hasn’t moved at all but the heat is now more oppressive, a sign they are further south, in the Midi. She can feel the sun rising ever so stealthily up her thighs, so much more aggressively than in Paris, and this metaphor first makes her smile, then causes her to feel dreamy.
She shakes her head. “I’m becoming delirious,” she thinks.
But on the other hand she feels ever so free.
She returns to the compartment from the other end, and walks down the rows of seats, as the train begins speeding up again, swaying dizzily between the wooden seats.
The man with grey hair is not sleeping. He is watching her navigate her passage, struggling against the train’s increasing motion, as if he were looking through her and not even seeing her. The possibility that somehow between Paris and Valence, on this stolen afternoon, she has physically dematerialized amuses her when she thinks of it. Is the man not really looking at her? He is quite handsome, in a prematurely greying way. His eyes are the same colour as his hair, pale grey veined with black – a man of marble. As she passes him, she gazes at his hands, laid out flat on the table. Quite beautiful hands which in her imagination she is already placing within her intimate theatre, the hands of a pianist, or there again a surgeon’s hands ready to sew someone’s wound up, or even a pair of warm and dry hands alighting on her knees, sliding up her skirt, moving into her underwear and grabbing her bum cheeks, hands capable of measuring her arse so much more than the sun outside.
She shakes her head, both amused and annoyed by her own cliched fantasy.
The four men are still busy with their card game. As she passes them, she sees it is a tarot deck, the same high numbers and cards, but something catches her attention: the images on the cards aren’t the ones she knows, the end-of-century scenes so familiar to the tarot. She imperceptibly slows down, still moving ahead though and turns back to look again, not quite brave enough to stand still. She’s right: the characters on the cards are mostly undressed, unlike the images she’s familiar with. The man nearest to her, an ebony-coloured African man, still holds four cards in his hand – two small squares as well as an eleven and a twelve: on the first one, the characters are sitting around a picnic scene imitating Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, the woman sitting is naked, but the man lying down also is, as another who is leaning towards her as if to bite her breasts is getting undressed. She has difficulty seeing the other card, obscured as it is by the man’s thick black thumb, but again the woman in the boat is nude. On the twelve, she can only see the upper half of the card: a ball somewhere in the background, but on the right hand side the image of a man seemingly offering his cock deferentially to two sitting women whose clothes have been partly pulled open, one of the women is thrusting her peach-coloured glove-covered hand towards the imposing virile member. The man whose cock it is has grey hair, and it makes her think straight away of the silent passenger in the seat a few rows back.
The negro throws the twelve down, and another of the men adds the twenty. She just has the time to glimpse the image of four men sitting at a table playing cards, all in the buff, while a woman under the table is seemingly sucking off the player on the left. The illustrator has frozen the scene just as her mouth is about to devour his mushroom head and her cheeks are delicately deformed by the intrusion.
She shrugs her shoulders. Scenes from a brothel, she reckons, no doubt a Belle Epoque set of cards.
She walks back to her seat, and distractedly watches the landscape roll by, sky moving between white and blue. The Rhone river flows heavily by, moving between nuclear power stations. At any rate, the stations do not affect the area’s luminosity.
She feels movement to her left and turns. The man with grey hair is already there, looking over her shoulder. And like earlier, he has the same distant and detached look, as if his eyes are fixed on a point some ten centimetres behind her.
“May I?” he says, sitting next to her.
He definitely has a vague English accent.
He calmly pulls up the arm separating their two seats, deliberately abolishing all distance between them, or any form of misunderstanding.
“May I…” These are the only words he says, and her quiet agreement, as she does not object, is all he needs as approval, as if those two words and the unspoken answer will justify all that will follow.
The man’s right hand skims by her neck while his left hand takes hold of her knee. His skin is just as she expected: warm and dry.
He allows her just a few seconds more just so she might imagine what is about to happen. His fingers tread ever so lightly across her skin, just as if he were caressing water without creating a stir across its surface.
His fragrance is both pleasant and discreet. She doesn’t know why, but his smell reminds her of Louis XV furniture, burnished wood tables and pieces.
For a short while he doesn’t move, his face just inches from hers, his hand almost motionless on her knee, his fingers delicately skimming her neck.
The dark clouds inside his grey eyes make him look like a phantom.
And he finally slowly bends over towards her and kisses her.
She holds on to him, slides her own hands under the fashionable grey jacket he is wearing, takes hold of his shirt, disturbs his tie…
The hand on her knee begins a slow and deliberate journey upwards along her thigh and cups her cunt, forcing itself against the already wet silk. The man pulls the thin knickers to one side of her gash, his fingers lingering against the soft and delicate lips with assurance. “With a sense of contained violence,” she thinks aloud. And the mental image of her cunt in his grasp makes her smile and hold herself even more open. She allows her hand to slip under the man’s belt, and through the thin material of his trousers grabs hold of his hardening virility, an initial contact that surprises her in its brazenness. She pulls on the zip of his flies and extricates the jutting cock now pulsing against her fingers, just as she leans her own body slightly backwards so that the man’s hands might have easier access to her stomach and, she hopes, her arse.
They caress each other for several minutes. He inserts two fingers deep into the swamp of her cunt, two very long fingers with short, invisible nails deep into the pit of her stomach, exploring her with even more avidity than his cock could, seeking what she desires with almost feminine science.
He has no need to change the pressure of his fingers against her neck. She leans over of her own accord towards the cock now surging through the folds of grey material and takes it into her mouth. It feels fresh, almost cold. First the thick, split apricot which she surrounds with her tongue, bathes in her spit, then the rest of his mast as far as she can take it. Three quarters of it almost, her mouth spread-eagled by this meat of desire, to the point of gagging against this dangerous weapon heading straight for her innards. She retreats to catch her breath and impales her mouth anew against the blood-engorged tip of his cock, torn between the need to suck him forever and forever, to fill herself with his wooden citrus flavour, and the sheer craving to feel him flow wildly inside her mouth, waves breaking against the back of her throat, and the freedom to drink all of him.
The man then pulls his fingers out of her heaving cunt and, taking advantage of her leaning back position, moves them, still coated with her vaginal secretions, towards her arse and digs them both into her sphincter. She buckles, rears against the fingers now stretching her wide and, doing so, opens herself even more to his rough caress, and when the man’s thumb at the front now starts applying pressure to her clitoris, she comes violently, feels her arsehole spasm against the fingers now burrowing deep inside her, and only the cock now embedded in her mouth prevents her from screaming.
He allows her to enjoy the moment. His fingers are still digging deep into the very fundament of her arse. His thumb is held hard, unmoving, against her inflamed clitoris. He gently pulls her by her hair and allows her face to rest against his chest, while she gasps for air.
Once the contractions slow down, he slides his fingers out of her and pulls her up against him as he moves onto the seat in front of her, between her splayed legs, and forcefully pulls her down onto him. Initially she fears she won’t be able to accommodate him, that she’s not open enough – he’s so much more larger than anything she’s had inside her before. His cock is still growing as he breaches her, his head brushing her labia aside as his shaft sinks deeply into her. Inside the hot furnace of her cunt, the man’s cock feels as cold as ice. She bites her lips to avoid screaming when she feels the cock assault her back wall and she takes hold of the top of the seat facing her and, seizing it desperately, allows herself to sway wildly, allowing his cock to plough every inch of her insides as she holds back her pain. The man, his hands gripping the sides of her rear, helps her rise and then again and again brings her down onto him, every single time deeper and deeper, as if she were a cave with no ending.
A few metres away from her, she can only glimpse the heads of the other four men every time she rises
