Eighty Days Yellow Page 16

  The room featured nothing else, as if Dominik had deliberately emptied it of furniture or anything that might prove a distraction.

  She had been asked to report at 10 p.m. This was to be an evening performance. Her first at such a late hour of the day, as all their previous encounters, as part of the unwritten contract between them, had taken place during the course of the day or in the early evening.

  Dominik had greeted her at the door and given her a casual peck on the cheek. As ever, his features were inscrutable, and Summer knew she would not get any answers out of him, so she remained silent. He escorted her up the stairs and opened the door that led to the topmost level of the house.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  Summer settled her violin case on the wooden floor.

  ‘Now?’ she asked Dominik.

  ‘Yes, now,’ he nodded.

  She was dying to ask who would be in attendance in addition to him, but thought better of it. Pangs of arousal were beginning to swirl inside her at the thought of the audience who would witness her recital, her service, spying on her every movement and gesture.

  She undressed. She’d come to Dominik’s wearing a pair of old jeans and a tight white T-shirt. He had told her there was no need to dress up today. Neither stockings nor high heels, he had indicated. She was to be totally nude. He appeared to enjoy the subtle variations of dress and undress in the continuing process of her ongoing exhibitions, the way he orchestrated her successive performances like a madcap, if thoughtful conductor.

  She swiftly shed her few clothes and stood there naked, facing him. For a brief moment, she wished he would just take her right there and then, on all fours on the wooden floor, but she realised this was not his intention today, or at least not before she had conjured up the music that made him so lustful. Once again, they had agreed beforehand on the piece she would be playing: the solo from the final movement of the Max Bruch violin concerto.

  His eyes kept on X-raying her. The room was warm; dying embers of sunlight filtered through the skylights.

  ‘Is that a new lipstick?’ he queried, glancing at her lips. He was observant. She normally switched lipsticks depending on the time of day, moving to a darker shade of red when night came. She’d been doing this for years. It made her feel the transition between her day and night self so much more acutely.

  ‘Not quite new,’ she answered. ‘I tend to wear a darker, warmer shade of lipstick for evenings,’ Summer replied.

  ‘How interesting,’ he remarked, appearing uncommonly thoughtful. Then, ‘Do you have the lipstick with you?’

  ‘I have both, of course,’ Summer said, indicating her small handbag, which lay on the floor next to her discarded jeans and T-shirt.

  Dominik walked over, opened the handbag and retrieved the two tubes she kept there and looked closely at them, assessing the respective shades.

  ‘Night and day,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Summer confirmed.

  He jettisoned one of the tubes, took the other between his thumbs and twisted it, causing the dark, waxy, finger-shaped lipstick to emerge from its plastic casing. He’d gone for the night colour.

  ‘Come here,’ he ordered.

  Summer obeyed, unsure of what he might have in mind.

  ‘Straighten your back,’ he said.

  Summer did so, thrusting her breasts ever so slightly forward in the process.

  Dominik approached her, his lipstick-wielding hand moving to her nipples, where he carefully began painting her hardening tips. Summer gulped. One nipple. Two nipples.

  Painted. Decorated. Enhanced. She looked down. It made her look so brazen. She smiled, admiring the perversity of his imagination.

  But he wasn’t finished.

  He took a step back, looked Summer in the eyes and said, ‘Open your legs wide,’ and got down on one knee, still wielding the lipstick tube. Following her gaze, he ordered her to look straight ahead, not down.

  She felt his finger separating her labia, inserting itself inside her moistness, pinching each lip in turn and holding it while his other hand began drawing the lipstick vertically along her cunt and then across both cunt lips.

  Summer felt a tremor race through her whole body, and for a moment her parted legs felt wobbly. She could only imagine what she looked like right now.

  Dominik rose.

  She had now been made up for her coming performance.

  ‘Painted like the Great Whore of Babylon,’ Dominik remarked. ‘Adorned. Perfect.’

