Chapter Twelve
‘You look amazing,’ Riz said, staring at Caroline as she walked in the door on Friday evening; he dashed to help her with her laptop case, something that he had never done before. ‘Have you been working out?’
‘Oh, a little bit,’ Caroline said nonchalantly, yielding the case to him even as she thought how ironic this was. She was noticeably tighter, stronger, slimmer, and now a man was rushing to take her luggage: surely, logically, he should have done it before, when she looked like she was too out of shape to carry anything?
She had definitely lost weight over the course of the last few weeks, a combination of arduous runs on the Studland beach from Tuesday to Friday mornings and limiting herself to the diet meals that Lexy’s cook prepared for her boss. Portion control, only a tiny amount of dressing, practically no dairy or carbs. It was horrible, nibbling on dryish slices of roast chicken while looking wistfully at the mayonnaise into which the kids were dipping their chips for dinner, or forking up a stir-fried prawn with no rice to go with it. She hadn’t realized before how stringent a proper dieting regime was. Up to now, Caroline’s idea of a diet had been to replace white rice with brown, buy low-fat hummus, avoid butter on her bread; she hadn’t realized that, for her to have anything close to Lexy’s figure, she would need to go much further, cutting out carbs almost entirely.
At first she had barely lost a pound, which she had found very discouraging. Frank had been a rock of support, however, explaining that the jogging was building up her muscle, which weighed more than fat, and that she should stay off the scales. Instead, she should watch for signs that her clothes were looser, that she felt lighter as she hauled her body over the sand. This week had been a breakthrough: finally daring to weigh herself, she had realized that she had lost half a stone, and that revelation made her almost as happy as the memory of hugging Frank two nights ago and the lovely chat that had followed, the two of them sitting on the sofa of her suite for a good half hour.
Caroline still didn’t know how she’d managed to avoid giving herself away. Frank’s thigh had been so close to hers that it was almost pressing against her. The words poured out of him as he confided that Lexy broke his heart when she tried to use sex to distract him instead of working on their marriage and parenting their kids. Frank was very discreet; he didn’t even say the word ‘sex’, but Caroline was sharp and intuitive, and it took only the subtlest reference to ‘intimacy’ for her to understand the situation.
Very sensibly, she didn’t offer advice, but just curled up and listened, murmuring sympathetic words from time to time. Eventually Frank headed to the spare room to sleep, but not before telling Caroline how grateful he was for letting him bother her with his troubles. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could talk about to his mates, he had explained; without his going into any more detail, Caroline quite understood that a husband complaining that his wife kept distracting him from serious conversations by offering sex would bring the same amount of sympathy as if he had tried to elicit it by lamenting that his cock was oversized.
It was highly unpleasant to think of Lexy regularly seducing Frank. So Caroline pushed those images away and basked instead in the revelation that Frank and Lexy’s seemingly happy marriage had problems significant enough for them not only to fight openly in front of Caroline, but for Lexy to declare that Frank wasn’t welcome in the marital bed that night. The day afterwards, the very honest Frank had told Lexy over morning coffee that he had stayed up for a while after she stormed out, telling his troubles to Caroline. By chance, Caroline had been about to enter the kitchen, and she had paused just outside to hear Lexy’s response. Lexy had laughed and commented that Ghost Mouse wasn’t getting paid enough if she had to listen to Frank’s shit as well as her own.
No shred of insecurity. No hint that Lexy felt threatened in any way by her husband sitting in the cosy atmosphere of Caroline’s living room after a marital fight, confiding his troubles to her. Caroline had been absolutely right. Lexy had indeed put her ghostwriter firmly in the no-risk-to-my-marriage category, along with the limp-noodle nanny and moustachioed Lina.
Caroline had spent the last two days, when not working, brooding very heavily and with great resentment on the words ‘Ghost Mouse’. When Lexy had coined the nickname the day they met, Caroline had actually liked it: she had focused almost entirely on the first word, as a sign that Lexy might genuinely be considering her for the coveted job. Now, however, she was giving much more attention to the second.
She did not let the resentment show in her behaviour around Lexy, of course. Even though, as Caroline was all too vividly aware, Lexy’s self-obsession was so all-encompassing that she would have been oblivious to any change in Caroline’s demeanour – short of Caroline throwing her laptop at her while screaming that she was very far from being a mouse . . .
‘Looks like you’ve lost more than just a little bit!’ Riz commented now, staring at her with obvious appreciation. ‘Congratulations! Have you been—’
Caroline cut him off. ‘You know what?’ she said, leaning in. ‘We can talk later. But right now I’m a bit sweaty from the journey and I want to have a shower. Why don’t you come in and join me?’
Riz’s face went pink, and he blinked madly.
