Eighty Days Yellow (15 page)

He liked the fact that, unlike so many other modern young women, she was not fully shaven down there, her thin thatch of pubic curls shaped, trimmed, in dark shades of reddish brown like a necessary barrier to her most private possession. One day, he had already decided, he would shave her. Himself. But he would keep this for a very special day. A ceremony. A celebration. The Stygian river beyond which she would forever be even more naked for him. Open. Bare. His.

The solidity of her thighs, the length of her calves, the infinitesimal scars across one of her knees – no doubt the vestigial inheritance of some childhood playground scrap – the surprising narrowness of her waist as if she had just been poured like liquid out of a Victorian corset into the sweet prison of her flesh.

The road now led uphill through Hampstead, the car diving through a canopy of low-hanging trees spilling from the heath extension. Dominik took a deep breath, mentally filing away every single sound and each seductive vision he had experienced, creating a memory album of emotions for rainy days.

Now on familiar roads, he distractedly remembered the thin smile on the lips of the blonde cellist, whose name he could no longer recall, as she had adjusted her black velvet blindfold and had given him a final look before plunging into personal darkness. The sparkle in her eye, as if she knew what was about to happen, had guessed at the nature of his plans. He had even briefly thought she had winked at him, complicit, mischievous.

Also, how Summer’s face had travelled through a spectrum of pinkness when the time had come to undress, once the other musicians’ vision had been impaired, the way she had turned her back on him to slip her panties off, displaying the roundness of her pale arse in all its majesty, the crack of her buttocks as she bent forward, revealing a thin valley of shadows. Then she had turned round to face him and had quickly moved the violin momentarily across her genitals as if to hide herself from Dominik, although she knew only too well that she would have to play standing up and wouldn’t be in a position to shelter her privacy from him for much longer.

Already Dominik knew he would feast on these fragments for a long time to come. As he parked on his drive, he looked down at his trousers. He was hard.

Dominik poured himself a glass of sparkling water and sank into his black leather office chair, thoughts of Summer flooding his mind.

He sighed, took a sip from his glass, the water deliciously cool on his tongue.

Images of Summer performing naked blended seamlessly across his imaginary screen with visions of Kathryn below him on a bed, on the floor, against a wall. Of lovemaking, of fucking, of the sheen of sweat on skin, the memories, the pain and the pleasure.

How, once, a guttural sound of both disgust and expectation had passed her lips as he ploughed into her from behind, his focus as ever pornographically fixed on the flower of her arsehole and thoughts of sodomy clouding his already troubled mind. The sound had acted as a trigger and he had smacked her buttock hard, twice in row, so hard that barely a few seconds later, the reddening imprint of his hand had emerged like a Polaroid bursting into life, across the delicate white skin of her behind. She’d screeched in surprise. So he’d repeated the assault, this time across her other cheek as he felt her cunt muscles tightening like a vice around his probing cock, an all too obvious betrayal of the effect the spanking was having on her.

Thing was, he had never spanked a woman before, neither in jest or in anger. He had never felt the need or even given it any thought. Nor had he been spanked himself in the interests of sex or minor kink. He knew that the practice was popular. So many Victorian novels of upstairs-downstairs, man-and-maid nature were full of the stuff, and it hadn’t escaped his attention that hard-core porn performers would on a regular basis take a hand to their partner’s arse in the throes of fucking, but he had somehow assumed this was all a convention, something many of them did for effect when facing the camera if only to relieve the monotony of the piston-like in and out of their warring genitals.

Later, he had asked Kathryn, ‘Did it hurt?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Really? Did you like it, though?’

‘I . . . don’t know. It was part of the moment, I suppose.’

‘I’m not sure why I did it,’ Dominik had admitted. ‘Just did. On the spur of the moment.’

‘It’s OK,’ Kathryn had said. ‘I didn’t mind.’

They were on the floor of his study, sprawled over the carpet, still catching their breath.

‘Turn round,’ he’d asked. ‘Let me see.’

