Asking For Trouble Read online

  Or she’d want to know what he did and I’d have to say, ‘I’ve no idea. I just know he’s got a mobile phone and his hours aren’t nine till five. But that’s no big deal, is it? How many people do you know who’ve got a proper job? Not many.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Clare would say, ‘but how come you don’t actually know what he does?’

  And I’d have to say, ‘Well, he doesn’t really open up much about that kind of thing.’

  ‘Well, what’s he into?’ she would say. ‘What makes him tick?’

  ‘Sex,’ I’d have to say. ‘Good, dirty sex.’

  ‘But there’s got to be something else.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t. Not that I know of.’

  So I told Clare nothing. I paid for breakfast and we trundled off in separate directions.

  I decided to drop by at Ilya’s before going home to recover in a darkened room. I wasn’t sure if he’d be in but his flat wasn’t exactly out of my way. May as well try.

  I didn’t think much about it. I wasn’t about to put demands on his time or his body. I just wanted to collect my watch and Jenny’s boa, then go.

  And when I reached the big stone steps, and another tenant was just leaving the house, I simply said ‘Cheers’ when he held the communal door open for me.

  Would’ve been polite to buzz and announce myself, I thought, as I made my way up the brown-carpeted staircase. But what the hell: he was probably going to be out anyway. I could leave a note.

  At Ilya’s flat I heard movement – just footsteps passing in the hall behind his door. Good, I thought, he’s in.

  I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again, louder.

  ‘Ilya,’ I called. ‘It’s Beth.’

  There was complete silence.

  ‘I’ve just come to collect my things,’ I said through the wood. ‘I’m not stopping. And I know you’re in.’

  After a lengthy pause, Ilya opened the door a wary fraction, his foot wedged behind it. He looked slightly flustered. I caught a glimpse of his fingers: they were covered in white powder. There was some white powder on his jeans, too.

  ‘I left my watch here,’ I began.

  ‘You can’t come in,’ said Ilya. ‘Sorry. I’m busy.’

  ‘I don’t need to come in,’ I said. ‘I just want –’

  ‘Beth,’ he replied, obviously trying to be patient. ‘You’ve called at a bad time. Now go on. Beat it. Go and sleep off your hangover or something. You look like you need to.’

  And he just closed the door, giving me another glimpse of those white-powdered fingers.

  I couldn’t sleep. My mind was in a whirl.

  White powder, I thought. Therefore drugs. But I knew enough about smack and coke to be pretty certain that you didn’t go coating your fingers in the stuff and spilling it down your jeans: expensive mistake.

  So maybe he was cutting something pure with crushed paracetamol or baking soda or whatever. Baking soda, I thought. Now isn’t that how you make crack cocaine? You play around with powders, potions and microwaves, then hey presto – you’ve got yourself a pretty nasty drug. Was Ilya running a little pharmaceuticals industry?

  Oh God, maybe I was having a weird fling with a seriously hard drugs dealer. He looked East European, though he seemed as British as the next person. So maybe he had connections abroad – bad connections with bad people who sold bad drugs.

  But it didn’t fit; there’d have to be more dubious characters hanging around him.

  Maybe I was still a bit drunk and once again my imagination was working overtime. Yeah, probably that. Just a dormant shot of tequila waking up to say hello.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Beth. What’s my favourite whore up to right now?’

  ‘I’m on holiday. I’m flat on my back on the living-room floor, lying in a sunbeam, listening to Galaxie 500 and talking to you on the phone. In fact, if you stand by your window and I lift my leg up, you might be able to see my foot. Can you?’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ said Ilya. ‘No, nothing. Ah, saw something move then. Anyway, you don’t sound busy, so I’ve got something for you.’

  ‘My watch,’ I replied. ‘Have you found it?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve got something else.’

  ‘A purple feather boa.’

  ‘Better than that.’

  ‘Hmm. Let me see,’ I teased. ‘Couldn’t possibly be a raging hard-on, could it?’

  ‘Got it in three.’

  ‘Well, well. What a surprise.’

  ‘Do you fancy popping over to collect? I’ve got something in mind I think you’re really gonna love.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Will it hurt?’

