Our Little Secret (21 page)

This is sauna etiquette, I remind myself. People go naked in saunas all the time. But knowing he’s there, just inches away from me, excites me in a way I’ve never felt.

‘You look very tense, Miss Henshaw,’ he says.

I can’t even trust myself to reply, worried that my voice will betray the tension I’m feeling.

He’s standing next to me and he’s naked. If I turn over I’ll see him. His cock will be inches from my face. My mouth is completely dry.

‘Shall I massage your shoulders?’

I remember how he made me lift up my pyjama top the morning of the party. How I felt powerless not to obey his command, and it’s the same now. His tone is neutral. Like it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask and not flirtatious at all. How can he do that? Ask if I want a massage, when he’s naked, and make it sound like he’s asked if I want sugar in my coffee?

‘OK. That would be nice,’ I manage.

‘Here, pull these down,’ he says, tapping the top of my swimming-costume straps.

Dutifully I lift up onto my elbows and, careful not to reveal any flesh, pull down the top of my costume.

‘You should really take the whole thing off,’ he says. ‘It’s bad to wear fabric against your skin in the sauna.’

I can’t look at him. I can’t open my eyes. If I do, I’ll give away what I’m feeling.

I can’t work this out at all. Is he being serious? Is his deadpan delivery all part of some sophisticated game? Does he really think I’m going to strip off and that’ll be just perfectly normal and fine?

But maybe he does? He sounds like he’s genuinely telling me off about my costume. Like I’ve foolishly transgressed a basic social rule.

I have several choices. To pretend I haven’t heard him, which is ridiculous and out of the question. To make a joke of it – but I really don’t think I can pull it off. Or to scramble out of my costume and pretend it’s no big deal to be totally naked.

I opt for the last.

Except that it’s a
huge
deal.

I quickly swivel and sit up too fast so that my head spins. Edward has already turned away, pretending to respect my modesty – except that he’s naked himself.

It’s so confusing and I’m so unsure of the rules. Does he often massage people in the sauna?

Is this just one enormous tease? Or is this the start of our affair?

Is it?

‘I think massages in the heat are the best,’ he says, like it’s no big deal, quashing my racing thoughts. ‘I see this brilliant Swedish guy, Sven, sometimes and he works his magic in a heated room.’

How can he chat like this, when we’re both naked? I lie back down on my front on the towel on the slats. I squeeze my thighs together and rest my head on its side, my arms above my head.

I’m laid out before him, naked.

Naked.

My mind swims in the heat about what it means. Each second seems to stretch out, as if we’re in slo-mo. The stifling temperatures seem to be loaded with the promise of what will happen next.

Edward is next to me, staring down at me. I feel heat all over my skin in a wave – not just from the steam, but because I know he’s looking at me. Does he like what he sees? Is he looking for imperfections? Of which there are many, I’m sure.

He opens my ankles so that my legs are slightly apart, and I feel him kneel with one knee on the bench between my shins. My breath catches.

He is in between my legs. Can he see me? Can he see up my thighs, between them?

He leans forward and I feel him place his hands on my lower back just above my bum. He makes a few exploratory squeezes, then massages quickly and firmly either side of my spine. His touch says that this is professional, that this is a sports massage. Except that it’s not.

Sven isn’t here.

It’s just us.

‘There,’ he says, quietly. ‘I thought so. You’re storing all your tension just in here. Breathe and relax,’ he says, as his hands work the base of my spine.

There’s nothing flirtatious in his tone, but his hands say something different. My skin sings as he touches me.

I keep entirely still as he starts to move up my spine and reaches my shoulders. When he does, I can’t help a low, lusty groan escaping my lips.

After a while the heels of his hands come back and grind in confident, knowledgeable circles at the bottom of my spine. I can feel the flesh on my buttocks rotating. From where he is above me, I wonder if he’s looking at them.

I squeeze my lips together. This is torture. Exquisite torture. To have a gorgeous naked man leaning over me, telling me to relax, when every fibre of my being is urging me to lever back on my knees and impale myself on him.

But God, his hands feel good.

He’s leaning right over me now. The hair on his thigh tickles my leg.

He only has to move slightly and he will be able to see all of me. I fight the urge to turn over with every ounce of self-control I possess. I ache to be below him. I picture it, as if it’s actually happening, and yet, despite how close he is, I can’t do it. I don’t have the nerve.

