Those Wicked Pleasures
Read Those Wicked Pleasures Online
Authors: Roberta Latow
Those Wicked Pleasures
Roberta Latow
Copyright © 1992 by Roberta Latow
In memory of
a friend
who also loved Lara
I didn’t restrain myself. I gave in completely and went,
went to those pleasures that were half real,
half wrought by my own mind,
went into the brilliant night
and drank strong wine,
the way the champions of pleasure drink.
C P Cavafy
It was a Cord, a Sedanca de Ville black motor car, long and low and sleek for a model made in 1931. A soundless glide on its huge, white-walled tyres eased it into the stream of traffic. Stylish and elegant, it represented to New Yorkers in the know old money, high society – and Emily Dean Stanton, the woman sitting behind the chauffeur’s open compartment under the automobile’s leather hood.
Every inch the handsome woman of a certain age, she removed a gold powder compact from her purse, released the catch – a small cartouche of diamonds and rubies – lifted the lid and gazed at herself in the small mirror. She was not displeased with what she saw but touched her cheek, then the skin at the corner of her eye, with the tips of her fingers. Lowering the mirror, she raised her chin and stroked her neck. She checked her raven-coloured hair, swept back off her face in a neat French twist at the nape of her neck. Not a grey hair in sight, not a strand straying from its place. All was perfection.
Emily Dean Stanton was not an impulsive woman, not subject to temperament. Therein lay her strength and her power. She was, too, highly practical. She leaned back against the grey Worcester upholstery, adjusting the jacket of her Mainbocher ‘little black town suit’, and slid her sables off one shoulder to lay them on the seat next to her. It was that practical turn of mind that made her
order Rigby, her chauffeur, to stop at Lara’s school. They were only a few blocks away. She had checked her watch. The children would be coming out just about now. She would give her daughter a lift home.
Rigby double-parked the Cord behind several other cars. Some minutes passed before the girls in their school uniforms, and carrying books and school bags, burst through the heavily carved oak doors into the street. There, some took off swiftly, eager to get away, while others milled around among their friends. Emily rolled the window down. She took note of her own long, slender hand, elegant down to its oval-shaped nails gleaming with ruby red glossy nail varnish. Hardly the hands of a woman of her years. Emily didn’t mind growing old, but meant to keep her good looks and chic. It felt good to be the Stanton matriarch, to be referred to as the American dowager duchess of New York high society. That was her life.
She leaned from the recesses of the back seat to look out of the window. There were the girls, all chattering raucously as they pulled off school ties and stuffed them into jacket pockets, linked arms with their best friends or walked off by themselves in all directions. Irritating creatures. So very inelegant. And what an embarrassment: a woman of her age there to see not her grandchild but her own daughter. The whole thing was just too public. She wished Lara would appear. More girls, and then at last Lara with, two steps behind, her best friend Julia. Lara stood out from the bevy of adolescents chattering like a flock of dull grey birds. She had presence, she had a kind of sensual shine that set her apart from the other girls. Emily was quite taken aback. She would have much preferred her daughter simply to fit into the flock. Let her be just another bird, if she had to be there at all.
Two girls raced across the road to climb into the back seat of the Cadillac parked in front of them. Emily felt the Cord purr into life. As Rigby put it into gear, she stopped him through the intercom. ‘Thank you, Rigby, but let’s just stay parked where we are.’
‘Shall I go and fetch Miss Lara?’
‘I think not.’
Emily leaned back, safely hidden. With fascination she watched her daughter through the open window. Lara removed her grey felt hat and stuffed it in her school bag along with her tie. Her silvery-blonde hair shone in the afternoon sunlight. Emily saw Lara reach behind her to undo the bow of grey grosgrain ribbon holding her hair back off her face. The girl shook out a mass of curly tresses. A mischievous glint appeared in her green eyes as, from her pocket, a lipstick appeared in her hand. Without the aid of a mirror she applied a pale peach tint, and then passed the tube over to Julia, who did the same. Lara removed her jacket and draped it over her shoulders, then undid the nearly bursting buttons of her white cotton blouse. Transformed, before her mother’s eyes, from school girl to provocative young woman. The girl’s almost raunchy good looks were far too apparent. Emily noted the direction of Rigby’s gaze. She was not amused.
