I walked past the air hostess, ignoring whatever standard processed words she spoke to me. I walked down the clanging metal steps and into the English rain, across the puddled grey concrete and down the never-ending corridors. I queued to present my passport, waited for my black case to spew around to me and then I walked through customs and out into the main airport as I had done countless times before and would do countless times again until the day I finally retired. I walked past the drivers with their bored faces and lazily held up signs, past the families with their expectant smiles, past the tired travellers sipping at badly made coffee, and then I stopped walking.
She was leaning against the wall, her hair looked as if at one point it had been scraped back into a perfect pony tail but now dark curls had escaped and rested against the pale skin of her face. She was dressed casually, a long brown skirt, some sort of blue top with lace edging round the bust, a dark coat hanging open. Either she was so aware of her youth and beauty she knew she didn’t need clothes and cosmetics to enhance it, or she was trying not to draw any more attention to the curves of her body. The only concession she had made to the Boots beauty counter was long dark crimson nails.
I knew it was her. The pain deep in my stomach told me it was her. It had been years, no, not years. It had been twenty-one months since I received that last e-mail from her, when she finally accepted I was a happily married man and I wouldn’t carry on corresponding with her. She was married too and had children, but she never made any claims to happiness.
She’d sent me one photo; I had never sent her any. In the midst of the time when we were e-mailing each other ten or twenty times a day she blessed me with one image of her. She was naked apart from a pair of black stockings. At the edge of the photo lay a pair of discarded stiletto heels; metal handcuffs rested by her outstretched hands. I’d stared as much at those handcuffs as at the curves of her breasts hidden under the waves of her hair. Now the woman from that photo stood mere feet away from me.
‘Catherine?’ My voice betrayed nerves I didn’t realise I was feeling until I spoke.
She didn’t reply and I was fully aware of myself as a middle-aged man approaching a beautiful young woman on the basis that she resembled a photo an e-mail flirtation had once sent me. But it was more than a resemblance. And it had been more than an e-mail flirtation, so much more. Then she looked me up and down and laughed.
‘If you like,’ she said, her brown eyes sparkling in a way that separated her from the weary atmosphere of the airport, as if everything surrounding her was just a video playing in the background.
I wanted to think about her answer, digest what each of the three words could mean but her long legs were already striding away from me. I trotted after her, more puppy than man.
‘I want to see everything,’ she said in a low husky voice.
The heat rose to my cheeks, the first time I was conscious of blushing in my life.
‘I want to be a tourist,’ she breathed into my ear. ‘Find a hotel, then show me everything.’
She didn’t say another word on the tube journey into central London and I had no idea how to ask her if she was the woman I thought she was, it somehow felt rude seeing we were already travelling together. I noticed that she was not wearing the wedding or engagement rings that had graced her long slender fingers in the photo and there were no marks betraying that she had worn any rings recently on her naked fingers. I gazed at our almost invisible reflections in the window opposite and the more logical part of my mind questioned what I was doing sitting so naturally next to this woman, but the majority of my mind was too busy acting out mini porn movies. Every time the movement of the train pushed her knee or arm against my body a thousand nerve endings responded and pulsed straight to my groin. I was a teenage boy again unable to control my excitement, getting a hard-on at the slightest stimulation. I imagined bending her over the seat, pulling her skirt up and fucking her roughly regardless of the other passengers. I visualised sharing her with the other men, varying gang bangs and orgies with being the only man allowed near her while the others looked on in envy with their hands fumbling in their pockets.
When we reached the hotel I had mentally fucked her dozens of times and was too aware that it was only in my mind that she’d permitted me to touch her. The hotel itself was part of one of those generic characterless chains, which was the main reason I selected it, no chance of bumping into anyone I knew. To be entirely certain I took her to the one in Southwark muttering something about it being a good location for tourist attractions as we walked into one of the blandest red-brick buildings it was possible to build. She didn’t say anything, staring at a nondescript painting in the reception as I booked us into a double room.
The room was everything you’d expect and nothing more, but it didn’t matter, my whole body was shaking as if it had reached a place where I could no longer control it. I sat on the bed in an attempt to steady my nerves. She was standing by the door, about as far away from me as she could be in this small room. All the things Catherine had written in those e-mails flashed through my mind, I remembered words and images I had once vowed to forget.
I will suck every drop of cum from your body
I want to ride your big fat cock until I collapse with exhaustion
Say the word, or click your fingers, and I will be on my knees in front of you spreading my ass cheeks for you
Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me. I am begging you to fuck me. Please Fuck me
I have fallen in love with you. I am in love with you. Please love me
I took a deep breath and walked towards her. I raised my hands to caress her face, she grabbed my wrists and held them an inch away from her skin.
‘I want to see London,’ she said.