Wildwood (27 page)

‘Avril,’ he groaned, his hands suddenly closing over mine, stilling them on his hard-on.

No? I asked with my eyes.

Easing my hands from him, he pulled me full against him, and for a moment our bodies met in a wonderful slippery kiss, as if we were melting together. Warm steam billowed about us. Then he turned me in his arms so that my back was to his chest, and reached for the bottle of gel. Evidently it was my turn. I could have protested that I was already clean but I didn’t think he’d listen, and besides there were bits of me that were feeling very dirty indeed.

With a firm clasp of his hand Ash squirted the creamy liquid over both my breasts and dribbled it down the line of my cleavage before discarding the bottle altogether. He didn’t bother with the shower scrunchie; he used his hands. He’d worked out exactly how sensitive my nipples could be and he
used
the knowledge ruthlessly, rolling and rubbing the innocent pink tips until I was squirming against him, helpless and undignified, my bum grinding against his braced thighs. He ran his hand down my belly and caressed soap into the delta of my sex, his fingers soaping my folds. Then he rolled me, gently but firmly, to face the wall. I put my hands on the sweating tiles.

For a moment he released me in order to find a bar of soap. I whimpered with loss, only slightly mollified as he ran his slick hands down my back and over my bum cheeks. Then he delved between my legs, soap and hands equally hard and slippery, and I forgot I’d been disappointed as he worked me into a lather of pleasure. I pressed my forehead to the cool tiles, eyes shut, transported by the alien, frictionless pressure. He rubbed the soap bar over my clit and pressed it to my cunt and in my reckless trance I wished he could shove the whole thing inside me. I thrust my arse cheeks out, begging him for more. He stroked up and down the interior of my crack, tracing rings around the secret star of my anus. I squirmed. He slid one finger, lubricated by that alchemical mixture of sex juices and soap, in through the tight ring of muscle. I gasped against the tiles.

‘Relax,’ he whispered in my ear, circling that finger joint, easing me open. His other hand, losing the soap bar, slid in around the front of my pussy to make sure I did just that, taking masterful possession of my clit. When he slipped a second finger in to join the first invader I felt as if my whole body were yielding to him. My muscles fluttered, my cheeks opened. I was seconds from orgasm.

All that changed when his fingers eased out and he nudged the head of his cock to my bum hole instead. The spasm of fear was instinctive and instantaneous; my eyes snapped open wide. ‘No!’

‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Just relax.’ I could feel his length, hot and so slippery, between my cool cheeks. The pressure wasn’t unbearable, but it wasn’t withdrawn either

‘I’ve not … I’ve not done that before.’

His breath was hot on my ear. ‘Then give it to me as your first, Avril.’ He kissed my burning cheek. ‘Give it up to me.’

My whole body seemed to have turned to jelly. I did want to give it to him; I wanted to give him anything he wanted. I wanted to surrender my soul. ‘I’m not sure I can,’ I confessed.

‘Yes. Yes, you can.’ His fingers stirred my clit, soothing, inflaming. ‘Just relax and let me do it all.’ He pressed against his target and I groaned, partly in fear, partly in discomfort, rising up on my toes. The fingers that had been playing with my bum slid round and fastened onto one nipple and I felt the little electric jolt chase all the way down to my clit.

The noises in my throat were suddenly less protesting, more helpless. ‘Oh God!’

Ash was patient, and he was very well lubricated. Fraction by fraction he ratcheted his cock head up into my arse, sliding in through the sphincter which could clench and flutter but never fully lock against him. Slow, rolling waves of sensation radiated from my bum up and down my body. My spine seemed to be one crackling length of exposed nerves. I felt hot; I felt cold. My legs were trembling wildly. My tits screamed for comfort and I stabbed my nipples against the cool tiles until Ash pinched them and then I nearly wept with relief.

Michael would have talked me through this. Michael would have said, ‘I want to fuck your ass. I want to fuck your beautiful big ass, you naughty girl, and you want me to do it, don’t you? You want to give me your butt crack and let me stick my big prick in it and come in your dirty, wicked, tight little asshole.’

