Читать книгу Red Grow the Roses - Janine Ashbless - Страница 7

‘Come on. Oh, God, yes – come on!’

And I do. Like I’m told. Filling her.

Sometimes I feel like all she wants of me is the gush of fluid, that I’m nothing but a donor to her. It’s the tiniest bit demoralising. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I want this baby as much as Penny does. I’m totally committed to the effort. I’ve given up coffee and alcohol and even fish, to my dismay – they’re supposedly caked in pollutants that depress sperm count – and I’ve switched to boxer shorts instead of briefs to keep the Boys optimally cool. I take my mineral supplements: zinc and selenium and vitamin C. It’s just as important to me as to her.

OK, so if I’m honest it isn’t. It couldn’t be. It’s all she thinks about these days. Sometimes I look at her and wonder how the dance-till-dawn party chick I first met turned into this macrobiotic-organic obsessive with the body honed by swimming and Pilates into a lean, mean, baby-bearing machine. Fitness is considered vital in the mum-to-be, these days, it turns out. No one just gets pregnant and carries on any more; it has to be conducted like a military campaign instead. Not that I object to a toned tum and a firm butt, obviously; it’s the look in her eyes that worries me, the way they’re like holes going down into a big dark place. Whenever we meet someone with a pushchair she tries to hide it but I see. I can see her hunger.

* * *

I get called away from the table during a dinner the mayor’s hosting at his official residence. It’s not a particularly formal do, luckily: just a Spanish business delegation and some potential local investors and a couple of members of the European Parliament. Not exactly exciting stuff, but not much potential for messing things up either; they’re all happily chowing down so no one’s going to miss me for a few minutes. Penny has turned up at the front gate, and security have rung through to me.

‘It’s all right,’ I tell them: ‘She’s my wife.’ And I bring her inside. She’s dressed up enough not to look out of place, thankfully, in a little cobalt-blue number I’m rather fond of because of the cutaway back. ‘Is anything wrong?’ I ask, drawing her into a corner of the hall, under a portrait of Gladstone. There are waiting staff at practically every corner so I keep my voice low. It’s odd seeing your wife in a work context. Two halves of my brain are in collision.

‘I’m ovulating, Richard.’

I try not to frown, though I’m secretly exasperated. ‘Couldn’t it wait?’

‘Well, you’re not planning on coming home tonight, are you?’ That’s true enough: with the mayoral elections coming up in a fortnight, once the guests are gone we’re all likely to be in a strategy meeting until the small hours. I’m going to have to sleep over here or else I’ll get back home by taxi somewhere near 4 a.m., at a guess. ‘And I have to be up early tomorrow,’ she continues, ‘to catch the train to my seminar.’

I nod reluctantly. Penny is a freelance consultant for the hotel industry and gives talks all over the country.

She switches tack, from rational argument to tease: ‘Bet you can’t guess what I’m wearing under this dress.’ Her eyes glitter and she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. It evokes the first stir of a reaction in the region of my crotch, just as she intends. Tease works.

‘All right then.’ I look up and down the corridor. The diners will be well into the bottles of Krug by now. And it’s not as if I’m the only political adviser the mayor’s got to hand. ‘Down here.’

I need a room with a lock on the door, which means a guest toilet unfortunately: I pick the one furthest from the dining hall. It’s an exceptionally well-appointed toilet of course. It also happens to be occupied, because as I lay my hand on the door I hear a voice within. A man’s voice, deep and measured. He’s talking to someone, although the other voice is not audible.

‘Blast,’ I mutter. I might think about heading to another location, except that Penny takes the opportunity to lean against the wall and brush her fingers up my fly, a furtive tickle that deprives me of the will to move anywhere. Her eyes are bright, her breasts plumped up even more than usual to create a mesmerising cleft. ‘Careful,’ I admonish weakly. ‘We need to be discreet.’

‘How can we be, when I’m gagging for your cock?’ she mouths. I love it when she talks filthy, which she knows, of course. That perfect, preened exterior combined with whorishly low speech makes for a delicious frisson.

Then the door opens. A man comes out, looks at us both, nods with a faint smile and walks away. I think for a moment that I recognise him but the familiarity is fleeting. Penny’s eyes follow him down the corridor. ‘Who was that?’ she asks with undisguised admiration.

I sigh and steer her into the bathroom. That’s certainly one sign she’s ovulating: she becomes a rapacious flirt. Another man in my position might not take it so well. ‘I don’t know him. One of the Spanish group, I should think – they’re in the running for a contract on the integrated transport initiative.’

‘Well, he knew you.’

‘Did he?’

‘He called you Richard.’

I blink, nonplussed. I can’t recall him saying anything to me at all. I can’t actually remember his face right now, come to think of it. He was tall and looked like he might have been Spanish; that’s all I recall. ‘Did you yank me out of dinner just to talk?’ I’m a little brusque, I admit, to cover my confusion. Penny rolls her eyes.

‘OK, love.’ She stalks over to the sink and drops her handbag while I give the room a once-over glance, just in case the conversation we’d overheard had been taking place live and not over the phone. But the room, though spacious for a toilet and slightly over-furnished – an antique armoire against one wall, a small but fiendishly ornate sofa upholstered in brocade, a huge matching gilded mirror over the marble counter that cups two sinks and a large vase of fresh roses – is empty of all human forms but our own. I push the door-bolt to.

‘So what are you wearing?’