  Still shocked by what had just happened, Summer was struggling for words.

  Dominik pulled a piece of black cloth from one of his trouser pockets and fastened the blindfold round her head and Summer was plunged into darkness.

  ‘I won’t know who is present?’ she protested feebly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Whether it’s just one person or more?’

  ‘That’s for you to guess and for me to know,’ Dominik answered.

  Another variation in the ritual.

  As the implications of the situation crowded her mind, Summer drew her breath.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ Dominik said. ‘You may rehearse if you wish. I will be back with my guest . . . or guests . . .’ She noted the deliberate touch of irony in his voice. ‘When I return in a quarter of an hour or so, I will not be alone. I will knock on the door three times and then enter. Then you will play for us. Do you understand the rules fully?’

  Summer signified her agreement.

  Dominik left the room.

  She picked up the violin and began her tuning exercises.

  Dominik had asked Victor to leave his shoes downstairs, so when they entered the top-room floor, Summer was unable from the soft shuffle of socks on wood to analyse the sound with any degree of precision that might betray the number of visitors.

  Seeing Summer standing in all her glory, violin in hand, her parts artificially enhanced by the scarlet shade of the lipstick, Victor beamed from ear to ear and turned to Dominik as if to congratulate him. He knew he was not allowed to speak.

  Ever since he had assisted Dominik in recruiting Lauralynn’s short-manned string quartet, he had been pestering him for information about what specifically he had been organising. Dominik also suspected that Victor had more than a passing acquaintance with Lauralynn, and that they were in each other’s pockets. Victor had always been a shady presence on the campus and in Dominik’s academic social life. He had maddeningly complicated Eastern European roots that mischievously seemed to vary according to whomever he was telling his story to. He was a guest lecturer in philosophy and a music aficionado of note, who moved between universities like a low-flying pundit and seldom lingered in one place very long, gratifying the amphitheatres with cunning brilliance, rehearsed gusto and abstruse theories he somehow always managed to get into print in rarefied publications. Victor was of average height, with salt-and-pepper hair and a short Mephistophelean beard, which he trimmed with maniac precision.

  Dominik was not one who listened to much gossip, but he knew the rumours surrounding Victor were plentiful, and often wonderfully spurious. He was the man to go to when it came to intrigue and matters libertine, with, supposedly, a seraglio of student affairs on his personal résumé. A head of department had once tut-tutted and hinted that there were certain extra-curricular duties automatically involved should any postgraduate researcher of the female kind want Victor to supervise a thesis. Indeed, very few students who were not pretty were ever taken on board by him, it had been noticed.

  For some time now, Victor had been wheedling Dominik for information about his ‘project’, as he put it, and Dominik had finally given in and admitted to Summer’s existence and how the game he was playing with her had been developing, even if he kept some of the more intimate details back.

  ‘I must see her,’ Victor had said. ‘I absolutely must.’

  ‘She is quite fascinating, I agree,’ Dominik had replied. ‘Maybe . . .’

  ‘Not maybe, my dear
boy. You just have to allow me. If only once. Surely she would consent?’

  ‘Well, she has consented to everything so far, or at any rate tolerated the strange detours this is taking,’ Dominik admitted to Victor.

  ‘Just as a spectator, you understand. Although not a disinterested one, naturally. Isn’t there a voyeur in all of us?’

  ‘I know,’ Dominik said.

  ‘Will you ask her. Please?’

  ‘Sometimes her consent is not actually expressed in words. I assume it. Or it’s in the eyes, the way she moves.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Victor said. ‘So would you, Dominik? I’m so fascinated by the object of your experiment.’

  ‘My experiment?’

  ‘Isn’t that what it is?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is when you put it that way.’

  ‘Good. So we understand each other, no?’

  ‘You watch her play, that’s all, understood?’

  ‘Absolutely, my dear boy, absolutely.’

