth and apertures. Regular working doesn't suit me, it interferes with writing, and now I earn my rent as a waitress at corporate events where the high priests of the City banks congratulate themselves by drinking buckets of champagne and falling over. The change of job meant a dip in my salary, so I moved, from West London, where rents cost the earth, to East London, where the cost is broken streets, a fall and a fractured finger.

It was the finger that saved my life.

The story begins on New Year's Eve. Having dumped Julian, an actor with floppy hair and lots of good teeth, I went with a girlfriend I don't particularly like to a tartan-themed charity ball in a kilt too short and my little finger bound to its partner in blue tape. There is something oddly poignant going to a ball with another woman and she must have felt the same way, abandoning me, as she did, for the first hairy-kneed faux Scotsman to say
och aye the noo
over the long candle-lit table.

After dinner consisting of haggis, which I didn't eat, I danced alone on the fringes of the swaying crowd like a stray swallow chasing the migrating flock.

A man appeared.

They usually do.

Men in the 21
st
century are no longer hunter gatherers. They are game players, artists, sculptors. They see me across the rainbow of fiesta lights as a blank canvas requiring their signature in a gooey splash of scribbled jism; a column of alabaster that needs to be reshaped, their sculpting hands eager to rid me of my clothes and go to work with their carving tools. I could be perfect, just perfect, if I only gave them the chance. The man, this shimmying shaking dancer, is wearing tartan socks, plus fours, like a lost golfer, and a Tam o'Shanter that gives him the earthy, intense look of Che Guevara.

'Dance?'

'I am dancing?' I answered.

'That's not dancing, it's just moving about.'

'I have a bad finger.'

'Not a very good kilt either.'

I liked him immediately. I can't stand men who say nice things as they push back their floppy hair.

'Drink?'

'That's very generous of you, seeing how the bar's free.'

We drank whisky.

'Twelve year old malt,' he said.

'You know about those things?'

'No. I'm just flirting with you.'

'Honesty can be very unattractive,' I said and he shrugged.

'I know, it's so hard to do the right thing.'

'Or know what it is.'

He tossed back his drink. So did I. He refilled the glasses. My eyes prickled as I swallowed the fiery fluid and the band silenced before a drum roll. A man leapt on the stage, the skirts of his kilt like a sail, and announced in a Highland accent...

'Twenty seconds...' He looked at his watch, paused, then counted backwards: 'Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...'

And we kissed.

It was at first a soft and tender kiss tasting of Johnnie Walker and garlic from the stuffed mushrooms that had accompanied the haggis. That lingering tang faded as I tasted his tongue and offered my tongue for him to sample. We kissed as if one of us, or both of us, needed mouth to mouth resuscitation. My heart was pounding in my chest and I wanted his hands that pressed against my shoulders to run down my back to my bottom that peeked out boldly when I bent from the shortness of the absurd kilt.

We joined a circle of people, crossed our arms and sang along as the band played
Auld Lang Syne
. I was wobbly on high heels. My finger hurt. My heart was popping in my chest like champagne bubbles. I took his arm and he held me steady, his hand running around my back and clinging to my side. He looked into my eyes. I love it when there is no need for words. I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking the same. If you are going to go to bed with a man it has to be right then, that night, that moment. The immediacy makes my pulse race, my underarms tingle, and it is just too sad to sleep alone on New Year's Eve.

'Your place?' he said, and took my elbow.

'Or yours?'

He smiled. 'I don't have one.'

'Lucky you met me, then.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I had a feeling my luck was going to change.'

The cab whizzed along the Embankment, the bridges lit like spaceships, the Thames a coiling sheet of silver steel. Our lips touched. My heart fluttered and I adored being in the back of a cab that black night with a stranger who knew nothing about me. I could be anyone – an artist, an actress, a Foreign Office analyst, a ballet dancer, recently retired, of course, more a choreographer. In the closet there are a thousand masks and every one fits.

He paid the driver and waved away the change.

'Happy New Year.'

I gave him the key to open the downstairs lock.

'It hurts with my bad finger.'

'Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that,' he said.

He dropped a kiss on my hand. We climbed the stairs and he opened the door to my flat without the fuss I always have, pulling in the door to a precise angle before turning the key. Men are always good at those things.

The lamp on my desk belongs to my grandmother. I had begged her to give it to me. It is an art-deco figure of a man in ivory-coloured porcelain. He wears a top hat and tails and stands below a Victorian lamppost lighting a cigarette. The woman he is waiting for has not turned up, perhaps her husband knows? But he perseveres. I like that. Men who persevere get there in the end and, while he waits, the lamp has a warm amber glow like an imagined sunset.