‘I was just meaning to tell you,’ he said under his breath, nodding to the lounge in which Stewart and Veronika were visible on the sofa, watching The One Show, ‘people have been saying to me that we need not to make so much noise when, you know, when we—’
‘So gag me with my knickers and then fuck me while the water’s running,’ Caroline hissed back.
Riz’s eyes went wide. Caroline was taken aback herself at her frankness before she realized that this idea had come straight from an anecdote of Lexy’s that she had spent all yesterday evening writing up. Jamal might have wanted Lexy to peg him, but Sean, a celebrity cricketer famous for his wild partying ways, had been quite the other way round, enjoying nothing more than to tie Lexy up in all sorts of eccentric positions and have his way with her.
This was the first time Caroline hadn’t actually had to ask herself what Lexy would do. She realized, staring at Riz’s now very red face, that she seemed to have internalized the question: now she was popping out the answer almost as easily as Lexy herself.
Ten minutes later, she was naked and facing the shower, water pouring down on the crown of her head as Riz, precariously balanced behind her in the bathtub, tried to slip his cock into her; she could hear him slipping around as the head butted against her and then retreated again.
‘I’m scared I’m going to fall on top of you and we’ll both smash our faces in,’ he said urgently. ‘I can’t really get a good stance back here, the bath’s so narrow . . .’
Caroline thought of the big walk-in shower in her guest suite at The Gables, of Lexy and Frank’s huge wet room with waist-high wraparound jets, of the rainforest shower in the gym with fragranced oils to match its colour-change programmes. How much sexier it would be if they were fucking in one of those, rather than this narrow, cramped bathroom!
Of course, if she were having sex under one of the many luxurious, state-of-the-art showers in the Sandbanks mansion, it would not be with Riz. Even as the two of them climbed out of the bath, clinging to each other and bracing themselves against the bath edge so they didn’t slip and fall, as she took up position in front of the sink, hands flat on the chipped tiles behind it, not daring to cling to the rickety sink itself in case it came out of the wall, even as Riz started sliding his fingers into her, making sure she was ready, and she groaned to show him she was – she hadn’t reminded him about gagging her with her knickers, as on reflection she really hadn’t fancied it after having worn them all day – even as Riz’s cock entered her and he started to get a rhythm going, she closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see the dirty grouting between the tiles, the broken cord on the cheap window blind, the various housemates’ stained bits of soap ranged along the crusted edge of the sink.
Caroline wasn’t in London any more. She was back at The Gables, showering after her run, in the big bathroom off the basement gym, immersed in a beautiful fantasy in which Frank, somehow failing to hear the running water, would open the door to the circular shower room, step in, and promptly babble apologies at the sight of Caroline in the nude, water dripping down her, soaping herself. She would turn and look at him, the soap held at her breast.
But she wouldn’t say a word. She wouldn’t try to seduce him in any way; she wanted Frank to do everything, initiate the entire sexual encounter. That way, not only would she have nothing to feel guilty about, it would be the most flattering scenario imaginable, because it would be all about Frank being attracted to her naked body.
He would shut the door behind him, slowly, and then tear off his clothes, all in one go. This would happen unrealistically fast, without the usual awkward moments when one tried to pull off socks and trainers, hopping from one foot to the other, so that neither Frank nor Caroline could have second thoughts or an attack of guilt. Like all culminating moments in the best romance novels, they would be swept away on an overpowering tide of passion.
And then he would be upon her. Much as Caroline would have loved to fantasize about Frank lifting her up in one effortless swoop, her legs wrapping around his waist as he pressed her back against the tiny, opalescent, extremely expensive gold-flecked mica tiles of the curved shower wall, not even her very vivid imagination could stretch to that. Some days ago Lexy had recounted a hilarious story of another basketball player trying to pick her up and fuck her against the wall of a hotel bathroom: according to her, it had been incredibly tricky. Although he had had the strength to hold her up, his feet had kept slipping on the tiled floor, and though he had taken a pause to stand on a bathmat instead, it had barely helped. Eventually, they had given up; he’d put her down and she’d turned round instead, bracing herself against the wall, with much joking about getting the hotel to send up one of those old-people rubber shower mats to stand on next time.
So, in Caroline’s fantasy, Frank would be kissing her neck and sliding into her from behind. With her eyes closed, Caroline could picture that it was Frank behind her, not Riz. Frank’s golden-brown hands on her hips; Frank’s handsome face contorted as he tried to hold on as long as possible, to keep the bliss of this encounter going for at least ten minutes; Frank’s thick hairy fingers, snaking around to start stroking her clit. The workings of lust, she thought hazily, were fascinating; she wouldn’t have dreamed of fantasizing about hairy fingers before she met Frank, and now, in her fantasies, she couldn’t stop picturing them all over her . . .
