Dirty Bad Strangers (17 page)

I felt him at my side, sitting close as he caught his breath.

“Hot,” he said. “That was fucking hot. What do you think, Steve?”

Steve.

Steve the stranger laughed. “That was really something special.”

“I told you she was a dirty girl, didn’t I?”

I felt strangely proud. Aching like a bastard but fucking proud.

“She’s gorgeous.” Steve smoothed my hair, ran his fingers down my back with surprising tenderness.

I smiled, strangely comfortable.

“Maybe next time you could bring your gothic friends, too,” Steve said.

My ears pricked. “Gothic friends?”

“From the club,” he said. “After the burlesque-whatsit. The ones we saw you with.”

A hitch of breath from Jason.

What the?

Oh my fucking God.

***

Jason

I caught Gemma’s hands as she reached for her blindfold. “Stop,” I said. “Just wait.”

“You’ve been watching me? Both of you? What the fuck, Jason?”

Steve mouthed sorry in my direction. Stupid dumb prick.

“Let me explain,” I said, “and if you still want to take the blindfold off, I won’t stop you.”

I let go of her hands, and they dithered before she folded her arms across her chest. Across her breasts. She pulled her knees up, covering as much of her gorgeous nakedness as she could.

“My dress, please.”

She got to her feet and struggled her way into it, shaking off my attempts to help her. I put her shoes in front of her, and she reluctantly accepted my arm to step into them. She wrestled with her coat on her own, then screwed up her knickers and shoved them into a pocket, her expression blank.

Shit.

She held onto my arm as I led her out to the car, but hoisted herself up without any assistance and buckled herself in.

“Talk,” she said as I shut the driver’s door behind me.

“Not here.” I drove us down the track to a field entrance, pulling the Land Rover off road and shutting down the engine. “I can explain.”

“You were following me? Before we’d even met? Your friend, too? That’s weird, Jason. Creepy fucking weird.”

I sighed. “It’s not that weird. There aren’t many burlesque nights in a sex club on a Thursday night. I knew where to find you.”

“It’s still fucking weird that you even wanted to. Were you in there? Watching me?”

“No. I was busy, but I couldn’t stop wondering what my dirty girl looked like, how you looked when you smiled, when you laughed...”

“So you stalked me?”

“That’s one way of looking at it. I called Steve, he came to pick me up and we drove to Soho. We waited outside in his car.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Red hair, contagious laugh. You were beautiful, Gemma, I knew it was you.” Even in the darkness I could tell she was blushing. “I just wanted to see you.”

She sighed. “It freaked me out in there, knowing I’d been watched.”

“Surely you can see the irony in that?”

“Of course I can see the irony in that,” she said. “But there’s a big difference. I
choose
to be here. I
choose
to meet up with you,
choose
to put myself in these crazy situations you set up for me.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “There was no choice in Soho. You could have been anyone, watching me, following me. Fuck knows what else.”

“I understand that, and I’m sorry,” I offered. “I’d never do anything you didn’t want me to, Gemma. I’m no crazy stalker.”

“I know.”

I shifted in my seat to face her. “Do you know? Truly?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Good.”

“But that was creepy, hearing Steve talk like he knew me.”

“I get that. If you want to end things here, I’ll understand.”

Please fucking don’t.

She was quiet for a long while, head turned to the window as though she could see out. “What’s going on here, Jason? What’s this
thing
we’ve got going on?”

“You really want to do this now? The big conversation?”

“This isn’t exactly how I imagined it, sat in a car in the middle of nowhere at God knows what time in the morning, blindfolded, but, yeah, I guess we need to talk things out.” She groaned. “I hate all this shit.”

“Blindfolded, anonymous, casual, dirty... That’s what you wanted.”

“It’s still what I want.”

“So, where’s the problem?”

Her sweet little hands gestured into nothing. “I don’t do relationships, and I don’t know on what planet this kind of situation ends well or leads anywhere, but I can’t stay blindfolded forever. We can’t keep doing
this
forever. I think about you all the time, about
this
. I don’t know how long I can keep up the blindfold thing before things explode.”

“I don’t know what happens next,” I said. “I try not to think about it.”

“You’re married.”

“On paper.”

“Does your wife have any idea?”

“We can’t stand each other, it makes little odds to her.”

“So, why are you still together?”

I smiled. “You want me to leave my wife?”

“No!” she scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. I just want to know.”

“We’ve got investments together, business ties, always have had. Some of them haven’t done so well. She wants me to give her the house, which is really the only major asset we have left. I won’t sign the papers and she won’t budge. Stalemate.”

“You stay together for the house?”

“She won’t sell up and split fifty-fifty.”

“And that’s it? The reason you stay? Just the house?”

“It’s a big house, Gem.”

“I guess it must mean an awful lot to you.”

Her words stung. “I’m at the end of my career. I wasted a lot of money. Too much money.”

“You seem pretty young to be retiring.”

I reached out for her hand and she flinched when I took it in mine. “I’m not a trucker, Gemma.”

“I gathered that much,” she said. “What
do
you do, Jason?”

I weighed it up, this way and that, battling the urge to walk away from this shit and never look back, mission abort, but I couldn’t. The words were in my mouth, until she spoke again.

“No, wait. Don’t. I don’t want to know. Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Maybe not ever. This thing we have works because it’s a fantasy. We change that and the whole thing gets complicated.”

“That’s true.” Despite her words I found myself squeezing her hand.

“I’m not ready to walk away, Jason. We still have things to do.”

“Your roomful of strangers?”

She squeezed my hand in return. “Let’s finish this, complete the fantasy.”

“And then?”

