Chapter 11

On the drive back when he and Tony had finished chatting and were driving in silence Andrew had switched focus and thought about the conversations with Suzanne. He was groping in the dark he felt, trying to understand Suzanne’s nature, but also how to act with her as a result. She kept emphasising that she loved to give up control, that she would do anything Andrew wanted. As with so much in his life he was both confused and slightly overwhelmed by that statement. But on the journey back to Edinburgh on the Sunday afternoon he had thought about the day, thought about Suzanne as a model in place of Maggie and realised that this was a way for him to start to explore this aspect of her sexuality. Modelling was so layered, not just literally, and there was an endless array of ways to push Suzanne, to pose Suzanne, to expose Suzanne. This was the first step on that journey.

As this was a spontaneous decision they were limited in Suzanne’s wardrobe but she had a large amount of clothes in her bag. Andrew raised an eyebrow at how much she had brought over but rather than look sheepish she merely smirked and carried on pulling items out of the bag. Once they were all laid out on the spare bed he selected a couple of outfits.

“I am going to torment you later never fear, but let me explain what these first shots are. I want some shots of you just being you, dressed normally, big smile, with an expression of ‘I can’t believe I am doing this’. You know the look, ‘I must really like him to be talked into this’. The reason for these, and it is important that you know and agree, is to show the older guys on the cancer ward. No skin, no cleavage, no short skirts, just you looking wonderful and natural. I am going to make sure the shots emphasis your tits and arse but not blatantly. Well okay they will be blatant but subtly blatant. I don’t know if I will use them or whether it is appropriate but I want you to be the pin up girl for the children’s cancer ward.”

Suzanne burst out laughing.

“That is the stupidest excuse to photograph a woman that I have ever heard and if it hadn’t come from you I would think you were so full of it.” Her smile softened. “But you really mean it don’t you. What are you trying to do? ‘Get better and one day you too will have someone like this in your bed?’”

“I hadn’t really thought of the situation but there have been times last term when you and Leslie came up in the conversations. The fact that my two best friends are women excited a lot of comment. I know it is very shallow but I think a picture of you might convince one or two.”

“So that’s all I am to you, is it?”

Suzanne’s voice was full of teasing.

“You are no different than all those grabby boys back at school.”

“You found me out, four years of patient seduction has finally been exposed.”

She came and took his hand.

“Do you really think it will help? What will the parents say? Why is this guy giving my son pictures of this buxom Scottish woman?”

“I don’t have a secret plan or even an open plan when I sit down with those children. I just chat away with them and let the conversation go wherever it wants to go. But I do talk about life after cancer and how first Leslie and then you helped me. I doubt any of these children have had sex, clearly not the younger ones, but even the teenagers. So relationships and sex and the opposite gender are all a mystery to most of them. Add in the fact that some of them have been sick for a long time and it is an area where they are all curious. They all see themselves defined as the cancer kid, skinny, no hair, all the usual physical characteristics. You would not be a goal per se, but rather just a way of emphasising that there is life after cancer. The fact that I am there is living proof obviously, I am in Cambridge at the University, I am so tall but that is in their face, the here and now, you would be this, oh I don’t know, this goal, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Suzanne’s eyes had softened even more.

“You are a good man sometimes Andrew, a good man. But what about the girls, the young women, are you doing to do the same for them?”

“I don’t think I can. You are just this beautiful model, they will never meet you so it seems harmless to show and even share your photo with the guys. I am not going to give photos of me to 15 year old girls in a cancer ward, it just seems icky, wrong. Regardless of the intent the parents would rightly freak. So no, I don’t think so.”

There was no way round that problem.

“Okay then, how about these jeans and this sweater? Perfectly acceptable but tight in all the right places.”

For the next hour they had fun, Suzanne posed first in the jeans and sweater outfit and then changed into the wool dress. She looked just like a teenage woman in the first although she oozed elegance in the dress, although Andrew was not an unbiased observer. As Andrew had anticipated working with Suzanne as the model was hardly working at all. After lunch though things changed dramatically.

“Go through to the bedroom and strip. The next two rolls of film you will be naked.”

