‘Did you think that was me?’ he yelled into the microphone. He addressed the question to the women sitting nearest to the rostrum.
‘Yes,’ the audience screamed as one.
‘Naughty girls! I’m much bigger than that.’
He tossed the wand to the woman in the dinner suit, who had retired to the side of the curtain, then began gyrating his hips in time to the music.
'Look at those muscles,’ Angela shouted into Clare’s ear. ‘Reminds me of your Gary.’
They reminded Clare of Gary too, and, despite herself, she felt a pang of desire.
The stripper began to pull the chiffon pantaloons down over his hips, turning his back to the audience and bending over so they were peeled over his very tight buttocks. When he got them to his knees he jumped around to face the audience again. He sat on the floor, jack-knifed his legs out in front of him and pulled the pantaloons off over his ankles.
‘Now it gets interesting,’ he promised as he sprang to his feet.
‘I really don’t want to see any more,’ Clare murmured.
‘Don’t you, love?’ asked the woman standing next to her at the bar. ‘I do. I want to see the whole bloody thing.’
Very slowly, constantly grinding his hips in time to the music, the black man hooked his thumbs into the waistband of the satin briefs and pulled them down an inch or two, then coyly pulled them up again to cries of ‘More!’ from the crowd. After repeating this teasing three or four times he finally stripped the satin to where it was just covering his genitals. He turned around again and quickly pulled the briefs to the floor, his tight buttocks dimpled at the side.
The women screamed out obscene remarks as to what they wanted him to do next. He smiled at them over his shoulder and tutted into the microphone. Then he spun round a complete 360 degrees, so fast none of the women glimpsed a thing. He did this twice more, before turning slowly so he faced the audience. His genitals were covered in a black leather pouch, held in place by a draw-string. It looked as though he was partially erect under the leather.
‘Now I need a volunteer,’ he said. Immediately he leapt off the rostrum into the crowd. A follow-spot had been switched on and tracked him as he sat squarely on the lap of a large, very overweight woman in a bright orange dress, his hand groping one of her massive breasts. The woman blushed a deep red but put her arms around the man and hugged him tightly. He had a struggle to escape from her clutches.
When he finally managed it, he ran amongst the tables up to the bar, where a young brunette in a very short black mini-dress was standing with a drink in her hand. He took the drink from her, tasted it and grimaced. ‘Her horse has got diabetes,’ he joked. 'Do you want to help me out?’ he asked her, taking her hand.
‘No way,’ she responded, snatching her hand away.
He bound over to a pretty blonde in a black halter top, white hot pants and black tights. She backed away but her friends pushed her towards him.
‘We have a volunteer,’ he announced, taking the girl by the arm and leading her to the rostrum, her resistance only nominal.
As they climbed on to the stage there was wild applause and cries of ‘Get it off’. The music had changed to a slow version of ‘Man with the Golden Gun’.
‘On your knees,’ the stripper ordered the girl, grinding his hips to the music again.
The blonde giggled, looked to her friends for encouragement and then, egged on by them, got down on one knee.
‘Right, here we go, ladies!’ He pulled the girl’s hand up to the draw-string at the front of the pouch. She did not hesitate. She pulled the bow that held it in place and tore the black leather pouch away, holding it aloft like a hunter’s trophy to an enormous cheer from the audience.
‘Can we go now?’ Clare wondered. Angela ignored her, straining to see the black man’s cock.
The stripper dropped to his knees. He pushed the blonde back on the rostrum and climbed on top of her. He bucked his hips up and down as if he were having sex with her, while she, in turn, folded her Black, mnylon-sheathed legs over his back. The women in the audience began to chant in time to the man’s thrusts. ‘In!’ they screamed, followed by, ‘Out!’
For the first time, and very much to her surprise, the spectacle affected Clare. She felt a throb of excitement. She could not tear her eyes away from the big, powerful muscles of the man’s buttocks and thighs, which rippled as he powered forward. Her excitement flowed from unbidden thoughts about what it would feel like to have that broad, hard body on top of her, thrusting an equally broad and hard cock into the depths of her meltingly soft sex. The surge of feeling made her realise what she’d been missing all these months.
The black man peeled the girl’s legs from around his back and sprung to his feet, his cock slapping against his thigh.
'Who's next?’ he bellowed, leaping into the audience again. He picked up a tumbler containing a gin and tonic, dipped his cock into it and stirred it around. ‘Cocktails, anyone?’ he teased.
‘Let's go,’ Clare said. This time she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She took Angela by the arm and began pushing her way through the crowd.
Unfortunately the stripper spotted the movement. He leapt through the tables and planted himself squarely in front of her, his muscular frame glistening under the light from the follow-spot. ‘Not leaving already?’ he said.
