Masquerade (5 page)

T
he sensation is exquisite. On the horizon a climax glimmers.

‘Don’t stop… Please don’t stop,’ I cry.

My teeth start clenching, my head glides on the floor, then I am gone like a spinning top. I come back to the marble floor in waves.

‘I really, really like having you inside me.’

He raises his head and looks searchingly at me. Then he puts a hand out and gently brushes away a damp lock of hair. ‘And I really, really like being inside you,’ he says and inside me his cock twitches.

I giggle and wriggle and wrap my hands around his neck and pull him down. ‘Are we going to spend the whole night on the marble floor? I think it’s really beautiful but I kinda like pillows, duvets and mattresses.’

‘So do I, baby,’ he says, and with a single graceful movement bounds up and, pulling me up, puts his shoulder to my stomach and hauls me up and over his shoulder. He carries me nude, but for my shiny black boots.

‘You are such a caveman,’ I scold, shaking my ass suggestively.

‘Just claiming what is mine,’ he says cheerfully, and with a firm slap on my naked bottom, carries on up the stairs while I giggle like a crazy coot. I’ve never been carried up a staircase. It is a heavenly feeling.  One I would have scoffed at and never thought I would enjoy.

Another singer I don’t recognize is crooning,
Is this love?
Jaron doesn’t look old but… His music.

‘How old are you?’ I ask his back while I watch the movement his pert ass makes as he climbs the stairs.

‘I’m a thousand years old, Billie.’

His mood has changed. For some reason I can’t imagine, he seems sad and unreachable. I try to lighten the atmosphere. ‘Are you a vampire or something?’

‘No, but I’m too old for you anyway.’

‘You don’t look a day over thirty.’

He laughs. It’s a bitter sound. ‘I’m thirty-two, but people like me, we’re like meteorites. We don’t last. We are bright, really bright, we can light up the sky with our fire, but we burn out and hurt the people around us. But I’m not going to harm you. I’m going to be gone long before I do that to you.’

I don’t like the sound of that. For a strange reason it frightens me. I remind myself that we’re just fucking. He has a girlfriend. I know nothing about him. I’m playing his mistress. And so far so good. I won’t let him spoil it by talking about things that are outside our reach.

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Jaron?’

It seems he’s had enough of this strange talk too. ‘No more talking, Billie love.’

The words Billie and love in the same sentence from his lips. So odd it is obviously a slip of the tongue.

‘No more talking, Billie Black,’ he corrects himself.

He takes me into a totally white bedroom. It is like a slice of heaven. There might be clouds under the bed. I know instantly that it is not his bedroom. He throws me on the white bed. The silk duvet is cold on my skin. I bounce and quickly raise myself on my elbows. He looks down at me with hooded eyes.

‘This is not your bedroom, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Is this where you take the girls you…like?’

‘No.’

‘Why have you brought me here then?’

‘Do you know you talk too much, Miss Black?’

‘Why does every fucking thing have to be such a secret? Why can’t you just be cool and tell me?’

‘I can’t have you and you can’t have me. Why pretend?’

I sit up and cross my arms over my midriff. ‘Just so we are clear, I don’t want to marry you or anything like that. I’m quite happy to just think of you as the most enormous erection I have ever had the good fortune to come across. So stop being so fucking secretive. It’s irritating.’

As if I had waved a magic wand the other Jaron, the smooth-talking operator, comes back. Un-fucking-believable. I stare at him in awe. What is he? A multiple personality. He looks me up and down so slowly my nipples tingle. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes when you’re irritated, babe,’ he says very, very softly.

He bends and kisses me, but his kiss betrays him. It is not sexy. It is long and lingering and almost desperate. It reminds me of the way my grandfather grasped my hand when he knew he was dying. Like a claw. Even after he died his hand was tightly clenched around mine. I was so shocked I did not move. My mother came and disentangled his thin hand away.

‘Where is he gone?’ I asked.

‘To heaven.’ My mother sniffed.

‘Is it a horrible place?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. It’s a wonderful place. You only get to go there if you are good.’

‘So why didn’t he want to go then?’

My mother had no satisfactory answer for me. Why do we fear dying if heaven is waiting?

Jaron is looking at me with a crazy expression on his face. My lips form a single shivery word: ‘Jaron?’

‘I want you to take all of me,’ he says roughly.

‘OK,’ I whisper. The idea is unfamiliar and exciting.

‘Bum up,’ he says, and lays me face down on the bed with two pillows under my hips. The thought of being taken from behind, of being face down, my ass high in the air and totally helpless, waiting for a
man
to mount me is, to my mind at least, dark and twisted.