‘Come and find out.’ She smiles at me, heavy-lidded, in the mirror. I walk over behind her, Mr Dick already doing his wake-up stretches under my uncomfortable goddamn boxers. ‘Inappropriate Behaviour’ while working is strictly forbidden even if it is with one’s spouse; there’ve been more than enough embarrassing headlines in the press about waste-of-money politicians and public employees gadding about when they should be doing something worthy and abstemious. The fact that this could get me into terrible trouble adds a distinct spice to the occasion. Standing behind her, I watch in the mirror as she lifts her hands and rubs lazily at her breasts, slipping the shoulder straps of her dress to reveal more of those delectable twin slopes – so pale they make me think of snow, so smooth I want to ski down them into the ravine between.

‘Show me,’ I whisper, and my voice is thickening. ‘Get them out and play with them.’

With a languorous smile she obeys, scooping each orb from dress and bra to prop them on the rumpled fabric, circling her nipples with her fingertips. The blushing points harden under the attention. I reach round and assist her, tweaking and flicking the stiff nubs until she surrenders them to me with the sigh I know very well. At the same time I press her to the marble slab, my awakening cock nuzzling up against the cushions of her bum. I enjoy watching us in the mirror; it’s almost like being in our own movie. I can see my hands looking coarse and dark on her cream-coloured skin, catch every flash and flicker of her eyes as my touch sets off cascades of reactions in her body. At this time of the month she’s quick to arouse, already primed. I feel her cheeks squirming back against my pressure. She’s ready for it.

‘As you were,’ I whisper. ‘Keep playing with those.’ As she takes over again I step back so that I can look at that wriggling ass, at her taut legs and her bunched calves, straining on the spike heels of shoes that exactly match the colour of her dress. Sheer blue stockings complete the ensemble. I lift her skirt, and stare. It must have taken some careful work with a mirror: she’s not wearing any panties, but written in blue felt-tip down the last couple of inches of her spine is the neat instruction FUCK, with an arrow pointing down into the crack of her behind. And across her bum cheeks is the broken word CUM SLUT.

Well, that puts lead in my pencil: six inches of solid graphite. My cock bounces out into my hand as I unzip. ‘How did you get here?’ I ask.

‘Black cab.’

‘With no knickers on?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s a very short skirt,’ I muse, lifting her right leg right up to open her wide as I seek entry. My stiffy goes in like a hot knife into her butter. ‘Do … hh … Do you think the taxi-driver noticed?’

‘He might have,’ Penny gasps. ‘He was looking.’

That is enough for me: she knows how to push all my kink buttons. I’m in and I’m thrusting, pushing her forward over the sink, plunging the depths of her lubricious hole. Her four-inch heel skids about on the marble benchtop. I know better than to try and take it slow, or to reach for her clit. She doesn’t care about coming, she just wants me to come. That’s why she’s put so much effort into this. She grips the curve of the sink and shuts her eyes, lips open in an O of sympathy for her impaled sex.

God, she feels good. Tight, yet so welcoming.

And as I pound away, as my whole body clenches toward ejaculation, I look past her face in the mirror and see another behind us both. A woman’s. She stands on the upright back of the French settee, her bare toes gripping the gilding and her arms stretched behind her to touch the wall, like a Rolls Royce hood ornament: the Spirit of Ecstasy. I know she can’t really be there, that there’s no way anyone could be in the room with us. It’s an optical illusion conjured by my horny mind as it catches in the fire of orgasm. A wraith-woman moulded from shadows, dressed in only a veil through which her delicate body glows, her hair a cloudy nimbus floating about her head. But that’s all I glimpse, because just then my climax shakes me and I’m pumping my cum into my wife’s hot cunny, and the whole room goes nova.

When I come back down to myself there’s no one but us two in the mirror. And no one else in the room, of course.

Penny fishes a pair of knickers from her handbag almost before I’m out of her, then goes to lie down on her side on the couch. Thirty minutes letting gravity help the little swimmers on their way, that’s the rule. She smiles at me when I go over and kiss her temple, but the smile is wan. ‘That was lovely,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Richard.’

It was great, I want to say. Didn’t you enjoy it? You don’t look like you did. It was great … but weird. Where in my head had that girl come from?

‘You OK, Pen?

‘Of course.’ I can see it in her eyes, which don’t really focus on me. They’re like empty wells but at the bottom gleam burning coals: the hope that this time it will take.

Like I say, sometimes it’s a bit disheartening.

* * *

Christ, if she actually caught me going on like this she’d kill me. I’m supposed to be 100 per cent supportive. It’s not as if I actually have to do that much except get my leg over with clockwork regularity and provide the seed. I’m supposed to enjoy that bit, aren’t I? And of course I do. Penny’s invested in a whole range of fancy underwear and some kinky little costumes – a French maid, a pirate lass, a naughty nurse – so that my co-operation can be guaranteed. I’m getting more sex now than in years. Every other day throughout her cycle, to be precise, with a week off when the red flag of yet another failure paints her pantyliners: mornings preferred because there’s a higher sperm load, and if I’m always in a bit of a rush before work that’s not a problem; there’s no need to linger and coming back for seconds is not encouraged.

* * *

I’m in a taxi on the way home, thinking about our little assignation as I look out at the deserted streets, and wondering when was the last time we had sex just for the fun of it. I’m not complaining; I’ve no right to complain. Penny has made it her business to find out everything that turns me on and she applies it with ruthless efficiency and not the tiniest smidgen of shame. She’s lifted from me the onus of actually giving her pleasure and made it clear I only need to think about my own orgasm; that’s enough to satisfy her. Isn’t that what every overworked man wants?

Well, maybe.

And I can’t help suspecting that the second that blue cross shows up on the plastic wand, all the feathers and fishnets are going straight in the bin. Luckily Mr Dick isn’t much interested in the long view. He just goes ‘Stockings? Wow! Count me in!’

