AllFreeNovel
Share Us
darkness but, once her eyes had adjusted, she could see a couple of mops and brooms hanging on hooks against the back wall. Felix pressed his mobile phone and the screen light came on, transforming the small room into a cavern of shadows. Grinning, he put his finger to his lips, indicating they should keep quiet, then switched his phone off. Only the light slanting in from under the door illuminated them now. Outside they could hear footsteps and then a woman asking for Felix.
Susie held her breath. There was something both deliciously transgressive and ridiculous about the two of them hiding out that made her see a whole other side to Felix’s personality. It was as if they had been transformed into one of the inked miniatures they’d just been looking at; his dark eyes shining from the hollows of his face, her dress a quilt of shadow. The scent of him – a mixture of an exotic musk and the actual perfume of his skin – washed over her like colour. A dark purple, she decided. Or was it mauve?
They waited, the silence stretching between them until it was taut. Outside the footsteps faded.
‘What are we doing?’ she whispered.
‘This… ’ He leaned down and kissed her, his lips and tongue insistent.
To her wonder, he tasted right, so right she moaned, the sound vibrating against his lips. Still kissing her, he half-smiled and, slipping his hand under her skirt, found her and started playing her. Wrapping one leg around his hip, she pulled him down into a deeper embrace, all rationale gone. The only thing she was aware of was wanting him inside her. Pushing her against the wall, Felix lifted her skirt and ripped off her underpants, then moved down her body. Struggling, she tried to stop him from going down on her, but he pushed her hands away as his fingers slipped beneath her jacket and T-shirt. He found her small breasts and pulled sharply at her erect nipples, pinching down hard as he did. She gasped, in both pain and pleasure. To abdicate control was terrifying to her, and panic began to flutter at the back of her throat, the fear that if she didn’t control the sex she would not be able to control the emotion. A paradox she could not afford. He was now between her thighs, her hands entwined in his thick hair, his mouth on her sex, sucking at her clit as his fingers played both her vagina and anus. Staring down, she could hardly believe that this was Felix Baum on his knees pleasuring her, still fully clothed, his thick black hair a bobbing mass between her legs. She was close to coming, but she wanted more, she wanted him in her, to feel his cock inside her. She hauled him up and began unzipping his fly. Released, he was compact and heavy in her hands.
Dropping to her knees, she took him into her mouth, wanting to please, wanting to make him cry out, plead for release, the scent of the curly black hair of his cock and balls a delicious aphrodisiac to her as she sucked slowly, curling her tongue under and around the tip, now her fingers playing his arse, her fingers cupping his taut buttocks, deeper and deeper into her throat until she could hear him somewhere far above groaning in pleasure. He was close, she could feel it. Suddenly he pulled away.
‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted you?’ he whispered.
Before she had a chance to answer, he lifted her leg over his hip and entered her, the length and thickness of him filling her with intense pleasure.
‘No,’ she whispered, so close she could hardly talk.
‘The longest I’ve ever wanted anyone,’ he told her breathlessly.
Faster and faster he took her, their pleasure climbing, then he paused, teasingly, before beginning the climb again, both of them struggling to stay quiet. The ecstasy was so intense it teetered between pleasure and pain.
‘You’re lying,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, I’m lying,’ he whispered back, then came, clutching her tightly, burying his face in her hair, his orgasm triggering her own in a silent tsunami that rippled through her body.
*
Ten minutes later, clothing adjusted, hair smoothed down, they stepped out of the cupboard to the amazement of a waiter and a security guard, who stopped talking mid-sentence.
‘Fantastic show, gentlemen,’ Felix remarked as they walked primly toward the exit.
Chapter Eight
The first thing Susie did when she got back to the apartment was to run a bath. As the water was running she went back into the open-plan living area and stared down into the glass tank in which Winnie, the tarantula Felix had given her, lived. The white mouse she’d put into the tank as feed a day ago was still alive, cowering in a corner. The tarantula, a reddish-brown mass of silent poise, squatted frozen in anticipation, two arms held up in the air.
‘You like toying with your prey, don’t you, Winnie? I suspect the hunt is probably more satisfying than the kill for you, just like someone else I know,’ she told the animal, feeling a certain wry affection for something so monstrous, hairy and female. Then, remembering that the bath was filling, she returned to the bathroom.