She shrugged. “Well, I’m not planning on getting gang-fucked every weekend for the rest of my life, so I guess eventually we walk away as strangers… or I take the blindfold off.”

So many things I wanted to say. Stupid things. Things about her beautiful laugh, and the way her gorgeous tits felt pressed against my palms. Things about the way she made me smile when I thought of her. How she’d made me feel alive again. How much she excited me.

How much I’d like to know the real Gemma.

I said nothing, just dropped her hand back in her lap.

“I’ll take you home.”

***

The house was dark when I pulled onto the drive. I let myself in and flicked on the light in the living room, jumping to find April on the sofa. Her eyes were blotchy, a tissue crumpled in her fingers.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.

I ditched my keys on the table, taking a cautious seat opposite. “What’s happened?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like it.” I felt a strange churning in my gut. Rage I could handle, the bitter snipe from her tongue more than par for the course, but tears, not so much.

“I just got thinking,” she said. “About everything. It gets too much sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” I slouched back, running my fingers through my hair.

“Ten years we’ve put into this. For what?” She gestured around. “This house? It wasn’t quite how I planned it.”

“Can’t say it was my life plan, either.”

“The papers have taken the bait, calling out the dirty little skank on her trashy little lies. They’re running the story tomorrow.”

“It’s not bait. It’s the truth.”

“Whatever it is,” she sighed. “I thought I’d be happy. Another narrow escape. Public persona maintained.” She stared at me through watery eyes. “I don’t know why I’m so fucking sad.”

“Because you want out,” I said. “Part of you hoped this would be it. I did, too.”

“I should be writing that biography, selling you out myself, if only I could be fucking bothered.” She let out a long breath. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you? Not just sex, for real. You’ve got that look about you, like you had when we first met.”

“How can I have anything real, April? We live in this fucking house together, plaster it on thick for the fucking media every five seconds. Every fucking person in the country knows my face, my business. How can I possibly have any kind of actual relationship?”

“You want one, though, don’t you?” She brought the tissue to her face again. “I do, too.”

I smiled at that. “You want a relationship?”

“I’m not entirely heartless, Jason. I may have some defence issues, but I still want someone to hold me at night. I still want to love someone.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“I didn’t say you were.” She blew her nose. “Did you ever love me?”

I stared at her. “More than
you
loved
me
.”

“I did care about you, Jason.”

“Cared about Fabien a little bit more, though, didn’t you?”

“Fabien’s different.” She twisted her hair idly around her fingers. “You told me you loved me, all the time. Told me you listened to my album on your way to training, can you remember? I actually believed that shit.”

Memories came crashing in. Me listening to her tacky electro-pop on the drive to the ground, not because it was any good. It was shit. Just because it was her. I was so fucking proud, and so fucking deluded.

“You didn’t actually listen to it, did you?” she managed a laugh.

“Did you ever really enjoy coming to the games?”

“Sometimes. You were so good, Jase. You still are.”

“Wish I could say the same for your singing.” I smiled to soften the dig. “Let’s get out of this, April. Save ourselves both the fucking heartache. It’s just a house. We could have a life, both of us. Maybe one day we may even be able to stand the sight of each other again. It’s got to be worth a shot.”

Her eyes flew wide, jaw open. “You’ll sign the papers?!”

“If you’ll go 50/50.”

She laughed like I was an idiot, tossing her hair back with all tears forgotten. “Nice try, asshole. It’s the only saving grace of the ten fucking years of shit I’ve had to put up with. You’ll have to carry me out of this house in a fucking casket before I’ll give it up willingly.”

Oh, how I fucking wished.

***

Gemma

I pushed it all away, focusing on my spins and nothing else. My muscles ached, but not so much as the lingering burn of being fucked raw. Ow!

The mirror at Dirty Angels showed all my flaws today. The loose flab at my waist, the jiggle of my thighs. My hair was wilder than ever, a cascade of ginger matting, and my face was beetroot pink. Miss fucking Piggy. I stopped and grabbed a towel.

“What’s eating you, Figi?”

Cara looked as flawless as ever.

“Is it that obvious?”

“A little.” She smiled. “Jason?”

“That obvious, too?”

“Need an ear?” She dropped herself on a bench, patted the space next to her.

I hoped I didn’t stink as I sat myself down. “Jason and I had a threesome, last night.”

“Doesn’t look like it went so well.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “It was amazing. Painful, but amazing.”

“Two at once? Yeah, that’s going to leave a bit of a burn,” she grinned. “So, what’s the problem?”

Chocolate eyes encouraged me. “The other guy asked me if I could bring my friends. You and Raven. Turns out they’d been watching me,
us
outside the club, before I’d even met Jason, before I’d even given him my number.”

“Really? Yikes!”

“It’s creepy, isn’t it?”

She tipped her head back and forth, weighing it up. “Does he make a habit of it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Creepy but I suppose it’s not unexpected. Can’t blame a guy for hunting you out, Firecracker. I’m sure you made an impression.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Anyone else would tell me he’s a crazy stalker guy and I should run a mile.”

“Almost certainly,” she laughed. “I guess my sense of normality is slightly skewed. Do you want to run a mile?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“So don’t. If you trust him, that is.” She put a hand on my knee, and shivers of last night came back to grab me. “Sex is weird, Figi. Intense sex, I mean, dirty sex. Sex that gets you, right in the dark, dirty, primal heart of you. That kind of sex pulls you in deep, breaks down barriers, makes you
feel
, even when it doesn’t make any sense. That kind of sex can make you fall for someone, hard, beyond all reason, because the place it takes you... it’s something else. Something beautiful.” Her eyes glazed, and then cleared. “Sorry. Too much.”