The Blue Guide (20 page)

We soon find a little wooded area off a minor path and, making sure no one can see us, creep in, divest ourselves of our clothes again, and fall on top of each other, giggling and kissing and sucking and grabbing at each other. We roll around like playful kittens for a while, then things turn dirty and this time it's her reaching into her bag for the strap-on, slipping it on and ramming it into my arse until I don't know whether I'm crying because I want her to stop or because I want more. When she takes it out, she keeps it on, using it on my clit this time, until I'm actually sobbing, from the intensity, from the frustration of
being on the cusp of orgasm and then having her ease off, teasing me, again. And perhaps also from love, I think as finally I do climax, clasping Carlotta's head to my chest and holding her fast against me.

Afterwards, Carlotta whips out a little digital camera from her bag.

‘Look what I buy this morning,' she says, and she brings it up to her face and takes a snap. She turns the camera to show me my own image on the back screen. I'm all heavy-lidded and somnolent, the cat that got the cream.

‘Souvenirs,' she says, and she takes some more, getting bossier as she goes on.

‘Left, right, no left a bit more . . . arch your back so your titties sticking out . . . open your legs more so I see your pussy. Spread yourself for me. No,
spread
yourself, I say.'

It's a turn-on, I must admit, and I take some similar ones of her. We even take a few of us together, turning the lens on ourselves, sticking our tongues out, planting big kisses on each other's cheeks, hamming it up.

‘Aren't you worried about Paco finding out?' I say as I watch her tuck the camera back into her bag.

‘You no worry, I save them to CD and delete from camera,' she says. ‘That's safer than prints. Then I just look at them on computer when Paco's out.' She laughs. ‘Oh, I gonna masturbate so hard over you when I back in Spain,' she says. ‘And I'll do a copy for you, to remember me by.'

I want to ask her what will happen then, when she goes back to Spain. What will become of us. But I so desperately don't want to marr this glorious afternoon.
So I don't say anything. And I don't say anything about maybe having fallen in love with her. That's for another time.

Over coffee and cakes on Hampstead High Street, Carlotta asks me if I can take her to a lesbian bar, since Paco is performing again that night. I tell her I'm surprised she doesn't attend his shows, and she sneers, waves her hand dismissively.

‘All those ugly women getting turned on by him,' she says. ‘And the gays too.
Grazie, no
. No thanks. I prefer to have him all myself when he come back.'

‘So you want to go to a girls' bar?' I say.

‘Yeah,' she says a little dreamily. ‘To see the scene.'

‘Do you go to lesbian bars in Madrid?'

She sips at her coffee, looks at me a little combatively. It looks for all the world like she's about to rebuff me with a curt ‘None of your business'. But then she relaxes back into her chair, lights a cigarette and looks at me intently.

‘Sometime,' she says.

The door is open for me, and I know it's now or never.

‘I know you have done this before . . .' I begin.

She exhales a little puff of smoke. ‘Of course,' she says.

‘Often?'

‘I never count,' she says with a certain aloofness. ‘I just say, I take it where I find it.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It mean if I see a pretty woman and she like me and I like her, I not gonna say no. You think I crazy?'

‘Have you ever –' I can't say it. The word ‘love' gets stuck in my throat.

‘What?'

‘Never mind.' I cast around for a way to skirt the subject. ‘When – who was the first one?'

‘Oh, Alicia, Alicia – we going back years now.'

‘OK, then when was the last time, before me?'

She crosses her legs, runs her fingers through her hair. ‘It was New York,' she says. ‘At a gallery in the East Village. Paco was rehearsing – he
always
rehearsing – and I was alone. This girl come in – a Venezuelan, I find out later. I just have to have her.'

I stare at her, my mind racing. I happen to know that Paco and she came to London directly from New York. Given how little time they have been married, it must have been during that very trip. This must have happened only a week or two before she slept with me.

‘What did you do?' I say, almost beside myself, both appalled and fascinated, knowing that what she tells me will make me suffer but obeying an ache in my groin to know more.

She breathes in and out deeply, and her breasts heave and fall. She's clearly getting excited too, at the thought of her conquest.

