Erotic Romance and Domination 2

I’m delighted to have not one but two stories in Maxim Jakubowski’s recently released anthology, The Mammoth Book of Erotic Romance and Domination.

Last week I gave you the opening of How to Get Sex When You’re Dead. This week, I’m posting the opening to my second story, Seven Stripes of Colour.

Seven is a story about kinksters who meet via online dating; kinksters who are old enough to have some serious baggage. This is one of those stories that made me moist-eyed as I was writing it. It’s rare that short stories do that to me. Novels, yes. Shorts, not so much.

Seven Stripes of Colour

Under a pale apricot sky, city buses looped in front of the railway station, their slow headlights weaving patterns in the dusk. Louise strode from cab to pub, her heart beating a little too fast. She loved doing this, meeting men in places where no one belonged, in stations, airports and motorway cafes. She imagined her grey, digitalised self on CCTV monitors as she made her way to another date.

The anonymity of these places appealed to the pessimist in her. She expected, at best, a short-lived affair. At worst, the two of them would part in relief after a sour coffee or non-descript wine. Then he and she would merge with the travellers around them, en route to elsewhere, confused and anxious, caught in the limbo of to-ing and fro-ing. Warp and weft. Yes and no.

Jason was different to the others, that much was obvious at once. His kindness and warmth were evident in his greeting: a broad grin and a kiss on the cheek. All too often, the dominants she met after ‘meeting’ online were, if young, guarded and cocky or, if older, charmingly chivalric.

“I’ll get this,” he said when she’d selected her wine at the bar.

“OK, I’ll get the next round,” she replied, indicating that already she liked him enough to stay and wasn’t expecting him to foot the bill. Establishing the importance of equality was, she felt, crucial if powerplay negotiations were to be fair and mutual.

Fifteen minutes into their conversation she wondered what the catch was. Married? Impotent? Deranged? Three hours later she knew, but by then it was too late.

“How’s your hotel?” he asked, quickly filling a silence.

“Five minutes away.”

He laughed but didn’t take the bait. Well, it was still early in the game so fair enough. The photographs he’d emailed didn’t do him justice. You wouldn’t call him handsome but he was definitely striking. His face had a skew-whiff, battered quality and his dark eyes glittered, really glittered. They held the mad energy of a man whose zest for life has resulted in him seeing too much. He wore faded jeans, trainers, T-shirt and a suit jacket which he hung over the back of his chair. His shoulders were wide, his arms muscular and darkly-haired. Rogue strands of silver glinted in his short brown curls and flecked his neat sideburns.

As they talked, buses crawled beyond the long, low window behind him. Occasionally, headlights swept into the dark wooden bar, bathing the two of them in a shuddering glow or framing him in momentary halos.

“I haven’t done this for over four years,” he said after Louise returned from buying the next round. Wine for her, beer for him.

Uh-oh, she thought. Here’s where it all goes pear-shaped. He’s going to tell me he’s just split up with someone and I’ve got a rebound on my hands. Or his ailing mother’s about to die, or he’s fresh out of jail.

“So how am I doing?” he added.

She laughed. “You’re doing great. Nine out of ten. Clearly a natural.”

“Damn, I dropped a point. How come?”

“Hey, no one gets ten. Ten would be perfection and a perfect person would automatically lose a point for being perfect, ergo insufferable.”

Jason nodded thoughtfully then smiled. “Well, I got top marks. Go me!”

After a pause, she asked, “So tell me, what’s the story? Why’ve you been away from the joys of dating?” Nervous, she ran her thumb and fingers up and down the stem of her wine glass, desisting when she recalled a claim the gesture was indicative of a subconscious gesture to jerk a guy off. So much wishful thinking in pop psychology.

“Ah, this and that,” he said. “Got out of the habit. Found myself continually disappointed. I was in a straight, you know, a vanilla relationship for around 18 months but…” He trailed off with a shrug. “It’s not for me. I tried but the older I get, the more I… Anyway, that ended over a year ago. And since then, before then too, I’ve been trying… No, wondering how to realise my desires without, how shall I phrase it?” He inclined his head at a philosophical angle. “Without causing harm.”

Her heart pumped harder. She found him simultaneously exciting and terrifying. She started to work the stem of her glass again, this time not stopping when she realised what she was doing.

“Should I be worried?” she asked. “I mean, if we decide we want to play together, would I be in danger? Because if so, I’m probably going to pass. Sorry.” She took a large sip of wine as if to support her decisive words.

Jason shook his head. “I’m ninety-nine per cent certain you’d be safe with me.”

He reached across the table, allowing his fingertips to drift over her hand. She returned the gesture, their contact tentative and fumbling like that of long-standing, melancholy lovers. The beam of headlights from outside crept across their table, casting glossy patches on the wood and rippling over their knuckles. When she looked up, his eyes were downcast, his curls briefly backlit. In that instant, she was irrationally afraid; not of him but for the two of them together. She felt as if they’d been caught in the arc of a searchlight and had nowhere left to run.

“And the missing one per cent?” she asked as the bar’s shadows settled around them again.

His smile was strained. Behind him, the buses kept huffing and purring, their passengers silhouetted in halogen-white windows. She thought of Blanch DuBois at the start of her journey trilling, “Why, they told me to take a streetcar named Desire!”

At length, he gave her a stern, serious look. “You,” he said, “are fucking beautiful. And you’re driving my cock insane. What’s our safeword?”

The confident delivery of his sudden, dirty seduction was more than enough to arouse her. She loved knowing this new man was sitting opposite her in a pub, his cock secretly swelling as they talked. Adrenaline made her fingers tremble, and a beat throbbed between her thighs. For a moment, the world burned, the lights outside gleaming in tones of white-gold, dark amber and bright cherry-red. She experienced the slippage, the shift of the mundane into a spectrum of yellow-hued, fiery magic, the start of a rainbow. She recalled the schoolgirl mnemonic for remembering the order of colours in the spectrum. Richard of York gave battle in vain. Red orange yellow, and so on.

“Red,” she replied, amusing herself by thinking, A bus called Lust.

“We should drink up.”

She grinned and touched her glass against his. “We should.”

*

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