Secret Surrender Page 4

  ‘I love you, Alice. I love fucking you and I love you. We are each other’s destiny.’

  But as the summer wore on, feelings of claustrophobia began to haunt Alice. She was worried that her physical dependence on Jacques was an addiction. She had shut out the world outside and, as her mother would have said, she had ‘let herself go’. Her hair had not been cut, let alone blow-dried, for six weeks and was beginning to look torn and haggard. She wasn’t eating well and was becoming scrawny. Her white skin was constantly covered in scratches and bite marks, and because sex had replaced sleep, dark circles formed under her eyes. Her bush, usually so carefully waxed and shaped, grew unruly and wild: Jacques liked it that way, telling her that the hairier she was, the more he could smell the sweetness of her pussy.

  And soon, real life began to creep back in. Alice had no telephone at her studio, but she could not ignore the daily letters from her parents begging her to contact them and make arrangements about starting her course in Paris. Alice’s ambitious streak began to rear its head again. The life she was living here with Jacques was intense, claustrophobic and deeply enlivening. She could not have hoped for a better introduction to the ways of making love, and perhaps she would never find a lover like Jacques again. But it was incompatible with the discipline and hard work she needed to put in to make it as an actress. She had had enough of being a waitress; she was sick of waiting to be discovered, she was eager to get to drama school. Jacques was an artist, too. She was sure he would understand.

  When she tried explaining this to Jacques, he didn’t understand. He despised formal education, and when she told him that drama school was the only route to an agent, he sneered at her for ‘playing the game’. This conflict was the source of their first bitter argument. They had just finished making love up against the window of Jacques’ room, Alice’s body wrapped in the white curtain and pressed against the glass, Jacques’ dick entering her from behind, and they had willed passers-by to look up and witness them. After they had both come, Jacques wrapped Alice so tightly in the cotton curtain that she felt trapped, like a mummy. She fought her way out of the bonds and screamed at him.

  ‘I’m losing myself in you, Jacques!’ cried Alice. Like her desire, her anger bubbled to the surface and spilled out. ‘We never see anybody but each other. My life is working as a waitress, and fucking you. It’s like drowning in honey. It’s too much, we can’t live like this for ever, we have no friends, we should be seeing other people, we can’t just live on our dreams like this.’

  Jacques gave her a wounded look as though she had kicked him in the balls. ‘You want us to be like every other urban couple, having cosy dinner parties and talking about house prices? Fuck you and fuck that. You and I, Alice, are destined for a life less ordinary.’

  ‘That’s not what I said. That’s not what I meant. It just gets a bit claustrophobic, only ever being with each other.’

  ‘Well, you are all I’ll ever want,’ Jacques barked. ‘But if I’m not enough for you, I’ll find you some fucking friends.’ His footsteps thudded angrily down the flight of stairs and the door’s violent slam left the whole building shaking.

  Alice was left naked on the bed feeling angry and confused. These feelings threatened to overwhelm her; she was in too deep. She returned to her own bedroom and tried to sleep, but she was wild with anger and frustration as well. Her body was already craving another fix of Jacques’ cock, and like an addict, she couldn’t relax until she had her hit.

  At three o’clock in the morning, the door slammed shut for the second time. Jacques’ voice, accompanied by two others that Alice didn’t recognise, drifted down the staircase into Alice’s room and woke her up. She leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes and took the stairs two at a time, to find Jacques standing on the landing with two strangers he introduced as Francis and Julie.

