Lace

  Griffin Lowe sat across the velvet banquette from Judy and they ate lobster bisque, roast lamb with watercress salad followed by caramelized, sliced oranges. Then as they sipped their coffee, Griffin gently took her hand under the table and Judy almost died of shock. Was this not 1968, when the up-to-date standard approach was “Hello, do you feel like a fuck?” And was she not a thirty-five-year-old figure of emerging womanhood, strong, direct and adult? So was she really experiencing that old familiar feeling in the pit of the stomach as if she were back in school again?

  Yes.

  They sat there for over an hour just holding hands and saying nothing. Judy didn’t move out of the restaurant, she floated. After the driver had helped her into the waiting car, Griffin murmured, “You must be wondering if this is my standard approach. I just felt happy holding your hand, so I didn’t want to stop. Now d’you want this to go any further or not?”

  “Well, perhaps just to the elbow.” He leaned over and took her in his arms. Judy suddenly felt his mouth pressed on hers, his arms crushing her body, his breath on her cheek, his fingers in her hair.

  She couldn’t remember getting out of the car and into her apartment. She only knew that her hands were shaking as Griffin slowly unzipped her black velvet dress and it fell to the floor of the living room. He pulled her to him and again she felt his mouth on hers, his firm square hands sliding gently down to the small of her back, pressing her body against him until her knees shook so that she could no longer stand. Then he gently peeled off her sheer black pantyhose and laid her, still trembling, on the yielding soft cushions of the couch.

  Shivering with pleasure she yielded to his touch, his fingers, his mouth. Then he, too, was naked and she could smell and feel the warmth of him against her.

  He lifted her in his arms. He put her down on the silk sheets of her bed, then, savoring each moment, they abandoned themselves to slow, sensual lovemaking.

  He licked her secret places. He tried to lick her ear, but Judy jerked her head away—she couldn’t bear that warm messy wetness. But of course sex was messy, so she gave in, surrendering to pleasure. He checked where else she liked to be licked, and they found it was almost everywhere. Then suddenly he grew fierce and so did she and they had a little wrestling match to see who got on top and he allowed Judy to win, but somehow they fell off the bed and onto the red-fox spread and then she felt his fingers inside her, after which he rimmed her rather noisily and she didn’t mind the warm messy wetness, not one bit. Then she twisted her body until he was powerless beneath her, or so it pleased them to pretend. She moved against him, driving him to the same frenzy that he’d made her feel ten minutes before, then she pushed him back against the cinnamon silk pillows, then leaned back and grabbed his ankles. She felt his strength inside her, his hard, hairy thighs beneath her ass, his fingers driving her wild.

  She woke early, happy, and calm. Suddenly remembering the night, she jerked her head around and saw his winged black eyebrows. She felt an odd, new sensation. She didn’t want him to wake up. When he woke up, he would leave. Immediately she felt suspicious of this new vulnerability. She felt possessive. Reminding herself that her bedmate was a well-known womaniser, Judy slid out of bed, put on her dressing gown and fixed breakfast.

  Griffin Lowe opened one eye, reached out one arm and tugged at her pink lace gown, then he pulled her down on the bed and murmured how he’d like to start the day, and it wasn’t with breakfast. So she slid on top of him again and once more they melted into each other, her slight body on his strong, lusty one.

  At last he said gently, “I told Carter to bring the car around at eight, so I’ll have to go soon. But I’ll be back.”

  Then he showered and suddenly he was gone, leaving her breathless, incapable of thought, incapable of work, incapable of doing anything except to relive in her imagination every minute since she’d met him.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that this new sensation wasn’t merely carnal desire or passion. For the first time, at the age of thirty-five, she correctly suspected that she was falling in love.

  Unsummoned, Griffin now drifted into Judy’s thoughts when she least expected it, catching her off-guard during conferences and meetings. She wasted a lot of time gazing dreamily into space, thinking of his skin, the way the back of his neck joined his broad shoulders, the soft hair on his forearms, the shape of his hands, the scar on his left hand (Why? There were so many things to ask him), the warmth of his body. Griffin even knew how to undress erotically, that slow loosening of the tie as he looked steadily at her, removing his socks before his pants to avoid that ridiculous, vaudeville view of hairy legs between shirt and socks.

