‘I can,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t she? She’s happy,
she’s doing what she wants to do. Expressing herself.’
‘Yeah, I suppose she was always good at that.’
‘Are you perhaps a tiny bit jealous?’ Jasper stood with a hand on his hip, giving me an amused look.
‘You know …’ I thought about this. ‘Perhaps I am. A bit. I wonder what it would be like to have fewer inhibitions.’
‘Nothing wrong with inhibitions, in their place. Otherwise what would the world be like? People shagging, or worse, on every street corner.’ He laughed. ‘We can’t all be exhibitionists, Sarah. Don’t worry about it.’
Trix entered in all her stately majesty, making my eyes pop open. Her hourglass figure was poured into a shiny black latex dress with lacing all the way up the back, from thighs to shoulder blades. The way the slim black cords criss-crossed her back and bottom was both aesthetically pleasing and undeniably alluring. She wore full-length black latex gloves too, and the kind of tottering-heeled court shoes that would very quickly earn me a broken ankle. Trix, however, strutted about in them without losing a mite of her poise. I didn’t think the floor would fare so well, and neither did Jasper, because he asked her to make sure she stayed on the carpeted areas.
She smiled with wet red lips and nodded. Her helmet of thick, short blonde hair looked perfect. She was like someone from an 80s style magazine.
‘Whoa, mama,’ said Jasper, impressed. ‘You just need the riding crop and you’re ready to star in a Madonna video. Or whoever has taken over from her these days. I’ll admit, I’m not well up on that kind of thing.’
‘Why, thank you,’ said Trix. ‘I’m leaving the props up to you, though. I’m presuming they’re in the house somewhere, but I didn’t want to snoop.’
‘Ah, yes. Sarah, could you go and bring us a selection? Anything you think might be suitable for our outline.’
I headed upstairs, thinking of the contents of our trunk of tricks. There was so much in there, it was never easy to choose.
Walking along the thick runner carpet in the upstairs passage, I noticed that Dimitri and Rosie’s bedroom door was open. A few steps further on, I heard noises.
I stopped in my tracks. I didn’t want to walk past now. They might see me.
Instead, I stood dithering and flapping my hands while the kissy-kissy noises turned into sighs and whispers and the odd little smack.
But this was silly. I couldn’t just stand here. Jasper was waiting.
There was a creak of bedsprings, then a grunt from Dimitri, then the unmistakable sound of someone getting very soundly fucked. The springs bounced bounced bounced and Rosie made a weird purry-gaspy noise that denoted hectic pleasure.
Oh, what the hell. They weren’t going to be looking out for me now.
I made a determined stride forward, but as soon as my eye caught – without really trying to, but somehow just landing there – the sight of the couple on the bed I had to stop and drink them in. Just for a second. Just because it was gorgeous and horny and I had never seen a pair of lovers taking such delight in each other before, apart from Jasper and me on the screen, and self-consciousness always intruded on those images for me.
Dimitri’s muscles stood out in his arms like whipcord as he braced himself above Rosie. His panoply of tattoos moved and flexed in rhythm with his thrusts, subtly changing the expression of a fierce-looking dragon with each in and out. A shark’s tooth hung from his neck on a black leather thong, swinging furiously, sometimes grazing Rosie’s skin. He had the body of a warrior, I thought, lean and spare and ready for battle.
Rosie, beneath him, was softer and rounder, her fingers laced together at the back of his neck, her legs raised and wrapped around him so that her heels bounced off his coccyx, giving him a deep angle of penetration.
But the real beauty was their faces. They were completely absorbed in each other and the pleasure they gave and received. Dimitri was working, his expression one of intense concentration mixed with a kind of wild rapture. Rosie’s face was dewy, her eyes were almost unfocused, but her adoration was clear to see.
Jasper would take such a wonderful still of this. Their faces, close and intent and transformed with love, could be a bestselling poster for the walls of student bedsits.
I felt a love for them, and for their love itself, that almost made me sink to my knees in the doorway and sigh.
But I didn’t. I scuttled off to the treasure chest, feeling aglow with a strange sense of the wondrousness of life and our astounding good luck in finding each other – me and Jasper, Rosie and Dimitri.
I opened the lid and let myself see the contents of the chest as if it were that first time again. That first time … I drifted off, recalling that fateful trespass with Will into Jasper’s private domain. We had thought he was in France.
For Will, the chest had been something to chortle over, to raise an eyebrow and make a ribald joke or two about the queerness of folk.
For me, on the other hand, it had been the personal equivalent of uncovering the hoard of Tutankhamun. And the golden King was Jasper.
How I had trembled, from a kind of holy fear, at what lay before me.
I trembled before it again. It seemed to represent my future. I could shut the box and choose a different path. Or I could accept the box, accept that it, and Jasper, were to be my life. Pandora had had it easy: a straight choice between knowledge and ignorance. This box was more complicated than that.