The streets slip past with unfamiliar swiftness: small shops and tree-lined avenues. It’s the dead time of the night and anything that does close down has done. The entrance to my local Underground station is barred with a metal grille, but the illuminated sign warns me I’m nearly home. I shake myself from my reverie as we pull up outside my apartment block. It’s only a year old and it gleams darkly against the sodium glow of the sky. It won an architectural award, did Mavin Wood Towers. It’s a nice place to live. They had to cut the wood down to build it, of course.

Then the taxi-driver switches on the interior light and all the cab windows turn to mirrors, and I see her in the reflection. She’s in the seat next to me, her feet drawn up on the upholstery: the girl from the bathroom mirror. She’s very pretty but completely colourless, like she’s been sculpted in ash, and only her eyes look truly real. I jump nearly out of my skin this time, and turn without thinking to swipe at the place she sits. My hand bounces off the empty seat cushion.

‘You OK, mate?’ The cabby sounds suspicious.

‘Uh,’ I say. ‘Yes.’ I shove notes into his hand and don’t wait for any change. I’m out of the taxi without another glance at my reflection, and as my feet touch the pavement I suddenly remember the identity of the man who came out of the bathroom. It’s like a door opening in my head. Of course I knew him. I’d seen him a number of times around the mayor’s office. Reynauld.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I say to myself, suddenly sweating with anxiety. The bastards know how to mess with your head like that. They can do more or less what they like, I gather. I’m not directly involved in liaison, but everyone in city politics knows about them.

I hurry to the front door of the block. It’s made of smoked glass and, as I reach for the number-plate to type in my security code, I see that behind my own dark reflection there’s a woman standing on the pavement under the streetlight. The woman. She’s veiled from head to foot, but the light goes straight through the gauze to outline her delicate body. She’s not moving, she’s just watching me.

With a convulsive movement I yank open the door and pull it to behind me. There’s resistance and I feel a frisson of panic, but it’s probably only the hydraulic spring. I’m inside and safe.

They can’t come inside unless you invite them, isn’t that right?

* * *

I’m doing my best to help the process along. I want to be a dad. I mean, I guess I do. I accept it’s going to change my life, it just doesn’t seem real yet. If it were up to me we’d both just bumble on as usual and leave it all up to chance, so it’s a good thing Penny’s got her teeth into the matter, I suppose. She always gets her way in the end.

Of course, even Mr Dick can be cussed and rebellious. Certain things are on the Forbidden List now, with the inevitable consequence that I’m constantly thinking about how much I want to do them. Like, no more hand-shandies; I’m not allowed to waste good cum.

How strange is it that masturbation is now an unattainable privilege?

* * *

I step out of the bath and towel myself down as the water drains. Somehow I manage to catch my own eye in the mirror. I’ve been a bit wary of mirrors since seeing that wraith-woman, but there’s been no sign of her since that first night and I’m feeling reasonably secure here. I’m at home for the weekend and it’s daylight, even if it is a watery winter light. It was probably all a figment of my imagination anyway, I know. If you’re awake and working for twenty hours in a day it’s no wonder that you start dreaming on your feet.

The bathroom’s tiled and accessorised in black and white and the towels match; my body is the only object in the mirror with any colour to it. I look at myself critically, but I’m pretty pleased, let’s face it. I look fit. I’ve kept the stomach bulge and the man-boobs at bay. I’ve still got a full head of hair, cut in a style that says ‘prime’ and not ‘middle-aged’. My cock and balls look just fine. I focus on the latter, hanging low in their sling of flesh, a bit struck all of a sudden by the magical potential of their bag of tricks. Whole new lives nestle in those spheres. Million of potential futures. If I was the last man alive I could repopulate the whole country, the whole world, given enough women and enough time to fuck them all. The thought makes Mr Dick swell a little, and I cup my balls encouragingly. ‘Come on, Boys,’ I whisper, giving them a little squeeze. ‘You can do it.’

It’s my day off: we’ve not had sex this morning. And now I want to stroke off, but it’s not allowed. I lift my cock away from my scrotum, feeling the slight pull as the damp skin separates. My cock responds to the touch by filling up a little, bobbing free of gravity. I shift my hips, restless. My scrotum is gathering to wrinkles. I want to jack off. Just solo, with no expectations and no consequences. A nice leisurely wank without the weight of Penny’s need. But I feel guilty; she wouldn’t know, of course, but I’d still be letting her down. I stroke the long curve of flesh and feel the swell surge down to the head. Aw, hell. Now it really is a semi.

‘Richard! I’m off!’

Wrapping the black towel about my hips, I exit the bathroom. In the hallway Penny is making last-minute adjustments to her make-up in front of the narrow wall mirror. ‘How do I look?’ she asks as I approach.

She looks great. She always looks great. Even in her winter clothes she’s sexy: she’s wearing burning red lipstick and a trenchcoat number that just screams of 40s repression and daring, and patterned stockings under that. Well, they might be tights but I can’t help seeing them as stockings. I embrace her from behind, my cock pressing with incorrigible hope into her through layers of towel and clothing. ‘You look lovely.’

Penny sighs slightly. ‘Save it for later, tiger. I’ve got a train to catch.’ It might be a weekend but she’s got an exhibition to attend and a stall to run.

I’ll be quick, I want to tell her, but I know better than to argue. It would just upset her schedule. I content myself with a goodbye grope and kiss before seeing her off and locking the front door. Then I look in the mirror, shaking my head at myself with blokish sympathy. I can see the bulge Mr Dick is making under the towel.

I need a wank. I mean I really need a wank. It makes me feel irritable and bold. I drop the towel on the laminate beech floorboards and strum my cock with slow, defiant strokes.