She had seen hints of Lara’s impending womanhood surfacing before, but never on a public street. It was quite sickening. Home was the appropriate place for her daughter’s sensual, provocative beauty and charm. Let it enchant the men of the family and their friends. Out in the world, Emily sensed there would be peril for Lara and trouble for all the family because of it. Emily tolerated no trouble in the family. The answer, of course, was Switzerland. You could rely on a good, strict finishing school.
She would speak to her husband Henry that very
evening. And David. David, her nephew, had lived with the Henry Garfield Stantons since his parents were killed in an automobile crash when he was five months old. His father had been Henry’s brother. David had become like Emily and Henry’s eldest son. David had greater influence over Lara than any of her siblings. He clearly adored her; Henry and all the children did. They had spoiled her. Only Emily had achieved relative immunity to Lara’s charm and her need to be loved.
Emily watched Lara and Julia walk in the opposite direction to the car. The girls hadn’t seen it. Emily was relieved. She rolled the window up and sat back. From a compartment she took a small silver thermos and a cut crystal tumbler. About an inch of chilled martini would be right. She drank it down. Must get that girl a new uniform.
Several months later, Lara burst into David’s sitting room.
‘I need to talk to you. All day I’ve been trying to …’
There was no one there. A sound from the bedroom. She flung the door open and barged into the room. ‘… catch you alone.’
Her cousin was naked and very evidently not alone. One part of her shocked self took note of the particular beauty of each of the two sensuous, nude women lying with him on the white sheets. The sight stopped and silenced her. An erotic aura permeated the room, like a rich essence, some delectable perfume.
David, with the tousled dirty-blond hair, his nakedness partially covered by Luan astride him in his arms, Myling making love to him with caressing hands, voluptuous yet delicate kisses: he seemed even bigger, more joltingly handsome and virile entwined in the women’s lasciviousness.
Lara had to watch David licking, nibbling the luscious exposed pale pink lips between Myling’s long, shapely limbs, flung wide to reveal herself open and yearning for the caresses of his tongue. The pleasure Luan experienced impaled upon him declared itself in her sighs, her helpless whimpers. Not so Myling. Pleas mingled with her groans of ecstasy. She wanted more from David: for him to deliver her into the brief oblivion of sex by whatever means, any act he chose.
And David, Lara’s cousin, where did that look come from? He seemed only half there in his unbridled sexual ardour. She felt it was a look she could never ask him to explain.
But she also knew she had never seen anything so sensually exciting. It was somehow desperately intimate and electrifying. Shocking but utterly beautiful. Scary, because it triggered something new in her, a feeling more intense than she could ever have imagined possible. Something in her wanted it never to stop. Retreat was impossible. Her heart raced, the beat drummed loudly in her ears. She wanted somehow to be magnetised, to be drawn into the threesome’s adventure. Oh, to feel those same sensations that Myling and Luan were reaping.
Here for the first time were stirrings of passion, of which, in the past, she had received only vague glimmerings. Her sexual inexperience was torture to her now. She realised she half wanted a man to take her in the same way her beloved David was taking his two orientals. Where would she find a man as divine as he to deliver her from what for a moment seemed the burden of her own virginity? She took a step closer to the bed.
All her life she had known David’s love. His friendly kisses, his gentle hands, the pleasure his touch always gave her, were as much a part of her life as breathing. But now
she saw there was more, something quite different, to be had from David. Not, alas, for her. A first for Lara: a stab of jealousy, a hunger, a twinge of raunchy lust. Desire that obliterated all else. Sensations that confused her. Forbidden excitement.
When, at last, David saw Lara watching his enthralled sexual encounter, he had to find a reaction. Embarrassment was not enough. He made the half-angry descent from the throes of an orgasm that had seemed to go on forever. With considered finesse, he unwound the women limb by limb from their erotic tryst and relaxed into the dishevelled, white linen-covered pillows.
David felt no shame at lying naked in front of Lara, nor for that matter at being found entangled in an orgy. She had grown up with four boys in the house, himself and her three brothers. Inevitably she had seen them in the nude, even in various stages of erection at one time or another. Between David and Lara, there had always been open and free discussions about sex. Their bond of love, as close as brother and sister, was strengthened by their physical attraction for each other. Intimate encounters were natural for them, and at those times, David was particularly careful to subordinate his own libido into mild affection. No, shame did not come into it.
