‘Nice dress,’ he said. ‘It would be even nicer around your ankles.’
Nicola’s cheeks flushed the colour of her frock. ‘I don’t think…’
‘But, my dear, you do. I can see it in your eyes.’
Nicola’s mouth opened. No sound came out. She felt like every note of the double bass was being plucked on a tightly stretched sinew deep inside herself.
And Johnny still hadn’t made a move. He watched her coolly, sipping at his martini.
Nicola couldn’t bear the suspense another moment. She put her drink down on the coffee table, threw herself at him and clamped her lips onto his.
She didn’t anticipate Johnny’s reaction. He extricated himself from her grasp, gripped her shoulders, and held her at arm’s length. ‘Whoa, whoa, my pretty little filly.’
Nicola stared at him, humiliation written all over her features. Johnny grinned, a gleam of triumph in his eyes. He folded his arms across his chest.
‘Now,’ he said, after a long pause, holding out a hand to her, ‘shall we proceed?’
Nicola’s heart beat fast. She understood then that Johnny made the rules. It was strangely exciting. Besides, in relinquishing control, she felt that in some small way it absolved her
of responsibility for her actions.
At the top of the steps was a small hallway. At one end was a bedroom with an ensuite. At the other was a locked door. When Nicola started towards the bedroom, he pulled her back. ‘I have someplace far more exciting to show you,’ he said, reaching up over the doorframe, plucking a key from its hiding place and opening the door.
It was dark inside and the contrast with the brightness of the rest of the place prevented her at first from seeing anything at all except what seemed to be a small blinking red light. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realised it was coming from the direction of an ornate Chinese screen decorated with a red-beaked crane flying towards the sun.
‘Now, let’s get comfortable,’ Johnny suggested as he began to undo the intricate cloth buttons of her frock. She attempted to help him but he held her wrists firmly and shook his head with a
tsk tsk tsk
as though she were a naughty child whom he was disciplining. He pulled the frock over her head. He held it up to his face
and smelled it before folding it and placing it in a pile. When he was finished, she was wearing only her stockings and her scarf. He was still fully dressed.
Johnny took both her hands in his and, kissing her, pushed her against the wall. He pressed against her with his body. The buttons of his shirt bit into her chest and his belt nipped her stomach. She could smell his perspiration through his cologne and alcohol-sweet breath. His cock, stiff under the soft fabric of his trousers, pushed against her thighs and cunt. He raised her arms up and out to either side. With her feet apart for balance, her body formed an elongated ‘X’.
Nicola heard the click of the manacles before she felt them close, warm and furry, over her wrists. ‘What are you doing?’ she gasped, panicked.
‘Stay calm, my petal. No one’s going to get hurt. And you’ll be able to write all about it in the morning.’ He ran his hands lightly down the inside of her arms. She squirmed under his touch, excited beyond any expectations. Not that
she’d expected to do anything at all, she reminded herself.
He knelt before her, lifted her left foot and pressed his lips to the arch. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he told her. When he returned, he had the shoes in his hands, the ones she’d brought to give back to him. He slipped her feet into them.
‘Johnny.’
‘Shh.’
He urged her legs apart and fitted over her ankles fur-lined manacles like the ones around her hands. He opened a lacquered box and pulled out a ball gag, which Nicola accepted, her heart beating fast.
It was only after he left the room again, this time locking the door behind him, that she began to wonder if this was such a smart idea after all. She knew almost nothing about Johnny. Just because he was well known, didn’t mean he wasn’t a complete psycho. Nicola’s teeth would have chattered if the gag hadn’t stopped them.
When he reappeared, he was wearing only the leather trousers he’d worn the night she first met him. Taking the gag out for a moment, he
kissed her, and she shook even more furiously. Johnny wasn’t going to harm her. She was pretty sure about that now. But what
was
he going to do?
His body was less muscular than Fox’s. Age and sun had toughened his skin, but he was undeniably attractive. She watched him light the candles in a large, free-standing candelabra. Then, he slowly pulled the scarf off her neck and re-tied it around her eyes like a blindfold. ‘I will watch your hands,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘If you put up one finger, I will stop what I’m doing. If you put up two fingers, I will do more. One says stop, two says go.’ She nodded, growing more aroused by the minute, despite—or maybe on account of—her residual fear. Her tongue was still fighting the gag and her leg and arm muscles were already wearying of their unnatural position. She felt his hands on her ears. He was inserting earplugs. With her eyes shut under the scarf, her mouth around the gag, and the rasp of her own uneven breath all she could hear, her skin grew unbearably sensitive and her blocked senses strained with anticipation.