You going to show up then, ghost-girl?

Nothing stirs in the reflection behind me. Of course not. It’s broad daylight and I’m safe in my own home. I begin to stroke in earnest. God, this is good. My cock is growing stiff and straight and tall, pointing at the glass. My balls are bunching to a fat mass like a fist. I put my hand on the wall and rise up on my toes a little, enjoying the clench of muscles that seems to focus my whole body’s attention at my groin. My eyes are open but I’m not really seeing. Instead I picture Ruth, the grumpy clerical secretary at work. I imagine her walking around as we sit in a focus-group circle, circulating the handouts. She always wears her blonde hair in a chignon and a skirt that is tight on her big thighs: in my fantasy she’s wearing seamed stockings too. She gets to my place, walking inside the circle of chairs, and as she turns from me I stick my foot out and trip her up. Down she goes on her hands and knees, files scattered everywhere, her head ending up nearly in my lap. She’s so surprised she doesn’t even get angry; she just stares at me with her eyes wide and her mouth set in a luscious O. I take advantage of the moment to whip out my thick cock and stuff it between her lips, so deep that for a moment she chokes. I grab her hair and use it to pump her head up and down on my huge length, and after a moment’s resistance she crumbles and begins to suck obediently. Everyone else seated round the circle makes gasps of lecherous appreciation; it’s such a fine sight and we’ve all fantasised about what that big surly mouth could do if put to proper use. They’re getting out their own cocks too; they mean to follow my example and take their own turns once I’ve come. And I’m going to come right now. ‘Take it,’ I grunt, spurting into Ruth’s mouth, down her eager, gobbling throat.

All over the mirror.

Afterwards I go into the kitchen and find a J Cloth and some glass cleaner under the sink. But when I get back into the hall there’s no spunk on the mirror at all. Not a drop. Just the mothprint of a pair of lips, halfway down the glass as if someone had knelt there and kissed the hard surface. It’s almost invisible unless you’re looking for something. I spray the smudge and rub hard with the cloth but it’s no good: the kiss is on the other side of the glass.

* * *

Worse than the prohibition on beating off is the one that says No Blowjobs – not even as an opening move, because saliva inhibits sperm motility or something. Which is especially cruel as Penny used to give head so good that it’d make my brain melt. I miss that. I fantasise about oral all the time. Even when I’m on the job, I might be humping away on top but I’m imagining sinking my cock between her lips, smearing her high-gloss scarlet lipstick all the way up my shaft, feeling the lap of her agile tongue on all the right places. Or I’ll be banging her from behind, those ass-cheeks which appear so neat when she stands looking huge now, uplifted under my hands with that black satin corset cinching her waist, and I’ll be thinking about how good it would be to slip into her tight pucker instead and waste all my jizz in the wrong hole. Because that one’s way off limits now too.

I fantasise about coming on her breasts. She has fantastic breasts, neither flabby nor flat but a good handful each, still as firm and perky as a younger woman’s, with the most beautiful big nipples that go hard as pink icing rosettes when I tease them. The areolae crinkle to the texture of cookies. Remember those Iced Gem biscuits you used to be able to buy? That’s what I think of when I’m sucking Penny’s nips. They’re that sweet. Her skin is the colour of rich cream and there’s a scatter of tiny moles or freckles from her left shoulder to her nipple, like the splatter flicked from a paintbrush, like droplets of dark cum already spilt in homage to her beauty. And her breasts are full enough that I can straddle her torso and slip my shaft into the valley between them as I cup and squeeze them together, making a sheath for my length. I remember leisurely tit-wanks that seemed to go on for ever, her tongue lapping the head of my knob as it popped out of the ravine to wink at her. I fantasise about doing that again. About taking myself in hand as my orgasm approaches. About feeling the cum gather in my balls and surge up and out to rain on the uplands of her breasts, obliterating the freckles, painting her creamy skin in my whiter shade of pale.

I want to come on the small of her back, and on her bottom and her thighs. I want to watch my spunk slowly dry on her hot skin and ease away the flakes between my fingers, feeding them between her lips to melt upon her tongue like communion wafers. I want to see her kneel before me one more time, the shiny brown swing of her bobbed hair framing her face, her mouth open like a baby bird begging to be fed, her tongue pink and eager to taste my spilt salt.

I miss her.

* * *

I wake in the middle of the night, or perhaps don’t wake at all. The covers are thrown back and I’m sweating, I’ve been having restless dreams and perhaps this is just another of them. There’s a glow emanating from the mirror over Penny’s dressing table, the reflection of the bedroom light, but it takes me a moment to realise that our own bulb isn’t on. And as I contemplate that, my head still full of sleep, the mirror-ghost appears and, stooping forward, steps out through the frame. Just like the girl in that Japanese horror movie, only without the jerky corpse/insect shuffle; she’s consummately graceful in fact. She stands on the dressing table with her bare feet not stirring the myriad bottles of perfume and moisturiser and pigment. Naked.

Naked, except for a veil of gauze that wraps spiralwise about her body in that way fabric only ever does in paintings, hiding nothing. I can see the tremble of her breasts as she breathes. Then with a light step she lands on the footboard of our bed. There’s no bump, no sensation of descending weight. I feel nothing. Thank God, I think: this is a dream.

She looks down at me with a slow, sweet smile. She’s beautiful, my mirror-ghost. Almost girlishly delicate, with a hairless sex, but with curves to her hips and breasts that are far from childlike. And the eyes in her piquant face are ancient and knowing, her lips lush with promise. She is a fairy maiden, a nymph risen from some still and secret pool. If only she weren’t so pale she’d be astoundingly beautiful, but she’s the colour of the Portland Stone statues that grace the pediment of the mayor’s residence; not a warm and creamy pallor like Penny’s, but a delicate grey. I’m reminded of the allegorical figure of the City who sits with her scales and her portcullis in either hand. Even her eyes are colourless, and her erect nipples are white like quartz pebbles.