I can’t face being accused of overstepping the mark, or of throwing myself at him, like he did the other night. I know instinctively that if he wants anything more than a massage to happen, then it will have to come from him. I sense he knows this, too. He might as well have put me in chains.

And then he moves down.

He leans against my buttocks, flattening his hands against them, pressing, kneading. It’s so intimate – so shocking – and yet . . . On the other hand, maybe this is what any professional masseur would do. Perhaps
he
gets this done all the time.

But all I can think is:
How is he feeling? Does he want me, too? Is he staring at me now, growing hard?
Blood pounds in me. If I were a cartoon, there would be kettles of steam coming out of my ears.

His fingers are lower now, splayed out against my hips. His thumbs massage the crease of my thighs and buttocks, slipping inwards, just inches from me. I can’t breathe. I am inwardly trembling, my nerve endings screaming.

Is he going to touch me?

Is he going to touch me where I need him to?

I can’t bear the tension. I feel myself aching, screaming.

I can’t believe this is happening. He’s intimately massaging me. We’re millimetres away from this straying into proper sex. But then he breaks the crackling, sizzling silence.

‘So, I hear you met my wife.’

It’s a statement, not a question. His tone betrays nothing of what he feels about this fact. We could be chatting in the kitchen. Even more alarming is that his tone doesn’t give any indication that he’s noticed what he’s doing to me.

‘Uh-hnn,’ I croak. I’m breathless. Dying of heat, unable to breathe, uncontrollably turned on, but now we’re talking about Marnie. His wife.

I picture her watching us, like she watched me dance for her, but that somehow only ups the sexual tension crackling over me, like I’m live with electricity.

What has she said? Did she tell Edward that she dressed me up? That he almost caught us together?
Edward is a sucker for a girl all dressed up.

I think of her note and of the vibrator she gave me, and how she assured me it was our little secret. Was she telling the truth?

But I can’t think about Marnie as his hands now move down, massaging lower, but somehow this is even more of a turn-on. His thumbs circle my inner thighs – not somewhere I ever thought of as an erogenous zone, but suddenly he touches somewhere halfway down on the inner edge of my thigh and it’s like he’s found the key to somewhere I never knew existed. Who knew I had an erogenous zone that specific, right there? I gasp, astounded, and I know that I’m going to come and nothing is going to stop it.

I’m trembling. I can’t help myself. He must know what he’s doing to me, but I don’t care. I can’t think. I can’t concentrate on anything apart from his thumb on my thigh.

‘She told me you were really helpful. Thank you for that. Poor Marnie. She’s got a lot on.’

Is that all she said? I can’t tell, but I don’t care. His thumb is still circling, higher and higher, the erogenous zone stretching with his touch.

‘It was nothing,’ I manage in a mumble. But it wasn’t nothing. THIS isn’t nothing.

I want to scream, but instead, wide-eyed and staring forward, on total red alert, eyes popping, I stop breathing as his thumbs reach the top of my inner thighs. I tremble violently in the silence that follows, waiting for the final millimetre, waiting for him to discover how wet I am. For him to make this moment flip from the pretend to the real. I’m nanoseconds away from pushing myself onto this thumb. I ache and strain for the release I know will come.

But then his hands move away. He grabs both of my thighs with both of his hands and, in a powerful, sudden movement, runs them down the length of my legs in one glorious, smooth wet stroke. It’s so unexpected and so strong, it’s as if he’s pulling the orgasm out of me. I open my mouth and gasp, my head exploding in a thousand stars as his hands move down past the backs of my knees and my shins.

He does the same thing to my legs three times and then flicks the sweat off the bottom of my soles, as if he’s flicking away energy, and each time my orgasm rolls over me like a wave. A giant tsunami of a wave.

‘There,’ he say, satisfied. ‘Better?’

Does he know what’s just happened? Does he know that he’s just given me the most extraordinarily intense orgasm? Of a kind I’ve never, ever had before?

I can’t move. My mouth presses dumbly into the towel.

‘That’s me done,’ he adds. His voice is hard to read. ‘You look less tense already.’

He’s got to be kidding, right?