He is the master of both our pleasures. His powerful hands run down my back and ass cheeks and down to the insides of my thighs. With both hands he opens me wide. That single rough action is the most erotic thing that has ever happened to me.

Suddenly there I am, spread open for his pleasure. Maybe if he wasn’t such a hulk of a man or so brutishly muscular it wouldn’t have caused the sensation of such powerlessness in me. 

I am so wet and turned on that I groan when he enters me. I exhale slowly and savor the full, forbidden pleasure of having a man’s dick inside me, a woman who thought she despised dicks. Perhaps he feels my excitement and how close I am to orgasm. My muscles are already beginning to spasm.

‘Yes,’ I scream.

The orgasm comes suddenly and powerfully but it lasts only a short time. My thighs are twitching and quivering, but he orders me not to move and takes me again and again. So hard that it makes him grunt and the bed shakes and the headboard rattles against the wall. His hands are on my hips, the fingers digging painfully into my flesh, and I am juddering about like a rag doll, but in my head I want him to grip me even harder, ravish me even more, brand me. I open my mouth and ask for it.

He doesn’t disappoint. His thrusts build up even more speed. He is like a jackhammer inside me. I begin to tremble and then an orgasm tears through me. This one is really the one that sages talk about. It is like a death. It shreds you, lays you bare to all kinds of odd sensations. Floating. Out of body. Hues. Emotions. I cry when I come down and he holds me close.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.

I shake my head, unable to speak.

‘Did I hurt you?’

I shake my head again. This time I try to reassure him by holding his hand. He doesn’t understand. He never will. He’ll never know what I experienced.

He strokes my hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers.

‘Don’t,’ I tell him. ‘It was beautiful.’

‘Really?’ He seems stunned.

‘It was insane.’

‘Insane?’

‘Out of this world,’ I tell him.

He grins.

‘Did you come?’ I ask belatedly.

‘Yeah. Did you not feel it?’

‘Sorry. I was too lost in my sexual high.’

He is still inside me and I feel his cock twitch again. I know what that means. ‘Can we rest a little?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ he says and lies gently on top of me, but he remains inside me, semi-erect. I know the night is not over and for that I am insanely grateful.

‘Do you have, like, a secret sexual fantasy?’

‘Yeah, I have fantasies.’

‘Something you’d be ashamed to share with anyone else?’

The blood rushes to my head. ‘Yeah.’

His eyes glitter like jewels. Precious. Beautiful. Full of secrets. People have killed for them. ‘What is it?’

Because I dare not look at the effect of my words on his face, I lift my head to his ear and whisper it.

A
tinny, unfamiliar ringing wakes me up. Usually I need a police siren held to my head to wake me up, but being in a foreign bed with a man’s body next to me makes me extra sensitive to my surroundings. I open my eyes and my fuzzy gaze falls on white walls, white carpets, white cupboards. For a crazy second I am confused. Where the hell am I? I turn my head the other way and my eyes suddenly focus. Jaron is lying on his front, his face turned to me. As I watch him, his eyes open and for a second he stares at me.

I am strangely embarrassed. ‘Your phone’s ringing.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Aren’t you going to take it?’

‘No.’

Immediately I suspect it is Ebony and I sit up and thrust my legs out of the bed. He catches my hand and tugs so I fall onto his body.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Home.’

‘It’s not Ebony,’ he says softly, his voice ultra-husky with sleep. ‘You can look if you want.’

‘No thanks,’ I say, making my face blank so he cannot tell how I am reacting to his erection. I shift my weight, which only makes it worse.

He chuckles—the sound is warm and sexy. ‘I love you like this. All hazy and tousled and blunt around the edges.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to bring a salami into the bed with you?’

One corner of his mouth lifts, a lovely little half-smile that goes with the sunlight coming in through the open windows. ‘I always bring breakfast with me.’

‘I like my salami sliced,’ I say.

And he starts to laugh. ‘Oh, Billie. There is just no one like you.’ He tucks a skein of hair behind my ear.

‘You came inside me last night,’ I accuse.

‘I know, I’m sorry. I got carried away. I’ve never wanted to come inside a woman before. But I want to come inside you all the time, Billie. I want to fill that pussy of yours with hot spunk until you drip like a sponge.’

‘Wow! Dirty talk before breakfast.’

He doesn’t smile. There is raw lust in his eyes.

‘I’ll stop by a chemist on my way home and get a morning after pill.’

‘Will you go on the pill?’

‘Why, are you planning to fuck me long time?’

‘Long enough.’ And there is a tension to his voice that wasn’t there before.