‘Can I mix you a drink?’ He indicated his cock.
‘No, thank you,’ Clare replied. Even through the baying cries of the women he must have been able to tell from the tone of her voice that she was serious. Or perhaps it was the expression on her face. In any event his experience told him she was not the right woman to use in his act. But he was getting an entirely different reaction from Angela, who was at Clare’s shoulder.
Dancing up to her, he grabbed Angela’s hand. She squealed with delight and surprise as he pulled her towards him and began wriggling his body against her like a snake.
It was only a matter of seconds before he’d transferred his attention to another woman, sitting at the nearest table. He pulled her chair out to face him and straddled her knees, without sitting on them, so his cock was right in front of her face.
Clare didn’t wait to see any more. She wrestled her way to the exit and down the stairs, Angela following in her wake. Pushing through the double doors she stood on the busy street outside.
‘Well, that was fun,’ Angela said as she joined her. ‘What a mover!'
‘You didn’t really enjoy it?’
‘Come on, let’s go and eat. I’m starving.’ The walked back to the car. ‘All right, I admit it wasn't sexy. But it was interesting. And that guy had a beautiful body. Have you ever had a guy like that?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you wonder what it would be like?’
Clare had wondered what it would be like with Gary. ‘No.’
‘I think it would be great.’
‘Is that a fantasy of yours? Some hunk?’
‘Yes, a nice bit of rough trade,’ Angela said, unlocking the car. ‘Isn’t that what we'd all like, really?’
Clare didn’t answer that question.
***
‘You're sure you don’t mind?’
‘Why should I mind? If it gets the job done more quickly it’s good, isn’t it? The sooner I get out of this mess the better.’
‘I don’t want to mess up your evening.'
‘What evening? I’m only going to watch telly.’
‘All right then. I'll only be another hour.’
Gary, as usual, had been the only man left working when she got back from work. He’d asked Clare if she’d mind him working late, to finish the last section of plaster on the new interior walls.
‘Do you want a beer?’ she enquired.
‘Can I have it when I’m done?’
‘Of course.’
Clare wandered up to the front bedroom. As that and the bathroom were the only places not affected by dust and rubble she’d put her telly at the foot of the bed. She switched it on and lay on the bed watching it without being conscious of what was actually on. She had had another hard day preparing for Bridget’s visit, due in three days’ time. Most of the presentation was ready but Clare had found mistakes in some of the statistics and had ordered last-minute changes to the marketing strategy. Although each country was going to be given the same packaging and artwork, Clare wanted it made clear by the advertising agency that the individual ads should be tailor-made for each national campaign. Results of product-launches in which an American commercial had merely been re-voiced and run without any other change had been extremely disappointing, though she knew that that was the approach Bridget Goldsmith favoured. She wanted the presentation to contain the evidence that supported her own point of view.
The sun had been out all day and as the house faced south — another reason Clare slept in the back — the front bedroom was hot. The sultry heat made her drowsy but the loud thuds and bangs as Gary worked away prevented her from dozing off.
Instead she daydreamed. Gary was stripped to his shorts again. Inevitably she compared his physique to that of the black stripper. Perhaps the black man’s muscles were slightly better defined, the result, no doubt, of pumping iron in a gym. Gary’s muscles were formed by hard physical labour.
Like most women, she thought, Clare had always believed a man’s mind was more important than his body, but she could not deny that she had been acutely aroused by watching the black man performing simulated intercourse. Equally Gary’s body was affecting her. Over the last weeks she had been intensely aware of it.
She wondered what Gary would. do if she wandered downstairs in something light and flimsy. The collection of lingerie donated by David Allston was quite extensive. She could put on the pink silk body. Or there was a short, black, lace slip with spaghetti straps, the lace making it almost totally transparent. What would he do if she wafted into the rubble of the back room wearing that?
Clare was not naive about sex. She had pursued everything in her life with tenacity, determination and thirst for knowledge. This attitude had served her well in business. She had risen rapidly through the ranks of KissCo and was the youngest managing director of any equivalent company in the UK. It had served her well in her sex life too. She had pursued her sexual aims with quite as much ambition as her career. She had selected lovers on the basis of merit, quickly discarding men who proved _ unsatisfactory lovers. Some might have thought her ruthless but Clare liked sex and saw no point wasting time in a relationship where, at the end of the day, it was going to leave her unfulfilled.
Her thirst for knowledge had made her a formidable competitor in business. She knew more about almost everything in the. cosmetics industry than any of her rivals. She knew more about how business worked too, about financing, sales promotion and advertising, and the psychology of management. There wasn’t a single aspect of KissCo’s operation she did not understand better than the departmental head who ran it.
