Heat Wave Read online

  What I Did on My Holidays

  MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  She was just another woman I’d met somewhere, as I searched for the million faces of Kay in every set of soft hazelnut eyes and the fleeting silhouette of every female body I passed in the street, on trains, in bars. Sometimes, I would recognize something of her, the way a curl of hair fell over a pale forehead, the turn of a lip, the curve of a slight breast beneath thin material, in the pink colors invading a cheek as I sustained eye contact just that one moment too long for innocence. But in all of them, it was evanescent and unseizable, and merely an ersatz dream of Kay. Never quite the real thing. But sometimes, a connection happened, and I took full advantage of it. You never knew where things might lead and I was all too aware that what happened had been so damn special and that I would be even more of a fool than I was already to even hope for anyone like her again. But a cunt is a cunt, and a bad man is still a man, and the allure of new flesh was something I couldn’t resist.

  Luba had a child of five, a small boy, and lived with his father, a boyfriend she had fallen out of both love and lust with. So we stole time from our other lives whenever we could both afford the time, concocting credible alibis for our lateness and absences. I have the nagging feeling that our respective partners guessed what was going on and sort of tolerated it, already knowing it was the sort of affair that would only lead nowhere and it was best to allow us to indulge in our wanderlust, rather than unnecessarily upset the apple cart and uncover a veritable nest of vipers that would complicate every one’s lives too much and force us to cross that line in the sand after which nothing would ever be the same again.

  We’d enjoyed frequent wet, sweaty nights, even the occasional afternoon in plain hotel rooms made for sex, but our desires screamed for more and we had decided we needed to spend more time together. A whole few days somehow. Somewhere else. Even though we’d agreed on this course of action, I was distinctly nervous if eagerly looking forward to the time we would have together, the ecstatic vision of her outstretched limbs on a bed, the prurient opening of her greedy mouth as she would feast on me, the dark folds of her openings dilating in the after-throes of pleasure. Because, between the fucking, we really didn’t have much to say to each other. We came from different places, both geographically and socially and, past the obligatory life stories and tales of previous loves there was little in the way of communication.

  I hated her taste in music and she, no doubt, found all my repetitive talk of books, travel, and films rather boring. I’d initially warned her I was often a creature of silence, and this seemed to suit her just fine. We fucked like rabbits or any number of animal species locked in the eternal and empty dance of the beast with two backs. I loved the look in her eyes as she gazed at me while I ploughed her hard and she succumbed to the unstoppable waves of her pleasure. She enjoyed the fact I had some imagination, albeit perverse at times, and regularly took her in more than just the missionary position or doggie style. I enjoyed going down on her and making her come long before I even tried to penetrate her. She was an easy comer, her clit as sensitive to the gentle or rough touch of my tongue, lips or fingers, as her dark, soft nipples lacked response to most normal forms of sexual stimulation. Well, you can’t have it all.

  But this was the extent of our communication. The affection we shared for each other was simple friendship and complicity, but we both knew it didn’t come from the heart. And we wanted more of the innocence of sex.

  On the pretext of a publicity tour sprung on me suddenly by my French publishers, I managed to liberate four days from my schedule. Luba pretended to her man she was visiting a girlfriend of hers who now lived in Paris. It would be our holiday. I didn’t wish to spend the time in a large, busy city—we’d done that already on a weekend past, a year or so before, sharing our time between feverish fornication, shopping, long walks, and restaurants to banish the threat of any real conversation. The coast it would be; not quite the right time of year, late September, but it would hopefully still be warm enough to at least walk on a beach and watch the seascape as it ebbed and flowed, waves breaking on the sand time after time like Sisyphus climbing that damn hill, never quite making it fully onto the shore. A vision I had always found hypnotic and profoundly peaceful.