  Victor distractedly fingered his short beard in a desultory fashion at regular intervals while Summer played. Her dark-red nipples were like targets bathed in the thin moonlight racing down through the square skylights, surrounding her with an uncanny halo that seemed to reverberate to the sounds of the music as the melody unfurled, journeying through its intricate avenues and side roads before reaching the perfection of its final destination.

  Her fingers were on the fret board and the smooth movement of the bow across the taut strings was like a surfer riding a wave. The music coursed through her body at a subcutaneous level, transporting her, and the men watched in soundless communion despite the music that enveloped the room; she knowing she was being watched; them gazing at her and feasting on her physical charms and vulnerability. As to who was in control, that was another matter altogether.

  Standing next to Victor, Dominik could hear the other man’s breath rise and fall, and realised Victor was as much transfixed as he was. Summer naked had this effect, her back so terribly straight it felt as if she was wantonly presenting herself for use, or examination, for ravaging. A mad thought flashed through his mind. Surely not? Or . . . maybe? He bit his tongue.

  With a superfluous flourish of self-satisfaction, Summer came to the end of the piece. The spell broken, Victor was about to applaud, but Dominik gestured quickly to halt his movement and brought his fingers to his lips to indicate that silence was still the order of the day. Summer must not know who or how many were present.

  Victor and Dominik exchanged glances. Dominik felt as if Victor was encouraging him. Or was it his imagination? Summer was waiting, holding the Bailly by her side, proudly nude. His eyes fell to her midriff, then lower. He perceived her slit behind the thin curtain of her sparse curls in the dim light now illuminating the room.

  He took a couple of steps forward, took the violin from Summer’s hand and gently set it on the ground behind him where it would not be harmed.

  ‘I want you,’ he said. ‘You make me want you, Summer,’ he continued.

  She was still blindfolded, so he could read no response in her eyes. His hand settled on her breast. The nipple was hard as rock. This was answer enough for him.

  He neared his mouth and whispered in her ear, ‘I want to take you right now, right here.’

  There was the hint of a nod, although he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘And there will be someone else watching . . .’

  Her chest heaved as she took a deep breath. He felt her shiver for a second.

  His left hand alighted on her shoulder, applying gentle pressure.

  ‘On your knees, on all fours.’

  And then he fucked her.

  Victor watched in total silence, fascinated by the spectacle of Dominik’s thick cock as it slid in and out of Summer’s opening, parting her lips with implacable force, pistoning into her depths. Observing the rise and fall of her breath as she was taken, the delicate sway of her breasts as they balanced below her, moved by the regular forward motion of Dominik’s body against hers, the slap of his balls against her lower arse.

  Victor wiped his forehead and briefly touched himself through the material of his green corduroy trousers.

  From the corner of his eye, as he kept on working himself in and out of Summer, Dominik could see how excited his colleague was, noticed him grinning wildly at him but was soon distracted once again by the way her anal opening widened under the impact of his cock inside her, like a wave taking its point of origin at the heart of her vagina and moving outwards in concentric circles, animating first her arsehole and then the rest of her body, giving life to the whole surface of her skin as the pleasure crest travelled across her.

  The rear hole yawned microscopically and Dominik could not help thinking to himself that he would one day wish to fuck her there. As he did this, he missed Victor’s prompt movement as the philosophy professor positioned himself ahead of him, by Summer’s bowed face. For an instant, Dominik imagined Victor was about to get his own cock out and force it into Summer’s mouth, the classic ‘spit roast’, as he knew it was called in more vulgar circles, and was about to protest, but all Victor did was take a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and, with terrible kindness, wiped the sweat away from Summer’s forehead, gifting Dominik with a beatific smile as he did so.

