The Apprentice Read online

  He nods, and I understand that he has understood, that he knows I would do anything to have him, fully, and that includes sharing him with Anne. If the only way she will concede him to me is piecemeal, then so be it. I’m prepared for that sacrifice.

  The alcohol is working its magic, making me brazen, for I feel a tingling sensation through my veins, through my whole body, and I hear myself say, ‘Where’s your bedroom then?’

  James jerks his chin over towards a spiral staircase in the corner, half-obscured by a tall and leafy pot plant. I stand up, dizzy with the feeling that suddenly it is me who is leading events, who has taken up the reins. There’s a power in it, but also a kind of panic. Panic at having to keep up the role now that I have assumed it.

  I stride across the room towards the staircase, forcing purposiveness and resolve into my movements, despite the jelly-like feel of my legs. James is following me. I reach the staircase and start to climb, and about halfway up I turn my head and survey the scene below.

  Anne is still sitting in the chair, sipping her cognac. She seems completely unmoved by the fact that we are leaving her, seems not to have even registered it, although I know that it can’t have escaped her attention. Above all, she is showing no signs of intending to follow us. Maybe, I think, and dare to hope, this time she is satisfied by her comfy armchair and her expensive drink.

  Reaching the top of the staircase, I find myself in front of a set of double doors that are already open on to a circular room, which I realise must be set in a little turret. The bed, circular too, must have been commissioned to fit the space. It’s a stunning room with a domed ceiling and windows all around – a sort of eyrie from which one can survey both the street and the communal gardens behind. The sky has darkened considerably now, and the streetlights are flickering into life on one side of the turret. On the other, the trees waving their branches in the wind are mere shadowy presences.

  I turn towards James, who has followed me up the stairs. As I do so, I lower myself to a seating position on the bed. Beneath my hands I can feel the finest linen. James certainly hasn’t skimped when it comes to his living arrangements. I look around again and notice that there is nothing else in this room beyond the bed.

  ‘Is this your room?’ I ask.

  He nods.

  ‘Then where –?’

  He interrupts me. ‘There’s a dressing room downstairs, beside the bathroom, with wardrobes and so on. It doubles as a guest room too.’

  ‘Will Anne –?’ I begin, but again I am interrupted, this time by a gesture – that of James holding up one finger against his lips. Then, as if relenting, or perhaps reacting to the expression on my face, he glances back over his shoulder and speaks.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ he says, in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘I do know, but …’

  I’m not sure how to go on. But I don’t want Anne to be involved, is what I was most probably going to say, but I’m scared that, if I say it, this whole thing will be called off, abruptly and without any chance of reprieve. Anne, it seems to me, is my only conduit to James and, if I demand her exclusion, I’m scared there’ll be no way back to him.

  Already James has moved closer to me, is easing me gently down onto the bed with his hands. Large and firm on my shoulders, they bolster me. I’m convinced he means me no harm, emotionally. Similarly, the look in his eyes is a guarantee of his sincerity. He wants me, as I want him, no matter at whose instigation this situation has come about.

  I lie back, unfurl myself against the bed, luxuriously. Throwing my head back into the pillows, eyes closed, I submit myself to the caress of James’s mouth as he peppers the tender flesh of my neck and throat with his lips. Moving around, he nibbles at my ear lobes, roots around my shoulders. All the while his hands are busy with my shirt, unbuttoning, shifting it off me and out from under me, before turning their attention to my bra – reaching round and expertly unclasping it to let my breasts spring free.

  Coming up onto his knees from where he has been bent over me, James strips off his jacket and shirt quickly, throws them to the floor. The way in which he does so – casually, flippantly, as if they were cheap rags and not the finest garments money can buy – turns me on. He undoes his jeans, but doesn’t pull them down, rushing to grab his cock out of his boxers. He’s in a hurry for me, as I am for him. I tear off my blouse and bra, then reach down, pull my skirt up and start struggling to push my knickers down, wanting him to enter me quickly, before Anne can intervene. He helps me, pulling them down from my lower thighs and off over my legs, throwing them aside as he did his own clothes. They land on top of his. Crowning, in all their polka-dotted glory, his sober coloured attire, they provide a stark illustration of how far apart we are, James and I. And yet we burn so hard for each other, across the decades that separate us.