  In a rosewood drawer by her bed she kept a pale blue shirt that he’d worn, and when he wasn’t there, she pressed it to her face and inhaled the musky odour of his body.

  Griffin immediately hired LACE for one of his new companies, pointing out that it would give them a reason to be together, which it did. Judy was surprised by his relaxed business methods. He didn’t waste energy looking dynamic; at times he seemed almost idle. He would sit at a meeting in a gentle, almost apologetic manner, rubbing the side of his nose with his left index finger as he questioned, commented, queried and encouraged other people, probing for every detail. Then he would sum up the entire meeting in three minutes. When Griffin Lowe went to a meeting, whether it was a formal one in his gray suede-panelled conference room or a casual discussion with feet on the desk, everyone present seemed to think fifteen percent faster and better. It was one of the things that Judy and he had in common.

  He and Judy saw each other three times a week. At first they were discreet, but increasingly they became reckless. His wife must surely know, Judy reasoned, and so did Griffin. “She won’t say anything, she never does,” he told Judy and she winced. She hated to think of herself as merely one of Griffin’s affairs.

  There was a long silence.

  “That was a very shitty thing to say,” she said, and she was only half-joking. She wanted to hurt him, the way those three words had just hurt and humiliated her. “She never does.”

  They’d had lunch at her apartment—smoked trout and half a bottle of Pouilly Fumée at the bedside—then Griffin showered, dressed and was now about to leave.

  “Very shitty . . .” Judy repeated, turning to him with a wicked gleam in her blue eyes. “So I’m going to punish you so that you never hurt or humiliate me again.”

  Griffin went along with it—he could have kicked himself for saying those three words—as she led him by the hand back to the rumpled bed and shoved him down on it. With a forced laugh—he was late for his next appointment—Griffin put a lazy arm up to pull her down against his chest, but she caught his wrist and said, “I’m going to tie you to the bed; then I’m going to have my way with you. I’m going to punish you so that you will never, never be shitty and thoughtless with me again.”

  She bit his forefinger hard enough to make Griffin jump with pain and surprise. Then she pulled off her maroon-silk dressing gown sash and swiftly tied his right arm to the headboard.

  He tried to protest in a playful voice, going along with the game. He recognised the real pain behind her teasing tone of voice, and he also recognised that he wasn’t going to make his next appointment. As she reached for his other wrist and wrapped a red silk scarf around it, he said in a resigned voice, “Aren’t you going to undress me first?”

  “I’ll take off your shoes,” Judy offered, yanking off his handmade Italian loafers; she then tied his ankles to the bed with his beige silk socks, so that he was spread-eagled.

  “Oh, no,” Griffin said in a high falsetto. “No, no, no! Not Gestapo-style correction, not . . . the whip, not torture, not the studded leather belt with the cruel brass buckle and the vicious stiletto heels and the swastika armband!” Groaning between laughs, he didn’t mind playing a masochist for once.

  “Worse,” said Judy, disappearing into the kitchen and then appearing naked in the doorway with a pair of
shears in her hand. As she headed for the bed, still with that wicked glint in her eye, Griffin nervously said, “Okay Judy, I’m sorry. Now let’s quit fooling around. This ridiculous horseplay has gone far enough, and I’m late as it is.”

  “Oh, but I haven’t started, so I’m certainly not going to stop,” she said. And before Griffin realised what she was doing she’d slashed through the jacket of his handmade suit.

  “Judy!” He tried to jerk himself upright but found, to his surprise, that he really couldn’t move. She started to snip through his silk shirt, imported the previous month from Jermyn Street.

  “Judy! What are you playing at? You gave me this shirt only yesterday. Remember?”