  ‘Maybe. But only a bit.’

  ‘OK then. I’ll be there in two ticks.’

  ‘Strip to your underwear,’ said Ilya, as I sauntered into his living room.

  He was rolling down the last window blind. Splintered sunlight gleamed through the bamboo shafts. I glanced around, searching for something to explain the white-powder weirdness, but saw nothing.

  Should I ask him about it? I wondered. But there didn’t seem much point: Ilya never gave me straight answers.

  So I undressed, piling my outer clothes on to the sunken armchair, my pussy already juicing. I’d ask him later. I reckoned he owed me some kind of explanation.

  Ilya surveyed my near-naked body without a flicker of interest. My underwear was good – black high-leg knickers with a hint of lace, and bra to match. Too good, I thought, deciding there and then to invest in something more appropriate to my slut-self.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Ilya blandly. ‘Now get down on your hands and knees.’

  As instructed I dropped on to all fours, a couple of feet in front of the sofa.

  I twisted my head round, trying to catch sight of him as he moved around the shabby, sun-warmed room.

  ‘Now remember the rule, Beth,’ he said. ‘Anything you don’t like, just give me the codeword and I’ll stop. OK?’

  I nodded, feeling a pang of sweet apprehension. I took Ilya’s reminder as a sign that I was in for some major torment. But whatever it was, I imagined I could handle it.

  ‘I’m going to blindfold you,’ announced Ilya, approaching with a tartan winter scarf.

  I gave a tiny giggle of eagerness and tilted my head high, allowing him to fix the band in place. The wool was very warm on my skin and Ilya took his time to secure it, adjusting it so my nostrils were free, tightening the knot at the back of my head and questioning me all the time: ‘Can you see anything? Is that better? Can you breathe OK? Is that too tight?’

  When I was shrouded in darkness, nothing happened. Ilya fell silent. His hands were no longer touching me. I wasn’t sure where he was standing. I felt giddy with expectancy, and my sex bubbled with little dancing pulses. I adored it when Ilya took control.

  The scarf was wrapped either side of my head, muffling the sounds about me. It pressed in on my eyes and squashed the tip of my nose. When I cast my eyes down, there was a tiny hole of light. Depending on how I turned, I could see the flecked beige carpet or parts of my hands with purple-polished nails and the big violet ring on my right middle finger.

  I raised my head and twisted it, trying to look up with a lowered gaze, but the angle made the hole of light vanish. And anyway, all that straining to gain a glimpse made my eyeballs ache. So I just accepted my blindness.

  Nervously, I waited for Ilya’s touch. My ears, sharpened by my lack of sight, yet dulled by the covering scarf, were greedy for every sound.

  At irregular intervals, the noise of passing cars rose up from the streets below and in through the open windows. There was a hammer chiselling away at stone: someone was having repairs done to the front of their house. A rooftop seagull called out and its feathered friends took up the sound like a football chant. They all squawked away to a jangling pitch before falling suddenly silent.

  Inside the room, when there were no cars on the road, I could just make out the ticking of a clock and the frid
ge humming in the adjoining kitchenette. Still no sound of Ilya.

  I felt strangely disembodied. It was as if my limbs had all disappeared because I couldn’t see them. I was nothing but the inside of my head. I was losing physicality.

  A car door slammed outside and there was a brief exchange of male laughter and voices although I couldn’t hear what was said.

  The clock ticked away. Come on, Ilya. Touch me.

  I half feared he’d left the room. Perhaps he was on his bed, reading a book or something, and amusing himself with thoughts of how long I’d stay there before daring to protest.

  A bus went by along the bottom road – the number seven, the only bus to pass this way – and it made that little ‘poof’ noise that buses do as they change gear or whatever.

  Then – ah – a touch, the softest of touches drifting across my back, making goosebumps prickle. I inhaled sharply and held the air in my lungs, recognising the velvet lightness as it swept over my skin: Jenny’s feather boa.

  My body, which had all but slipped away from me, sprang to sensation under its whispering caress. I felt the existence of my back more acutely than any other part of me. Then I felt my left wrist and hand as the feathered length tickled a path across me there. I released my breath in a murmur of delight.