After what seemed like an unbearable period of waiting, he stroked her hair. She almost came on the spot. He drew his hands down slowly over her body, lingering over her breasts and stomach. She felt his fingertips less than the heat and movement of them. Sometimes she sensed that he wasn’t using his fingers but his breath to caress her. And then he drew something soft and suede over her skin for a long while before flicking her gently with it. Every so often, he pulled aside the gag and kissed her mouth voluptuously. Then—nothing, for what seemed like an eternity. Then—a bite, or a scratch, a flick, on her tummy or breast or thighs. Panting, writhing, her whole body aflame, she felt her juices run down her legs. When he opened her slippery labia with his fingers, she strained to capture them, and when finally he touched her clit—with a vibrator—she went off like popcorn.
Just as she felt she really could not take it any longer, he turned off the vibrator and applied his mouth to her. She put up one finger, but it took a while for him to notice.
‘Johnny,’ she moaned as he methodically removed the gag, the blindfold and the earplugs and undid the manacles around her wrists and ankles. A smug expression on his face, he carried her floppy body to a black chaise on the other side of the room. The cool leather stuck to her wet skin. Taking a bottle of scented oil from the shelf above, he massaged her wrists and ankles, her arms and her legs, his hands passing deliberately over her ripe cunt.
‘Aren’t you going to fuck me?’ she gasped.
‘Goodness gracious me, Nicola. I thought you didn’t want to “make love” to anyone else but Fox.’ Johnny pronounced the phrase ‘make love’ as if he were describing some quaint but obscure medical procedure. ‘And here I’ve been, admiring your Clintonian logic all evening. Speaking of which,’ he said, unbuttoning his fly and placing his hand on the back of her neck, ‘why don’t you just make your lips comfortable around this?’
Johnny was marathon man, and Nicola thought it was a pity for his sake that sex hadn’t been an Olympic event. ‘Go for gold,’ she
murmured at one point, lifting her head, circling her fist weakly in the air.
‘Just keep sucking,’ he replied.
By the time Nicola left Johnny’s flat it was already late in the evening. Every one of her nerve endings tingled, her head was spinning and her jaw felt like she’d just spent three hours in the dentist’s chair. Johnny walked her down to find a cab. As they waited for a taxi, he pulled her towards him and brushed her forehead with his lips.
‘That was incredible, Johnny,’ she said.
‘I could see you were enjoying yourself,’ he smirked.
She sighed, mindful that ‘He Has Feelings Too!’ ‘But I’m afraid I can’t see you ever again. It’s best if you don’t call me.’ She treated him to a little smile that tried to be brave enough for both of them.
Johnny, who at that exact moment was thinking that it wasn’t too late to call Liz, prickled at her words. Johnny was every bit as
Ralph/FHM/Details/Loaded
as Nicola was
Cleo/Dolly/Cosmo/Elle.
He was no keener on commitment than on acquiring one of the fascinating testicular diseases regularly featured, with photos, in his favourite publications. On the other hand, he intensely disliked being told by a woman not to call. He was the one in control. That’s just how it had to be. ‘I’ll call if I feel like it,’ he challenged.
‘I’ve got a boyfriend. You know that. I don’t want to hurt him.’ She sniffled. ‘Or myself. You can’t just do what you like.’
‘Johnny does,’ he stated coolly, ‘what Johnny wants to do. Taxi!’
As her cab sped off in the direction of the Cross, Johnny returned to his flat in an unexpectedly bad mood. He performed his tasks like an automaton, washing the martini shaker and glasses and drying them with a soft cloth, holding them up to the light to check for smudges but not caring if he found any. Flicking on the light in the ‘dungeon’, he sloped across the room to the Chinese screen, ducked behind it and turned off the video camera that was mounted on a tripod
behind the elegantly described eye of the crane. Then he blew out the candles and proceeded to straighten up. Nicola’s last words still rankled more than they should have, and this puzzled and annoyed him.