  We connected at Orly airport, south of Paris, and, changing terminals through unending corridors and conveyor belts, caught a smaller plane to Montpellier. The sun was shining when we arrived in midafternoon. I’d made car rental arrangements and we were quickly on the road, racing down twisty roads, between vineyards and hills toward Sète, where I had booked us into the Grand Hotel, where I’d stayed for a brief night some years back following a literary festival nearby.

  “It’s so pretty,” Luba commented, as we drove through the Languedoc valleys to our destination.

  “It is,” I agreed. “Wait until you see the hotel. I’m sure you’ll like it. It’s unusual. An amazing glass-covered atrium, and sweet rooms.”

  “Nice,” she said.

  “And most of the rooms overlook a canal. Almost like Venice but without the smell,” I added.

  “I’ve never been to Venice,” Luba commented. “Will you take me to Venice one day, Conrad?” she asked.

  “I will,” I said. Lying. I’d already promised her New York, Seattle, and New Orleans. One more promise didn’t cost me. Luba knew as well as I did we’d never do those things and that we’d eventually drift apart when we encountered new lovers who would satisfy more than just our genitals.

  “Great,” she said.

  The room we were given was just perfect, ultramarine-themed, with seashell motifs scattered across the terra-cotta walls. The windows opened to a small balcony just big enough for two on a thin day. The view unveiled the T shape of the town’s inner canal, cluttered with small pleasure boats on either side, a semimedieval clock tower and a pattern of ever receding bridges as far as the eye could see. Dropping her case to the floor, Luba had rushed to the window to let some air into the stuffy room, and just fell in love with the whole place.

  “It’s so...beautiful,” she said, bending over the balcony’s metal edge to look down to the street and the water below, her already short skirt hitching up in the process, revealing the lower curve of her great arse and the thin fabric of her barely there thong.

  “Isn’t it?” I agreed. “And we’re just a twenty-minute drive from some great beaches.”

  “Where you can go naked?” she asked, recalling a conversation we’d had a week or so back.

  “Yes,” I said. “Lots of space and privacy. Anyway, at this time of year, there can’t be too many tourists or holidaymakers.” I’d been researching the area on Google. Illicit sex requires meticulous planning.

  “Wow,” Luba shrieked, already relishing these few days of impromptu vacation. “We can be like a real couple.…” And leaned forward an inch or two further, as she shifted her weight from one foot to another, her hands gripping the balcony’s metal edge. The diminutive strip of her thong panties was eating into the tight crevice of her arse crack, stirring up lust in me with every minute movement of her excited body. I moved onto the balcony in turn and touched her shoulders. She shivered as I breathed down her neck. The blue-green canal was a vision of peace, its surface uninterrupted by movement. I lowered my hand to her partly uncovered back cheeks.

  “A nice view behind you, too,” I remarked.

  “Oh,” she said, as if she hadn’t realized the delightful spectacle she had been providing for me.

  “Stand still,” I ordered, gently smacking her right arse cheek.

  “Hmmm...” Luba sighed.

  “Not a word,” I continued, pushing her black skirt up to her waist, fully uncovering her thinly protected arse. I pulled suddenly on the thong’s elasticized waist and tore the negligible material away from her body.

  “You...”

  “Quiet,” I insisted. “I’ll get you others.”

  I stuck my hand between her thighs, forcing her to o
pen her legs some inches further to my advance. As I expected, she was already quite wet. I moved forward, pressing her whole body against the metal barrier. I was quite hard myself and unzipped my black jeans with my free hand.

  “Bend,” I instructed her.

  “Here?” she feebly protested.

  “Here. Now,” I confirmed.

  I shimmied on the spot, allowing my jeans to slip to the balcony’s floor, and readied her with two fingers. Luba moaned gently. On the other side of the canal, I caught sight of a middle-aged man sitting and fishing, a lunch box and a bottle of mineral water perched on either side of him on the stone edge of the canal. He had noticed our activity and peered at us, trying to see more, or better.

  “Look,” I told Luba, “that man, there, he’s watching us.”

  A mad thought occurred to me.