The living room, also my study, contains a cork board pinned with appointments, random phrases that weave their way into stories, a spare passport photo ready for when I lose my passport. There is a black leather sofa, a blue rug woven through with a Tibetan snow lion stolen from the loft at home, two tubular steel chairs from the 1960s and a table with extending sides. My laptop sits on a copy of Longman's
Chronicle of the 20
th
Century,
a gift from my uncle, a writer, because he is mentioned in 1985, the year I was born.

The ceiling rises to a peak, like an arrowhead. There is room to lay out my yoga mat at the entrance to the annex the landlord, Simon Singh, calls 'the kitchen.' The bathroom contains a tall arched window with a view of the grey slate rooftops and glass-walled City banks, hidden that starless and moonless night, although on sunny days I like to imagine men with binoculars watching as I step into my knickers.

On the floor there is a letter from NatWest containing three pages of threats. A loop of Christmas cards like a washing line is suspended at an angle between two walls and a sprig of mistletoe hangs serendipitously from the light fixture. I stabbed him in the chest with a good finger to get his attention.

'Excuse me.'

I pointed at the mistletoe and pointed at my lips. He grinned.

'Yes, they are beautiful.'

I ran my tongue over them. They felt cracked like flaking paint.

'Do you mean that?'

'I wouldn't say it if I didn't.'

'Mmm.'

Relationships are nine parts intuition, one part madness. The first part of the nine consists of physiognomy, and he was rather good-looking in that tousled hair, firm-jawed-needs-a-shave sort of way; big brown eyes full of secrets, wide shoulders in a white shirt.

He drew me to him, pressing his hands against my back. I was trapped, encircled, gathered up, protected. Our heads adjusted, and our lips moved in for a second tasting, slower, more ponderous, and I recalled something I had written, words that came into my head because they had been fiction and now they were fact: I kissed the stranger, this unshaved Che with sparkling eyes, and I thought, the kiss is the greatest of gifts, a miracle, uniquely human. A kiss beneath the mistletoe. A kiss after midnight. A kiss before dying. The devil's kiss. As a picture tells a thousand words, so a kiss says everything that's important. I am told prostitutes never kiss their clients. It is too personal, too human. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss our hands and wave as loved ones begin a journey. We kiss strangers before dawn in the first hours of a New Year because our wintry lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss.

I enjoy the sway of two anxious bodies swirling about each other like a faltering gyroscope, like a whisky-soaked octopus. His hands slid under my short skirt, and the thing that went through my head was: oh, God, I wish I wasn't wearing tights. I wriggled free and dragged him towards the bedroom where I turned on the lamp. I have a big bed. I like big beds.

He gazed around at the clothes escaping from the wardrobe like fleeing ghosts, shoes too drunk to stay on their heels, the pillows like sand dunes on the beach of my saffron sheets.

'Messy clothes tidy prose,' I said.

'What?'

'I write.'

My first chance to lie and I blurt out the truth. It made him think.

'A journalist?'

'Novelist,' I replied, knowing the word sounds more boastful than the imprecise and unassuming 'writer,' which means close to nothing: copywriter, scriptwriter, underwriter, typewriter.

'Anything I may have read...?'

I sealed his lips with my finger.

'I hate questions.'

'So do I.'

He grabbed me. I liked being grabbed. I like wriggling free then being grabbed again. I like running away and being chased, being caught. We kissed and kissed, then paused for breath. He pressed his teeth against my neck, just gently, and I forgot to mention the kiss of the vampire and how that, too, is so wonderfully erotic. I could feel his cock swelling against my stomach, pushing at me like the head of a kitten pushing at a closed door. I ran my tongue over the bristles of his chin, his neck, his chest. He released my bottom as I slid down to my knees. I patiently unhooked his belt, unbuttoned the buttons on his plaid plus fours and tugged at his boxers – how sweet, I thought, they are tartan.

His cock was straight, firm and, in the dull light of the lamp, the head was pink like his lips. I sucked the head and ran my fingers over the quilted skin. He sighed. He relaxed. The stranger had met a girl at a ball and the girl had taken the stranger into her mouth, down, down, deeper and deeper; it was just so gloriously decadent being down on my knees like this and I wanted to swallow him whole like an oyster.