As he was wiping down the black lounge, he noticed Nicola’s scarf on the floor. He picked it up and folded it, then put it to his nose. It smelled of her perfume, a subtle citrusy scent almost like grapefruit. It smelled of mornings and sunshine and youth.
Like a long-forgotten but once-favourite photograph, a picture unfolded in Johnny’s mind of the sharehouse he lived in when he did architecture at Sydney Uni twenty years earlier. It was a rundown terrace in Newtown, but he had thought it a palace at the time, occupying the front room with its wide verandah. He and Daria would sit out there in the morning before class, soaking up the sunshine, drinking gallons of tea, eating mandarins and enthusiastically discussing everything from the merits of Tom Wolfe’s
From Bauhaus to Our House
to the new multicultural broadcasts on television.
Daria. Johnny felt like someone had punched him in the gut. Of course. Nicola reminded him of Daria. Why hadn’t he realised this before? They had in common that very appealing earnestness, not to mention honey-coloured skin and big guileless eyes.
Daria and he were only twenty and classmates when they started going out. Johnny had been one of those awkward teenagers who was bad at sports and who liked mathematics; the looks that would make him a handsome older man never sat right on a younger man’s face. Daria was the first girl he’d ever had sex with. Desperately in love with her, he was jealous of the fact that she’d had several lovers before him. When she got pregnant and insisted on an abortion, he was devastated. But she was eager to finish her course and, she insisted, too young to be a mother. He begged her to marry him, but her response was that maybe they shouldn’t see each other at all, for a while, anyway. Hurt and furious, he began sleeping with as many different women as he could. He’d show her. He showed her all right. She concluded she was
better off without him, met someone else, and began her life as an architect, wife and mother within six months of graduation.
Johnny tied the scarf around his neck. He sat on the lounge for a long while, lost in thought.
Nicola spent the short trip home stewing with fury, mortification and guilt. She asked the cabbie to drop her half a block from home. She wanted to compose herself before facing Fox. Checking her face in the mirror of her compact, she powdered her nose and re-applied her lippy. She took a few deep breaths and forced herself to smile.
‘Hello, honey.’ Fox greeted her at the door with a kiss and an appreciative once-over of her outfit from head to toe. He cocked his head at the sight of her feet. ‘I’ve never seen those shoes before. Very sexy.’
‘Yeah, I just got them.’ She spoke slowly, as though checking each word as it came out of her mouth to make sure she wasn’t really saying, ‘Johnny B. Wright gave them to me.
And then he fucked me in them.’ She pivoted coquettishly to show them off. For all her anger with Johnny over his apparent coldness and insensitivity at the evening’s end, and her inescapable guilt, her whole body felt alive with pleasure.
‘And how was the launch?’
‘Great.’ She struggled to remember what she had told him. Eye shadow or lipstick? She hedged her bets. ‘Fab new-season colours.’
‘Speaking of colour, you’re looking a bit flushed. You all right?’ He laid the back of his hand against her forehead with concern.
Nicola squirmed away, sure that she had ‘The Wildest Sex of Her Life! and It Wasn’t with Her Partner!’ stamped all over her. ‘I’m, uh, I’m just feeling a little fluish or something. I don’t think it’s too serious. I probably just need some sleep,’ she said.
‘That’s such a sexy frock,’ Fox commented as she undressed for the shower. ‘Don’t you usually wear your silver scarf with it?’
Shit.
She’d left it at Johnny’s place. ‘Uh, I think I must have left it at work.’
Since when did you start working in the lion’s cage at Taronga, Fox wondered, silently observing the red scratch lines and bite marks on her belly, breasts and legs.
A
week later, Nicola steeled herself, and dialled Johnny’s direct line at Wright Angles. It had taken a day or two for her to come to her senses. What her senses told her was that she’d got it right the first time around—with the rocksteady Fox. Meanwhile, Johnny had sent several more lush bouquets. She decided she had to put a stop to it. And she wanted her scarf back.
The phone rang only twice before he answered. ‘Yeah.’ Even his phone manner was arrogant.
‘Johnny.’
There was a pause on the other end.
‘It’s me.’
‘What are you wearing?’
‘Uh, Johnny.’
‘Under your clothes.’ His voice was bizarrely compelling.
She stood up and glanced over the partition. It was lunchtime. Only the receptionist and the art director were around. The receptionist was filing her nails, and the art director was hunched over a light-box examining transparencies. Lowering her voice, she told him, ‘Lacy black bra and French knickers.’
