Living Death (31 page)

She put down her iPhone and went up to Conor and put her arms around his neck. ‘That’s that sorted,’ she said.

‘I’ve never been out with an armed woman before,’ he told her. ‘I’m not sure what the protocol is when it comes to undressing. Do I have to have a firearms licence?’

‘Well, it’s straightforward enough. I take off my holster and you carry on where you left off.’

She unfastened her gun and laid it on the side-table next to her iPhone. ‘There.’

‘That’s a fierce unusual breakfast for a dog,’ said Conor, coming up close to her again, and taking hold of her sweater. ‘Two boiled eggs, a cup of tea, and some toast if he wants it. With blackcurrant jam? I mean, none of that will do him any harm, but—’

‘I told you,’ Katie interrupted him. ‘Barney doesn’t realise that he’s a dog. He’d be smoking cigarettes and trying to drive my car if I let him.’

She stood on tiptoe so that she could give him a flurry of little kisses, to distract him. Even though she was wearing her thick-soled lace-up shoes he was six inches taller than her, at least. He kissed her back – a long, slow kiss, with his brown eyes open, looking directly into hers – and at the same time he started to lift up her sweater.

Katie raised both arms so that he could take her sweater off. She was pleased that she had put on one of the new Heidi Klum bras that she had bought last week from Brown Thomas, with fuchsia pink flowers on it, and that she was wearing the matching thong, too. Most of her underwear drawer needed sorting out and throwing out, and she hardly ever managed to wear underwear that matched.

‘I love that perfume you’re wearing,’ said Conor, as he reached around and unfastened her bra, sliding the catch open one-handed.

‘Obsession. It’s what I wear to work to intimidate my superior officers. The men, anyway.’

He took off her bra and dropped it to the floor. Then he held her breasts in both hands, gently rolling his fingertips around her nipples. They kissed even more deeply, and as her nipples stiffened, Katie began to feel more than just attraction, she felt hunger. She began to kiss him so hard that she was almost eating him. At the same time, she started to unbutton his thick blue mouliné shirt, pulling it off his shoulders. His chest was hard and muscular, with a V-shaped arrow of dark brown hair on it, and his stomach was taut – the stomach of a swimmer, or a man who exercised every day.

Once she had wrestled off his shirt, she unbuckled his tan leather belt and opened his trousers, tugging them down to his knees. He was wearing navy-and-white striped boxer shorts, which did nothing at all to conceal how stiff he was.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Sit on the bed.’

He sat down, prising off his shoes with his feet. Katie knelt on the floor in front of him to drag off his trousers, and then she pulled down his boxer shorts. His penis was huge – much thicker than John’s. Its head was swollen to a dark mauve colour, and it was already gaping at her with a glistening drop of fluid. Conor had trimmed the hair around it as neatly as his beard, which told Katie that he was vain about his appearance, but which also suggested that he was aware of what women liked in bed.

She grasped the shaft of his penis tightly and rubbed it slowly up and down. Then she closed her eyes and touched her fingers of her left hand to her forehead like a clairvoyant.

‘It’s telling me something,’ she said.

‘What’s it telling you?’

‘It’s telling me that it feels exposed out here, without any trousers on. It needs to find somewhere dark and warm and slippery to hide in.’

She opened her eyes and looked up at him with a mischievous smile on her face and both of them laughed.

‘That’s amazing,’ said Conor. ‘Jesus. I won’t bother to say a word in future... just let the flute do the talking for me.’

Katie stood up and he unzipped her skirt. She kissed the top of his head while he took off her pantyhose and then her thong. When he had done so, he kissed her between the legs, and gave her a quick lick with the tip of his tongue, too, which made her shiver.

They climbed together on to the bed and kissed and caressed and stroked each other. Katie had made love to only one man since John had left her, and he had been rough and preoccupied with other thoughts, even when he was on top of her. But Conor was giving her all of his attention now, massaging her breasts and running his fingers down to her hips to make her shudder with pleasure.

‘You have…. the most extraordinary face,’ he told her. ‘You look like one of those beautiful women in a mediaeval painting. I’ve never met a woman who looked so willing and yet so sure of herself, both at the same time.’