She had applied the same zeal to her private life. She had become interested in art deco and had researched it to such an extent that she was regarded by some auction houses as an expert on the period. Her enjoyment of sex had motivated her to approach that subject with similar application. She had bought books, watched porno movies, and talked to all her friends about their experiences. She had been astonished, but not shocked, by the diversity of sexual behaviour. Over the years she had read about every sort of sexual perversion. They fascinated her. Not because she had the slightest desire to be tied toa mediaeval rack and whipped, or dress from head to toe in black rubber, or any of the hundred-andone other activities the books graphically described, but because it never ceased to amaze her that such things could be sexually arousing at all.
But quest for knowledge had revealed more ractical information. She had, for instance, ome an expert on masturbation. In school the basic sex lessons had barely touched on more egocentric goals, but her extra-curricular reading, at that time confined to various how-to-do-what books, had explained in great detail the advantages and techniques involved. She had quickly learned to explore her own body with the same thoroughness she employed on everything else. Later, having successfully invented a series of procedures to stimulate herself to .very vivid orgasms, a friend had told her about dildos. Their introduction into her masturbation routine had been nothing short of explosive, the combination of a hard cylindrical object buried in her vagina and the artful cajoling of her clitoris producing enviable results.
Her knowledge of the byways of sexual experience had been good preparation for David Allston. She found him attentive and charming and, what was more important, the way he manipulated her body, the way he used his fingers and mouth on her, had given her intense pleasure, even if when it came to full sexual intercourse things had been less than satisfactory. Had he not been so good at foreplay, he would have become a victim of her ruthless selection policy, the survival of the fittest. But he was good: oreplay had become the main event.
When after their first few weeks together he’d brought her a gift-wrapped, black lace teddy and a pair of black hold-up stockings, with lace tops, and a little card suggesting that she might like to go and change into them while he waited downstairs, she’d found the idea exciting. There was something about getting dressed up for sex that appealed to her. Her response had clearly encouraged David. The gifts had become more elaborate, the cards extended into letters, his brief attempts at intercourse abandoned in favour of more exotic gratification.
Since the rituals had always resulted in a wonderfully satisfying orgasm for Clare, she had raised no objections. There was no one else in her life at that moment. But recently the rituals had become ritualised. She began to yearn for spontaneity. As her reaction to the black stripper had clearly demonstrated, she yearned for penetration too.
Clare felt a strong and powerful pulse emanating from her sex. It caused her nipples to pucker. She felt cold, little chips of marble nestling in her bra. Getting up off the bed, she switched off the television. She usually had a bath or shower when she got home but had decided to wait until Gary had finished. She supposed she felt faintly embarrassed about being naked while he was in the house, however silly that seemed. Clare thought of herself as liberated and independently minded. She wasn’t too concerned with social niceties or the quibbles and taboos of conventional morality. That did not mean, unfortunately, she thought, that she had escaped the conventions of the sexual role that she had been nurtured in from an earlier age. In the mood she was in she would have loved: to be able to go downstairs, not fancifully dressed in flimsy lingerie like something from a scene in a porno film, but dressed as she was now, and ask Gary if he would like to go to bed with her. As simple as
‘MORNING, MRS MARKHAM.’ George Wickes smiled courteously. ‘Morning, Mr Wickes.’ Clare was on her way out of the front door. ‘Everything all right? Just come to check up, as usual.’ ‘Everything’s fine. Really taking shape now.’ The carpenters had fitted the floor of the new kitchen and bathroom and were busy installing the new kitchen units. ‘Should be finished tomorrow. Then you can start to get back to normal.'Gary Newby had not turned up at the house since their night together on Tuesday. She remembered him saying he wasn’t coming in the next day, but it was Friday and there was still no sign of him. She didn’t have his number or address. ‘That'll be wonderful. Ah, while you’re here - I just wondered . . .’ She didn’t know how to put it. ‘Yes?’ He looked worried, as though there was going to be a problem with the work. ‘Gary. I just wondered if Gary would be coming in again.’ ‘Should be. He’s on another job at the moment. He'll be here to finish up tomorrow, though.’ ‘Oh.’
