The Pleasure Quartet (34 page)

At peace.

It was odd, Noah reflected, how easy it was to fall into habits so quickly with someone. Or was it a reflection of the seamless way they had connected? At weekends, they went for long walks each introducing the other to quirky parts of London the other was unfamiliar with, cautiously skirting areas which held awkward respective memories, dipping into street food and enjoying pit stops at random cafés and bars along the way.

‘It feels odd,’ Noah said. They were seated mid Sunday afternoon on a wooden bench facing the river by the National Film Theatre, biting into overfilled piping-hot burrito wraps from the Wahaca van, warily trying to avoid spilling sour cream, guacamole or meat juices down onto their jeans.

‘What does?’

‘It’s as if there are two of you . . .’

‘How come? You can’t be seeing double; you haven’t even been drinking yet.’

‘There’s you and then there’s the Summer I’d read about, the Summer from the book . . .’

Summer sighed.

‘You’ve read the novel?’

‘How could I not?’

‘It was a long time ago now, another life,’ she said.

‘We all come with luggage.’

‘I somehow think I carry more with me than most others,’ Summer remarked. ‘But then that’s not news for you, is it?’

Noah told her about Bridget, and then about April.

He concluded his recollections.

‘You know about Dominik,’ Summer said. ‘There have been others, too.’

‘I realise that.’

‘Too many.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Noah insisted. Provided her health was not compromised – and he now knew that it hadn’t been – he couldn’t have given a monkey’s toss if Summer had fucked half the population of London before they met. She did not seem to accept his opinion on the subject though, no matter how many times he tried to reassure her that her past history was none of his business unless she wanted to talk about it, and even then, he found that the vagaries of her sexual life and mind intrigued and aroused him. It was one of the very reasons that he had sought her out, that he found her so attractive now. Her unabashed taste for pleasure.

He remembered that brief but insistent glimpse of the sauna photos all those months back and how they had profoundly marked him. But dared not query Summer further. He wondered what she would think of him if she knew the full extent of his desires. If she suspected how her torment had aroused him. Would she want him more or less, if he revealed all of his inner secrets? He was not sure if he wanted to know the answer.

A few yards away the South Bank skateboarders rushed and ran and glided, a maelstrom of movement and agility, crowds gathered to observe and photograph them. The book-tables stallholders were packing up their stock as evening approached.

‘I want you to fuck me,’ Summer asked.

‘Not an invitation it would be safe to turn down,’ Noah remarked.

Her eyes stayed on him.

‘Hard,’ she continued.

‘There will be cabs on Belvedere Road,’ Noah said as they rose from the bench.

That night, Summer asked him to tie her down. He kept no rope in the flat, but they managed to improvise with some old neckties lying in the bottom of one of his drawers. He blindfolded her on his own initiative.

The sex was good. As if they had reached a new level, overcome a final obstacle.

She was alone in Noah’s flat. They had shared a quick morning fuck less than thirty minutes ago and as a consequence he had been running late for a meeting and had darted out of bed, showered, dressed and rushed out of the door before he’d even had a chance to finish the coffee that she had brewed for him. He took it black, without any sugar.

Summer had finished her own and was now sipping his, thinking of his mouth touching the rim of the mug where hers now rested, and where his lips had earlier been as he expertly navigated the ever-shifting patterns of her arousal to bring her to climax. Noah rarely let a sexual encounter between them conclude without first making her orgasm. He seemed to take her satisfaction as a point of pride. Initially, Summer had found the attention strange to adjust to, and had reassured Noah that it wasn’t necessary – he didn’t need to make her come every time.

‘I’ll do what I like,’ he had told her. The tone of his voice at once bemused and imperious. A threat and a promise in equal measure.

Now she revelled in it, let him spread her legs and go down on her when she was still half drunk with sleep and shaking off the previous night’s dreams. Sometimes she came quickly, and on other occasions he lapped at her for an hour or longer as she mined the museum of pornography in her head until she found the fantasy that felt right for that particular moment from a library of scenarios that had been her companions for as long as she could remember. Her thoughts remained her own, too dark to share with anyone, even Noah, she feared.

