The Pleasure Quartet (22 page)

I ordered a scotch.

He watched me take my first sip. Then rose from his stool and walked over to me and sat down. He was taller than I had initially thought, and even when he was sitting alongside me I had to look
up at him.

I instinctively looked at his hands. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

‘Cheers . . .’ he said. I couldn’t get a grasp of his accent.

‘Thank you . . . for the drink . . .’ I muttered. The liquid burned my throat, albeit in a pleasant way.

‘I’m Zander,’ the man said.

‘Zander?’

‘It’s short for Alexander.’

‘Ah,’ I nodded.

‘You?’

‘Me?’

‘You have a name, I assume . . .’

‘Joan. It’s Joan.’ No way was I going to tell him my real name, and right then it was the only one that sprang to mind.

‘Nice to meet you, Joan.’

‘You too.’

‘Call me Zander. I see you’re from the colonies?’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said.

We fell into an uneasy, pointless sort of conversation. He was a Sales Director – not a salesman, he loudly insisted, although it made no difference to me whatsoever – for a company
based outside Brighton manufacturing bespoke soft furnishing and was in London for an exhibition at Earls Court.

By our second round of drinks, I’d moved on to white wine and in a gesture of familiarity his fingers were grazing my knee. I let him. I felt nothing. Tried to think of myself as a blank
slate.

I agreed to yet another glass, but resolved not to drink more beyond that point. Whatever happened, I wanted to be lucid. An impartial observer. I disliked how Zander’s hands kept on
surreptitiously touching me. My knee, my elbow, my side, as he tried to make rhetorical points. He seemed more intent on talking about himself than enquiring about me anyway, splendidly unaware of
my total lack of interest in him as a person.

But he was a man.

And I was coming to an uneasy realisation that maybe a man was what I wanted right now. To find another form of fulfilment, anonymous pleasure. Something normal, uncomplicated. To be passive.
Was it my mind or my body talking? Between the semi-monologue that came in one ear from Zander’s direction and promptly flew out of the other, my certainties oscillated wildly.

‘. . . my room?’ Zander’s voice faded back into my consciousness.

‘What?’ The look on my face must have betrayed the fact I had been faraway.

‘I was saying how nice it is to be able to chat to someone. Maybe we could repair to my room and raid the mini-bar, no?’

‘Why not?’ I found myself answering. Zander offered me his hand as I slid off my stool. The waistcoated young barman smiled at me, as if approving the total indifference of my
decision.

We shared the lift with a family of German tourists who gave us disapproving sideways looks as if they well knew the purpose of our upwards journey.

Zander unceremoniously grabbed my arse as we walked into his room. Because of the prestigious location of the hotel, I was expecting something large and luxurious, but the space was narrow and
dimly lit, not much larger than the bedsit I had shared with Iris and still occupied on my own.

Flipping the light switch with his free hand, Zander pulled me towards him and pushed his lips against mine. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach him and closed my eyes. Up front, he smelled of
cheap deodorant or cologne. Our noses clashed. Why did this never happen when I used to kiss Iris?

His fleshy lips parted and his tongue forced its way into my mouth. He tasted of booze and other things I would rather not think of right then. I passively bore the brunt of his embrace, coming
to the realisation that every man was different and that this one, Zander, the Sales Director, was in no way comparable to Edward and his elegance and refined attention to the way his partner of
the hour reacted, or even Thomas and his innate forcefulness when he was with Iris.

Locked into the kiss, I felt his hands move across me, grope randomly, dig into me and his growing cock strain against the wall of his pinstriped trousers as he aligned his body against mine.
His breath quickened. I felt limp and detached from the whole predictable rigmarole unfolding.

Almost a spectator.

He parted briefly from me and threw off his jacket, then loosened his tie and unbuttoned the front of his shirt.

‘Do the rest,’ he asked.

When I had pulled his shirt sleeves off and he stood there topless, pale hairless white chest and uncertain abs on display, he kept on gazing at me.

‘Trousers,’ he ordered.

I fumbled with his belt, pulled the zip down and revealed his Y-fronts. And froze, knowing there was now no going back. Is this what I was really seeking tonight to alleviate my loneliness and
confusion?

