Innocent Blood

‘There’s no turning back, Frank,’ Astrid told him.

He rolled down the thin elastic and pulled down her thong. She’d had a Brazilian-wax and was completely hairless, like a ripe pink fruit. Her lips were slightly parted and he could see that she was already glistening wet.

Again he tried to touch her but again she snatched his wrists and levered his arms away. ‘Now, then. I want absolute submission.’

‘I’m not used to this.’

‘Exactly.’

She took hold of his cock and angled it between her legs. All the time he was looking at her, trying to understand why she was doing this, but she gave nothing away. She waited for a very long moment, her lips enclosing his glans, but only just, her head back, staring at the ceiling. Then she slowly sat down, so that Frank sank into her, as deep as it was possible to go, and she let out an aahhhhhhhh of satisfaction.

When he woke up again it was already growing dark. The sky was the color of royal-blue ink, the cicadas were chirruping, and he could hear people splashing and laughing in the pool below. He sat up in bed and pulled at his cheeks to stretch his dehydrated skin.

‘Astrid?’

She appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing a white fluffy hotel bathrobe and holding a glass of wine. Her hair was sticking up at the back and she was smiling.

‘You’re awake, then?’

‘I don’t think I’ve slept so good in days.’

She sat down on the bed beside him and ran her hand through his hair. ‘You needed it. You’ve been needing something like this for a long time.’

‘I guess I ought to feel guilty.’

Her robe had fallen open so that he could see the curved underside of her breast. She gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. ‘So do you?’

He thought about it, and he suddenly began to understand that he could tell her the truth. It had been a long time since he had been able to do that with Margot. He had never lied to Margot about anything serious, like how much he loved her. But he had told her again and again how impressed he was by her paintings, and how much he liked her friends (particularly that wiry-haired busybody Helen Mitchell, and her catarrhal husband, Byron) and how delicious he found her pasta with salmon and Pacific pesto. And somehow all of those small, inconsequential untruths had crept up year by year like ivy over a fairytale window and stifled their life together.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sad, but I don’t feel guilty.’

‘Sad?’

‘Sad for Danny. Sad for Margot. But it’s like breaking a piece of precious china, isn’t it? No use trying to stick it back together again. Best to remember it the way it was, when it was perfect.’

‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’

He reached into her open bathrobe and caressed her bare shoulder. This time she didn’t try to twist herself away.

‘What do you think?’ he asked her.

Astrid did things for him that night that he had fantasized about but never had the nerve to try, not with Margot. She seemed to have no inhibitions at all, and an endlessly burning sexual hunger. Each time he turned over and tried to sleep, her hand crept over his hip and started to pull at his cock yet again, and her tongue paddled in his ear. ‘Not tired yet, are you?’ she breathed.

Sometime shortly after midnight she was kneeling astride his face, her back arched, gripping the bedposts while he licked her and her juice coursed down his chin. At two in the morning she wriggled her finger into his anus while she bit the skin of his scrotum until it bled. At four thirty he was taking her, doggy fashion, grunting, on the bedside rug. At a quarter after six, when the sky was already light, she climbed on top of him again and made love to him in dreamy slow motion.

She woke him again just after eight, lying heavily on top of him and nuzzling his neck.

‘Not again, Astrid,’ he begged her. ‘I’m bushed.’

‘Don’t worry, you poor old man, I have to go. I’ll see you again tonight.’

He tried to turn his head around. ‘How can I get in touch with you?’

She kissed him once, twice, three times, then she climbed off him. ‘You can’t. I’ll get in touch with you.’

‘Astrid . . .’ he said as she hooked up her bra.

‘You’ll have to trust me, Frank.’

‘Look, I’m not asking for commitment. I’m just asking where I can phone you, in case something comes up.’

‘Ohhh,’ she teased, sitting down next to him and squeezing the sheet in between his legs. ‘In case something comes up, huh?’

He kissed her. ‘You’re extraordinary, do you know that?’

‘I’m no different from any other girl, Frank. It’s just that you’ve forgotten what girls are really like . . . That’s if you ever knew.’

Frank watched her as she finished dressing and brushed her hair. ‘You make me feel . . . totally different.’

‘I know.’ She gave him the gentlest of kisses on the forehead, then left him. After she had gone, he lay back on the bed and stared at the swirling plaster patterns on the ceiling, thinking of The Process.

Of course the sands of Present Time are running out beneath our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum, ‘What are we here for?’ is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. ‘What are we here for?’ But the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. We are here to go!

Tuesday, September 28, 3:27 P.M.

‘How’s it going, people?’ Garry Sherman breezed into the so-called ‘hospitality suite’ at Panorama-TV with a makeup towel still tied around his neck. His hair was as black as crows’ feathers; his suit was sapphire blue and his face was orange.

His three guests were sitting around a small Formica-topped table eating sandwiches and barbecued chicken legs and drinking wine out of plastic cups.

‘You’re all way too polite,’ Garry grinned. ‘You haven’t started throwing food at each other yet.’

‘Actually, we’ve been getting along like a house on fire,’ drawled Jean Lassiter. She was a handsome fiftyish woman with silvery bouffant hair. She was wearing a salmon-pink suit and strappy silver shoes.

‘That’s not what I want to hear,’ said Garry in mock disgust. ‘I want aggression! I want tantrums! I want overweening egos!’

‘Oh, I think you’ll get plenty of contention,’ said Dr Fortensky. ‘Just because we’re all nice people doesn’t mean we don’t have very strong differences of opinion.’ Dr Fortensky had a bald, suntanned dome of a head and the kind of huge yellow-tinted designer glasses that had been popular in the mid-1980s.

‘That’s right,’ put in Sara Velman. ‘So far we haven’t even been able to agree what sexual domination actually is. Is it handcuffing your lover to the bedpost and whipping him with wet spaghetti, or is it making him iron his own shirts?’ Sara Velman had glossy brunette hair, fashionably chopped, and a highly groomed assertiveness that came from being the Vassar-educated only daughter of a very wealthy family.

‘Give me the handcuffs and wet spaghetti every time,’ said Garry.

A bespectacled young studio assistant opened the door and said, ‘Two minutes, Mr Sherman.’

Garry went to the mirror on the opposite side of the room, jutted out his chin, and closely inspected each of his profiles in turn. ‘OK, I’m going to introduce you to our studio audience one after the other. I’m going to say a few highly flattering words about your respective books, at which time your book covers will appear on the screen. I’m going to ask each of you in turn what you think about today’s subject: Women on Top. After that, I’m going to invite you to rip each other to shreds, and I don’t care how outspoken you are or how riled up you get, short of getting out of your seat and socking each other on the nose. This isn’t the Jerry Springer show – besides, my budget doesn’t run to bodyguards.