  “Pull your T-shirt up,” I told her. She obeyed. I knew her well enough to realize this would excite her. I unzipped the side of her short black skirt and let it fall to the ground. The man beside the canal could now see all of her. And then I roughly pushed myself inside her. As I fucked Luba on the balcony, I wondered what the man must be thinking. How much he could actually see? From where I stood, his features were unclear; even with glasses, my eyesight is far from perfect. Was Luba looking across at him while I mounted her, or were her eyes closed? Was he enjoying an erection? Luba shuddered under my assault.

  Possibly because of the circumstances, we both came quickly. The man hadn’t taken his eyes off us throughout. Deflating, I slipped out of her dripping cunt. I was about to walk back into the room, but Luba stopped me.

  “Wait,” she said, and moved sideways and onto her knees, taking my damp, limp cock into her mouth. “I’ll clean you,” she remarked. I knew this was totally for the benefit of our voyeur. I almost got hard again right away under the slow, meticulous ministrations of her tongue as she proceeded to lick our combined secretions from my cock.

  “We taste nice,” she said.

  “Time for real food,” I said, as we moved back into the room to wash and change. Fish and seafood restaurants were thirteen to a dozen only half a mile farther down the canal, in the approaches to the port, and I had determined to have a feast of oysters on my first evening in Sète. Luba had never tried oysters, but after some hesitation took one from my platter. She found both the texture and taste revolting, much to my amusement. She stuck to salad and fish. Later that night, she remarked that even my cum now tasted of oyster, which I found a tad far-fetched.

  The following day, we took the car down the coast and found a remote beach beyond an area of ponds where flamingos lurked in immobile silence. So long after the season, the sands were quite empty, and we indulged in some skinny-dipping despite the lack of sun. The sea was turning to its duller autumn colors and melancholy filled the air as we surveyed the flat horizon of sea and beach, then desultorily fucked in the lee of a small dune. What with a quiet breeze fluttering around us, the sand got everywhere, and what had seemed like a good idea turned out to be both uncomfortable and even painful. So much for all the outdoor fucking my characters often practiced in numerous past stories, albeit generally set in the Caribbean or the Maldives under a fiercer sun!

  On our third day, we shopped in the small town and I bought Luba some fancy underwear which she, of course, promised to model for me later. I even found a dark-brown button-down shirt in the local Monoprix. We walked all the way up the hill to the cimetière marin, where local poets and singers were buried, and looked out to the impassive sea that separated us from the coast of Northern Africa. By afternoon, we were both slightly sad as well as tired, and took a chaste nap, cuddled against each other in the exiguous double bed. We awoke as the sun was setting on the canal, and Luba asked me what she should wear. I had her try on the new underwear and jokingly remarked that her pubes needed a trim.

  “So do it,” she suggested. I fetched my kit and positioned her on the bed with thighs wide apart, and with a roving eye for the ever so dilated opening of her exposed cunt, began to trim the growth on either side of her lower lips with my sharp nail scissors. The sheer intimacy of the game visibly aroused her. By the time I had finished, she was almost bald, a sight I much enjoyed, her curls all shorn, with just a semblance of five-o’clock shadow as evidence she was no longer a child.

  “Voilà,” I said, admiring my work.

  “Très bien,” Luba said, looking down and approving. “Wow, you haven’t left much at all,” she remarked. Her face was slightly flushed, and the vision of her sitting on the edge of the bed with legs so wide open, her inner folds revealed, wondrously naked below the waist (she still wore a book-promotional T-shirt for an anthology of pulp fiction I had loaned her to sleep in) quick-started my imagination.

  “You should go out like that tonight,” I suggested.

  “Like this?” her eyes widened.

  “Well, you can wear your long skirt, the one with the flowered motif,” I added.

  “It’s almost transparent,” Luba said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I demand it, actually.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “So which top should I wear, then?” She foraged through her small case.