Riz was making her come, and as she did, trying to be quiet for the housemates, images of not only Frank but the sex scenes from her Regency porn novella flashed before her eyes. She had been amazed, rereading that, how explicit she had been; she had completely let her imagination run riot, without a shred of embarrassment about the perversity of the entire story.
It was as if, when she began to write, she stepped into a parallel universe, where she was no longer boring old Caroline with her boring old job and her boring old life, but someone who was able to take a huge step into a world where she could write anything she wanted, creating characters who had everything she didn’t: titles, fabulous costumes, amazing bodies, a stately home to play in, a total lack of inhibition, the bravery to live out their fantasies rather than just type them onto a screen.
Like Lexy. Lexy, who seemed to have done almost everything sexually possible, and was utterly unembarrassed telling Caroline about it. That sample of Regency porn had given Lexy the assurance that Caroline would not only be utterly unshocked by anything Lexy could recount, but that she would be able to depict it sexily on the page; not having realized how many tales of her exploits Lexy had been planning to unload on her expectant readers, Caroline had not realized how important her erotica had been.
And now Caroline had not only captured Lexy’s voice, but was telling her story, gaining confidence with every sex scene she wrote, trying to emulate her, to become more sure of her own body and her own attraction, to turn herself into the kind of woman who would attract a man like Frank –
Frank. Caroline was coming again, and it was all she could do not to moan his name. Even as she spasmed over Riz’s fingers, it was Frank she pictured behind her, his cock inside her. Frank had replaced Jim in her fantasies, the sexy muscled blacksmith of her Regency erotica: how often had Caroline masturbated to the image of Jim hammering away at her, while she had morphed into the lovely Lady Maria, slender as a wand with thighs like steel from riding her wild Arab stallion, blonde hair tumbling over her perfect body?
Nothing was too decadent, too perverse, for the spoilt and beautiful Lady Maria, who had, together with her brother the Marquis, been orphaned very young, and grown up experimenting with him, a pair of youthful libertines in an atmosphere of absolute freedom . . . And now the two fantasies merged. Caroline was Lady Maria, the wet hair slicked to her back no longer light brown and poker-straight, but champagne blonde tresses, her body magically reed-slim; but it was still Frank behind her, a flood of dirty words pouring from his mouth as he pulled out and, bending her down into the sink, her breasts pressed uncomfortably into the cold ceramic surface, shot all over her back.
The sensation of her big boobs squashing into the sink bowl snapped Caroline into real life. Lady Maria’s tiny breasts would have merely grazed it delicately, while Caroline’s were spilling into the small sink, practically filling it. Meanwhile, Riz was panting like a steam train from his efforts, while Frank or Jim, both prime physical specimens, would definitely not sound like they were about to have an asthma attack just from a ten-minute fuck.
She might not be Lady Maria, Caroline told herself, her forehead pressed uncomfortably against the back of the sink, but her life had been transformed in the last month. She had regular, very good sex; she had lost half a stone; her skin, after two electro-current treatments and the daily vitamins and omegas she took religiously morning and night, was visibly smoother and less prone to redness; and the book was going so well that she truly thought she might be able to finish the contract and call herself a writer.
Slightly nervous at how racy the memoir was proving to be, she had sent a couple of the sex scenes off to Gareth a few days ago. To Caroline’s great relief, he had responded that very same day to say he was loving it, and not to hold back. If the book ended up being a romp through Lexy’s entire sex life, he had emailed, why not? It would be a totally fresh take on the celebrity memoir-slash-novel, and it was always easier to tone down sexy bits than to spice them up.
Also, he had started the email with ‘Hello my lovely!’ and ended it with ‘Big hugs!!’ which had made Caroline feel very happy indeed. Clearly Gareth felt confident enough in her work to be his jolly self with her, rather than holding her at a coolly professional arm’s distance.
‘God, that was fantastic,’ Riz said, reaching for some loo paper and wiping down her back. Caroline was unable to help observing how scratchy and coarse it felt. Whoever had been on loo-paper-buying rota had clearly bought it from the pound shop on the high street; it had been a false economy, so thin and unabsorbent that Riz needed three fistfuls to clean Caroline up completely. The toilet roll in Lexy and Frank’s mansion, by contrast, was quilted and velvet-soft, four-ply, more than up to the TV-ad challenge of being tugged at and unwound by the needle-sharp teeth of a cute Labrador puppy, or wiping a load of semen off someone with the greatest comfort possible.