‘I keep looking at her,' she says, ‘but she don't react, don't return my stares. I
know
she know, though. That she playing with me. When she go, I follow her, and after a few blocks she turn round and she say to me, “What do you want?”'

‘What did you say?'

‘I come right out with it. “I want you,” I say.'

‘Jesus.'

‘And you know what she do? She just smile and then she lead me right up to her apartment on that street and we stay in bed for the rest of the afternoon. I think I come – what? – ten, fifteen time. She do something with her tongue that –'

She stops, fishes in her suede Balenciaga bag for her
purse and flattens some notes on the table. ‘Let's go,' she says, and in the space of a heartbeat we are out of the door and flagging down a taxi.

‘Langham Place,' she says to the driver, ‘but we in no hurry. Take your time.'

As the car pulls away from the kerb, she yanks down one of the folding seats with their back to the driver and hitches up her skirt. On her knickers I can see a blot of moisture. She pulls them to one side to reveal her tidy little cunt, all shiny and glistening in the sunlight.

‘Go down on me,' she commands. ‘Let me feel your mouth on me, your tongue.'

I kneel at her feet, on the taxi floor, and bring my mouth to her foaming pussy, wondering if I can satisfy her in the way the Venezuelan did, or the way Paco does. Not that she complained last time, in The Zetter, but I'm feeling a little inadequate, a little lacklustre, after her description of the girl in the gallery.

She doesn't complain though, and as she starts writhing, gripping each side of the seat to secure herself as we go round corners, I stop worrying about the other girl and about how my prowess matches up to hers and just hope that the driver doesn't slam on the brakes and ask us what the hell we're doing.

He doesn't, but after we've dropped Carlotta off at her hotel and are crossing Marylebone to reach my flat, I bury my head in a magazine, determined not to catch his eye in the mirror or to give him any chance to ask me if his ears had been playing tricks on him.

I make a few calls to find out where I can take Carlotta that's trendy but discreet, then get changed, wondering what one wears to a lesbian bar. At twenty-eight, I'm really not very worldly-wise where many things are
concerned. I finally settle on some wedge heels and a black satin pencil skirt with a scooped-neck beige Joseph top. No doubt Carlotta will be wearing something rather more outré.

With five minutes to kill, I check my emails and find there's one from Daniel, apologising: the last thing he wanted, he said, was to offend me. I send one back, apologising for being oversensitive. I add that I am free on the date he asked about after all, then at the last minute before sending delete that sentence. I really don't want him to think I lied, even though I did.

And then I'm in another taxi speeding back to Carlotta's hotel, starting to feel like a bit of a human pingpong ball.

When I knock on the door to Carlotta's suite, it's the maid who answers.

‘Madame is showering,' she informs me. ‘She says to order yourself a drink.' She leaves, closing the door behind her.

I step into the drawing room, stand listening to the sound of the rushing water from the bathroom for a minute, wondering whether to go and hop in with Carlotta. I'm pretty sure she's expecting me to, and I'm certain she wouldn't say no to a quick one, but left on my own for a minute I suddenly find I have an overwhelming desire to take advantage, to have a bit of a snoop.

I tiptoe into the bedroom, ears keenly attuned to what's going on in the bathroom, the door to which is half closed. Carlotta's singing something in Spanish. I imagine her hands skimming her breasts almost unconsciously, running down her belly and soaping the neat little folds of her pussy, the delicate little eye of her sphincter. I cast the image from my mind, try to concentrate on what's in front of me: the silver chest of
drawers. Now where did she put the picture, the one she says she's thrown away? Was it the middle drawer? I open it. It's empty. So, I find, are all the others.

I turn around, scan the room. There are two circular bedside tables, and as soon as I see them I'm consumed by curiosity. Who couldn't resist a peek, even if it's only to find a tube of KY Jelly nestling next to the Gideon's Bible?