  Venturing out toward the port and its flock of welcoming restaurants and bars, I retreated a few steps behind Luba as we moved along the narrow walkway by the canal. I caught the final rays of daytime sun shining through the skirt, illuminating the sharp silhouette of her long legs. I wondered if others could also see she was wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

  “It feels so sexy,” she whispered to me, as we sat at a café sipping citron pressé and an exotic liqueur she had been speculating about earlier. Her bare arse pressed against the metal of the seat, as her skirt spread across her legs, concealing her unusual nudity from the many passersby. “Makes me feel so horny, you know, Conrad.”

  She had wanted to fuck after I’d trimmed her pussy hair earlier, but I’d turned her down. Later, I’d promised. There was no rush. First I wanted to go out and eat. “Fatten me,” she’d joked. “Absolutely, and more,” I’d answered enigmatically, a crazy plan taking root in my feverish mind.

  The restaurant we finally chose was beyond the port area and specialized in Spanish cuisine and served enormous portions of food. It was crowded. The service was slow. Time enough for her mind to wander as the itch below took hold of her senses. I’d never seen Luba in such a state of febrile agitation before. I would never have guessed that the feeling of being impudently exposed below would have such an effect. I was turned on too. Cause and effect. The meal took ages, but the food was delicious, just spicy enough but lacking aggression.

  Luba wiped a faint trail of tomato sauce from the corner of her lips as the waitress took the plates away.

  “Any dessert?” the young woman, who walked with a limp, asked us.

  I looked to Luba. “No,” she declined. “I’m just too full.” The waitress moved away. “Isn’t she pretty?” Luba queried me.

  I had in fact found her plain and unappealing. “Not really,” I answered. “Anyway, didn’t you once tell me that you weren’t into other women?”

  Luba grinned back at me, mischievously. “Tonight,” she said, lowering her voice, although we were speaking English, “I’d do anything. Just the way I feel.” Her hand moved under the table to her lap. She was touching herself.

  All I could do was smile. “Anything?”

  Luba lowered her eyes. “Yes. Anything.”

  I recalled earlier idle postcoital conversations about mutual fantasies.

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  She nodded approvingly. The waitress brought the bill. I looked her up and down. No. Not what I had in mind.

  There was a small bar facing the Grand Hotel on the other side of the canal. Not a tourist haunt, more of a faded joint for local regulars. There were half a dozen men at the bar and others in a back room, noisily playing pool. The place had a fami
liar smell of stale cigarette smoke and alcohol. We ordered a couple of espressos. I looked Luba in the eyes, determining that she was still willing to go through with any sort of madness I felt fit to inflict upon her.

  “Look around and choose one,” I told Luba.

  “Any man?”

  “Any one.”

  She turned and perused the small crowd at the bar. One of the men drank on his own, not part of a group or any conversation, nursing a half-empty glass of red wine. He looked slightly familiar, and I thought I recognized him as the watching fisherman from the other day. Middle-aged, stocky, florid. I couldn’t be sure, but it could well be him. He noticed our gaze, held our eye contact, and smiled enigmatically. Him being here would make sense; it was just a few yards from the spot where he had been fishing and it would be natural for this to be his cafe of choice.

  Luba couldn’t decide.

  “Him?” I discreetly pointed him out to her.

  “Okay,” she accepted.

  “This is what I want you to do, then,” I commanded her, providing her with specific instructions to follow. I handed her the key to our hotel room and she walked off toward the stone bridge that led across the canal, leaving me to settle the bill. All the while, the man at the bar had been watching us with quiet intent. I moved over to him, negligently dropping a ten-euro note on the counter.

  “You recognize her, don’t you?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Impossible not to. That was quite a show you two put on the other day.”

  “Do you find her attractive?”

  “Of course,” he answered.

  “You can have her, if you wish.”

  “You’re joking,” he responded.

  “I’m not,” I replied. “For free. We enjoy variety, you understand. You can be her holiday present from me. Interested?”

  “When?”

  “Now. But I stay to watch. That’s not negotiable.”

  He put his glass down.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.