The path of their relationship had followed a strange trajectory. Their bodies melded together so instinctively, it was as if they had always known each other. But the other things – the shared conversations, their histories, likes and dislikes and getting used to each other’s habits and foibles – took time. Together they were like a tree with one solid root and an endless mass of new green shoots still finding their way to the sun.

She was wearing one of his shirts, a crisp white Hugo Boss that he saved for special occasions and important business meetings, with a shark collar and turn-back cuffs that flopped around her wrists without the obligatory links pinning them down. It hung loose at her narrow waist and skimmed her wide hips and barely covered the smooth valley of her slit and the firm curve of her rump.

Outside, the day was bright and crisp. She stood in the middle of the living room in front of the wide bay window with her feet bare on the smooth surface of the wooden flooring. She had pulled aside the net curtain to allow the sunlight to stream in. Not even a solitary puff of cloud scudded across the horizon. The sky was an uninterrupted slate of pale blue.

Noah’s neighbour, Candy, the woman with the soft name that in Summer’s view in no way matched the toughness of her exterior, surfaced from the door of her basement flat. Summer observed her as her silhouette came into view, her head first and the rest of her morphing into sight as she climbed higher on the stairs that led to road level. Today the dead-straight, shining ink-black length of her hair was loose around her shoulders and her ample frame encased all in black to match, her blouse buttoned tight over her breasts and cinched low with a patent leather belt that highlighted the turn of her broad hips and secured the denim leggings that made no attempt to conceal even an inch of her generous curves.

Summer had often wondered whether the ceiling that separated Candy and Noah’s apartments was flimsy enough, or Summer’s groans loud enough, that Candy could hear them making love. It was admittedly unlikely since Noah’s bedroom was separated by another floor, but she still liked to think about it on the fleeting occasions that she bumped into the other woman when Summer was on her way out and Candy on her way in or vice versa.

Candy’s full form disappeared from view as she turned up the street, and Summer quit staring out of the window, and turned back to the kitchen to put her mug down, seek out some breakfast from Noah’s minimally furnished cupboards and start her day.

She poured some toasted granola into an earthenware bowl, cut a banana into pieces which she dropped in on top and added a few spoonsful of Greek yoghurt that yesterday evening had tempered the spice of the chilli con carne she had cooked for dinner. She mashed the ingredients together into a damp paste and took a bite. Since Noah didn’t take milk in his coffee, Summer often found the fridge bereft of it and had learned to improvise with her cereal.

A problem had been niggling on her mind for weeks now. A weight that she just couldn’t lift from her shoulders no matter how hard she tried. Its presence could no longer be ignored.

She called Aurelia.

She had thought of calling Lauralynn, but dismissed the idea. Her friend was too close to her and too invested in her happiness to help Summer initiate her plan. Lauralynn would provide her kind words of reassurance, try to convince her that she was being irrational. Ever-cool and curious, Aurelia would see the whole thing as a kind of sexual experiment. Considering Aurelia’s history, which she had told Summer a little of, she might even empathise in her own, aloof way.

The Mistress of the Ball did not sound in the least surprised to hear from Summer, or to discover that she had now left Rio and was once again located permanently in London.

‘I need your help.’

‘Of course,’ Aurelia assured her.

Later that evening, over a takeaway mushroom pizza that Summer had picked up from Le Cochonnet, off Lauderdale Road, and a couple of glasses of Fat Bastard Shiraz, she broached the topic with Noah. She waited until they had almost finished the bottle, her heart beating in her mouth all the while. Summer found talking about her feelings difficult. It would be so much easier to show him with her body. But she needed his permission to do that. She wished that she could somehow open a window into her mind, heart and soul for him to peer straight inside.

Noah had sensed that something was in the air. Bothering her mind. He could hear the brittleness in her voice. Had noticed her hands shaking as she topped up their glasses again, although it was unusual for them to drink during the week and even on weekends they rarely consumed more than a small glass of wine each. He feared that Summer might be about to tell him that she had decided the whole affair had happened too soon, was too intense, and call it off.

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ she said.

‘Anything,’ he replied. His eyes reflected kindness.