Down to her knees she slides, slow as oozing cement, eyes huge and fixed on my uncovered form. I think maybe I should protest. But this is only a dream, nothing to worry about – and if it isn’t a dream then I’ll have to wake Penny, who sleeps beside me, still muffled under the duvet.

I can’t wake Penny. It’s too much. She can’t be expected to deal with this too.

With softly creeping movements the mirror-girl inches her way up my legs, her lips almost brushing the hair that stands erect on my spooked skin but her shining eyes fixed on me. Her own hair billows around her head like smoke: it’s a grey like the rest of her but streaked with rust. I think she must have been a redhead once. The lips in that pointed face are incongruously full, almost swollen. The tongue that laps out between them is the palest shade of pink and as she kneels over my crotch and takes me in her mouth I catch a glimpse, the merest hint only, of teeth.

She’s cold. Her mouth is cold. It’s like being sucked by a cream dessert, yielding and smooth and sweet. My cock responds to the slick embrace with an instantaneous surge of heat, and I arch my back off the mattress as my whole body goes rigid with shock and pleasure. Then she drops me, letting me ease from between her lips as she withdraws her head – only it takes much longer coming out than going in because it’s twice as long now and getting longer by the heartbeat. Her saliva gleams on the ruddy column, giving it a pearlescent sheen. She smiles at me questioningly and bats at the crown of my cock with teasing little licks. My hands are pinned by my sides, too heavy to lift from the sheet.

This has to be a dream.

With a tilt of her head she crouches lower, her mouth opening wide to suck my scrotum. Into that cool cave goes first one bollock and then the other, bathed in her wetness. I am shaking now where I lie, every fibre quivering, and my erect cock points up at my face and nods against my belly with every jerk. But as she releases my balls and licks her way back up its length it rises clear of my supine form, twitching. It doesn’t give a stuff about dreams or reality, cold or hot. It just wants her mouth. So she engulfs me, a cool ocean in which my body swims, my mind trailing helplessly behind like a plastic float. I surrender all control of my limbs and give myself up to her moon-cold kisses until I’m leaping wave after wave of arousal and surging toward the light. When she bites, I barely feel the pain. I feel the pelagic upswell that follows in its wake though: the perfect wave. It drags me down into the deep and everything turns to black.

It was certainly a dream. I wake in the morning with a monumental hard-on and mount Penny almost before she’s awake. And she doesn’t object, of course, even though it takes me – despite my breathless horniness – nearly for ever to come.

* * *

I’ve been having these lurid fantasies, sleeping and waking, for months now. It’s a case of what you can’t have, that’s what you want. And what I want is sex that hasn’t a thing to do with procreation. It’s become an obsession. I used to be so pedestrian in my fantasies, I’d imagine what it would be like to fuck newspaper models and pretty Australian soap starlets and that girl in the canteen I never spoke to. Now I catch myself in crazy musings. There’s a big Catholic church with a convent attached to it down the end of our road: I’ve screwed Penny while picturing myself standing on the altar, cock in hand, jerking off an impossible spunk-shower over the upturned, outraged faces of the nuns kneeling before me. There’s a public garden where, if it’s a quiet day at work, I take my packed lunch to eat; there are often students there sketching the statues and the plants because there’s an art college on the boundary road, and for some reason a lot of them seem to be Italian or Spanish. I find myself eyeing them up, fantasising about having three or four of those cool, aloof girls on their knees before me, their sleek hair swept behind their shoulders as they take it in turns to suck my cock, squabbling delightfully when one gets too greedy and holds centre-stage too long.

Christ. I’m turning into a real horn-dog.

Maybe the more sex you get, the more you want.

* * *

I come out of the rather fancy town house and stand on the top step with the computer printout in my hand, feeling sick. When I look down at the paper the figures blur and dance, meaningless. It’s a good thing the doctor explained the results to me.

A good thing … Oh, God.

I went to a private clinic for the semen analysis, keeping it quiet, not telling Penny. I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t me that was holding us back. Well, now I know. Low sperm count, and those that are there have something wrong with them. Stunted tails, I gather from the doctor’s sympathetic words, that cause them to swim in fitful spirals instead of straight ahead.

Fuck fuck fuck. What’s going to happen when Penny finds out? Because she will: eventually she’ll have us both down our local GP, demanding medical check-ups and assistance. It only counts as infertility if you’ve been trying for two years, but she’s going to lose patience sooner rather than later.

How’s she going to react when she finds out it’s me, that I’m the one letting her down?

I stumble to the car and drive all the way home without the slightest awareness of my surroundings. It’s only when I’m in the big basement car park under Mavin Wood Towers, reversing into my parking space, that I register anything outside my own head, and then I nearly accelerate into the bloody wall because the mirror-girl is back, sitting behind me, bisecting the rear window and visible in my rear-view mirror. ‘Ah God fuck!’ I shriek, slamming the horn by mistake. The cacophony in the concrete undercroft is horrible. I’m out of the car in a flat second, staring in at the back seat – but no one’s visible, of course. She was only there in the reflection.

I feel sort of foolish then, and ashamed of my cowardice, and pissed off. I look round to see if anyone’s witnessed my panic, but the parking area is deserted.