  I would love, I think as I reach for him, to know the story of James’s life, his erotic biography. Maybe one day he will tell me. Perhaps one day, when all this is over, we will be friends.

  These are the thoughts that tumble through my mind as I raise my knees and open myself to him, guiding his prick towards me with one hand. Already growing frenzied, I have the other hand on my sex, two fingers jiggling my clit. Although the last thing I want to do is attract Anne’s attention, I can’t stop the low moans that are escaping from my throat. I don’t remember ever feeling this fired up with Nathaniel, though I’m sure it must have been like this in the early days. Or perhaps not – perhaps I need this feeling of transgression, afforded by James being so much older than me, being practically old enough to be my grandfather, to get really hot. Nate and I were soul-mates, and perhaps for that very reason unable to achieve the true excitement that difference brings. I’m not sure now that he ever held any real mystery for me. I never missed that, having never known it. But suddenly mystery seems very desirable.

  I pause before guiding James inside me and, opening my eyes, I find that he is looking into my face as if questioning me. He seems to be wondering what I am thinking, and I hope that I am mysterious to him. It strikes me that he might never have had a woman as young as me, or not since he was young himself. Perhaps this is all as new to him as it is to me. The sense of being on the threshold of a discovery is palpable.

  Yet while all of this has been winding its way through my thoughts, I’ve become aware, just as I suddenly knew in the pub, that Anne has grown near. I haven’t heard her catlike creep up the stairs, but then I have been moaning in spite of myself, and the rustle of the leaves against the windows has been echoed by that of the crisp linen sheets on the bed.

  I turn my head away from James’s gaze and look towards her in the doorway, but, to my astonishment, without any real disappointment. There’s an inevitability to it all that precludes that.

  Anne returns my stare dispassionately, almost as if her mind is elsewhere, as if she’s here physically but not mentally. I wonder what thoughts are ticking through her mind, what images flutter there. For it’s obvious that this is something complicated for Anne, something beyond mere lechery and voyeurism. This, after all, is the author of such multilayered and emotionally complex novels as Night Moves and Inside the Doll’s House. Nothing is ever simple for the characters in Anne’s fiction, especially when it comes to sex, and I can’t imagine it can be for her.

  James, meanwhile, hasn’t questioned why I’ve stopped, why my attention has been diverted away from him, from which I deduce that this is no surprise for him either. How could it be otherwise, when Anne accompanied us home? This thing, whatever it is, is not a thing between James and me, but a thing between James and Anne, first and foremost. It is me who has been blind to that, thinking that I could have him to myself, if I hung on in there long enough. I thought that Anne was instrumental in all this, but she’s more than that – she’s integral. Without her there would be nothing.

  James is still staring at my face, but I don’t look back at him. I can’t. I don’
t want him to see my humiliation at having let myself be carried away on this wave of desire and longing and falsity. But more than that, I’m riveted by Anne and the whole issue of what she’s going to do next, now that she’s entered the scene that she’s set, like an author walking into one of her own books and subverting the plot. Is she finally going to let down her guard and join in? Am I going to see my literary heroine naked, and even get it on with her? I’m terrified and freaked out by the possibility.

  Anne steps forwards, and for a moment it’s almost as if she’s in some kind of trance. But then she seems to come to life again, and it’s at this point that I notice that she has something under one arm, some kind of leather valise, chestnut brown and glossy in the low light. Pulling it out, she steps towards the bed and lays it down next to us, without looking at us. For a minute or two she merely regards it, and it strikes me there’s a certain wistfulness or even sadness in those ice-blue eyes. I probe them with my own, but like the sea they seem both limitless and opaque, resistant to my questioning. Anne has a past, I think, that I will never fathom. Ditto James. What has brought them both to this point will never be entirely clear to me.