‘That’s chocolate to my ears,’ I say lightly, but in fact, his words jar. The truth is, no matter how much I lie to him or to myself, I don’t like to think that what we have has a time limit. Which, of course, I realize from a purely intellectual level is a contradiction. Everything in life has a time limit. Even things that seem to last are taken away at death.

I am always reminded of that photo I once saw of a woman and her friend who had rigged up a camera to take a picture of them standing against a waterfall. They are smiling into the camera and totally clueless that behind them by some freak of nature the waterfall has caused a wave that is about to engulf and kill them in seconds. That is most of us. We are smiling into the camera of our relationships. Just behind us, the wave: the end of it all.

‘Are you sore this morning?’ he asks, tracing his finger along the bridge of my nose.

‘After last night? Do you have to ask?’

‘Yup. It turns me on to hear you say it.’

‘Yes, I’m sore. I feel as if I’ve had a sandstone pillar repeatedly thrust into me.’

He pulls me up by my armpits while I squeal and puts me astride on his penis. It is hot and hard. He looks hungrily at my breasts. ‘Put me inside you.’

‘I’m sore.’

‘I want you to be more sore.’

I look into his eyes. They are heavy with desire. ‘Why?’ I whisper, but I have already lifted my hips and caught his large cock by its base.

‘Because I want to brand you. All day long I want you to feel the pain and remember me inside you. I want you to be wet and ready by the time I come back tomorrow evening.’

I hold his shaft at the center of my core. ‘Are you going somewhere tonight?’

‘Yup.’

I sit on his cock and slide it all the way in. And boy does it stretch and burn.

‘Pain?’

I nod.

‘Good,’ he growls.

I breathe out noisily.

‘No cheating. I want to feel the lips of your pussy open and flatten around the base of my cock.’

I wriggle and push farther down. The action makes me gasp.

‘Lean forward.’

Impaled on his shaft I lean forward and he squashes both my breasts together and sucks and bites both my nipples at the same time while I stretch my neck out and moan. It doesn’t take long before both of us hit our highs. For the first time in unison.

I roll away from him and sit up. My toes sink deep into the luxurious carpet. ‘I need a wash. I stink of sex.’

He catches my hand. ‘Don’t wash. I want you to be dripping my cum while we have breakfast. In fact, I don’t want you to wash at all. All day long I want you to put your fingers between your legs, smell your fingers and remember my cock.’

I laugh.

‘Show me your pussy.’

‘What?’

‘Open your legs and let me see your pussy.’

I look down at him, all messy hair and buffed. He is golden in the way only true blonds can be. An unrelievedly beautiful creature. The truth is I am a bit star-struck by him.

Slowly, I rotate my hips toward him and leaning back on the palms of my hands in the vague, probably futile hope that my stomach will stretch and look flatter than it really is, (there was a time I couldn’t give a monkey’s what anybody thought of my body but it is impossible to be like that when you are around someone as impossibly beautiful as Jaron) I smile slowly and open my legs.

‘Fuck, Billie. That’s beautiful.’

‘What?’ I ask innocently.

‘My cum leaking out of you. Makes me want to fuck you all over again.’

‘Forget that. I’m already burning.’

He puts his hand out and inserts a long finger into me. I inhale sharply.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Like hell,’ I reply and we are interrupted by a sound downstairs. I start and look at him questioningly.

He grins. ‘Relax, that’s only Ian, my housekeeper. Feel like breakfast?’

I take his finger out and close my legs. ‘Yeah, but not eggs and bacon.’

‘I know. A bowl of jam.’

I stare at him in disbelief. ‘You’ve had me investigated?’

He links his hands behind his neck. Casual and unrepentant. ‘I only wanted your address, but Drake was a bit more thorough than I expected.’

The phone rings again. He picks it up this time. ‘Yeah, you can bring it up.’

He jackknifes into a sitting position and I am reminded again how agile and light he is considering his mountainous size. He stands and, naked, walks to a cupboard. He opens it, takes two fluffy toweling robes out and hands one to me. It is very large and I have to fold the sleeves.

‘Come on,’ he says and takes me up to the roof. A small, dapper man in a gray sweater and black trousers is already there. Jaron introduces him as Ian. Ian greets us both and starts to serve. I take the chair Ian holds out for me to sit on. Even though I have a balcony it has never crossed my mind to have breakfast in the fresh morning air. It’s actually nice—very nice.

My bowl of jam is served to me on a silver tray with a teaspoon set next to it. Jaron is having the works—bacon, sausages, hash browns, eggs, beans and toast. After Ian disappears Jaron takes a sip of his orange juice and regards me over the rim of his glass. I put a spoon of jam into my mouth.

‘I never would have believed it if I had not seen it,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Jam for breakfast. I thought Drake had finally cocked up.’