‘Let me see you,’ he continued.

In a daze I began to shed my clothing until I quickly stood facing him in just my non-matching underwear. A sly grin animated his lips.

‘Nice,’ he remarked.

He moved closer to me, spun me round and began fiddling with the clasp of my bra. He was only partly successful and, after a short while, he gave up and pulled the straps down towards my waist
and uncovered me. I unclipped the bra and let it fall to the floor. He turned me again to face him, got down on his knees and pulled my knickers down. I held my breath.

‘Very nice,’ he stated. Was he comparing me to others he had known or was he just being polite? I was adrift on the etiquette of the circumstances. Trying to recall whatever comments
Iris might have made in the past about my body. Or had she ever done so?

He rose. His erection straining against the fabric of his white pants, a ramrod shape whose outline appeared fiercer than if it had actually been unveiled and mere hard flesh and veins.

‘Suck me.’

It was now my turn to lower myself down to my knees, though not before noticing with no small amount of irritation that he had only looked at me, not made any attempt to give me pleasure. I
slowly approached his crotch, holding my breath, and my lips met the thin, warm material and roamed briefly against the cotton hill of his unfurled penis. I extended a tongue, puckered my lips and
took his covered cock an inch or so inside my mouth.

‘Not like that,’ he remarked and pushed me briefly away and pulled his pants down, allowing the cock to dangle out and extend to its full length.

‘Now.’

His smell was unlike Edward’s. Where Clarissa’s partner’s long and languorous cock had retained a faint smell of lime from his previous shower, Zander’s shorter but
significantly thicker appendage emitted a suffocating, musky odour and a curious pulsing heat that quickly faded.

Again I opened my mouth and tentatively seized the glans of his cock between my lips, licking its extremity, tasting the velvet smoothness of its raw skin, pushing back his short foreskin. His
cockhead felt rough against my tongue, but altogether pleasant in a soothing sort of way. I circled his ridge, delineating it, exploring its borders. As hard as he already was when I had taken him
into my mouth, I could feel the penis growing still harder as I partly swallowed it and moved cautiously, attempting to match my ministrations to the rhythm of his cravings, communing with the
growing tenseness of his body and the fingers now sweeping through my hair.

‘Not so fast,’ he cried out as I settled into a quick/slow/quick sweep of my tongue across his bare skin and began elevating his levels of sensitivity. ‘I want to make this
last . . . Get value for my money . . .’ he snickered. I presumed that he was talking about the wine, not that it had seemed very expensive.

He withdrew from my mouth and nodded for me to get to my feet and brusquely kissed me again. His tongue deep inside me, reaching for the back of my throat, as if mapping the emptiness his cock
had just abandoned.

I held my breath.

His fingers roamed across my body, weighing my breasts, kneading my arsecheeks, pinching my nipples until I was forced to exhale if only to control the rising pain this provoked.

Unlike the thousand kisses I had exchanged with Iris, there were no emotions involved in his frantic embrace, just something both feral and mechanical which my body blandly accepted and refused
to acknowledge as a trigger for sensations of pleasure. Perhaps he was just not very skilled at lovemaking, but I felt myself too inexperienced to be an adequate judge.

We parted.

‘Let’s fuck. Now,’ he said.

‘Okay.’

‘I hope you’re clean.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I showered earlier . . .’

He laughed. ‘Very funny . . . I meant you’re clean of any diseases?’

I blushed.

‘Totally,’ I blurted out.

He stepped out of the pool of his trousers, bent down to reach the jacket he had shed and extracted a small, flat cardboard box from one of its inside pockets.

‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said, pulling out a condom. He tore the envelope and handed it to me. His cock stood straight and rigid. ‘Put it on.’

I tried not to panic and to puzzle the delicate manoeuver out, stretching the plastic skin open and attempting to place it over his hood. But the elasticity of the material and my nervousness
worked against me, and I failed. Zander shrugged and took over, sheathing his hard cock in one swift, practised movement. I stepped towards the bed.

‘No,’ he stopped me. ‘Not there.’