I make myself take the elevator up to the twelfth floor, not the stairs. The interior of that little box is lined with smoked mirror-glass, but I grit my teeth and step inside. I refuse to be afraid of her. What has she done, after all, but crawl out of my dreams and bestow her cool kiss? Does she even exist outside my head? Should I be afraid of that? Resolutely I turn my back on the mirrored wall and stare at the numbers over the door.

Halfway up, between the sixth and seventh floors, the lift slows to a halt and the lights dim. I shut my eyes. I’m sweating: I can feel the cold trickle inching down my spine toward the cleft of my ass. My shoulder blades bump lightly against the glass and under my suit jacket I feel my skin crawl.

Something brushes my thigh and the front of my trousers. I look down to see a slim, naked arm draped about my hips, the pale hand stroking my crotch and searching for my fly. Her nails are long and just a little too pointed.

Oh, hell.

My eyes flick upwards. There’s a camera in one of the corners, of course. It won’t get the best angle, but if it’s still working – and I’ve no way of telling that – it’ll see enough. The thought of being filmed on CCTV while an unseen woman opens my flies and pulls out my cock is too uncomfortable. I turn my back to the lens and face the mirror.

She’s kneeling there beyond the glass, and her hand juts from its surface as if from peaty water in a still pool. I can imagine that easily: there’s something about her that makes me think of Celtic twilight and ladies of the lake. But she’s perfectly conversant with the uses of buttons and zips, I find; popping one and pulling down the other, reaching beneath to the cotton that’s sticking to my skin, finding her way to my over-eager cock and my useless balls.

And my only response is to hold my waistband so my trousers don’t fall down. Because all of a sudden those balls don’t feel so useless. She doesn’t care if my sperm can’t swim straight; she just wants to feel the hot spurt of my cream over her cold tongue.

She just wants to suck me.

I lay my forehead on the cool glass. I can see her smooth inhuman face swimming toward me through the depths of the smoky glass, breaking the surface, lifting out from the mirror. Her hair is sleeked behind her as if wet and gravity are drawing it down. Her pale lips part, spreading for the ruddy blunt bell end of my erection. Cold: cold like moor water. The hair rises on the nape of my neck and my scrotum contracts with a heave, but the chill is nothing compared to the slick caress of her mouth.

And I’m so fucking grateful. I could drown in gratitude, if I wasn’t going to drown in pleasure first.

* * *

‘What’s that?’ Penny asks, pointing at my chest. I pull my dressing gown over hastily to hide the paired dimples of the puncture wounds.

‘Dunno. Just insect bites, I think.’ I feel groggy, hungover.

‘The mayor’s residence has bedbugs, does it?’

‘You’d be amazed. Old building, you know. There’re all sorts of dirty old corners.’

‘Ew. Don’t go bringing anything home with you, that’s all.’

Too late, I think. I pour my third cup of tea since staggering out of bed.

‘Are you going into work then?’

I ought to. Not that there’s anything to do, because it’s the election today. Far too late for him or me or anyone else to affect the vote, but we’ve got to be seen to be around. ‘Later,’ I mumble. ‘We’re going to be up most of the night waiting for the results to come in.’

‘Well, I’ve got to get going.’ She heads off to the bathroom to finish her morning ablutions. I’m so dull-witted that I don’t immediately notice that she doesn’t come back. I just sit there nursing my cup of tea and staring at the cloudy sky through the window. Picturing a face as pale and luminous as those clouds. When I rise from the breakfast bar the apartment feels eerily still. I wander down the corridor and tap on the bathroom door.

‘You still in there?’

There’s a soft noise: a sob. My heart sinks. Opening the door I find Penny sitting on the edge of the bath. She lifts her face and tries to smile, but her mouth is all over the place and all the blinking she’s doing doesn’t hide how wet her eyes are.

‘My period’s come on.’

‘Oh, love,’ I whisper.

‘I thought this time … I was late … I really thought …’ She stops talking and clenches down. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she grits out. ‘Not to worry. We keep trying.’

And all I can do is hug her and rub the stiff angles of her shoulders and wish helplessly that there’s something I could do to make her happy. And hate myself.

From the corner of my eye I see pale shadows shift in the bathroom mirror. I press Penny closer to my chest and shield her face, not wanting her to see the girl in the glass – and certainly not that look of possessive avarice burning in those pale eyes.

* * *

The mayor loses the election. It’s no landslide, but by shortly after midnight enough of the ballot boxes are in and counted that we’ve got a clear picture of the results. It’s not going to be made public until tomorrow, of course, but a silence falls over those of us gathered in City Hall as the phones ring and the same message is relayed from ward after ward. It’s always harder for the sitting candidate to win, of course, and we’re not entirely surprised.

I leave the scrum of officials and PR men and activists and head upstairs, wanting to be on my own. The top floor has a famously good 360-degree view of the City from its conference suite: this isn’t the mayor’s gracious official residence but a modern oblate high-rise that squats on the north bank of the river, an architect’s wet dream of steel and glass. The windows run floor to ceiling on the top storey. I stand in the unlit room, looking out over a landscape as darkly glittering and beautiful as the bottom of the sea, the outlines of water and stone picked out only by the phosphorescent glow of individual lights, the sky as opaque and starless as if it’s a mile of water pressing down upon us. The creep of car headlights brings to mind the gleam of bottom-feeding crustacea.

I feel the numb ache of defeat in every fibre of my body. In days I’ll be out of a job. Perhaps it’s a good thing I’ve not been able to give Penny a child; we’re going to need her income. Hah. There’s cold comfort for you. I’m a failure, let’s face it. Unable to do my job and sway the pendulum of political opinion, unable to provide for my family, unable even to father a baby – that simplest of biological functions. Isn’t the most primal and basic goal of all life to replicate itself? Isn’t that what we’re designed for? Even microbes can reproduce, but not me.