  I could feel the weight changing on the floor as Ilya moved. The boa trailed over my calves. I had legs now. In fact, I had my whole body back again, because it was singing in anticipation of the next touch. The nerves beneath my skin were set on red alert, ready to react immediately to the merest hint of contact.

  For a while I felt nothing but dust motes. Then my feet exploded to a silken breath. Wispy feathers moved across my arched insteps and brushed the bottoms of my. toes.

  Then nothing again.

  And then the back of my neck, a line of velvet fronds floating over my skin under and across my collarbone, then shivering away via the downy pit of my arm.

  Not once did Ilya’s flesh touch mine. Everything was feathers: across my lips, on my thighs inner and outer, snaking up around my arm, sliding under my belly and waist. I drew quick breaths as the feathers fell, always unexpectedly, and sighed pleasure as they dragged gossamer tracks over my skin, and left desire tingling in their wake.

  Waiting for those touches to begin and end was like a torture designed by angels.

  And the whole thing made me wary because Ilya wasn’t into soft sex and gentle titillation. I reckoned he was up to something. Maybe he was trying to lull me into a false sense of security before subjecting me to some dirty degradation. The thought made my sex bloom open like some flower on time-lapse photography.

  Then the boa came to a halt. Released from Ilya’s guiding hands, it lay draped across my back. After all that teasing, the motionless feathers gained a weight completely out of proportion to what they were.

  I felt Ilya’s touch on my buttocks, then on my knickers, front and back. In one swift movement, he scrunched the fabric into a narrow band and gave a sharp upward tug.

  I yelped as the stretched material split the flesh of my vulva and sliced into the gap of my arse. He jerked again, ramming the crinkled gusset hard into me. Then he began sawing back and forth, running the fabric along my moist groove and abrading my clit.

  ‘What’s with all this nice underwear?’ he asked. ‘I thought you wanted to play the slut, Beth. Why don’t you wear whorish knickers like before? Cheap, gaudy bits of nothing. They suit you better, don’t you think?’

  ‘Ow,’ I said as once more he slammed the crumpled knickers high. ‘Yes. I was going to get some soon anyway. I swear.’

  Ilya released his hold on my knickers.

  ‘I don’t want to see these again,’ he said, hooking a thumb either side of the waistband. ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I breathed.

  And then he jerked the fabric down, leaving the black shiny cotton creased in the crook of my knees. I heard him move further away.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Ilya, and my sense of him surveying my sex was so strong that it seemed almost tangible.

  In the darkness of my blindfold, that unseen gaze had a magnifying power. My cunt swelled to a huge hungry pout: it swelled between my legs as blood pumped into my groin and puffed the lips apart; and it swelled in my mind until I could think of nothing but my cunt, hanging glossy and open below the line of my arse.

  Everything else about me disappeared; my body ebbed away again. I was all cunt, inside and out. I was slick, scarlet flesh quivering with need.

  Somewhere in the distance a car started up with a long whinnying sound. When the car drove away, I strained to hear the clock ticking, barely audible through the ear-covering scarf.

  Ilya touched me. I groaned.

  ‘Greedy bitch,’ he murmured approvingly.

  His fingers skimmed my outer labia, stirring the fringe of silky hair, making my arousal shoot. Then they dipped deeper to glide along my plump-sided inner crevice where I was so deliciously gorged with moisture. He rimmed circles just within the opening of my vagina, teasing out more wetness and warmth.

  ‘Ah, Beth,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’re always so wet for it. Your pussy’s always so ripe.’ With his fingertips, he smoothed my juices backward, up and through the furrow of my buttocks to the pursed mouth of my arse. ‘It’s getting predictable,’ he continued, sliding up more cream.

  My excitement sizzled as Ilya stirred damply around my rosebud hole. Then he drove in the length of his finger, making me moan soft and deep.

  ‘So you know what I’m going to do to you . . .’ he breathed, cramming a second finger alongside the first. ‘Don’t you?’

