‘You’re crying,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘I knew that you would.’
With her right hand, she wrestled off her T-shirt, revealing a lacy purple bra. ‘I’ll let you do that,’ she said hoarsely. He reached behind her to unfasten it and her big round breasts fell out of the cups with a deliciously complicated double sway. The areolas around her nipples were as wide as fallen rose petals, and the same faded pink color, edged with brown.
He tried to hold her breasts in his hands, but she pushed him away. Instead she leaned over him, so that her nipples just brushed his chest, and swung them from side to side, until they crinkled and stood up.
Every time he tried to raise his hands to touch her, she forced them back down. He felt a rising frustration, but at the same time he was growing more and more aroused. His heart was pumping so hard that he could hear the blood rushing in his ears, and he was actually trembling.
Astrid pulled down the zipper of her leather mini-skirt and let it drop down on to the carpet. Now she was wearing nothing but her thong and her ankle boots. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You can take this off, too.’
She climbed back on to the couch and sat astride him so that the thong was right in front of his face. He hesitated, but she waited for him, looking down at him, steadily breathing.
He looked back up at her. ‘I don’t know whether I can do this.’
‘Then don’t,’ she said, but she didn’t move.
He took hold of her waistband. Her stomach was rising and falling and he could feel her radiated warmth against his forehead. He knew that whatever he decided to do now, it would change everything. His life would never be the same again.
‘There’s no turning back, Frank,’ Astrid told him.
He rolled down the thin elastic and pulled down her thong. She’d had a Brazilian-wax and was completely hairless, like a ripe pink fruit. Her lips were slightly parted and he could see that she was already glistening wet.
Again he tried to touch her but again she snatched his wrists and levered his arms away. ‘Now, then. I want absolute submission.’
‘I’m not used to this.’
‘Exactly.’
She took hold of his cock and angled it between her legs. All the time he was looking at her, trying to understand why she was doing this, but she gave nothing away. She waited for a very long moment, her lips enclosing his glans, but only just, her head back, staring at the ceiling. Then she slowly sat down, so that Frank sank into her, as deep as it was possible to go, and she let out an aahhhhhhhh of satisfaction.
When he woke up again it was already growing dark. The sky was the color of royal-blue ink, the cicadas were chirruping, and he could hear people splashing and laughing in the pool below. He sat up in bed and pulled at his cheeks to stretch his dehydrated skin.
‘Astrid?’
She appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing a white fluffy hotel bathrobe and holding a glass of wine. Her hair was sticking up at the back and she was smiling.
‘You’re awake, then?’
‘I don’t think I’ve slept so good in days.’
She sat down on the bed beside him and ran her hand through his hair. ‘You needed it. You’ve been needing something like this for a long time.’
‘I guess I ought to feel guilty.’
Her robe had fallen open so that he could see the curved underside of her breast. She gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. ‘So do you?’
He thought about it, and he suddenly began to understand that he could tell her the truth. It had been a long time since he had been able to do that with Margot. He had never lied to Margot about anything serious, like how much he loved her. But he had told her again and again how impressed he was by her paintings, and how much he liked her friends (particularly that wiry-haired busybody Helen Mitchell, and her catarrhal husband, Byron) and how delicious he found her pasta with salmon and Pacific pesto. And somehow all of those small, inconsequential untruths had crept up year by year like ivy over a fairytale window and stifled their life together.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sad, but I don’t feel guilty.’
‘Sad?’
‘Sad for Danny. Sad for Margot. But it’s like breaking a piece of precious china, isn’t it? No use trying to stick it back together again. Best to remember it the way it was, when it was perfect.’
‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’
He reached into her open bathrobe and caressed her bare shoulder. This time she didn’t try to twist herself away.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her.
Astrid did things for him that night that he had fantasized about but never had the nerve to try, not with Margot. She seemed to have no inhibitions at all, and an endlessly burning sexual hunger. Each time he turned over and tried to sleep, her hand crept over his hip and started to pull at his cock yet again, and her tongue paddled in his ear. ‘Not tired yet, are you?’ she breathed.
Sometime shortly after midnight she was kneeling astride his face, her back arched, gripping the bedposts while he licked her and her juice coursed down his chin. At two in the morning she wriggled her finger into his anus while she bit the skin of his scrotum until it bled. At four thirty he was taking her, doggy fashion, grunting, on the bedside rug. At a quarter after six, when the sky was already light, she climbed on top of him again and made love to him in dreamy slow motion.
She woke him again just after eight, lying heavily on top of him and nuzzling his neck.
‘Not again, Astrid,’ he begged her. ‘I’m bushed.’
‘Don’t worry, you poor old man, I have to go. I’ll see you again tonight.’
He tried to turn his head around. ‘How can I get in touch with you?’
She kissed him once, twice, three times, then she climbed off him. ‘You can’t. I’ll get in touch with you.’
‘Astrid . . .’ he said as she hooked up her bra.
‘You’ll have to trust me, Frank.’
‘Look, I’m not asking for commitment. I’m just asking where I can phone you, in case something comes up.’
‘Ohhh,’ she teased, sitting down next to him and squeezing the sheet in between his legs. ‘In case something comes up, huh?’
He kissed her. ‘You’re extraordinary, do you know that?’
‘I’m no different from any other girl, Frank. It’s just that you’ve forgotten what girls are really like . . . That’s if you ever knew.’
Frank watched her as she finished dressing and brushed her hair. ‘You make me feel . . . totally different.’
‘I know.’ She gave him the gentlest of kisses on the forehead, then left him. After she had gone, he lay back on the bed and stared at the swirling plaster patterns on the ceiling, thinking of The Process.
Of course the sands of Present Time are running out beneath our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum, ‘What are we here for?’ is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. ‘What are we here for?’ But the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. We are here to go!
Tuesday, September 28, 3:27 P.M.
‘How’s it going, people?’ Garry Sherman breezed into the so-called ‘hospitality suite’ at Panorama-TV with a makeup towel still tied around his neck. His hair was as black as crows’ feathers; his suit was sapphire blue and his face was orange.
His three guests were sitting around a small Formica-topped table eating sandwiches and barbecued chicken legs and drinking wine out of plastic cups.
‘You’re all way too polite,’ Garry grinned. ‘You haven’t started throwing food at each other yet.’
‘Actually, we’ve been getting along like a house on fire,’ drawled Jean Lassiter. She was a handsome fiftyish woman with silvery bouffant hair. She was wearing a salmon-pink suit and strappy silver shoes.