He had become her teacher-lover, giving Lara gentle pleasure and some insight into the loving sex he sensed she craved. He preferred that he should send her out into the sexual world prepared to enjoy every experience. Better him than one of the horny, unloving University jocks lined up to plunge her into the ‘let’s-get-laid’ syndrome.
But, so far as he knew, Lara had never seen any of her brothers making long, hard, no-holds-barred, sexual love. How long had she been there? Just how much had she seen?
No traumas for Lara. That was his prime concern. He would have to make certain she walked away enriched in some way by what she had seen; made to understand that there was nothing ugly or menacing to upset her. He wanted her to know what rich pleasures the erotic had to offer. That unique joy that adventurous sex can deliver. How sublime the descent to the sexual animal in oneself can be.
Always looking to add something valid to Lara’s life, David realised she must be included now in the scene she had stumbled upon. How? Instinctively he knew the best way was to behave casually. Her experience as
voyeur
must not be made to feel a shameful intrusion. He wanted nothing to damage sex for Lara. He could only want her to revel in it, love it, enjoy every aspect of it as he did himself. On her terms, and only when she was ready for it.
The twins, naked Chinese beauties beneath the sheet casually covering their sensuous, silky smooth mounds, lay now more decoratively erotic than actively pornographic, draped languidly against David. It was up to him to ease them all out of the situation. The girl was his adoring seventeen-year-old cousin, not theirs.
David took his time. He studied the pretty flushed face, the smouldering green eyes. He felt a moment of sadness for the loss of the dancing, mischievous twinkle he was used to seeing in them. Instead he read hungry passion in those eyes he loved so much. Suddenly, little Lara had revealed the woman within her, and, as such, had all the needs and desires of one. In a moment his feelings for her changed. Now he loved both the child and the woman. He felt closer to her than ever before.
David smiled at Lara, ‘Hi. Well, since we all had lunch together, at least we’re spared awkward introductions.’ He waited for her reaction.
Lara said not a word, made no move. The stillness seemed only to add to the erotic essence still permeating the room.
Myling, not insensitive to the girl’s embarrassment, kissed David on the cheek and smoothly slipped away from him and off the bed. Wearing her long, straight black tresses like a mantle over her nakedness, she moved gazelle-like across the carpet. On approaching Lara, she touched the girl’s cheek gently with the back of her hand. She kissed her lightly, most sweetly, on the cheek, and stroked Lara’s silky blonde hair. Lara showed no reaction to the Chinese woman’s advances, except perhaps the tear lodged in the corner of her eye. Myling, always the sensualist, lifted the tear away with the tip of her tongue, and, leaving another tender kiss on the young girl’s cheek, walked away from her. She closed the door Lara had left ajar.
Returning, Myling gently, almost cautiously, took Lara’s hand in hers and coaxed her, while opening the buttons of her blouse, towards the bed. Though David had eyes only for Lara, the sexual excitement he felt now was for all three women in the room and seemed to expand in spite of his care for his cousin. Myling’s teasing and coaxing of Lara, the feel of Luan’s long seductively nippled breasts in his hands, her lips descending upon his once-again erect penis, inflamed him more than he wished. And then Lara was there, as if in a trance, naked to the waist, on her knees next to him. In a moment her ripe breasts were in his hands and he licked the dark nimbus, sucking hard on the innocent nipples. He heard her pathetic whisper: ‘I thought you loved me, only me.’ The tears trickled down her cheeks.
He placed sweet, gentle kisses between her breasts and told her, ‘I do love you.’ With sudden unease, he realised Myling was lowering Lara back on to the pillows and
slipping her skirt down off her hips. Myling was making Lara ready for him. It jolted him out of the grip of Eros. He shot a forbidding look at Myling and dismissed the two Chinese women from the room. Lara was gently pleading: ‘David, take me, please take me. I want a man’s penis inside me, I want to feel what Myling and Luan have with you. Love me, David, the way you love them.’
He kissed and caressed Lara and tried to distract himself from the pleasure he felt in her hands by slipping her blouse over her shoulders. She fondled his still-erect penis, and then for the first time took that part of a man that she had, always, until that moment, thought somehow ridiculous, slowly inch by inch in her mouth. While she licked and kissed him, she began to suck with a passion and a love of cock that came as naturally as to the babe that finds the mother’s nipple. Then, holding him in both her hands, she looked up into his eyes and begged, ‘What are we going to do? I need you to love me at least as much as those women.’