My cell phone rings, making me quiver. It’s Penny. I don’t take the call. As silence returns I move over to the room’s environmental control panel next to the elevator, and turn on the lights.

Instantly the night outside vanishes, the windows becoming mirrors.

She’s there, waiting for me. I’m cerebrally intrigued to see that she’s only reflected in one of the angled panes, even though I’m visible in several. Her long hair is fox-red now, after days of feeding from me. There is even a hint of colour in her cheeks.

Gracefully, almost idly, she circles my reflection and, as I watch, begins to dance. It’s strange to see her brushing up against me, draping her arms about my neck, rubbing her rear into my crotch – all without me being able to feel a thing. The tease is entirely visual. Each flick of her hips makes the blood surge in my veins. Each jiggle of her breasts makes my need grow. But I feel oddly discomfited in the midst of my fascination, as if I’m jealous of my own reflection. I move my hands, trying to interact with her dance, and she laughs silently as my mirrored self moves too, clumsily encircling her undulating hips. Turning in my arms she grasps the front of my shirt and tears it open.

My real shirt, the one on my material body, remains unscathed. The one in the reflection is shredded and my chest revealed. The look of confusion on my face is comic. She’s mocking me, I suspect – mocking my desire to rationalise, at any rate. She rakes her nails across my bare skin and my reflection bleeds, yet I feel nothing. She shreds my trousers – effortlessly; her nails must be sharp as knives – and squirms her pert little rump against me.

‘Come here,’ I say hoarsely. ‘Come on out.’

Her eyes lift and meet mine, looking straight out from the glass, her lips forming a smile so wanton that it makes my cock stiffen all on its own. Then she abandons my reflected self and walks out from the mirrored room into the material one. Her feet make no sound on the carpet, of course, but I feel the caress of the cold air that surrounds her. I take a deep breath as she closes on me, lays a slender hand on my breastbone, and then pushes me backwards on to the table and climbs on top.

This time I hear the fabric of my shirt tear.

* * *

She tastes like that Chinese tea: lapsang souchong, that’s the one. Slightly smoky, slightly tannic. Cold.

Eat me, I beg. Eat me up. Take me down to that dark place and let me never come back.

* * *

When the elevator door opens I’m lying supine on the polished conference table, speckled with love-bites, and she’s kneeling over me. She’s framing my head with her straddled thighs and grinding her pubic mound down over my face, but I’m not exactly applying myself to the job. Traumatic pleasure has got me pinned, capable of nothing more than groans. She’s got her teeth buried deep in my balls and she’s sucking hard, and that’s about all my mind is capable of grasping right now.

Until Penny steps out of the lift.

I look up from between the mirror-girl’s white thighs as my world cracks like a dropped glass. ‘It’s not what it looks like’ – isn’t that what I’m supposed to say, caught in flagrante like that? That’s the cliché. Try and talk your way out of this: Mr Dick is standing at full mast, angled as a gnomon over my belly. ‘It’s not what it looks like, darling: I’m not really fucking her.’

The mirror-girl makes the point far better than I ever could, lifting her face from my punctured balls and stiff cock to snarl at Penny, showing a red mask that’s all savage teeth.

‘Richard?’ Pen takes an unsteady pace forward, dropping her handbag.

Light as a cat, the mirror-girl springs off me and the two women stare.

‘That’s … That’s my husband.’ Penny sounds aghast.

The mirror-girl doesn’t reply. I’ve never heard her speak. She snatches my wrist and pulls me up from the table, heading for the window. She’s strong, but I’m so weak I can’t keep my legs under me. I’ve lost too much blood, I think, as the floor shoots up to meet me and my shoulder is wrenched at an unnatural angle. Blue-black explosions of colour flare behind my eyes. My knees burn on the carpet as she tows me. I see her bound through the pane of glass and my arm follows, tight in her grasp.

It’s like jelly; gelid but yielding. My hand sinks into the pane and it doesn’t appear on the outside of the glass where the walkway is, waving over the city landscape, but only in the reflected room. With a jerk she drags me through up to my shoulder. For the first time I try to resist, though not wholeheartedly.

A warm hand grabs my other wrist, drawing it out behind me. Penny. It’s Penny, holding me back.

The mirror-girl pulls again, much stronger, and my head is wrenched through to the other side. For a moment, strung between both worlds, I see what the reflection looks like from within. I see what she looks like in her own world.

I scream, but I know Penny can’t hear me any more. The warm hand is nearly pulling my left arm off: the cold one is wrenching at my right. I shut my eyes and haul backwards as hard as I can, twisting my wrist in the mirror-ghost’s grasp. Her fingers feel as thin and hard as bone.

Then she lets go. It’s so abrupt it has to be deliberate: I pitch over backwards and the glass shatters to tiny cubes, letting in a ferocious blast of night air. Every light on the observation floor goes out as I tumble into Penny’s arms. It’s freezing cold. She gasps my name over and over, and we crawl together over the crunching safety glass toward the lift. We end up crouched together by the wall, and she takes my head in her hands and presses her cheek against mine, trembling.

‘Pen. Oh, thank God.’

‘I came … I came to see if you were OK.’ Her skin feels hot and even though I’m dizzy and shaking I wrap my arms around her, craving that warmth. The tears running down my face – hers or mine – burn my cheeks.

For a moment the memory of what lies beyond the mirror fills my head, and then I push it away, burying my face in my wife’s warm scent.