Ash said nothing. There was just his harsh breathing on my ear and his hands on my tits and my sex and his cock boring
into
me, filling my world. There was just my softness giving way before his hardness. Then suddenly the discomfort melted to a sensation of fullness and I knew that it was done, he was in, and there was a wet sensation running down my crack and my thighs that I couldn’t tell whether it was sweat or blood or soap or just my imagination.

‘OK?’ he whispered, his lips trembling over my skin, his tongue etching his name on my soul.

What the hell choice did I have? I’d yielded to him and he’d taken it all. He had conquered territory I’d never given up to any other man and now he was going to lay claim to it. He began to move, sliding his cock in and out. I felt every inch. I think he was quite careful, but the sensation was extraordinary and my body very nearly could not cope. It was dirty and it was divine; it was like taking a shit on the high altar of St Paul’s Cathedral while the entire choir sang the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’; it was like fucking God.

I came on his hands and on his cock. My lips were pressed to the tiles, which spat back my cries down my throat as everything exploded. After that all my clenched muscles relaxed – except for my arse whose tight ring was spasming like a hand about his shaft, completely out of my control, gripping and relaxing in a pulsing dance. He took his cue from that, thrusting firmer and deeper. I felt his balls slapping my pussy and I felt him quicken and shudder and I heard his groan as he filled my virgin hole with his cream. Suddenly I was slippery inside as well as out. Ash’s arms locked around me and he groaned into my wet hair and my throat, over and over.

‘Good?’ he asked, still holding me, when his crisis had passed.

‘Good,’ I whispered, twisting to lick the sweat from his jaw.

After all that, we needed to get washed yet again.

When I emerged from the bathroom there was a certain hitch to my gait, courtesy of a novel sensitivity in the tender membranes of my anal bud. I borrowed a pair of knickers from Miranda’s drawer, figuring she could spare them and that my need was great. They were white lace with blue flowers, rather expensive looking, but I couldn’t find anything plainer; the rest of my clothes seemed very dowdy in contrast as I pulled them on. Aching for a coffee, I filled the kettle at the sink. The wet street below the window was a confusion of headlamps and neon, blurred by rain.

‘What’s the time?’ Ash asked as he came out, towelling himself. There was a slight frown knotted between his brows.

‘Gone eleven,’ I said, after looking around in vain for a clock and finally retrieving my watch from under the bed.

‘That’s late. She should be home by now, surely.’

‘Maybe she’s …’ He had a point; Miranda had promised to meet us straight from the office. ‘Well, she works London hours. She might have had a deadline or something.’

Ash didn’t answer, but he pulled his clothes on with swift movements that suggested eloquently that he was not reassured. He got the rucksack out from under the chair too, to check that the contents were safe. I went to open the door, picturing quite irrationally Miranda coming up the corridor outside. Looking out, I stared, not really understanding. Then I pulled back in, checking the interior walls of the room.

‘Ash!’

He looked up. ‘What?’

‘This door … Ash. Which is the way out?’

Stuffing the book back into the bag, he strode over to join me. I waited for his verdict, still trying to orientate myself. There was no corridor on the other side of the door, just a bare, unfurnished room. The floorboards were rough, the walls stained to an indeterminate grey by years of dirt. There was

a lone door in the wall opposite. The only feature was a single broken chair with no seat.

Ash too looked around Miranda’s flat to see if we had somehow managed to mislay the outer door. ‘Shit,’ he said grimly. Then he crossed back over to the bathroom door and flung it open. No white tiles winked beyond the lintel, only another grey box room and a broken chair, at exactly the same angle as the first.

How do you get lost in a single room?

Striding back, Ash brushed past me into the strange room where the corridor should have been. I followed, uneasily. ‘What’s happening?’

Deliberately, he laid the chair over on its back and then pulled open the furthest door. It revealed a third grey room beyond, another identical door and another seatless chair – this one laid flat upon its back. It was like one of those infinite vistas you get by tilting two mirrors together. I felt dizzy. ‘Ash?’

‘Get back into the flat,’ he said. I obeyed willingly, hurrying to the kitchen. Grasping the frame of the sash window over the sink, I tried to raise it but the wood resisted. I struggled for a minute, cursing under my breath. The sodium-lit vista outside twinkled mockingly in the rain. Then Ash reached in past me, grabbed the frame and heaved. Nothing budged. ‘Step back.’

