Fusionnement

They’re in Amsterdam. A late-night stroll through the darkness of the notorious red-light district, idling away the last hours of their trip. Random turns, meandering footsteps that lead them along the narrow, neon-flecked canals to the entrance of the Theatre Casa Rosso.

Sex shows are almost a cliché in that part of the world. It’s harder to miss than to see the backlit, fibre-glass hoardings that flank frequent basement entrances, or the surly, unshaven minders who promise “real live fucking” to the men and women who walk by.

He’s read that the Theatre Casa Rosso is different though. As they approach, he allows himself to hope that it’s just as he’s read. The elaborate entrance, overshadowed by its sign of garish pink neon, does appear to have more in common with a London theatre than the other cabarets of flesh they’ve walked past. Shaftesbury Avenue with phallic statues, instead of black cabs and double-deckers. The queue of would-be spectators might just be waiting for a performance outside the Criterion, or the Gielgud. The whole thing is comfortingly familiar. It’s almost enough to entice them directly inside.

Almost.

He glances at Laura. His wife has always trailed behind him when it comes to sex. Understandable, when you considered the head start that he’d enjoyed.

Too much of a head start to be healthy?

Perhaps.

It’s taken more than a decade of togetherness, but Laura is finally beginning to accept that it’s no sin to submit to all the pleasures that her flesh can afford her. Unfortunately, he’s already passed the point where his cravings will be satisfied by evenings of exotic love-making with his wife alone. His thoughts swim with decadent, piquant imagery. He longs for the extreme: nights of desire and passion, when his body and senses are drenched in newborn experience, when he recaptures the forgotten thrills of nascent lust. He wants to play the virgin, to feel sex afresh again.

A year before Amsterdam, he’d slipped into an affair with a colleague. The bloom of freshness had soon withered, leaving him to realise that he was merely repeating himself. And he loved his wife, adored her. His dissatisfaction wasn’t with love: it was with sex. What he wanted - what he needed - was a companion, a willing accomplice in decadence. He wants his wife to chart the new discoveries with him.

He wants her to catch up.

So they stand in the damp night, watching the queue of people as it shuffles forward into the secret, sordid depths of the theatre. He watches with some amazement, caught off guard by the fact that the number of couples and women easily surpasses the total of single men.

Laura turns to him, her green eyes wavering over his face.

“Would you like to go in?”

“Would you?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Then let’s go.”

They step toward the back of the queue. As they join it, she turns to him again.

“You’re sure about this?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“Yes . . . no, not really. I don’t know.”

“Then there’s little point in standing here, is there?”

Despite the chill October night, their room at the Marriott seems hot when they return. He opens a window, the noise of the Leidseplein drifting up to him. His mind teases him bitterly. So close. So damned close. He flicks on the television and selects one of the hotel’s adult channels, before slumping in the room’s solitary easy chair. His eyes behold the group scene played out before him, and his cock throbs resentfully. He longs to be amongst them, the warm, damp flesh of strangers sliding over his own.

It feels like he’s the one stifled behind the glass.

The sound of running water in the bathroom stops, and Laura emerges, dressed only in her lingerie; lace-cupped bra and matching panties. The brilliant whiteness brings out the remains of her tan.

Her eyebrow arches when she glimpses the television screen. “A little local culture?”

He stares at her for a moment, then gets up from the chair. He reaches her in three strides, presses her back against the low chest of drawers, kisses her hard. His damp lips almost slip from hers in his haste.

She twists her mouth away. “I’m not sure that I want to if it takes cheap porn to get you interested.”

He runs the tip of his tongue down the side of her straining neck. She tastes of honey and salt, and he drinks her down avidly.

“Does it really matter why I’m interested?”

“Yes.”

He pulls back to look at her face. “I don’t think that it always should.”

“Well, it does to me.”

He presses his erection against the gentle swell of her abdomen. “I’m afraid it doesn’t to me.”

“Oh, I’d noticed.”

She stares back defiantly, an arrogant challenge glittering deep within her jade gaze. Her pale pink nipples are already stiff, pressing hard against the diaphanous lace of her white bra. He looks down her body, deliciously aware of the hint of flame-coloured hair inside her equally sheer panties.

He lifts his gaze again. “Do you want me to stop then?”

She pauses. “I might.”

“And when do you plan on telling me?”

She tilts her head haughtily. “The moment I realise that you’re no use to me.”

“Fair enough.”

He kisses her again, slower now, more thoroughly, allowing time for their rhythms to sync. His fingers draw slow lines down from her shoulders to the upslope of her breasts.

“You’d better get a move on if you want to impress me,” she whispers. “The clock’s ticking.”

He forgoes guile, cupping her breasts firmly, moulding the pliant flesh to his grasp. The sensation of her lace-covered nipples digging into his palms makes his skin itch, his arms tremble. Her tongue dances against his lips, darting against his teeth, into his mouth. She presses her body hard against his cock.

“Unzip me,” he gasps.

“Unzip yourself. You can get it ready if you want me to have it that badly.”