This is terrible. I’ve still, despite everything, got an erection that could stand for Parliament. My balls seethe, swollen and tight with the urge to erupt and shed – well, I can’t even guess: the mirror-ghost has drained me dry and I ought to be shrivelled and flaccid but I’m not, I’m burning with arousal. Pulling Penny further up on to my lap I kiss her fervently and push her skirt up her thighs. She makes an incoherent noise that might be protest, but she kisses me back and clings to my neck. My fingers find the edge of her panties, and I pull at them, sharply, my hands clumsy and quivering. Her gusset is thick with the sanitary pad that I wrench aside. Then I pull her up and over my stiffy, impaling her slippery depths.

‘Richard!’

‘Please,’ I groan, my dry lips mumbling her in the half-dark, my breath coming hard and bitter. ‘Please, Pen.’ I have to: I have to slake this torturing tumescence. All my cum’s been drained already but I need to go again. Right now.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Please. Yes. Oh, yes.’

Grunting, sweating, clumsy – we slither together, frantic now. Penny’s thighs rise and fall and I grip her hips with desperate strength. She’s gasping. I’m nearly weeping with the need for release, because I can’t possibly come again, not now.

But somehow I do. Riding a long white streak of pain I flood her, pulse after pulse.

* * *

And now Penny is pregnant. When she couldn’t have been fertile. When I had nothing left to give her, from testes inflamed with poison.

Now I’m really scared.

(Roisin)

And this is Roisin, the mirror-ghost. She is the oldest of the vampires in the City: so very old that she hardly remembers her first life, so old that only her name remains to her. Her history has dissolved in the murk of years, her ambitions and personality washed away by the tide of time. She has forgotten almost everything. Her body too has surrendered its identity, even its reality. It has become as tenuous and fragmented as her mind.

Matter is no longer material. The material is no matter. She is on her way to becoming a ghost, or a god.

She remembers only how to love. The thirst for love still drives her. She doesn’t feed casually, not like Ben or Naylor, Reynauld or Estelle. She doesn’t choose a different lover every night then abandon them disbelieving and distraught before morning. When Roisin feeds, it is with passion. She falls for her lovers with the swift, heart-clutching imperative of romantic fervour. She becomes obsessed and will woo a new flame for weeks, lavishing her kisses upon them alone. She shadows and protects them, keeping them close, shutting the world with all its dangers and horrors away, spinning a cocoon of love to cradle them.

And she will be gentle as she eats you. Tender as her lips wrap about your warm flesh and seek the throbbing pulse. She will mourn you with exquisite sorrow when you leave her bereft.

Fear her love.

Roisin will come to you out of a silvered glass. Be not too vain, or the white lady may spy you and want you for her own. Under the moonlight, she will stoop to kiss your flesh with her pale lips and fill you with her cold fire. In silent places she approaches, her presence marked only by the faintest whisper, a stir of chill air not strong enough to break the cobwebs spun on an autumn night. Her skin is whiter than porcelain, her lips full, her breasts small and soft, her eyes an empty void aching to be filled with the sight of you. She needs. She is the embodiment of need.

She is beautiful, and she will break your heart.

It’s hard to say what it is that attracts her in the first place: a look in someone’s eye, perhaps; a particular indefinable scent of skin or the sound of a racing pulse. It’s the indescribable chemistry of passion: a mystery. Perhaps she sees or tastes in them a faint echo of her first love. And yet every time she is betrayed; that is her tragedy. Her lovers grow wizened and ungrateful, dull as clods of earth where once they were brimming with life, and unresponsive to either pain or pleasure. Just as swiftly as she falls for them she inevitably finds herself one night, without warning, perplexed and frustrated and indifferent, and she turns away in search of new succour for her empty and aching heart.

And she forgets.

Once outside of the fierce focused light of her love, the living are too ephemeral to make any impression on her memory. Roisin has lived so many years, seen so many faces, that mortals are like transient patterns formed by mud swirled in water. She finds comfort in places she knows, but even places change. Meadows are suddenly covered in swathes of housing, trees grow to giants and then vanish in the blink of an eye, skylines rise and fall like a tide. She clings to those people whose immortality – if not their permanence – makes them more than passing shadows, to Reynauld and Naylor in particular. They are the anchors of her disintegrating life. They are beacons in the fog.

The present washes over her, too ephemeral to grasp. The past decays. She recalls … What? Fragments only.

The smell of the wild briar roses after which she was named.

A lead-weighted spindle hanging from her fingers, twisting flax to thread.

The seep of bog water into leather shoes stuffed with fleece to cushion her numb toes. Hands heavy on her arms, marching her too fast through the puddles, the mud splashing up under her woollen skirt all over her bare legs.

Long-handled, Y-shaped lengths of wood. They pushed her underwater, face down, pinning her limbs to the muddy bed. The water looked yellow as piss from below, and bubbles of air rose like golden balls from her open lips.

She remembers love. It was love that destroyed her and love that kept her alive through death. She’d loved someone, though she can’t remember who – or what. Just the ferocious, all-consuming passion of his embrace; the terror and the ecstasy. Only that it made everyone afraid. That they’d met in darkness, though she cannot recall whether it was once or many times, and that dogs had been howling.

Some things still prick her memory at odd moments, recalling briefly that first raw passion – strange things, like the lift of a white dog’s muzzle, or the feel of leaf mould under her nails, or the smell of wet and sweating horses.

The first, fresh, coppery taste of blood.

They staked her in the swamp because they were afraid of the one she loved. All winter she lay there, while the ice thickened over her head and in the tissues of her body. Nothing lived in that acid water: no fish or insect gnawed at her cold flesh. Nothing moved except the occasional bubble of gas ascending to the surface. Then when the spring thawed her out she rose from the mud, thrust aside the stakes and went home. Looking for love, hot and red.