After stripping her clothes off she leaned against the slate-covered wall, uptown New York a shimmering sliver through the long vertical window. She still smelt of him. She touched herself and sniffed her fingers. The two of them together was a pungent chemistry; it made her instantly want him again. She groaned out loud and didn’t recognise the noise she made. It was both exhilarating and wrong; it was also the most consciously unprofessional thing she’d ever done. It was her one rule: don’t mess with the gatekeepers, especially one who’s arguably the most powerful in the contemporary art market – and an inveterate womaniser. Was she that self-destructive? She knew Felix Baum was a vulture, a bone-picker. He could not help himself; he was hard-wired for conquest and able to take anybody down with him.
She turned the taps off as the bath was about to overflow, then stepped out into the bedroom to collect her dressing gown. As she did, she noticed that the window leading out onto the fire escape had been left open. Shivering, she walked over to close it. As she turned back to the bedroom she saw them: a pair of slippers – pale green, distinctively individual, worn, their soft leather echoing the shape of a small woman’s foot – placed neatly under her bed on the right side, the side her ex-lover would always sleep on. Susie recognised them instantly.
She stood there paralysed, waiting for Maxine herself – slipper-encased foot first, then the ankles, then the legs, torso, neck… then finally the face, Maxine’s eyes narrowed in that familiar accusatory expression Susie had both loved and dreaded. But there was nothing but emptiness and the distant shriek of a fire engine heading down Ninth Avenue.
She closed her eyes, then opened them again. The slippers were still there. Last time she’d seen them, they’d been under her bed back in Bow, London, over a year ago – the night before Maxine had left her. How had they got here? She picked them up gingerly, her heart pounding against her ribcage, convinced now that Maxine’s ghost would materialise. There was nothing, only the faint scent of a familiar skin cream that took her back to Maxine and their lovemaking.
*
Felix took all his clothes off, folding his trousers and shirt methodically and carefully hanging them over the edge of the chair for his housekeeper to deal with in the morning. He then stood in front of the full-length mirror that was set in the door of his dresser. He hadn’t washed and the scent of their lovemaking rose up in waves from his body. He could smell Susie on his face, penis and fingers and he had no intention of washing her off. Not yet. He liked it; there was something in the musky smell that took him back to his adolescence, to a time when there was a furtive excitement in such couplings – as if they held the promise of a whole new future, a transport out of his then-dreary existence.
He studied his reflection in the mirror, the five sessions a week with his trainer evident in his lean physique, the muscled shoulders and upper chest. His legs athletic and long, the thick black pubic hair feathering up toward his belly button; his penis, heavy and flaccid, fell to one side, still sticky with her. He touched it for good luck, then checked his neck and chest for love bites or bruises. There were none, but his nipples (large for a man) were a little red from when she had bitten them, and he made a note to avoid starched shirts for a while. He looked good for 38; perhaps the torso was a little long, his legs a little short but at six foot three it was barely evident. For a moment he conjured up the image of her on her knees, him in her mouth, and he stiffened immediately. I have had her. I have had Susie Thomas.
He walked, naked, back to the bed, the sheets already turned down for him. He would go to bed as he was, drenched in the cloud of them, the odour triggering flashbacks: snippets of lovemaking, a petit mal of the cock and heart. Sighing, Felix slipped between the cool, crisp clean sheets and lifted a thick catalogue from the bedside table.
It was from one of Susie Thomas’s exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London, entitled Sexualising/My Time/Your Time. He opened it to the first page, a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a younger woman, standing in her studio in the East End of London, her arms crossed defensively, staring straight out at the viewer. An introduction ran beside it:
I remember the first day Susie Thomas walked into the lecture room at Guildhall. I was giving a lecture on Russian constructivism and she was 20 minutes late. She turned up, her long red hair up and artfully constructed around what appeared to be an old birdcage, the singing canary perched within interrupting my lecture at least ten times that afternoon. I would say it was love at first sight… What was more interesting was that the birdcage, on closer inspection, was in fact a model of the Russian constructivist Tatlin’s Tower, which led to a whole new discussion on the topic. The woman is a genius… and has an innate gift for both visualisation and the notion of the artist as the art. Of all the Young British Artists, she lives it the most.