  James is still kneeling over me, his prick still enclosed in my fist. Although my mind has wandered from him, the tension of the moment has kept my grasp on him firm. I finally manage to look back into his face. He’s observing Anne now and, though his body is rigid, his expression tells me that he, at least, knows what is about to happen, or at least its essential flavour. He’s not in the dark like me. I look back at Anne.

  With a surgeon’s careful movements and precision, she unzips the case and folds back the lid. I gasp. Displayed inside is a panoply of the most exotic and refined sexual toys that I have ever seen. Not that I’m an expert in the field, an aficionado. To date my experience has been limited to a straightforward vibrator that Nate bought for me, to ‘keep me company’ when he was away. I used it, but not that often. He was keen for me to try it on him too, but we never got around to it. I guess we were both a little embarrassed. Funny how shy you can be with someone you think you know so well yet how uninhibited with total strangers.

  Anne clears her throat, as if calling my attention back to the present. Inside her box of tricks, I see one object that looks like it must be used for spanking, and another that resembles a riding crop. There are also some black leather wrist cuffs, and a gold moulded mask, again in what looks like leather. But it’s the exquisite polished-wood dildo that has most caught my eye. At its sculpted tip it resembles the bulb of a penis in slightly elongated form, then it thickens a little towards the centre, dips in like a corseted waist and finishes in a ripple of three bulges at the base. Its combination of ridges and ultra-smoothness have me longing to try it out.

  From beside it, Anne takes out a small, square brown bottle of what I take to be lube. She removes the top, slowly, and the air fills with the scent of honey. I swallow drily, eager for things to get moving again, in whatever form she decrees.

  She holds the bottle up and tilts it, and, as she watches the slow drip-drip of the mellifluous liquid, it’s as if she’s relishing making me wait, in having this power over me. Or am I just being paranoid?

  James’s eyes are following Anne’s movements, a half-smile creasing the bottom half of his face, mischief firing up in his eyes.

  ‘Looks like somebody’s paid a visit to our secret place,’ he mutters at last, and he sounds hoarse with desire. His words rent the air; it’s as if a curtain has been torn, revealing a new world behind it.

  Anne smiles too, in her restrained, almost secretive fashion. ‘Calla Lily,’ she replies, her voice as hushed as if she were in a church service. And indeed, there’s a sort of reverence to the atmosphere now, an air of holy ritual. A transcendence of the ordinary.

  ‘But no,’ she continues, still smiling to herself, not looking at James. ‘I didn’t have a chance to go,’ she said. ‘Not this time. So I ordered online.’

  The image conjured up is almost comical: one of Anne, this great if under-appreciated novelist, sitting up in her study, supposedly writing great works of literature but instead getting all warm and moist as she browses designer sex toys, clicks on a few of her favourites and then feeds in her credit card details. I think of her awaiting the postman with particular excitement, and of the frisson she must feel as she opens the door and takes from him a package that, this time at least, contains something a little naughtier than the usual stack of new novels to review.

  The dripping stops, and time seems to stand still. I look up at James to find him gazing at Anne, a little like an obedient dog awaiting an order from its master. There’s a kind of devotion in his eyes, and a submissiveness, that makes me wonder anew at where he’s coming from in all this, what lies beneath it all. What is his erotic history, and is he even conscious of his motives and desires or does it all lie far beneath the surface, impervious to attempts at excavation?

  Anne nods, but, as she does, her eyes turn from James to me, it’s me that she’s looking at as she greases the dildo, running her elegant fingers, finished in a chic French polish, slowly up and down it. It’s too much, and I have to look away.

  Then she holds a hand out to James and he takes the implement silently. He turns to me, makes as if to bring it towards my pussy where I still lie beneath him, legs parted, nearly forgetting myself in all this drama and expectation.

  ‘No!’ says Anne imperiously, and we both look towards her. She’s standing by the bed as before, looking down on us.