I walk over, open Paco's – or at least the one that is most likely to be his, given that it's on the side nearest the men's dressing area. When I do so I let out a little gasp of surprise that I'm quick to stifle. But it's not the little gold handcuffs that take me unawares, nor Carlotta's strap-on, which she used on me only a few hours ago – though that does force me to confront the fact that she may have it primarily to use on Paco more than on other women. No, what stuns me most is the sight of the very picture I believed destroyed, the sketch that Carlotta did of me in the Olympia pose.

I pick it up, stare at it. Almost as disconcerting as the fact of having found it at all is what it reveals of Carlotta: she is, I see immediately, a true artist, a talent. She's combined the audacity of Victorine's pose with a real eye for my body, for my face and its nuances. The picture just
is
me, my essence. I wasn't expecting that, wasn't expecting her to be so good. Carlotta is no dilettante.

The shower goes silent, and I drop the sketch into the drawer, where I now see the infamous black scarf too. I close it and hurry back into the drawing room, staring out at the Nash steeple and chewing my lip. Part of me wants to confront Carlotta right now, ask her why she lied to me about the picture, but there's a little voice in my head that tells me I should hold off, that it would be much more fruitful if I somehow found
a way to trick Paco into admitting that he knows about my modelling session.

My brain is working overtime when Carlotta appears in the doorway, stark naked, towel-drying her hair. I can't help but look her up and down, admire her. With her pubes still wet and flat against her, her large clit is more prominent than ever. Just the sight of it makes my own swell in anticipation. I walk up to her, press myself into her. She smells of milk and figs – a new shower product she bought in Liberty's, she tells me. I push my face into her neck, reach for that fat clit and tug it with my fingers. In return she slips her hand down the back of my skirt and into my knickers and rims my arsehole with her fingertip, then enters me. I cry out.

She smiles, steps back. My fingers are coated with her; I put them in my mouth. She spins away from me.

‘Better go get ready,' she says.

I sit on the sofa. My mind is blown, totally blown, by this creature. I no longer know what I'm doing. My self-control just falls apart whenever I'm near her. It's like a sickness, this always wanting more, this never being sated of her. This is going to kill me.

She reappears, a vision in a gold lamé halter dress and matching heels, with a Versace denim jacket thrown over the top to make it all a little more street. Just as I feared, I feel a bit like someone's granny next to her. I'm just hoping this bar I've been recommended isn't full of short-haired dykes in dungarees. I think they'd take even less kindly to Carlotta than she would to them.

We're in the Glass Bar, a private members' club for women in one of the old porters' lodges at Euston Station, drinking large vodka and tonics. Carlotta's
wondering how come I've never been with a girl before, and I'm asking her if it was that obvious. It was, she laughs, but that's not to say I'm at all bad. With a little more training, who knows . . .

She leans forwards to kiss me. ‘Just joking,' she says, hand on my thigh. ‘You drive me crazy.'

I confess to her that this has all been a bit of a shock to me, that I'd never seriously envisaged doing it with another woman and still can't quite believe it's happened.

‘Not that I'm not happy about it,' I reassure her. ‘But it's a big thing, finding out you really like doing something that had never really even crossed your mind as a possibility. It makes you wonder if you were who you thought you were.'

Carlotta laughs, rolls her eyes. ‘Don't get so heavy,' she mock-scolds. ‘Just enjoy yourself.'

I laugh back, but inside a trace of concern remains, niggling away inside me. If I'm not who I thought I was, who am I, and what will my life be like from now on?

After a while a couple appear at our table and ask if we'd mind if they join us. Carlotta says ‘No, no', and pulls her stool over so there's room for them.

They squeeze into the narrow space, sit down. ‘I'm Jacqueline,' says one, ‘and this is Michiko.'

We nod and introduce ourselves, and soon we've fallen into a conversation with the pair. Jacqui, we learn, is a graphic designer from Stoke Newington, and Michiko is a waitress in a Japanese restaurant in Camden, which is where they met. They make a comic pair – Jacqui tall and lanky with bleached dreadlocks and a pretty but slightly beaky face, Michiko petite and doll-faced with cropped black hair. They hold hands, though, and are obviously very fond of each other. I sneak a
look at Carlotta. What would it be like to be with her, really
be
with her?