‘Everybody makes such a fuss. I like jam. Why shouldn’t I have it?’

‘It’s not exactly good for you.’

I have a few choice answers to that but I don’t want to spoil a perfectly fine morning. Besides, he looks insanely fucking sexy in the morning light. ‘So, tell me, what sort of business is it that you do? This place can’t exactly be cheap.’

‘What if I told you I’m an arms dealer?’

I look him dead in the eye. There is a tight, horrible feeling in my stomach. I’d rather he dealt in drugs. ‘Are you?’

He chows down a piece of bacon dripping with the egg yolk: absolutely disgusting.

‘No. I’m in property development.’

I exhale the breath I am holding. ‘So what is it that you do then?’

‘Did I not say? Property development.’

I nod. ‘You must do very well.’

‘I do OK.’ He smiles. ‘It pays the bills.’

‘And you are trying to break into the fashion business,’ he says, very smoothly changing the direction of our conversation.

‘Drake is very thorough.’ I spoon a mouthful of jam. ‘I was curious about something. Why did you go to that dive where we met? I mean, you obviously don’t take tainted Es and hardly drink…’

‘I went there because I like the music.’

‘And you never want to get high or drunk?’ I ask him curiously.

‘That’s not how I get my high.’ He takes his phone from the pocket of his dressing gown, hits a few buttons, scrolls through a list, and uses his index finger to click on something. ‘Here,’ he says passing his phone to me. ‘Watch this.’

I take the phone from him and look at it. It looks like snow-covered terrain taken from the air. The angle changes and I realize that it has been taken from a helicopter. I can see its shadow on the snow.

‘That’s me wingsuit surfing a thousand feet over the highest mountain peak in the world, the summit of the Himalayas.’

The camera pulls back to a man standing at the door of the helicopter. He is wearing a blue helmet and it is impossible to see his face, but I can tell that he is Jaron. He simply drops out of the helicopter and the video shows him simply free falling against a blue sky. Shite. That looks fucking dangerous. Suddenly the feed changes back to one of those gopro cameras and it looks very much like Jaron is falling to his death on some snow-covered mountain called the Himalayas.

‘That’s me traveling at over one hundred miles per hour,’ Jaron says.

The problem is no parachute opens and the mountain peak seems to be rushing up at frightening speed toward the camera. Involuntarily, I open my mouth. Is Jaron showing a video of him crashing into a mountainside? He is now so close to the ground I can even see tracks on the snow left by wild animals. Pull up, pull up, I want to shout.

‘My God!’ I exclaim.

‘That happens fifteen feet from the ground.’

What he is referring to is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. The falling man suddenly flares out and becomes a human glider. His suit has wings. All in black he flies down the mountainside full of dark, sharp rocks and snow like that creature from the mothman prophesies. He flies over dangerously craggy rocks as if he is powered by something more than the webbed wings of his suit. The sense of space and drama is incredible. He looks no bigger than a fly, so vulnerable against one of the most hostile landscapes on earth. It almost doesn’t look real. Surely humans can’t do that! He flies so near the sharp rock I actually feel an odd prickle of fear and panic for him. It is only a video, I have to remind myself.

Then his blue parachute opens and he no longer flies like a bird, but looks like a helpless human being, tossed about by nature, flung down a mountainside. The parachute slows him down and he begins the motion of running while still airborne until he reaches a snowy patch where he lands and carries on running.

He stops running. The parachute around him. He is safe. And I look up at Jaron with totally different, totally impressed eyes. The nerves of steel required to free fall from that height and then to wait till fifteen feet off the ground before raising your arms to unfurl those puny little suit wings. Talk about the ultimate extreme sport.

‘This is what you do to get a high?’

He chews and nods at the same time. ‘Yeah. And sky diving, bouldering—’

‘Bouldering?’

‘Climbing without safety equipment.’

‘That’s just stupid.’

He shrugs and continues the list I interrupted. ‘…and volcano boarding.’

‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s zooming down the face of an active volcano on a reinforced plywood toboggan.’

‘Ugh! What do you use for brakes?’

He grins. ‘My heels.’

My mouth drops open. ‘No shit! What sort of speeds do you do?’

‘I’ve clocked speeds of nearly ninety kilometers per hour.’

‘Right. So a helicopter drops you up there and you zoom down.’

‘Nope.’ He pours himself a cup of coffee. ‘You have to hike up there first.’

I shake my head. ‘Jesus, you’re really intent on harming yourself, aren’t you?’

He laughs. ‘If you want you can come sky diving with me the day after tomorrow.’

‘I won’t be falling out on my own, will I?’