  Realising it wasn’t Dominik who was touching her there, albeit with gentleness, Summer seized up for a second and he felt her cunt muscles grip his cock with undue vigour. Thoughts racing through his brain with impossibilities, improprieties and memories galore, Dominik reflected frantically that he had once read – was it in the Marquis de Sade? – that when women died in the throes of sex, their vaginal muscles froze and a man’s cock could remain stuck there, embedded like a vice, or was it in other pornographic tales involving women and K9s, as the Craigslist personal ads less than euphemistically spelled it out? The shocking reminder struck him like a bolt of lightning and he came, violently, almost disgusted by his own thoughts.

  When he looked up again, Victor had left the room. Beneath him, Summer seemed to be gasping for breath.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked solicitously, pulling out of her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said haltingly.

  She collapsed full length onto the wooden floor, as spent as he was in her own way.

  ‘Did it turn you on to know we were being watched?’ Dominik asked.

  She undid her blindfold and turned her face to him. She was flushed.

  ‘Terribly,’ she confessed, and lowered her eyes.

  Dominik now knew how her mind worked, how her body responded to the gaze of a voyeur, but she was still uncertain where he would take her next.

  It was half-term at the university and Dominik had long ago agreed to attend a conference overseas at which he was one of several keynote speakers and had arranged to take time off in the foreign city following his official talk.

  When Summer had asked him when they might meet next, he had informed her of his forthcoming absence. The disappointment was visible on her face. They were in his kitchen on the ground floor having some toast and butter following the top-room fuck. Summer had slipped her T-shirt back on, still obscenely leaking, and at Dominik’s request had not slipped her jeans back on and was sitting bottomless on the metal chair at the granite kitchen top, where he had laid out the plates and glasses of grapefruit juice.

  She felt highly conscious of her state of undress as the criss-cross pattern of the seat’s slats cut into her bum. No doubt he would witness another set of provisional marks latticed across her arse when she next stood up, and he would visibly enjoy that spectacle when she finally had to walk upstairs again to retrieve her jeans, with Dominik behind her in a perfect line of vision.

  Dominik was once again his distant self and seemingly unable to address any subject of importance, let alone comment on what he wanted out of her in the long run. Summer, however, was pragmatic and happy to go with the flow. He would explain when he thought the time was right, she expected.
For now, he restricted himself to small talk. She wanted so much to ask him about himself, his past, in an attempt to ‘read’ him, understand this curious man better, but maybe this reserve, this distance, were an integral part of the game. On one hand, she felt enormously attracted to him, while on the other, there was something of the night in Dominik, a darkness that she craved but that scared her at the same time. It seemed every step in this relationship of sorts was a sly progression in some journey to a place she couldn’t yet conceive.

  ‘Have you ever been to Rome?’ he asked her idly.

  ‘No,’ Summer replied. ‘There are so many places in Europe I still haven’t visited. When I came to Europe from New Zealand, I swore I would take full advantage and travel all over the place, but money has always been short, so it has seldom arisen. I once went to Paris for a week with a small rock band I sometimes play fiddle with, but that’s all.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘It was wonderful. The food was exquisite, the museums tremendous, the atmosphere electric, but because I was playing with people I’d previously not been involved with a lot – I was a last-minute replacement – I spent a lot of time rehearsing, so I didn’t have a chance to visit all the places I’d hoped to. I’ve sworn to myself that I will go back again and see and do more. One day. Do Paris properly.’

  ‘I understand Paris has a thriving private-club scene.’

  ‘Fetish clubs?’ Summer queried.

  ‘Not quite,’ Dominik replied. ‘They call them clubs échangistes, which translates as “swing clubs”. Almost anything goes.’

  ‘Have you ever been to one?’

  ‘No. I’ve never had the right person to take.’

  Was this a covert invitation? she wondered.

  ‘There is a notorious one called Les Chandelles, the Candles. It’s terribly elegant, nothing sordid about it,’ he emphasised with a faint smile.

  Then he dropped the subject.

  Infuriating man. Just when she was full of further questions. Was he thinking of taking her there and ordering her to perform? Music only? Or also to be sexually displayed? Mounted in public maybe? Even by others? Summer’s imagination was frantically racing ahead.