She shifted her body, settled on her flank, offering him the sight of her regal, square arse. Dominik peered. The mark of his hand over Kathryn’s lunar surface had almost faded away. The way the imprint of sex disappears so rapidly from a person’s features and you never know once they are dressed and assuming their conventional civilian persona what they had privately been doing; this had always baffled him. As if, deep down inside, he wanted people to be marked by the sex they had shared, for it to be for ever written on their face. Anyway, the outline of his outstretched fingers was now just a memory across Kathryn’s rear.

‘It’s almost gone, the mark of my hand.’

‘Good,’ she had said. ‘It would have been pretty awkward for me to explain to my husband had it still been present!’

Later, during the course of their short-lived affair, on the one occasion he had managed to steal Kathryn away from her marriage for a whole weekend, and they had found a pretext to squat a room in a Brighton seafront hotel and never seen the light of day or beach, he’d marked her arse with added savagery and she’d complained of a dull, persistent pain when she had to sit down to eat in a nearby restaurant overlooking the seafront. Dominik had been surprised by the compulsive nature of the way he had spanked her, hit her and briefly felt shame – violence against women disgusted him. He had never even thought of hitting a partner before. Spanker and spankee, is that what they were becoming? Where did this compulsion to dominate, to express the depths of his desire in violent fashion, come from?

But Kathryn had never objected.

It puzzled him long after they had parted. The unanswered question in his mind as to what she actually felt when he was doing this to her, in the moment.

He unzipped his trousers, freeing himself at last, noting the thin pattern of veins coursing up and down the stem of his rock-hard cock, the ridge below the penis head, the scar tissue from his childhood circumcision and darker shades of flesh embroidering the upper reaches of his trunk. He thought of the pale glimpse of Summer’s shapely, fragile buttocks as she had undressed before diving into the music.

He wrapped his fingers round his cock and pulled on it again. Up, down, up, down.

He silently imagined the slap of his balls against Summer’s firm arse, and the sound his hands would make with every sharp, dry contact, the way her skin might shudder under every repeated impact, what private melodies it would forcibly extract from her lungs to roar past her pursed lips.

He closed his eyes. His imagination was now in overdrive and filling the size of an Imax screen.

And came.

Yes, Dominik knew, when the time came, he would most definitely spank Summer Zahova, violin player of this parish, but then you only spank the women you still lust for after the initial fuck. Those you want badly. The special ones.

Dominik only waited forty-eight hours before he made contact with Summer again. Over and over, he reflected on their previous encounters. Gut feeling told him that she had not quite embarked on this ambiguous adventure merely for the sake of the violin, the expensive vintage Bailly he had gifted her with and whose crystal tones had dominated that late afternoon in the crypt with such intense and melodious clarity. This, or at any rate, what this was fast becoming was not just a transaction between benefactor and beneficiary, client and customer, a man full of lust and a young woman with a flexible attitude to morality. He had seen something in her eyes from the very first time they had met. A curiosity, an unspoken challenge, a willingness to take unreasonable risks in the quest to keep the fire inside going. At least, that’s the way Dominik explained her words and gestures to himself, and her easy acceptance of his unconventional demands. She was no amateur whore doing this for the money, or the violin.

Of course he wanted her. Badly, at that. The way she had played for him, naked, with just that hint of blush spreading across her cheeks when she had finally undressed, until the divine flow of the music had abolished her final reservations and she had stood playing with exhibitionistic pride. It was undeniable. The faint curve of her lips throughout the special performance had betrayed the fact. She had felt at peace with herself, floating in some strange private mental place throughout, oblivious to surroundings or circumstance. It had excited her.

Dominik now knew that he wanted more than to just take her to his bed.

That would only be the beginning of the story.

He finally called her late on Saturday morning when he knew she would be working at her part-time job at the restaurant in Hoxton. He wanted the conversation to remain brief, not to give her the opportunity to ask further questions. It would no doubt be a busy time there.

The phone rang several times before Summer picked up.

She sounded rushed.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me.’ Dominik knew he no longer had any need to give his name.

‘I know,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m at work. Can’t speak long.’