  He moved his two buried digits in a few quick twists, and then they were skewering in and out of me, scissoring open and shut with an intensity so rapid and wild that a massive pleasure surge streaked through my body and I could only answer with a howl.

  ‘Ah, you’re so hot for it, aren’t you?’ he said, working away at my arsehole.

  I uttered a stream of garbled pleasure, feeling him kneel between my calves. Then he doubled that pleasure by inserting two more fingers into the liquid centre of my pussy. I groaned and gasped as, with both hands, Ilya plunged into me back and front.

  He matched his rhythm, shoving in both sets of fingers at the same time: Then he started to alternate, shunting in, out, back, front, back, front.

  ‘So where shall I stick my cock today?’ he rasped. ‘Arse or cunt? Arse or cunt?’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said softly. I knew the choice wasn’t mine.

  Anal sex had been on the agenda right from our first phone call. And though I was keen to experiment, and though his fingers felt good inside me, now that the dirty deed was imminent, doubts started to crowd into my mind. It was going to hurt. His prick would not slot into my arse the way it slotted into my cunt. It was going to hurt. I’m not into pain. I’d already told him that.

  Ilya pulled all of his fingers out of me.

  I felt him stand and heard him undress. My body was burning up with eagerness and fear. Part of me wanted him to delay, to put off the inevitable for as long as possible; and part of me wanted him to get on with it then it would be over and done with, and I’d know the truth of how good or bad it was.

  ‘I need better access than this,’ said Ilya, tugging at the knickers round my knees.

  I shifted position so he could remove them, then he pushed my bra up so the cups and underwire were bunched above my tits. I was getting to realise he preferred me with a bit of clothing on rather than completely naked. Nudity was obviously too pure, too much like lovers. A scrap of rucked-up underwear or a raised skirt made me look cheaper, tartier, greedier.

  My breasts hung free and Ilya tweaked gently on my nipples, pulling them floorward and stretching my flesh to points. I moaned, lustful and anxious.

  Then I felt his hands on my scarf blindfold and he pulled the knot a little tighter, making it press on the tip of my nose again.

  A floorboard creaked on the far side of the ro
om. I froze.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I asked. ‘There’s someone here, isn’t there?’ In a panic, I reached for my blindfold.

  Ilya grabbed my hand to stop me. ‘Don’t be silly, Beth,’ he soothed. ‘It’s just me and you. All alone.’ He guided my hand back on to the carpet.

  I listened and I could hear nothing. Ilya wafted the boa from my back. There was no one there. It was just the house groaning, the way houses sometimes do.

  ‘Spread your knees wider,’ said Ilya, and I did. ‘Now don’t move. I’m going to put some music on.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ I complained as he moved away. I didn’t need an accompanying soundtrack, especially when – judging from his scanty CD collection – it was probably going to be classical or heavy rock. Maybe anal sex was going to hurt so much that he wanted to drown out my screams with a guitar solo.

  The music started, churchy and dramatic. I recognised it from the film Rollerball – Bach’s Toccata, I think. Scary film. Scary music.

  I sensed Ilya return. Seconds later, his fingers pressed into the crack of my buttocks and they were full of cool silky moisture.

  He was using lube on me.

  This was it: crunch time. My heart raced and I feared my bottle might desert me. But the lubricant calmed me; it felt so good.

  With slippery fingertips, Ilya smeared the stuff generously up and down, lingering over my anus, rubbing steadily.

  Then, with delicious ease, he slithered in a couple of fingers.

  ‘Ahhh,’ I said in a long sigh of pleasure. Then ‘Ahhh’ again as his two digits squirmed and pushed, greasing me richly within. I could feel myself loosening to his internal massage – and then a wider stretch on my tunnel made me gasp and squeal.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I implored as the doleful organ music boomed. ‘Tell me. Please. Oh, tell me.’

  ‘Three fingers,’ he replied in a husky murmur.

  ‘Oh God,’ I cried, and he twisted those compacted fingers in and out of my tightness, adding a tinge of pain to the delicious invasion.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ I wailed, and I had to drop forward to lean on my forearms because my body was crumbling from all the worried delight. I pressed my forehead to the ground, tilting my arse high for him and moaning constantly.