  “A mistake,” said Judy calmly, carefully cutting into his left trouser bottom and slicing up, roughly, toward his groin. “You really did hurt my feelings, just then, so I’m afraid I’ll have to upset your life the way you’re upsetting mine.”

  Griffin started to simmer. He wouldn’t have minded if it were a Saturday, but he had a busy afternoon ahead, and after all, they’d just . . .

  “You did come, didn’t you?”

  “Shut up. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll make sure that you can’t talk.”

  She put the shears down, picked up her tights, stuffed them in his mouth and gagged him with his tan silk tie. Then she carefully slashed up the other trouser leg and yanked away the debris of gray flannel. For one second Griffin worried as the shears were flourished in the air and then slashed toward his boxer shorts. He started to give muffled yells for mercy. Whatever she was playing at, it seemed the correct way to react.

  “I’m going to punish you so that you never do it again,” Judy said softly. “I’m going to make you sorry! I’m going to make you suffer! There’s a law against what I’d really like to do to you at this moment!” As she bent toward his cock, to his embarrassment, Griffin felt himself stiffen. She curled her tongue and flicked it at his flesh with butterfly strokes. Griffin groaned with pleasure, whereupon Judy stopped. She scrambled off the bed and again headed for the kitchen, reappearing with a bottle of olive oil. She said in a conversational voice, “You really should be more considerate, Griffin.”

  Kneeling on the bed beside him, she tipped the whole bottle over him, and the oil ran off his body and onto the sheets. Judy moved to the bottom of the bed and started to massage his left foot, carefully starting with the big toe and kneading hard under the instep, then going all the way up his leg with hard, oily strokes. He thought, She’s going to suck me off; that’s what this is leading up to. But she didn’t. She stopped short of that point and started to rub his right foot, then expertly massaged his entire body until her hands were kneading the big muscles on either side of Griffin’s neck. Occasionally she brushed the tips of her nipples across his chest as her thumbs pushed rhythmically toward his ears.

  “Now you should be limp and acquiescent,” she said thoughtfully. Then she crouched over Griffin’s oil-slick body and with the tip of her tongue just licked his stiff cock with little cat-licking-the-cream sort of licks, after which she knelt astride him and carefully stroked her clitoris with his cock, taking no notice whatsoever of Griffin, in fact, treating him as a sexual object to bring herself to orgasm. Griffin was spread-eagled on the bed and she was sitting on top of him, so there wasn’t much that he could do about it. A muffled groan escaped his lips. By now he was slightly purple in the face and highly excited as Judy very carefully knelt astride his hips and put just the tip of his cock inside her, then quickly lifted her body so that it almost slipped out. After a few minutes of this teasing, she suddenly pushed it right in, and ground her body against his. Then, just as suddenly, she jumped off him.

  There was a muffled yell of fury from Griffin.

  “No! I’m going to fix myself a highball!”

  She padded away, leaving Griffin jerking at his bonds, and returned with a large Scotch-on-the-rocks. She took a swig and rolled it around her tongue like mouthwash. The she stretched out beside Griffin, took two ice cubes in her mouth and bent down again. He gave a muffled yelp, because the stinging sensation was totally different from the normal inside of somebody’s mouth; instead of being warm and soft and wet it felt freezing and dangerously lumpy.

  Judy sucked away until the ice in her mouth had melted and Griffin had lost his erection. Then she curled her forefinger inside him and wriggled around a bit, feeling for his prostate, and when she found it she pushed against it until Griffin quickly jerked to a climax.

  She stood up and poured the rest of the highball over his head—the bed was now covered in a revolting mixture of olive oil and melting ice—then she nipped out to the icebox. Saying, “This always looks so humorous on film,” she returned with a lemon meringue pie, which she carefully ground in Griffin’s face. She pulled the tinfoil base away, stood up and surveyed the scene.

  “My God, what a mess!” she said disapprovingly, then turned on her heel and headed for the shower.

