Quiver

“I want to hear you say it.”

He removes his hand and pushes his cock into her, filling her. He is a perfect fit. Skin on skin. A hot ember that spreads up through her freezing limbs.

“Say it!”

“Size twelve.”

He groans and thrusts vigorously into her, then pulls back, hovering tantalizingly close to her outer lips, teasing her, before plunging in again. And out. And in, again and again. She wants him deeper. She wants to swallow him up. He pauses for a moment and throws his legs over hers so that he is actually sitting on her. The end of his shaft, now bent, rubs hard against her clitoris. She moans. He buries his hand into her hair, and pulls her head away from him, wanting to watch her come.

“Does that feel good? Does it?”

“Yes.”

She drops her legs so that he is clamped between her thighs. He fastens his mouth to her breast and bites sharply. The pain intermingles with the intense pleasure of him moving hard inside her. The faint echo of some Negro spiritual resounds in her head. She thinks she is experiencing a spiritual revelation.

“How good? Say it.”

“Good.”

“Just good?”

“Ahh…ahh!” She screams as her first orgasm ripples through her and the Negro spiritual breaks into a chorus of demented angels, all of them under five foot three.

Somewhere in the vague distance she can feel herself contracting, the echo of her cry still bouncing off the walls of the huge meat freezer.

He smiles, still hard, still wanting more.

“What are your feelings on tripe?”

Before Jock’s next major shipment she had packed up her small bedsit with its one-bar heater, poster of Phar Lap, her hardback edition of Black Beauty, single narrow bed and dress rack with her four standard outfits. Under a pile of magazines she found the ankle binders, wrapped carefully in plastic. She threw them out, triumphant.

Jock’s mock-Palladian mansion was built conveniently close to his main warehouse. The swimming pool was designed in the shape of a lamb chop. She had never seen that much wealth, that much brazen luxury screaming look at me, I’m rich, I’ve made it!

She tiptoed around the first week, holding her breath, not quite believing that she was part of this lush landscape of thick carpets and quilted antique chairs. Jock teased her, renaming her his great silent Stance. At night in his emperor-sized bed he took to clinging to her like a child, his small torso tucked comfortably between her hips and breasts. She loved this contradiction, this utterly masculine man who was so much smaller than her. She loved looping her long arms around his belly, the fruit of his sex curled up, vulnerable, sheltered in her large hand. The smell of him sleeping made her feel safe for the first time in her life.

At the end of the first week, after a particularly vigorous love making session, she told him in a small voice about the ankle binders. He listened intently while stroking her long flanks, his piercing blue eyes clouding over in empathy.

“It was stretching machines for me. Johnson’s height extenders, then the illegal growth hormones. God, did Dad give me a hiding when he found out about those.

“‘Son,’ he said. ‘It’s not how much you’ve got but what you do with it.’”

He buried his head in her hair and whispered into her ear. “And look at us now, eh? King and Queen.” She pulled him closer, wanting to be inside him, wanting a fusion of their two bodies, spirits and hearts.

It was as if her subconscious had been waiting for this opportunity to submit, to relinquish the martyrdom of her earlier years. She knew this was love.

The habits of their lives began to fall in with each other. Every morning Jock would get up at five thirty, work out on his home gym for half an hour, then meditate in the pool, floating on his back with his eyes closed, wearing only a pair of sun-glasses while his collection of inflated plastic pigs bobbed up and down around him. Stacey, on hearing the familiar sound of the water filter, would press her face into his pillow, his scent comforting her as she drifted back off to dream until seven. Then she would get up, and check the Dow Jones faxed in by Jock’s stockbroker, Deidre.

Deidre had become a great friend, advising Stacey on her dress sense and on how to manage Jock, who was one of Deidre’s more challenging clients. Secretly, Deidre was thankful that she had found a way of influencing him. Jock was renowned for playing the stock market as fiercely as he played the horses and he usually lost. Stacey, by contrast, was naturally cautious and Jock had discovered that she had an innate gift when it came to the share market. He arranged for her to leave the TAB and put her in charge of stocktaking at his main branch.

Slowly, as the weeks passed, they both began to open up to each other. As weeks turned into months Jock’s vulnerabilities and fears revealed him to her not as a diminutive god but as a fallible equal. The complexity that lay beneath the cocky bravado endeared her further. If anything it was his energy, the essence of his ego, that began to swamp her. She was constantly swept up by his desires, his career. She felt like a planet in orbit. And, although she was falling deeper in love, she began to feel the strength of his personality hijack her own fragile persona, as if he was seeping into her through a process of strange osmosis.

Yet at the same time she was delighted to discover a kind of silent resourcefulness within herself.

Every day Jock would get her to chauffeur him to his main office, preferring to finalize deals on the mobile phone while Stacey, an excellent driver, maneuvered the Mercedes through peak-hour traffic.

“Two thousand sheep, direct to the port of Dubai. You heard me, mate…Dubai, Saudi Arabia. Ahmed el Hassam, yeah, that’s the bloke.”

He started taking her to the society events he engineered invitations to. He was determined to legitimize both his money and his status. They caused quite a sensation: Stacey, tottering along in her high heels, with her quaint old-fashioned English and demure manner, escorted by Jock, overdressed in pink silk and linen, striding along beside her. When a photo of Jock grinning broadly, his face practically buried in Stacey’s cleavage, appeared in the social pages, he was thrilled, and had the photo blown up and sent to all his clients. To him, this was the pinnacle of success and he reveled in it.