There’s a fire inside her, a fever he’s never witnessed before. Its alien heat singes his skin, makes him want to burn screaming in its glorious flames. Where has it come from? They’ve been in Amsterdam for three days, and despite all his suggestions, all his cajoling, the city’s more salacious aspects haven’t seemed to touch her at all.

The puzzle turns invitingly inside his mind. Did she really want to go inside the club? Did the prospect excite her so much? He pauses without realising. Then why didn’t she want to go in when she had the chance? What held her back?

“Losing interest?” she asks mockingly.

He comes back to her, to himself. Without a word, he fumbles his trousers open, pushes them down his thighs. His thick cock paws at the air. Most of his recent erections have been half-hearted. There’s no such lack of motivation now.

“Touch me,” he says.

“No.”

He takes her hand, pulls it downwards, wraps her fingers around his rigid shaft. “Stroke me.”

“No.”

Holding her fingers in place, He begins to move her hand up and down the length of his cock. It’s like masturbating with a glove on, but the touch of her skin against his is so damned good. His knees falter fractionally, and he feels the sweat soaking into the back of his shirt, rivulets of salt running down his spine, snaking their insidious way between his buttocks.

She kisses him slowly, withdraws, licks her own lips languidly. It’s as though she’s tasting the after image of his mouth. She glances down to where he’s moving her hand over his erection.

“You’re enjoying that, aren’t you,” she says. It’s a statement, not a question.

He nods, the words locked away in his throat.

“My, what a hard cock you have, sir!” She speaks in a sing-song voice, the tones of a kindergarten teacher reading the children their afternoon nursery rhyme. It ought to make him angry, but it doesn’t, not even close.

“Your cock seems almost ready to explode, sir,” she continues. The entire time, her hand and arm are limp in his grasp, neither compliant nor resistant. Simply there. But her pink nipples remain taut, and the devilish light in her eyes speaks of lust far from being satisfied.

He relinquishes his hold on her hand. Without his motivation, it ceases to move. She holds his cock as she held his hand walking down the narrow canal side streets. He finds her nonchalance even more arousing. Reluctantly, he eases her fingers from himself, afraid that he’s going to come there and then in a knee-buckling eruption that will surely bring peal after peal of bitter laughter from her lips.

He glides his fingers down the outsides of her waist, smiling at the way she shivers. His fingers brush against the waistband of her panties, then slip inside them.

Her eyes lock with his.

“Don’t even think about tearing them.”

He hesitates, then pulls hard, outwards, the full strength of his hands and his arms combining. Laura lurches against him, a soft flag seized in an indifferent gale. There’s a rending of cotton, and then the remnants of her panties are in his hands, loose streamers of white dangling from his fists.

“Bastard,” she hisses. She doesn’t try to move away from him.

He drops the two halves of cotton and lace to the carpet. Later, alone in the dark with his memories, he wishes that he’d taken more time with them; inhaled her aroma from their softness, slowed wiped the elixir of her cunt across the gleaming head of his cock.

But that’s for later.

He presses her legs apart with his knees, slips between her open thighs. His cock scarcely needs guiding. The straining head nuzzles greedily at the already inflamed lips of her sex.

“Not an advocate of foreplay, then?” she says caustically. Despite the tone, her voice quavers slightly as his glans finds the entrance to her sweet cunt. A faint sheen of perspiration across her forehead and her sculpted cheekbones lights her face.

“Not tonight,” he says.

He advances in millimetres. He wants to feel everything, to remember every single second.

She doesn’t need foreplay. She is molten inside, her luxurious flesh drenched in warm oil. Her heat moulds his flesh to hers perfectly. As he starts to thrust within her lubricous gasp, he knows that he won’t last. He’d felt the portents of his orgasm when he was in her hand. Resisting the siren call of her sex would take more strength than he’d ever possess. His thrusts quicken. He fucks her joyously, carelessly, as deeply as he can.

“Oh, fuck, yes! Fuck yes!” she gasps as his cock invades her, as he presses himself hard against her swollen clitoris. Laura rarely uses vulgarity during sex, never uses the earthy tones that he craves without him begging her first. Her words are like accelerant upon the heat of his volatile lust.

Savagely, he pulls the straps of her bra from her shoulders, smears his mouth across her bared breasts like a frantic teenager, tongue lapping at her bullet-hard nipples. He can’t get deeply enough inside her. He wants to bend over backwards, bend himself in half, to make his body an arrow - his cock its glistening tip - and fire himself inside her. The chest of drawers creaks beneath her, thudding into the wall behind. The noise prompts his mind to envisage a faceless guest in the next room, listening to them as he (or maybe she) lies alone in their miserably empty bed, masturbating to the sounds of their frenzied fucking. He wants to share the image with Laura, almost does, and then she grabs his head and overwhelms his mouth with hers.

“Oh God,” she half-screams as she pulls back. “Oh fuck, I’m coming all over your cock!”

That’s it. The last vestiges of his restraint evaporate, and he empties himself inside her in hot, pulsing streams.

Somehow, they manoeuvre across the room, collapse together onto the bed with his cock still embedded inside her. And as they fall, he can’t help but wonder if their wildest fuck ever will mark the start of the change he’s yearned for, for so long…