That’s it? Just like that, he’s going? Is he really going to pretend he doesn’t know what just happened?

I turn slightly and see him grab the towel. He ties it around his waist and tucks the end in, before turning towards me, but he can’t hide the huge bulge beneath the towel. My throat is completely dry, my insides clenching with desire. I just want to rip the towel off. I just want to see his huge erection. I want to hold it, lick it, taste it, fuck it. The proof is right
there
, but so out of bounds.

‘Take your time,’ he tells me. ‘You can stand it more than me.’

And then he opens the door and he’s gone, in a blast of cold air.

I hit my forehead on the wooden slats.

43

The next morning I’m still trying to work out what happened. I’ve been in a headlock of confusion all night. On the one hand, there’s the quite overwhelming fact that Edward Parker massaged me naked in the sauna and gave me the best orgasm of my life. And on the other, that actually, as far as he’s concerned,
nothing happened
. Except everything did. My head goes: we had sex, no we didn’t, we had sex, no we didn’t. It’s exhausting.

As I make my way downstairs, I glance at the nudey bronze man and the framed artworks on the wall and try and put my finger on how it can be that Marnie and Edward Parker live like this. How can they function normally with such a crazy undercurrent of sexuality going on all the time?

But then, maybe I’m just not used to Americans. Maybe my Englishness makes me naturally more uptight. Maybe their art holds the key. Maybe their sensuality is just part of them, part of their artistic nature, and I’m just picking up on it, like the cultural novice I am.

What is increasingly clear to me is that they live their lives on a different level from anyone I’ve met before. People like Dad and Scott and Tiff are of an altogether different class. And it’s not just to do with money. It’s to do with an aesthetic. The mundane level of life that my people settle for and call happiness isn’t even on the bottom of the Parkers’ radar of enjoyment.

I hear voices as I approach the kitchen.

‘There you are,’ Marnie beams, as I come into the kitchen. She marches over to me and claps her hands, then gently strokes my cheeks, back to her usual tactile, lovely Marnie ways. Her eyes sparkle as they stare into mine, as I try to cover my shock. I can’t help but smile at her.

I had no idea she was back in the house. Was she here last night when I was in the sauna with Edward? I couldn’t find him, after I’d come out of the sauna and doused myself in a shockingly cold shower. I guess he must have gone to one of the ‘red rooms’. His study, perhaps. Or maybe he was with Marnie all along. This house is just so weird. The way it can swallow people up and hide them.

I glance over to where he’s sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping a coffee. He munches a piece of toast and doesn’t look up from his iPad. Just seeing him sitting there in a white T-shirt makes me flush. I can’t stop thinking about his naked bum and his hands. Oh my God. His hands.

‘Morning,’ I say to them both.

It’s the first time I’ve seen Marnie since I danced for her, and even though she’s being so friendly now, I can’t help remembering her laughing as I scuttled away along the corridor in my half-undress, tripping over myself. I’m determined to try and regain my professional status with her. She’s not remotely embarrassed about it, so I guess neither should I be. Certainly her wide-eyed, innocent grin betrays nothing of what happened between us the other night.

‘You’re OK?’ she checks.

As I meet her eye, I’m pretty convinced her comment is not loaded and that she has absolutely no idea what happened in the sauna last night. But why would she? Edward didn’t know either, did he?

‘Uh-huh. Fine, thanks,’ I reply, with a deceptive smile. This is all just so weird. I cover up how freaked out I feel by opening the cupboard where the cereal boxes are kept.

She’s wearing a blue leather pencil skirt cinched in at the waist and a printed T-shirt with a kind of rock band-thing slogan on it and a collarless leather jacket. She has heavily made-up eyes and pale lips, and she looks like she could step right into a magazine.

She grabs her coffee and takes a quick sip. She’s obviously in a hurry.

‘So, will you get there at around eight?’ she says to Edward, going over to the breakfast bar. She leans down behind him and kisses his cheek, expertly commanding his attention.

From behind the door of the open cereal cupboard I spy on them. I realize, with a jolt, that I’ve never actually seen them together before. I haven’t let myself imagine it, but now that I see them here, in this mundane domestic setting, I see something I hadn’t expected: they’re perfect. Portrait-picture perfect. Side-by-side like this, they’re bizarrely matching: a male and female version of the same beast.