‘Shall we have a bath together?’ Riz suggested rather bashfully, chucking the paper in the loo and flushing it. ‘Might be nice to have a bit of a soak, eh? I bought a couple of Lush bath bombs on the way home from work. And I was thinking – I’ve got a game to go to tomorrow, but maybe we could grab a bite to eat on Sunday? There’s a new Italian place on the high street. It’s got a wood-fired oven and apparently the cooks used to work at Jamie’s Italian, so it should be really authentic . . .’
Oh, wow, Caroline thought as she extracted her upper body from the sink. He’s asking me out on a dinner date. How do I feel about that?
Honesty compelled her to admit that a month ago, before the call from Campaspe, she would have been flattered at the revelation that her booty call no longer saw her as a convenient and semi-secret shag, but a woman with whom he was happy to be seen in public. She couldn’t help but be pleased. Nor could she blame Riz for being keener on her now that she had lost some weight, toned up a little, gained confidence; those were, after all, attributes anyone would find attractive.
But Riz wasn’t what she wanted in a boyfriend. Even putting aside her crazy daydreams about Frank turning to her one night on the sofa of her living room, telling her that he couldn’t stand Lexy’s selfishness any more and he realized that she, Caroline, was the woman he really wanted to spend his life with – even ignoring those stupid fantasies, couldn’t she do better than Riz now? She was no longer the office drudge, stuck writing tedious press releases for journalists on trade magazines to push aside, but a ghostwriter to a major celebrity. Couldn’t she look higher than a podgy guy who worked at . . . where did Riz even work? She was pretty sure that he was in IT at an energy company, but which one?
The balance had altered. Before, Caroline had always perceived it as tipped in Riz’s favour. Riz was male, and in Caroline’s experience that meant he automatically had an advantage: so often it was the woman who wanted to get into a serious relationship while the man held back. Also, Caroline had been fatter than him when they were just hooking up – not sexy fat, which would have been a very different story, but dowdy fat – which in her opinion had also meant that she was lower on the scale than he. She had always secretly felt that the way they had kept their sex life on the down-low had been driven more by Riz than by herself. She would have been okay with the other housemates knowing about it, while she’d had the feeling that Riz would not.
Now it was Riz who wanted to go public, and she who was holding back. But that created a dilemma, as she had no wish to give up her regular sex partner. What with Frank’s proximity and the racy scenes Caroline was writing for Lexy, she had sex on her mind a great deal of the time, and though she brought her vibrator with her to Sandbanks, by Friday she was eager to return to London simply because she would be able to get a good couple of fucks over the weekend.
I’ll have to go along with this to get what I want, she decided. I’m perfectly happy to go out for dinner with him every so often, and if he tries to have a talk about us, I’ll just say that I’m working so hard on the book I can’t possibly think about anything else until I’ve finished. Basically, I’ll string him along and use him for his body.
Which is definitely what Lexy would do!
The offer of a Sunday dinner date was easy to resolve. As Riz reached past her to put in the rubber bath plug and turn on the taps, she said:
‘That sounds lovely, but I can’t Sunday night. I have to go to a charity awards show with Lexy. She wants me to write about it for the book. I’m really freaked out about what I’m going to wear, actually.’
‘That sounds amazing!’ Riz said, turning back to give her a hug. ‘Why don’t you go shopping tomorrow to buy something new? Now that you’ve lost some weight, your old clothes might not fit. I could come with you, if you’d like.’
Oh goodness, Caroline thought, as he reached up and smoothed back a lock of her hair. He really does seem into me. Offering to come shopping to help me choose a party dress – aren’t men supposed to hate that kind of thing?
‘You should get a nice pair of heels as well, if you don’t have them,’ Riz added, looking down. ‘Your legs look good from all the exercise. What’ve you been doing?’
‘Running on sand,’ Caroline said, unable to help feeling very proud of herself. ‘Well, running and walking, on and off. It’s so hard.’
‘We could go for a run in the park over the weekend, if you fancy it?’ Riz asked. He was a positive suggestion machine this evening.
‘I’ll see,’ Caroline said, deflecting with a smile. ‘I might not have the time – I’ve got to write all weekend. This deadline’s mental.’
‘It’s really cool that you’ve become a writer,’ Riz said shyly. ‘Like, following your dreams.’
He picked up the paper bag that contained the bath bombs.
‘Would you rather have Big Blue or Sakura?’ he asked. ‘That’s cherry blossom.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They did have one called Sex Bomb, but I thought that might be a bit much . . .’
One day, it won’t be, Caroline thought, even as she told Riz that cherry blossom sounded lovely. It might seem like a silly, small thing, but one day, men won’t buy me anything but Sex Bombs, because I am one! Just as they would for Lexy.
Caroline wanted Lexy’s bathroom, Lexy’s confidence, Lexy’s sex life, Lexy’s husband. She wanted every single thing that Lexy possessed. And that left her with a burning question: what, exactly, would it take to get them?