  Ten minutes later she reappeared, immaculately dressed in a buttercup, sleeveless, short linen tunic with matching pumps. “I’ve got an appointment, Griffin, so I have to go now,” Judy said in a polite voice. Then she picked the shears off the floor and placed them on the bed, about a foot from Griffin’s head. He tried to yell his indignation at her, but only muffled sounds came through the gag in his mouth as he struggled furiously.

  “You were in the Boy Scouts, Griffin, you work it out,” she said, and walked out of the apartment.

  Griffin couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that she’d really left him. He couldn’t believe that he wasn’t able to free himself. He jerked and struggled with his ridiculous silken bindings, gradually getting very cold on the unpleasantly sticky, damp bed, which stank of Scotch.

  Eventually he found that by curling his right hand carefully around, he was able to pick at the knot of the dressing gown sash. It took him about half an hour, but then with one bound he was free—and telephoning Carter to bring around a fresh set of clothes.

  Griffin was furious.

  But he was also impressed. He—Griffin Lowe, the big-dealer, the lover and leaver, who kept his women neatly organised in a private emotional filing system that never overlapped with office hours or impinged on his domestic comfort—had been faced with a situation that his power, charm and savoir faire were unable to resolve. There had been real fury behind what Judy did—and she hadn’t weakened. She had also demonstrated the physical power she had over Griffin. She understood his body so well that she had kept him at the point of orgasm for an hour and a half, teasing him almost beyond endurance until his nerves were raw.

  He had been humbled, if not humiliated.

  From that moment, the pattern of their relationship shifted, and Griffin treated Judy with a great deal more care and respect, not because he was afraid of her, but because she had done exactly what she said she would do—she had punished him!

  But Griffin knew that he had to risk her pain and fury once more. He knew he had to spell their future out to her—it was only fair. One evening, a week after she’d tied him up and slashed his clothes off, they both lay naked on her bed, in the soft, final rays of the setting sun. They were both voluptuously tired after making love, and Griffin didn’t really want to talk, but he knew he had to. He held her hand hard, knowing that he had to make it clear to her, knowing that it was going to hurt her. Eventually, he simply said, “Delia knows I’d never leave her or the kids, Judy. I’ve fought too hard for what I’ve got to dump my family or to hurt them.” There was a long silence. He felt ill at ease and Judy looked so closed off and remote that he slid off the bed and padded, naked, to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of Dom Perignon in one hand.

  “I can’t think why she puts up with you,” Judy said.

  “Delia knows there’s an odd kind of security about a man who’s always falling in love.”

  Judy projected anger as he untwisted the wire and eased out the champagne cork with his thumbs. He had to b
e straight with her. “Fact one, Judy—I meet a lot of beautiful women and I enjoy them. Fact two—I also have a family. For me these are two entirely different areas of interest, and I hope you realise this.”

  She stretched one arm from the tousled, cinnamon silk sheets and took the glass of champagne he offered. “I mean, Judy, I’m underlining it. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas, but I want you to understand I will never, never leave my wife. It would hurt her too much and I could never live with myself afterward.”

  There was a long pause.

  “That’s what they all say.” Judy carefully tipped her glass over his head. “And anyway, who asked you? A long time ago, I decided I was never going to marry. I didn’t see the point of making unrealistic promises I wasn’t sure that I or anyone else could keep.”

  Griffin put down the champagne bottle and headed for the bathroom. At least she hadn’t smashed it over his head. And he had—finally and clearly—said it.

  Judy continued in a dreamy voice: “I keep telling myself that I shouldn’t want to marry you and I don’t think I really do. It’s just that I hate your being married to somebody else.” She raised her voice so that, in the bathroom, he could still hear what she was saying. “I don’t want to be dependent for my happiness on someone else, and I can’t help feeling that way.”

  Griffin padded back, and she thought how handsome he looked as he stood in the doorway towelling his hair. He tried a tentative grin.

  “Goddamn it, Griffin, listen, please. I’ve always valued my independence, but now I notice in myself a sudden painful urge to tell you everything, Griffin, every secret of my life.”