  The couple she saw standing at the top were so good-looking they took Alice’s breath away. Francis was mixed race, a good head taller than Jacques, with cocoa-brown skin and a physique that looked as though it had been carved in mahogany. He wore a T-shirt with the Brazilian flag on it, denim cut-offs, beads around his neck and wrists and his hair was tightly knotted into short dreadlocks. The woman who stood next to him was the sexiest female Alice had ever seen. Julie had the alabaster skin of the natural redhead, smattered with freckles on her nose and shoulders. She was tall for a woman, only slightly shorter than Jacques, and was the dictionary definition of an hourglass figure. Dainty ankles swelled into shapely legs, which led to a generous arse and thighs, barely covered by a mini sarong that looked like it might have been a sari in its previous life. Her tiny waist was the same size as Alice’s but thrown into stark contrast by a pair of round, full, pendulous breasts which were struggling to be contained by the red bikini top she wore. Like Francis, Julie wore a lot of jewellery, but while his wooden beads were the same colour as his brown skin, her wrists, ears, ankles and neck were draped with chains and baubles in clashing metallic colours; silvers, golds, coppers and bronzes cast tiny brilliant lights on to Julie’s fair skin. Her facial features were strong, fleshy and sensual. A wise, full mouth was a natural dark red without the aid of make-up and huge, round greeny-grey eyes lit up her face. Compared with Julie, Alice felt faded and washed out. The length and texture of Julie’s vivid red hair Alice could not see as it was coiled tightly on top of her head, held in place with a chopstick. Alice wanted to see that hair unleashed more than anything, and had to fight her desire to pull out of the chopstick, run her fingers through Julie’s hair and let it fall over her shoulders. She made do with a chaste, social kiss on the cheek.

  Alice was torn between happiness at new people to socialise with – like normal couples did – and disappointment that this unexpected company meant she wouldn’t get to fuck Jacques again tonight. The four retired to Jacques’ bedroom for the ritual of lighting the candles and opening the wine. There was nowhere for all of them to sit but on the bed. Francis and Julie were playful and flirtatious, and made a refreshing change from Jacques’ brooding intensity. It turned out that they were not established friends of Jacques’ but a couple he had picked up in a bar. Julie was a source of fascination. Her lips were stained a dark berry colour by the red wine, and Alice found that she wanted to lick it off. To kiss Julie, place her tongue between those damson lips and probe all the corners of her mouth. She was surprised at the strength of the attraction, and wondered if Jacques could read the familiar signs of her arousal – glittering eyes, flushed cheeks and erect nipples, which Alice tried to cover by folding her arms over her chest.

  But when Alice saw Francis and Jacques look to the women, then back at each other, and raise their eyebrows, she suddenly understood that she was not the only one feeling a sexual charge. Before she could think about how to make a move on Julie, Jacques leaned across the bed and kissed Alice as though they were the only two people in the room. Alice was aware of Francis and Julie’s eyes on them as her nipples poked out from beneath her dress and Jacques guided her hand to his fly so that she could feel his burgeoning hard-on.

  Soft sucking sounds and gentle movement from the other side of the bed told her that Francis and Julie were also kissing. While Jacques’ teeth clamped down on to the skin of her shoulder and he began to give her a love bite, she feasted her eyes on the other couple, brown skin on white flesh as they began to move and rise. Barely knowing what she was doing, Alice reached a hand across the bed and her fingers found Julie’s arm. She began to trail her nails up and down the soft skin on the inside of Julie’s elbow. Julie’s sighs grew louder. As if by prior agreement, Jacques and Francis disentangled themselves from their women and sat back on the bed, watching the proceedings unfold. Alice knelt opposite Julie and crawled towards her, while Julie did the same. Alice and Julie crouched opposite each other, tentatively squeezing one another’s tits, Alice delighting in the way Julie’s bulbous breasts squeezed out between her fingers, Julie revelling in Alice’s firm, pointed tits. Their knees bash
ed together and their pussies were touching, smooth lips brushing against silky clits, their liquids mingling.

  Alice was dimly aware of Jacques running to the edge of the room and trailing a camera on her. She played up to it, pulling Julie’s hair so that she fell on to her back and riding her body like a surfer on a board, grinding her clit into the other woman’s soft mound of Venus and spreading her legs so that the camera could see her pink, glistening hole, a hole that was aching for a man even while she wrapped herself around a woman. She could sense Francis and Jacques moving in the background but could only focus on Julie’s body and the camera, the permitted voyeur which made an already intense experience almost unbearably charged.