‘I realise that.’

‘I was expecting you’d call.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want you to play for me again.’

‘I understand.’

‘You will make yourself available Monday. Let’s say early afternoon.’ Dominik, secure in her likely availability and willingness, had already secured the crypt. ‘Same place.’ They agreed the time.

‘On this occasion, you will be playing alone.’

‘OK.’

‘I look forward to it.’

‘So do I.’

‘Must I prepare any particular piece?’

‘No. You choose what you wish to play. I wish to be enchanted.’

‘Good. What must I wear?’

‘Again, your choice, but wear black stockings underneath. Hold-ups.’

‘I will.’

‘And your black heels.’

The images in his mind were already materialising.

‘Of course.’

He’d picked up the keys to the crypt the previous evening and paid a generous bribe to the caretaker to ensure that, once again, there would be no staff in attendance beyond the closed door throughout their stay.

Rushing down the steep and narrow stairs, Dominik pushed the door open and the musty, enclosed smell of the underground area washed over him, followed by a delicate substrata of wax, faded memories of burned-out candles and long-forgotten devotions. Peering into the darkness, he brushed his hand against the cold stone wall on first his left- and then the right-hand side and finally found the light switch. He’d forgotten from the previous recital that the switch was on the wrong side of the door. He slid the plastic knob upwards through its narrow allotted channel until the crypt was shrouded in a delicate veil of light, not at full power, but discreet, velvety, just the right level for the occasion. Dominik had always been an orderly sort of person, precise, attentive to details, and this was a ritual he had rehearsed endlessly in his mind since his brief conversation with Summer on Saturday when today’s arrangement had been concluded.

Checking on his watch, an expensive silver Tag Heuer, he hurriedly carried some isolated chairs that had been scattered across the crypt and pushed them up against the back wall. It had to be just right. He looked up at the ceiling and noted a bar of small spotlights. He walked back and picked up one of the chairs, brought it to the centre, climbed on it, wary of its somewhat unsteady grip on the irregular stone floor and adjusted the position of the central spotlight so that it shone onto a particular area. To emphasise the effect, he slightly unscrewed two of the other lights at either end of the rail. Yes, this would now work much better.

He glanced at his watch. Summer was a couple of minutes late.

Briefly he flirted with the idea of reproaching her for this and the possibility of heaping some form of punishment on her for this infringement, but decided against it just as he heard her quiet rap on the wooden door.

‘Come in,’ he shouted out.

She was wearing her little black dress again, with a grey knitted woollen top covering her shoulders and arms, firmly gripping the handle of her violin case in one hand. The heels made her look taller.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted out. ‘There were delays on the Jubilee line.’

‘That’s fine,’ Dominik said. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

He looked into her eyes. She held his gaze, pulled her top off, looked for somewhere to leave it, unwilling to let it drop to the floor.

‘Here,’ Dominik suggested, and held out his hands.

Summer passed it over to him. The wool was still warm from its continued contact with her body. He unashamedly brought it to his nose, sniffed it, hunting for her scent, something green and pungent far away in the fragrance’s background. As she watched, Dominik turned his back on her and carried the light garment away to set it down on one of the chairs he had left against the crypt’s back wall.

He stepped towards her. ‘What will you be playing?’ he asked her.

Her response was hesitant. ‘Actually, it’s something of an improvisation, based on the
Fingal’s Cave
overture. I’m a great fan of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, but it’s very technical and I haven’t quite mastered all its intricacies yet. This has similar wonderful melodies, so over the years I’ve been playing around with it, although it’s written for a full orchestra and not a violin on its own. I hope you don’t mind me not sticking to a strict classical repertoire?’

‘That will be fine,’ Dominik remarked.

Summer smiled. For the past day she had agonised over her choice of music to play.

Still just a few metres from the wooden door that allowed passage into the crypt, she glanced ahead of her and noted how Dominik had positioned the lighting, the way the spotlight threw a circle of incandescent white across the stone floor, and realised this was to be her ‘stage’, where he wanted her to play today.