‘Well, you’re not so bad yourself, Mr Hound Lover,’ said Katie. ‘When I saw you walking into the station there, I thought you looked like one of those Vikings that used to come into Cork in a longboat, looking for a bit of rape and pillage.’

‘I promise I won’t pillage,’ said Conor. ‘I don’t want to be seduced and arrested, all on the same night.’

Katie reached down and cupped his balls in her hand. They were hard and tightly wrinkled and she gently played with them as if she could tell his fortune from those, too.

‘Your breasts are beautiful,’ he told her, although he sounded a little breathless because of the way that she was fondling him.

‘Too big,’ she said.

‘They don’t look too big from here. It’s your perspective. You’re closer than I am, so they look too big to you, but they’re not.’

Katie couldn’t help laughing again. A man had never aroused her so much and yet so amused her at the same time.

‘Mother of God,’ she said. ‘You sound like that episode of
Father Ted
. “Big, near... small, far away.”’

With that, she opened her legs wide, and took hold of his penis, and guided the head of it between her lips, so that it nestled there for a moment. She kept a tight grip on it, though, so that he couldn’t push himself forward and penetrate her, and she looked up into his eyes and kissed him and said, ‘It’s talking to me again.’

‘What’s it saying now?’

‘It says it wants me, but the question is, do you?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘There’s a whole rake of difference, Conor. Your cock turns me on all right, but I don’t go to bed with cocks. I go to bed with men. What I mean is, once your cock is satisfied, and shrinks away, will you do the same? I’m not asking you for commitment. I’m simply making sure that I’m not just another notch on your bedpost.’

Conor smiled. ‘There’s only one way to find out, Katie. Try me and see for yourself. And will you tell the flute to shut up for a moment? I want you, the same as he does. In fact, right at this moment, about a hundred times more than he does.’

Katie laughed again, and released her grip on Conor’s penis, and he slowly pushed himself into her. She had always been quite tight, but Conor was the first man who had ever made her gasp when he entered her. He felt enormous, as if he were stretching her apart and filling up her whole pelvis. She closed her eyes and clung on to him, digging her fingernails into his back, while he entered her right up to the hilt, and she could feel his neatly clipped hair prickling against the smooth bare lips of her vulva.

Now there was no more laughing. Their lovemaking became powerful and rhythmic, with Conor plunging into her again and again, faster and faster, with both of them panting like a duet.

She was beginning to feel the warm dark tension of an orgasm rising up inside her when Conor suddenly took himself out of her, and sat up on the bed with his back straight.

‘Let me be true to my name,’ he breathed.

‘What? What do you mean?’ Katie asked him.

‘Turn over,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Turn over. I’m a Hound Lover, let me love you like a hound loves his bitch.’

Katie turned over and knelt up on her knees and elbows. Conor parted the cheeks of her bottom with both hands and gently entered her vagina from behind, sliding all the way in. He then began to make love to her again, not as quickly as before, but very deep – so deep that he kept touching the neck of her womb and making her flinch.

She couldn’t remember when she had last felt a sensation like this. She stared down at the pillow and all she could think of was the ever-increasing tightness between her legs, and Conor’s penis slowly but relentlessly pushing its way into her body. She felt her muscles ripple inside her, and then the darkness rose to overwhelm her and she was quaking and quaking and crying out loud, and even though she was crying out loud Conor kept pushing his penis into her again and again until she thought that she was going to go mad with the ecstasy of it.
Stop,
oh God, don’t stop!

But Conor did stop, although he was still inside her. He gripped her hips, and she could hear him breathing very quickly, as if he were trying to stop himself from sneezing. Then he climaxed, and she could feel the warmth of his semen flooding her vagina. It was such a relieving, satisfying sensation that she dropped her face forward on to the pillow and felt that she could have stayed like that for ever.

At last, though, his penis subsided and he took himself out of her, and she could feel his wetness running down the inside of her thighs. She eased herself over on to her side, and held out her arms for him, and they hugged and kissed each other, and stroked each other’s faces and shoulders and backs as if they had both discovered something magical that nobody else in the world had ever discovered before.