The place that she took him to was light and airy, an artist’s studio contained within an industrial-looking gated East London apartment complex near the Olympic village, with a wide open-plan living space, small bathroom and a bedroom that was more like a boudoir, kitted out in red and purple tones with luxurious, soft rugs warming the polished wooden floors and veils of chiffon hanging over the low futon bed. Bottles of lubricant, toy cleaner and a glass bowl full of condoms in brightly coloured wrappers sat on a side table.

In the main room, an assortment of beanbags and large soft pillows, wrapped in arabesque crimson and gold covers, had been pushed up against the wall. There was one sofa, as wide as a single mattress with sunken cushions, that looked as though it had borne the weight of many bodies. A series of black-and-white photographs hung at regular intervals displayed different sections of a man’s body – the same man, Noah believed – undergoing various methods of what some might consider torture. In one image, hands that belonged to another were pulling on thick silver bars that had been pierced behind his nipples, stretching his skin from his chest. In another, thick hooks had been threaded through the flesh that covered his shoulder blades. The final shot displayed his face in profile and part of his mouth. His expression – passive, inscrutable – wore the shadow of neither a scream nor a smile.

Noah looked away.

Summer was nervous. He could see it in the twist of her hands, the rounded slope of her bare shoulders. She was wearing the short black dress that she’d had on when they met in the alleyway in Recife. The same pair of ballet flats. The exact same outfit, he realised.

He wished he knew what to say to soothe her, even as a sense of dread rushed through him, a dawn of anxiety he could barely control.

It was the middle of the day. Sunlight filtered through the thin curtains that had been pulled across the wide French doors, scattering dappled beams across the polished floor. He wondered who else lived in this block, what kind of secrets the neighbours were concealing.

Summer had introduced him to the other man and woman who were in the room with them. Vincent and Aurelia. He was young and buff and bronzed and half-naked in just a pair of baggy hemp trousers of the sort that Noah imagined yoga teachers wore. Aurelia was as beautiful as her name, a tall willow of a blonde who might have been just on or below thirty, dressed like an actress from the 1940s in an oddly modest, sky-blue tea dress that reached past her knees. They were both barefoot. She was covered in a tapestry of tattoos that Noah could have sworn shimmered and twisted when she moved. No matter how many times he looked at her and tried to capture in his mind the images she wore etched on her skin, when he looked again they had shifted or morphed into something else.

‘Are you ready, Vincent?’ Aurelia asked.

Vincent nodded.

‘And you two?’ she asked Noah and Summer together. Summer barely moved her head as an affirmation.

‘Yes,’ Noah replied, even though he was unaware of exactly what he was consenting to, just following in Summer’s footsteps in the hope of keeping her happy.

‘Then let’s get started,’ she said.

Beforehand, Aurelia had taken Noah aside and confirmed with him what he considered his limits to be, and what action he could take if he wanted things to slow down or to stop. Aurelia would be there to witness, to guide if needed and intervene if absolutely necessary, but would not strictly speaking be involved. Noah had told her that he wanted to see whatever it was that Summer – who had stayed mum on the subject – wanted to show him, and if that made him uncomfortable, then so be it.

Vincent had set up a length of red rope that hung down from an iron loop fixed to a heavy beam that ran across the centre of the ceiling.

Summer approached Noah and kissed him softly on the lips.

His heart ached for her. She had the demeanour of a woman about to walk off the side of a precipice and he wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to – whatever it was that she felt he must know – it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all to him, but he knew that there was no use in protesting. When she set her mind to something, she was immovable.

He watched as Summer walked over to Vincent, and the rope, and reached one arm behind her back to unzip her dress. The garment fell to the floor and down to her feet and she stepped out of it and tossed it to one side. She was nude underneath. He admired her body. The soft, now familiar lushness of her curves. Her breasts, full and ever so slightly uneven but perfect nonetheless. He couldn’t look at them without thinking about how they felt cupped in his hands and the way that she responded when he gently sucked her nipples. The hollow of her tummy button, the smooth valley of her pudenda. That flaming, untameable burning bush of her hair and the way it flared out over her shoulders. The natural arch in her back that gave her an air of proud defiance. He loved the unapologetic way that she carried herself. Nudity suited Summer.