I stood looking at him, nonplussed, noticing with dismay that he had kept his socks on. They were black and reached just above his ankle.

‘I want to have you on the floor.’

He gripped my shoulders and brusquely forced me down onto all fours. I felt the bulk of his body looming over me as with his foot he swiftly spread my legs open and lowered himself. His fingers
parted my lips, noting my lack of lubrication.

‘Damn it, you’re so dry . . .’

I heard him spit on his hands and wet his cock.

First the squishy contact of his soft balls pressing against my buttocks, then the tip of his cock exploring the rim of my hole and a sudden thrust and he was inside me. Filling me. Stretching
me. Impaling me. The initial pain was intense. Edward and Clarissa had caressed and played with me endlessly, prepared me with kindness, before Edward had finally entered me, finding me open,
welcoming and eager. This was brutal, invasive.

The salesman began to thrust, a loud exhale of breath with every repetitive movement, animalistic, greedy.

He grabbed my waist with both hands to steady my wavering position and continued his attacks. I felt my bowels loosening, my insides turning to mush, my borderline hurt inevitably retreating
into a diffuse sense of arousal.

But before I was anywhere near ready to climax it was all over.

‘Fucking hell!’ the stranger inside me cried out. ‘You fucking slut. You’re so tight. Aahhh . . .’

He bucked, dug deep and hard into me with a final violent thrust and orgasmed with a mighty roar of pleasure. Then collapsed onto my back, short of breath, still panting.

We never exchanged any further words.

His lust sated, he eventually pulled out of me in silence, retreated to the bathroom at the far end of the narrow hotel room, ignoring me all along, and hurriedly washed, then dressed and left
the room, slamming the door behind him, as I lay on the floor, mute, naked, breached and incomplete, still in a daze, trying to process the experience.

When I finally rose and looked around, the hotel room was singularly bereft of his possessions, cupboard empty, bathroom free of toiletries, as if he had never stayed here.

I looked around for my clothes. On the pristine bed Zander had left a couple of banknotes. For me.

I swallowed hard.

It seems I was worth a whole week’s rent.

He had hired me, bought me, used me.

Was that why I had ended up here, I wondered? And I recalled the stories in Joan’s diaries of the sex she had sold, her mixed emotions around the fact.

And I tried not to feel bad about it.

The second time was easier.

And the third and fourth, and the times after that, easier again.

I remembered what Joan had said in her diaries, about travellers of the night carrying a certain aura with them – a shadow – that was recognisable to others of the same ilk. I had no
wish to walk the streets, for fear of my safety, nor to join any kind of brothel that might give me some harbour and convenience but end in my being caught in a raid and treating myself to an
unwanted criminal record.

There was something more than that, too. Each time I pretended that I was just going to try it the once, and then one more time again, each occasion planned to be the last, until my curiosity
was piqued once more or my loneliness reached an even lower ebb. Joining a bawdy house would have cemented my place in a world of whoredom, in a way that lingering in hotel bars did not.

Nobody ever mistook me for anything other than a prostitute, no matter what I wore. I began to wonder what it was exactly about me that gave men that impression, since my skirts were not short
and my blouses not low cut. I had never thought of myself as coy, or a particularly good flirt. Perhaps it was just unusual for a young woman to spend time alone at the bars of upmarket hotels.

My second was a man younger than I was, only eighteen, and a virgin. I did not believe him at first, until his hands began to shake when he undressed me. He was dark haired and pale, with
pointed ears, and a wide mouth and he asked me to teach him how to bring a woman pleasure. I told him that to teach him that, I would need to demonstrate on the body of another woman, for I could
give pleasure in others, but I was still not sure how to elicit my own.

‘We don’t have another woman,’ he rightly pointed out.

He didn’t have any money for a hotel room either, having only cobbled together enough to linger in bars like I did, hoping to come across someone either cheap, or easy.

That night, I was both, so for a little more than the price of a nice dinner I led him into an alleyway and ordered him down onto his knees and under the shadow of my skirt, and I held his face
against me and had him lick me until I came into his mouth. I had to help him up again, since his legs had gone numb beneath him.