  The sight of Julie and Alice pleasuring each other was too strong a pull for the men and soon all four bodies came together again. Alice closed her eyes and let the sensations wash over her as Francis’s hard body pressed against Julie’s soft one, and when she felt hands gripping her clit and pulling apart her pussy she kept her eyes closed tightly. The thrilling part was not knowing who was touching her. But there was no mistaking Jacques’ dick, nudging at her lips one minute and then, when she opened her mouth to receive it, teasingly withdrawing and slapping her cheek as her mouth gasped for his length. Then a sudden movement and he was on her, inside her, fucking her while Francis and Julie’s hands caressed her neck, arms, feet, legs. All four of them crawled over each other, hungry mouths biting and licking whatever they could get, drifting in and out of sleep and orgasm.

  Alice did not remember falling asleep, but she woke with a dry mouth and thumping headache. Her body was sore all over, spent by the force of two intense climaxes. She felt the way she used to at school when she had swum a kilometre, or done a long cross-country run. She surveyed the scene. Francis and Julie lay side by side but not touching on the half-bare mattress, their perfect young bodies looking like a pair of brackets facing one another. Jacques remained asleep, exhaustion and deep sleep softening the features which had been twisted into expressions of rapture just a couple of hours ago. He had one arm slung over the pillow. Alice could still see the imprint that her head and body had made on the bedclothes. All of a sudden, what she had done shocked her. She had a sudden clarity of vision, and knew that this must not be allowed to happen again. She wanted more than anything to get out of the room, because she knew that if she stayed, she would wake up and never do anything the rest of her life but remain here and enjoy those sensations again and again and again. It would be so easy to forego the life that she had planned for herself and stay here. But Alice knew that even she and Jacques would not be able to survive on dreams, sex and a waitress’s meagre wages. Better to end the whole thing now and preserve the summer as a perfect memory.

  Self-preservation was the overriding instinct as she picked up her clothes from the four corners of the room and slowly, carefully, silently put them back on. Alice turned her attention towards the video camera. She pressed the eject button. The tape slid noiselessly out of the machine, and Alice held it in her hand, aware of the magnitude of what she was about to do. Bending down, she kissed the sleeping Jacques goodbye for ever, closed the door behind her with the softest of clicks, and ran barefoot down the stairs to her basement room, one finger unhooking the shiny black tape from its reel and pulling at first an inch and then a yard and then what seemed like miles and miles and miles of black ribbon, the magnetic strip that contained the images of four bodies fucking. Alice closed her fist around the tape and crunched it, tore it with her hands as she ran, made it into a ball and wrapped it round and round the now empty cassette. She threw her clothes and the few books she had brought with her into the battered holdall she had arrived with. Without thinking about the lost deposit on her rented room, or the job she was due to give up in a week anyway, she left the building for ever.

  The first train of the day to Paris was leaving in forty minutes. Feeling giddy and mad, Alice bought herself a first-class ticket with the credit card her parents had given her for emergencies and made her way to the platform. Even at this early hour, heatwaves shimmered in the distance and distorted the view. The sun beat down on her bare skin, reviving the smells of last night’s adventures. She bought a bottle of mineral water and locked herself into the tiny station washroom where she gave herself an impromptu shower, pouring two litres of volcanically filtered water over her head and running the tiny bar of soap between her legs and under her arms.

  Her cleansed body was a metaphor for the life she intended to live from now on: fresh, focused, in control. A tiny voice in her head was screaming at her to turn back before it was too late. She let ambition and excitement about her career drown it out.

  Alice’s first-class seat faced in the direction of travel as the train pulled out of the station. Forward, not back, thought Alice. From now on, I only look forward.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALICE DECIDED TO treat herself to a glass of champagne and a plate of oysters to celebrate her escape and, delving into her bag, found a drama textbook she had been meaning to study all summer but had not opened. She had an amazing experience under her belt; now it was simply a question of learning the discipline of acting. As she sipped the cool, dry, crisp champagne, Alice silently toasted her future career. It would be hard-going without sex for a few months but men needed to slide down her list of priorities for a while. It was time to concentrate on herself.

