Picture This

They were in the small office that was adjacent to the annexe housing the installation. It contained a desk and a wall of filing cabinets, all of which, Susie guessed, appeared to hold indexed information and filed papers on the entire Kocak collection. Felicity had produced a box file filled with newspaper clippings on Girl in a Yellow Square of Light and several letters that formed the provenance of the painting.

‘Complicated men like that are never easy, which is why I’m wary of artists – male ones, that is. Too much ego. Like actors and most creatives. But this is amazing.’ She held up the letter. Just then Felicity’s mobile phone rang. She took the call. ‘Hi… he has!? Well, get him out of the pool immediately, and get the band to start early. Okay, I’ll be there in five.’ She clicked off, then turned to Susie. ‘My idiot stepson has fallen into the pool again. I have to go back – if you want to keep reading, feel free, just switch the lights off and pull the door shut when you leave.’

*

Susie waited until Felicity’s footsteps had faded into the distance, then returned all the letters to the folder – except one. Carefully she folded it along the creases made by previous folding, then slipped it into her clutch.

Before she left she took a moment and stood in the middle of the Chapman Brothers’ installation to murmur a prayer to the art god of revenge.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The hotel room had expensive lighting, the kind that throws a kind of aquatic half-light and makes everything softer, more beautiful. Susie stepped back and admired her handiwork. Felix lay naked and splayed, tied to the four posts of the hotel bed. He’d played along; submissive was a new role for him and he’d come to the conclusion that she might need to feel empowered because in reality she was not; so he’d decided to indulge her.

It had been a bemusing proposition, but now that he was tied up, the bonds around his wrists tight enough to cut into his skin, his legs splayed to each bedpost, he was surprised at how hard he was. It wasn’t so much surrender as the trepidation involved that he found arousing. She was now kneeling astride him, dressed in a bra, a suspender belt, stockings but no underpants. Last time they’d had sex was over three weeks earlier, and now there was something different about her body he couldn’t quite place. At first he wondered whether it wasn’t only the way her bra pushed her breasts up, but then he realised she was more voluptuous.

‘You look different, more… womanly,’ he told her carefully.

‘I said no speaking; you’re spoiling the game,’ she answered roughly, then tied a blindfold tightly across his eyes, plunging him into darkness.

He felt acutely aware of how helpless he now was; but, blind, all his other faculties seemed heightened.

Susie glanced around the room. By the bedside table there was a heavy marble ashtray. She could reach across, lift it and smash it across his head if she wanted. He would die instantly, she thought, momentarily tempted. Would she do it, if she really thought he’d killed Maxine?

No, she would make him pay slowly, ruin him, then let him languish in some dreadful state penitentiary. Until then she had to play the game out.

She stared down at his muscular tanned body, his heavy and hard cock pressing against her sex, his nipples erect, the scent of him delicious and musky rising up from his chest hair, his thick, black armpit hair exposed as his muscled arms lay tied above his head, the pout of his full lips below the blindfold, the beauty of his face… was he capable of something as calculating as betrayal and murder?

She ran a finger across his lips, knowing she would have to conjure up an erotic memory to stay in the moment. She remembered a time when Maxine had tied her up, splayed like this, between the wooden pillars of her London studio. It had been one of the most erotic lovemaking sessions they’d had, and it still made her wet to think of it. She pushed her finger slowly into his mouth. Wet. Beyond wet – pulsating, aching, wanting. Maxine, usually the one to be taken, had insisted she take Susie that day. It had been the day after one of Susie’s openings at White Cube, both of them still wired from the drinking and carousing the night before, both of them wanting release. Maxine had tied her tightly, roughly, and then with a scalpel had carefully cut around her breasts, arse and crotch so that the rest of her had stayed clothed. It had been intensely sensual, the way her breasts pushed out of the fabric of her tight T-shirt, her jeans held together over her hips only by the outer seams, her shaved pussy and arse tantalisingly exposed. She knew Maxine was angry with her, obliquely furious for the great reviews that had appeared early that day. She knew the power play was dangerous, that the scalpel could slip, and yet she had surrendered control, like Felix had surrendered control. She took both of his nipples between her long fingernails and pinched down hard. He groaned.

When Maxine had tied her up, she hadn’t blindfolded her. Instead she had gagged her, so that Susie could watch but not utter a single groan or cry. At the time she had seen how Maxine had made her into a fantasy figure, the opposite of a sexless doll – a body that had no identity. But it was only about genitalia: sex, nipples, glistening lips waiting to be fucked, penetrated. She’d also made her wait, in the way Susie was making Felix wait, and in this waiting was the imagining.

She bent down and bit his left nipple while still twisting his right, then ran her tongue down the centre of his body.

‘Sit on my face,’ he murmured.

‘No.’ Her voice firm, authoritative, remembering how the gag had tasted, pushed hard against the back of her tongue and teeth, how before she was tied up she’d watched Maxine take two of their largest dildos and lubricate them slowly and teasingly in front of her. Then, remaining completely dressed herself, she had slowly bitten and sucked at each of Susie’s nipples, drawing out sensations Susie hadn’t even been aware that she could feel, without touching her clit or bringing her off, despite Susie’s muffled pleading, her writhing at the tight bonds. Only when she could see that Susie’s nipples were raw and swollen in painful pleasure did Maxine drop to her knees and, cupping Susie’s naked buttocks in her hands, draw her sex and clit to her mouth. Knowing exactly what her lover liked, she deliberately played it the other way, sucking and tonguing her erect clit without touching her vagina or anus. Then every time she sensed Susie was near orgasm she would stop completely and take her mouth away, blowing on Susie’s swollen labia, each time taking her to a new plateau of pleasure.

Susie reached Felix’s groin, his hot cock arching high over her face. She deliberately avoided touching it, instead gently biting the inside of his thighs, circling the root of his sex until he was begging her to blow him. His cries kept her in her own bondage memory, of how after an hour of Maxine’s mouth on her sex, Maxine finally reached for the two dildos and, with her mouth fastened firmly around the tip of Susie’s clit, parted her wide from beneath and slowly pushed both dildos into her. Filling her and spreading her in an utterly exposing manner, all her inhibitions lost in the sheer overwhelming pain/pleasure of it, as Maxine, to her surprise, pushed them faster and faster in and out of her writhing body, screaming at her to come.

Susie took Felix’s balls into her mouth, first the right and then the left, sucking gently, her fingers curling up behind his buttocks, finding him and entering him slowly, his torso tensing in expectation. Then finally she took him into her mouth, deeply, thinking about those dildos, the breadth and length of them, the way she felt so completely split and penetrated by them, by Maxine, by her anger, her authority over her at that moment. Then when she felt the beginning of an orgasm at the base, she withdrew and, raising herself over his body, plunged him into her, her sex wet at the thought of what Maxine had done to her two years before, riding him hard until he shuddered into her uncontrollably.

And then she came, not with him but in her memory.

Turning, she noticed Felix’s video camera sitting on the side table. She climbed off but left him still tied to the bed, blindfolded, spent and damp.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere. Stay there.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No.’ She lifted the video camera and moved as silently as she could towards the door.

In the en suite reception room she checked the screen of the camera. The first set of stills were from the videos he’d taken of them, that first night on the balcony. But scrolling back she came across a still of a half-naked woman standing i

n the centre of Felix’s lounge, angel wings arching out from behind her. For a moment she thought it might be an artwork, then she recognised the woman. It was the waitress, the one who’d accosted her at the Met Gala. So he had lied to her.

Shocked, she touched the screen and watched as the camera followed the woman as, laughing and obviously stoned, she led the way out to the balcony…