‘Take them off for me tonight?’
What am I doing?
‘No, Johnny, look, I shouldn’t have answered that question. I have to talk to you.’
‘Talk is boring. Didn’t you say that yourself last night?’
Nicola was taken aback. ‘Last night? I didn’t see you last night.’
There was a brief silence on the other end. ‘Who is this?’
‘Nicola.’
‘I knew that.’ Johnny seemed to be doing some quick thinking. ‘Just yanking your chain, Nic.’
Anabelle says,
If He Yanks Your Chain, You Tell Him to Flush Himself!
‘I’m serious, Johnny.’
‘Settle, petal.’
‘Don’t patronise me.’
Self-esteem—the Personality Trait for January!
‘Ooh, feisty!’ The truth was, Johnny was aghast at the thought that Nicola had caught him out. Over the last few days he’d been contemplating the possibility that she could turn out to be someone special in his life—boyfriend or no boyfriend. Yet thinking about Nicola that way made Johnny feel vulnerable, like he’d just built a house, the doors and windows of which couldn’t be shut. So he fortified himself in the only way he knew: with booze, coke and other women. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t sincere.
Nicola silently counted to three. ‘Look, Johnny. I don’t think this is getting anywhere. But I left my scarf at your place. Could you mail it back to me at work?’
‘That’s a tad impersonal.’
‘I think I’ve got altogether too personal with you, Johnny.’
‘Nicola.’ Johnny’s voice lowered to almost a whisper. ‘Do you think I’m a monster?’
Nicola was thrown by the question. ‘Uh, no, no, of course not.’
‘It would be OK if you said yes. Sometimes I think I’m a monster.’
Nicola went silent.
‘Why don’t we meet for a drink at seven tomorrow and I’ll give it to you. Aqua Luna?’
Nicola thought for a moment. There was no way she should be meeting Johnny Wright again. ‘Tomorrow’s not good for me,’ she said. ‘How about Thursday?’
Fox was rostered for overnight duty on Thursday.
Following three Stoli martinis with a twist of Johnny B. Wright charm, Nicola gazed into the hypnotic blue glow of the bar and felt like someone caught in a rip in a warm, tropical sea.
It was useless to struggle. To struggle would be to drown. If she drifted out far enough, she concluded with a drunken logic, she’d have a better chance of eventually making her way back to shore.
Once could be written off as an accident. Twice was pushing dangerously close to an affair. Nicola hated the thought of lying to Fox. On Friday afternoon at work, while doing some research on the internet, she briefly wondered if it wasn’t time to log on to
www.breakupgirl.com
(‘One of Our Favourite Sites—Turf and Surf!’) but the thought of life without Fox made her feel deeply sad. Besides, she’d read enough Bridget Jones not to have many illusions about life as a singleton and she knew without checking that Johnny would score two out of ten on the Ideal Mate’s Rates test. As Anabelle would say, ‘He’s Wild in the Sack—But Will He Make the Bed?’
That evening, Nicola arrived home to find the table set with candles and roses and a small wrapped parcel next to her wineglass.
‘What’s all this?’ she asked, her jaw dropping.
Fox smiled. Except for Nicola’s column, which he read dutifully, despite the fact it had a tendency to leave him with lingering performance anxiety and a curiosity as to how Nicola knew all she did, Fox didn’t usually read
Lip.
In preparation for this evening, however, he’d studied the entire ‘On Your Knees!’ feature on romantic proposals from a few issues back, ticked off every item on the checklist and then added a few of his own.
He reckoned it was time to stake out his territory, batten down the hatches, piss in a circle around the tent. Fox had smelled smoke. He wasn’t sure if it signalled a three-alarm blaze or merely a cooking experiment gone wrong, but he was taking no chances. He’d started up the ladder truck, primed the extinguishers and now he was going to reel out the big seventy-five-mil hose.
‘Nicola,’ he said, dropping to his knees, ‘I love you. Will you marry me?’
Nicola burst into tears. Fox had anticipated this. He folded her into his big strong fireman arms, stroked her hair and waited for the
inevitable confession. When it came, he told Nicola that he was content to ‘let bygones be bygones’, but that if Johnny ever tried to come onto her again, he’d ‘throttle ‘im’.