She could see it, feel it, even taste what it had been like. She could remember exactly how he had felt as he plunged into her vagina, precisely how he had held her effortlessly in his arms. It was like she had been given a wonderful present, which she could take out and examine-with huge delight whenever she felt the urge. The urge had become urgent. Twice since Tuesday night Clare had masturbated and on both occasions had come ferociously as she relived the experience with the builder. She had deliberately recreated the conditions, masturbating in the bathroom, bent over the side of the bath. She masturbated on the bed. Both the places he had taken her. Usually she could extend her masturbation rites for a long time, luxuriating in the feelings she created, but the thoughts of Gary had provoked her too powerfully, and her orgasms had been achieved in no time at all. She sipped her coffee, wondering what David had dreamed up for tonight. If Bridget had not intervened she might well
‘GARY?’ ‘Who is this?’ ‘Clare.’ ‘Clare?’ ‘Clare Markham. You're standing in my house, remember?’ In the middle of a very disturbed night’s sleep Clare had suddenly realised how she could contact Gary. He would be working in her house on Saturday morning and might answer the phone. She’d dialled her own number at nine o'clock in the moming. ‘Oh right, Ms Markham.’ He sounded distant and unfriendly. ‘Clare,’ she corrected. ‘I didn’t have your number,’ she explained. ‘My number.’ He sounded puzzled now. ‘Yes, so I could ring you.’ ‘Why would you want to ring me?'That was not the reaction she’d been expecting. ‘After Tuesday night I thought that might be obvious.’ ‘Oh.’ 'Gary, you do remember?’ she asked with alarm. 'Yeah sure,’ he said noncommittally. ‘Well?’ ‘Well what?’ ‘I'd like to see you again.’ His tone changed. ‘Really?’ he said brightly. ‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Did you think I wouldn't?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘After what happened between us?’ ‘Tjust thought...’ ‘What?’
She saw his red Toyota pick-up park a little way down the street. She had been waiting, guiltily, in the front bedroom watching for it, the love-sick schoolgirl unable to do anything else. . She managed to resist the temptation to run downstairs and fling open the front door before he’d walked up the garden path. Instead she waited at the top of the stairs and walked down sedately once he’d rung the bell. ‘Hi,’ she said. 'That was very nice of you.’ She sat down next to him and touched his arm. ‘I thought Mr Wickes had hired a professional cleaner.’ She nodded at the bottle. 'Would you rather have a glass?’ 'This is fine.’ Clare realised she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him outside the subject of the work on her house. They didn’t know each other well enough for silence to be comfortable, so she scratched around desperately for something to say. 'What's your next job?’ she asked, finally coming up with a topic. ‘Fulham. House conversion into two flats.’ ‘That’s i
‘DARLING, HOW ARE you?’ ‘Overworked and underpaid.’ Clare kissed Angela Barker on both cheeks then pulled herself back up on to the bar stool she had been occupying. Angela wriggled on to one beside her, the fact that this made the short skirt she was wearing reveal even more of her slender, shapely thighs attracting the attention of several men. ‘The usual?’ Clare asked. ‘Please.’ Clare caught the bartender’s eye and made a signal to indicate that she wanted another glass identical to the one already sitting on the bar in front of her. Angela had rung her at lunchtime and they’d agreed to meet in their regular haunt, a club tucked away in Bruton Place which was equidistant from Angela’s office and Clare’s. Angela had said it was urgent. 'So?' Clare asked. ‘What's the problem?’ ‘No problem. Just an opportunity.’ ‘So what's the opportunity?’ ‘You know that builder of yours? That hunk.’ Clare looked at Angela steadily, hoping her face gave nothing away. She hadn’t told her fri
‘Thanks, Miriam,’ Gary said, as they squeezed into the banquette. ‘Is himself about?’ ‘He’ll be in later,’ she replied. She looked at Gary with a smile, and Clare caught, for the briefest of moments, an expression of lust on her face. Then her more professional demeanour returned and she walk back across the bar, her long legs attracting admiring glances from most of the men she passed. Clare looked round. Beyond the bar was a large restaurant, bustling waiters. It was decorated in shades of blue, with dark blue walls, a pale blue carpet and a huge display of corn flowers placed on a table in the centre of the room dramatically lit by an overhead spotlight. The rest of the restaurant was dimly lit, with candles flickering on every table, their light reflecting off the sparkling polished glasses and silver cutlery that was set on crisp, starched, white linen tablecloths. 'You like it?’ he said. ‘Beautifully done. So tell me about your friend?’ A girl in the club uniform of gold le
Clare turned away from the window. Though it was in the furthermost recesses of the room and not lit directly, she could see a large, very low double bed. In the dim light she thought she could make out a figure lying on the ruffled white sheet. ‘Well, here’s to your taste in women, pal,’ Malcolm said, handing Gary and Clare their glasses. The champagne was delicious, cool and refreshing. Clare sat down next to Gary. ‘Honey, you awake?’ Malcolm shouted loudly without looking round. ‘It’s showtime.’ The figure on the bed stirred. It stretched and yawned. ‘She’s always sleeping,’ Malcolm said. ‘Hi, honey.’ The figure got up from the bed and walked into the light. She was young, probably no more than nineteen, and tall, with raven-black hair so long it hung down her back and brushed over her small but pert buttocks. Her face was long, with high cheek-bones, a large, sensual mouth and big, dark-brown eyes. She was naked apart from a pair of tiny black panties, no more than a triangl