Now, they hardly spoke, although they both continued to smile at each other. There was nothing they needed to say, not yet. Katie felt as if her life had suddenly been brought into perspective. All of the pressures that she had been facing at work and all of the guilt that she had been feeling about John still seemed important, but she saw now that she could cope with them. Even if she and Conor never slept together again, she knew that she was strong and attractive and her life had much more to offer than pompous senior officers and Knocknaheeny scumbags and a crippled former lover who was only staying with her because he had nowhere else to go and nobody else to take care of him.

Conor at last looked at his watch and said, ‘Look – it’s still early. Let’s go out for one last drink, shall we? It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to walk up to Henchy’s so you won’t have to drive.’

‘All right,’ said Katie. ‘But when we get back, I think the flute will be asking for an encore.’

Conor gently touched her forehead, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘He won’t be the only one.’

*

They walked up Summerhill arm-in-arm to St Luke’s Cross and went into Henchy’s, with its black-painted front and its windows engraved with lettering. They sat in the same corner seats next to the front door that she had sat in with Kyna the last time she had been in here, and she thought of Kyna and wondered how she was and what she would think of Conor. Would she be jealous?

They shared a bottle of chardonnay that wasn’t quite cold enough. Conor talked about some of the pets that he had managed to find, including a bull terrier that had almost bitten his fingers off when he had tried to tug it out from underneath a snooker table. An elderly man at the bar was telling a long and incomprehensible joke about goats being thrown down a well, which he could hardly finish because he was wheezing with laughter.

‘What time are you driving up to Tipp tomorrow?’ Katie asked him.

‘It’ll take about an hour and three-quarters, traffic willing, so I reckon about twelve.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘Really?’ said Conor. She had an inkling that he had nearly said ‘
No, you’re not
,’ before remembering that she was a senior Garda officer and that she was employing him to do a job for her.

‘Yes, really. I want to see these dog fighters for myself.’

She didn’t say how strongly protective she felt towards him, now that they had made love. She wanted to make sure that if some hard case like Guzz Eye McManus found out tomorrow who he really was, and what he was doing in Ballyknock, he wouldn’t end up in a shed somewhere in Ballingarry North with his skull smashed in.

*

It was still raining as they walked back down the hill to the guest house. Back in Conor’s room, they undressed and took a shower together, soaping each other and kissing and enjoying the slippery wet feeling of each other’s bodies.

When they had towelled themselves dry, they lay on the bed together, naked, just looking at each other. Katie stroked Conor’s damp beard and said, ‘I have to leave pure early tomorrow. I have to go back home first and then to the hospital and God alone knows what else will have come up for me to deal with. I’ll pick you up at twelve.’

‘I think you work too hard.’

‘So do I.’

She reached across and started to fondle his penis, which quickly stiffened. ‘This is one of those nights that I wish would go on for ever,’ she said.

‘It’s only a pup. We have plenty of time.’

‘That’s what I’m always telling myself. But it isn’t true.’

She got up on to her knees and grasped his penis in her hand and took him into her mouth. She felt that it was like sucking a large glossy plum, and she was almost tempted to bite into it. He laid one hand on her thigh and let his head drop back on the pillow and let out a soft, contented sigh.

‘This,’ he said. ‘This is a preview of Heaven.’

She swirled her tongue around and around him, and probed him with the tip of it. She was aroused by the feeling that she was both subservient and in control, slave and mistress at the same time. She took him in deeper, as deep as she could without choking herself, and with her right hand she rubbed him more and more briskly until she felt his leg-muscles tightening up.

‘Oh dear God,’ he whispered, and climaxed. The first spurt Katie swallowed, but then she took him out and he spurted again, and his semen shot up the side of her cheek and across the bridge of her nose.

She sat up straight and reached for the pillow so that she could use the pillow-case to wipe her cheek. Then she leaned over and gave Conor a long, lascivious kiss.

‘Thank the Lord the brassers down on Union Quay couldn’t see me like that. They’d have said that I had a face like a painter’s radio.’