As previously noted, Fox was good in a crisis. ‘No one gets between me and my baby,’ he declared in a quiet but firm voice.
‘Oh, Foxy,’ Nicola sighed, resting her head on his strong chest. She felt all her fear and stress fade like nicotine stains under a peroxide gel. Fox, staring over the top of her head, narrowed his eyes. They sat like that for a few minutes until Nicola realised she was dribbling on his pecs. When she looked up with a goofy smile on her face, Fox’s eyes, now soft and forgiving, were fixed on hers.
Following a vigorous session of lovemaking in which Fox demonstrated that he’d read ‘Sex Positions to Please Her!’ and was willing to experiment a little so long as it didn’t involve anything unhygienic or technology-based, they slept soundly in each other’s arms.
Nicola didn’t want to waste either time or resolve. First thing Monday, she phoned Johnny at his office and asked him to meet her at lunchtime at a cafe not far from either of their workplaces. Being in the centre of town, it was more of a coffee shop than a cafe, but Nicola was glad of the lack of a more intimate atmosphere.
‘We’re going to be married,’ she informed him, her voice resolute.
‘Why?’ Johnny asked. He poured one spoonful of sugar after another into his espresso.
Nicola rolled her eyes. ‘Because we love each other?’
‘George Bernard Shaw said that it is most unwise for people in love to marry. Besides, I note a querulous inflection in your voice. Maybe you’re not so sure as you think you are.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Our species wasn’t designed for monogamy. Men, as is well documented, have a natural hankering to spread their seed around. Interestingly, I believe I read under your very own byline that women have a similar, built-in urge towards promiscuity, something about selecting the best
sperm. It’s only after conception that your sort opts for fidelity, which, in biological terms, is purely for the sprog’s benefit.’
‘You’re infuriating.’ He was also right. Nicola had researched the article while trying to cope with her fantasies about Johnny, seeking some sort of justification for her wayward impulses.
He shrugged and then looked at her from under his eyelashes. ‘Hey, Nic,’ he purred. ‘What do you say we go back to my place and you exorcise all those harmful, pent-up feelings of hostility you seem to have for me by slipping into your stilettos and pissing on me in the bath?’
‘Yuk.’ Nicola started to laugh but caught herself. ‘Johnny. Read my lips. I. Am. In. A. Serious. Relationship.’
‘Nic, you know that old bra ad? “Lift and separate”? Well, that’s what you’ve gotta learn to do with sex and relationships. Lift’—he gestured as if raising imaginary breasts towards his chin—‘and separate.’ He pulled them out to the sides. ‘Hey, Nic.’ He winked.
‘What?’
‘I think you’re wearing entirely too many clothes.’
Nicola bit her bottom lip and sighed. ‘Give me your hands, Johnny.’
He held them out, wearing his best bad-boy grin.
‘Huh,’ she commented, turning them over and examining them.
‘What is it, my little palm reader?’
‘You
do
have opposable thumbs, after all.’
‘Of course I have opposable thumbs. What are you talking about?’
‘It’s just that you seem to have such difficulty grasping anything I’m saying.’
‘Perhaps I overestimated your adventurousness,’ Johnny replied petulantly, pulling his hands out of her grip and lighting a cigarette. ‘Maybe you should just stay with your fireman.’
‘Maybe I should. Maybe I never should have done otherwise. He’s a real man, Johnny, and the measure of a real man, I can tell you now, is not just defined by the dimensions of his penis.’ She’d written that line recently in an answer to one of her readers’ letters. She was quite proud of it. ‘But
Johnny. Two things. You’re taking back these shoes. And you’re giving me back my scarf.’
‘Yes, mistress.’ The mischievous gleam had returned to his eyes.
‘Johnny.’
‘Sorry. But you’re very sexy when you order me around. You should do it more often.’
Nicola shook her head, yet she couldn’t stop the corners of her lips from curling into a smile. ‘So where’s the scarf?’
‘Up in Bent Towers. I have to meet someone after work, but I’ll be free by nine. I’ll meet you at the bar and we can have a drink, then we’ll go and fetch it together and I’ll give you a tour while we’re at it. At least you can see what I do before you drop me out of your life forever.’
‘All right.’
It only occurred to Johnny then that he’d already arranged a rendezvous a little later with Liz. He’d have to call her and cancel.