  At the end of the meal she was surprised to find her bill had been settled. She looked around the carriage, wondering who could have been so generous. She hoped that it was the distinguished-looking gentleman in the crisp suit and the open-necked shirt, nursing a glass of red wine and sneaking glances at Alice over the top of his copy of Le Figaro. His sandy hair, broad muscular build and light tan could not have been more different from Jacques’ wiry, intense sexuality, and there was something solid and appealing about his good looks. And he was immaculately dressed and groomed; his French polish made a refreshing change to Jacques’ scruffy bohemian air. Alice raised one quizzical eyebrow in his direction.

  ‘Do I have you to thank for my meal?’ she asked him.

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive me,’ he said, and his voice was smooth and fruity, like the wine he drank. ‘I saw a beautiful woman reading a book about the theatre, and I always like to help the struggling actress in any way I can.’

  ‘I’m not even struggling yet,’ said Alice. ‘I start drama school in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Your voice is very charming,’ he said wistfully. ‘I could listen to you for hours. Why don’t you join me at my table?’

  Alice was pleased to slide into the plush red seat and examine her new friend across the polished walnut table. Up close, Alice could see that he was slightly older than she had first thought — in his mid- to late-thirties – and she welcomed his confidence and his dry sense of humour. As the French countryside rolled by, the man asked her with great interest about her prospective career, the course she was taking, and the kind of work she wanted to do as an actress. Alice almost felt as though she were being interviewed for a job. He kept the conversation professional but Alice couldn’t help wondering what the pinstriped material of his trousers concealed. She thought she saw a promising bulge nestled against the top of his right thigh. She thought of Jacques’ dick, and the idea of living without it caused an anguished pang between her legs. She felt her nipples stiffen and folded her arms, trying to disguise her arousal, but she only succeeded in pushing her breasts closer together and emphasising her cleavage. The man opposite her was too much of a gentleman to leer, but she noticed him shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  As the train pulled into Paris, Alice explained that she would be going home to her parents now to collect her things but that she would be back in Paris to move into her new flat in about ten days.

  ‘Have you any friends in the city?’ said her new companion. Alice shook her head. ‘Well, then,’ he went on, effortlessly hauling a heavy leather suitcase down from the overhead rac
k, his shirt sleeve tightening over a bulging bicep, ‘I would very much like to take you to dinner and get to know you a little better.’ Then he gave a surprised laugh. ‘This is ridiculous; we don’t even know each other’s names.’

  ‘It’s Alice. Alice Hill.’

  ‘Alice Hill,’ he said, fishing in his suit trouser pocket for a card and a Mont Blanc fountain pen. He offered the card to her, blank side up, and Alice wrote her full name and her mother’s telephone number on the back of it. ‘If something terrible happens to me and I lose your number, here is another card so you know where to find me.’ He handed it to Alice. When she read the name, she let out an involuntary gasp. For she had spent the last six hours in conversation with Pierre Daumier, arthouse film director and winner of the Palm D’Or at the previous year’s Cannes Film Festival. Alice had seen every one of his films and admired him hugely.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t recognise you,’ said Alice. ‘I feel rather foolish.’

  ‘There’s no reason why you would,’ said Pierre. ‘Not if I’m doing my job properly. After all, my place is behind the camera. It’s beautiful girls like you who should be in front of it.’ Alice liked the way his smile showed up the fine lines around his eyes. His friendliness and authority was refreshing after Jacques’ tortured-artist act.

  Alice and Pierre said goodbye on the station concourse with a single kiss on either cheek. When his lips touched her skin, there was none of the sizzling electricity that had characterised the first flesh-on-flesh contact with Jacques. But perhaps that’s a good thing, thought Alice. After all, I couldn’t have gone through life a slave to my passions. It could be a good thing for me.

  Over the next year, Pierre Daumier proved to be a very good thing indeed for Alice Hill. True to his word, he called her in London two days after their meeting on the train and arranged to take her out to dinner at La Coupole on her first night in Paris.