I retreated to the fridge. Ash picked up a saucepan and slammed it against the bottom pane, which smashed. I put my hands over my mouth. Two inches behind the glass on which was painted that glittering night street was a wall of grimy brick. Ash struck that with the pan and the handle snapped off in his hand.

On the largest shard of glass still in the frame the raindrops crawled down and a bus passed slowly in the street below.

‘Ash! What’s going on?’

Slinging the handle into the sink he looked me in the face for the first time. He was really pale, and there was a cold, glittery look in his eye that I knew and did not like. ‘We’re trapped,’ he said flatly. ‘This is a trap.’

‘You mean … Michael’s caught up with us?’

‘Caught up?’ He glanced around our cluttered bolt hole. ‘No. This is the sort of thing you do on your own territory. Deverick got here before us. Long before us.’

My stomach churned. I hated the way he was looking at me. ‘How?’

‘You tell me.’ His voice was quiet, under iron control. ‘This was your plan.’

‘Me?’ The look he had on made me recoil. ‘Hey, I had nothing … This isn’t –’

‘Does your friend Miranda even exist?’

‘Miranda?’ Suddenly the thing that had been nagging at the back of my mind all along stood out proud. ‘Oh God.’ I wanted to slap myself. ‘Miranda knew him. Through her brother. She knew Deverick. Oh God, Ash …’

‘Really?’

‘I’d forgotten. She mentioned it at the wedding. But she’s never spoken about him since and I didn’t think …’

‘I bet you didn’t.’

‘You believe me, don’t you?’

‘Believe what? That you didn’t sell me out; that you’re just plain stupid?’ He might have noticed the rage kindle in my eyes but he marched on regardless. ‘Yeah, I’d love to believe that, Avril. We both know what he’s like. Women will do anything he wants. Miranda or you – what’s the difference? And either you or I was dumb enough to trust that there was one female who wouldn’t just open her legs to that man and let him take control.’

I whirled away across the room. There was nowhere for me to go but that couldn’t keep me still. ‘I did not betray you!’

‘You were sleeping with him, weren’t you?’

I felt like my stomach and my mouth were full of blood. ‘You knew that,’ I snarled. ‘You never asked me how I got hold of the book and anyone else would have. You already knew, and you’d been using that – been using me – to get close to him.’

His eyes were blazing; everything else was cold as ice. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m paying for that. I thought you’d seen through him. I thought that since you knew what this was really all about you’d made the decent choice. I thought that maybe just one other bloody person in the world was capable of doing something that wasn’t about how much money they could make or who they could fuck or what was in it for them!’

I felt like he’d knocked all the air out of my chest.

Ash spread his hands. ‘All my fault,’ he snarled. ‘I’m the idiot here.’

My voice, when I found it, was gravelly with shock. ‘You shit. You want to know something, Ash? You aren’t the good guy you think you are. You are
exactly
like Michael fucking Deverick, down to the dregs. You both think that you’re better than everyone else on the fucking planet and that gives you the right to tell us what to do. You’re bloody identical.’

Ash looked like I’d slapped him. He took a step forwards, mouth open.

‘No,’ I said, holding up a hand. ‘Sorry, there is a difference between you.
He’s
got a sense of humour.’

Ash’s mouth twisted as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

‘Knock, knock,’ said Michael acidly from the doorway. We both turned in horror.

All along I’d managed on instinct, refusing to analyse my decisions. I’d trusted to action and relegated the consequences to the back of my mind, refusing to show them the light of day. Now the consequences had caught up with me. Now the
repercussions
stood casually against the door frame in a black coat, his eyes glinting, and he was holding a gun. Behind him I could see the pattern of the corridor wallpaper. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got a punchline for that one, but the compliment is noted, Avril.’

Ash retreated slowly behind the bed, and the gun’s muzzle lifted to cover him. It was an old-fashioned-looking weapon, I thought from some disassociated corner of my mind, with a rounder barrel than the ones you saw on television.

‘The real joke,’ continued Michael, ‘is that it is entirely your fault, Ash, that I was able to track you here. You can’t blame Avril for this.’ He lifted his other hand from his coat pocket, displaying between two fingers a transparent plastic bag, like an item of police evidence. There was a something small in the bag: a bright aquamarine piece of fabric.