  ‘Then … ?’ prompts James.

  ‘Turn her over,’ she says curtly, and I shudder at the robotic aspect to her voice. Again, I think, it’s as if she’s in a trance, been taken over by another power. I think of watching the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and how I got the creeps every time one of the characters realised a partner or a friend wasn’t the same person as before.

  But Anne hasn’t been taken over by alien life forms. Anne is acting according to some all-consuming inner need, some kink in her that gets off on watching, on controlling proceedings without actually taking part. I’m the first to admit that, lacking in worldly wisdom as I am, I don’t know whether this is a rare thing or not. I’m aware of the existence of dominatrices, dungeons and so on, and of the need in some people to control and in others to submit, but this is my first experience of someone who seems to get off on that kind of behaviour, and I am struggling to understand.

  James is quick to obey her, sliding one arm under my lower back, wrapping it around me and then levering me over. My skirt flips back down as he rolls me, and he whips it up to expose my bare rump. I close my eyes, my throat dry with apprehension and desire, my heart pounding with sudden violence.

  I start, as if electrocuted, when I first feel the caress of the oiled wood against my tail bone. Then I let out a rending, long-drawn-out moan as the implement is pulled down between my arse cheeks, tracing a vertical line over my sphincter and over my perineum to my pussy, where it stops to tease and tantalise.

  ‘Aaarrrgh’ is all I can manage, desperate now to be filled by this beautiful dildo. But James is hesitating. I look over my shoulder, ready to plead with him to go on, to beg and to abase myself if necessary. He’s oblivious to me though: his eyes are locked with Anne’s. Again I get the sense of some sort of coded message passing between them, or rather from Anne to him. James, I see, is unable to really act until Anne accords him her permission.

  And at last, after what seems like interminable minutes, she nods brusquely again, and then the dildo seems to tremble at my hole before pushing slowly inside. I raise my rump higher as my muscles inside clench around the magnificent toy, welcoming it, ensuring that it can’t be withdrawn – not now it’s finally inside me.

  It feels, as James starts to push it in and out, gently at first and then with increasing speed and force … it feels … Words, which I have always thought of as my strongpoint, start to fail me. The only thing I can think of as it works its magic again
st my inner walls is the word ‘heaven’. This is what it must feel like to go there.

  As James creates a rhythm, I try to fall in with it, pushing back on the dildo to meet it, creating a kind of rapturous unison. Although I can already feel it building up, I fight to delay my orgasm. I want it so bad, and I know that were I to lay a finger or two on my clit I’d explode, go off my head with joy. But I’ve waited for James to be inside me for so long, in one form or another, that I don’t want to come and bring this to an end.

  James’s free hand is on one of my upturned buttocks, his fingers digging into my flesh, driving me bananas. His thumb is creeping ever closer to my arsehole, encroaching on the milky flesh between my cheeks, and I wonder if he’ll dare enter me with it – whether that is on Anne’s agenda or whether he’ll be thwarted again, called away at the last minute, like a dog that’s gone after an illicit bone. I realise that that’s the second time I’ve thought of James as a dog at Anne’s beck and call, and for a moment I feel a curious mixture of pity and disdain. Pity at the fact that he feels compelled to obey her orders and disdain at his allowing himself to be controlled like some kind of puppet – or puppy.

  That, in turn, makes me wonder what he really thinks of me. He’s been nothing to date, if not kindly and respectful. He even gave me the chance, this evening, to let myself off the hook if I wasn’t happy with the way things were going. A chance I didn’t take. I wonder if he feels pity for me too, or disdain. Or whether he understands the reasons that keep me here when I barely even intimate them myself.

  His thumb pad is against my sphincter now, pressing, pressing, and I’m growing delirious with need. I push back against him, accepting, even inviting him in. I’ve never had anal sex before, although Nate tried once. I just couldn’t relax. Now – perhaps aided by the cognac – I am more than willing. My pussy and arse are tingling with want.