Suzanne’s eyes got large instantly and Andrew could even she the pulse in her neck beating rapidly but she did as he demanded. Again he waited five minutes to let her mind get all agitated with what he proposed to do to her. But these were baby steps for him, and often from moment to moment he had no idea what he was doing. When Andrew got through into the bedroom he smiled as Suzanne stood there, naked and nervous. When he told her to slip under the sheet her face was a mixture of relief and disappointment. He sat on the bed and looked down at her.

“Don’t worry, I will challenge you, force you to confront your fears and desires. You need to give me some time as I learn about all of this. You look relieved and yet also disappointed. What were you scared of? I was going to take naked photographs of you?”

She looked down. Bingo. Andrew tilted her head back up.

“You were also excited that I was going to take naked pictures of you, weren’t you?”

She said nothing but there was a miniscule nod of her head. He pulled her back out from under the covers and stood behind Suzanne, his arms round her waist and his lips tantalisingly close to her ear. It wasn’t so much a whisper as a growl.

“Suzanne, you told me I could do anything to you. I have thought about you, about your needs, about taking that control from you.”

Suzanne shivered in his arms.

“I promise that I will take photographs of you naked. Explicit, graphic photographs, showing your face, your body, and your legs spread wide apart. But dear Suzanne, you will never know when. Each time I take out the camera your heart will race and your mind will explode, is today the day, am I going to be lying here exposed, blatantly naked? You know that your pussy will be dripping wet, maybe the camera will capture your lust, right there for the world to see. Think about that every night next term as you lie in bed, trying not to play with yourself. One day soon your dark desire will come true. It may be tomorrow or it may be the summer.”

Andrew rubbed his finger against Suzanne’s temple and stood up.

“You are such a bastard, you know that? How the fuck can I concentrate on anything else with that image in my mind? You so get me Andrew, you know just the things to say to totally fuck with my mind.”

Although he was fully dressed Andrew held her, let Suzanne get the adrenaline out of her system. After 10 minutes or so she was finally ready to carry on. These photos were for Suzanne, not the prints that could be made of them but it was Andrew’s attempt at exerting a little control, while she was vulnerable, in this case naked under the sheet. Over the course of the two rolls Suzanne relaxed again and was flirty and sexy. By the time Andrew finished the last of the shots he was wound up something terrible. He put the camera down and nearly fell over trying to get out of his jeans as fast as possible. That Suzanne was turned on was in no doubt as he plunged into her in one thrust. Andrew pulled out, stood at the end of the bed and hauled her down to the end before starting to fuck her again. With Suzanne’s ankles on his shoulders and his hands pulling her thighs back against him she was in the classic ‘el’ shape. Andrew knew the expression he was trying to convey, somewhere on the continuum of scorching lust to passionate love, but could never tell what he actually looked like. Best not to think about it in case he actually looked like he had kidney stones or something. Today he tried to convey control, slaking his lusts on Suzanne’s body. He must have been doing something right as she was totally out of control. The power in Suzanne’s legs and torso was on display, Andrew was struggling to hold her in position before she suddenly went rigid for two seconds and then the wave burst over her. The sobbing moans of ecstasy were impossible to defend against and Andrew came almost involuntarily, adding his own grunts and roars to the cacophony of sound. He sank to his knees at the end of the bed, letting his heart and breathing slow and the world to swim back into focus. Wearily climbing into bed Suzanne snuggled up against him and they lay there for a few minutes basking in each other’s presence and lost in their thoughts.

“For someone who claims to not know what he is doing you don’t appear that way. You had this air about you as you fucked me, you were in charge and I should be lucky that you were fucking me. God, it was so hot. And earlier, fucking hell Andrew, am I that transparent. I should be petrified, indignant, and adamant that it will never happen but all I can think about is lying on the bed, legs spread. I really am a fucking basket case.”

“No, I don’t think you are that. Just a wonderful woman with a complex sexuality that she is trying to understand. Me, I am just the lucky bastard that gets to help.”

They showered for what felt like the third or fourth time that day and Andrew took Suzanne over to her house in time for dinner before Vanessa’s performance.

Leslie was there with Julian when he arrived at the Campbells for dinner. Brian kept them entertained during the meal with his recounting of his conversation with Mungo Drummond. Drummond had been pissed at Andrew for pre-emptively slapping down any possible additional partners but amazingly enough once Brian told him about the additional endowment money from some important Scottish business people, he forgave him. Andrew in turn told everyone about Lord Barnes mentoring Mhairi and how that was driving some of this jealousy.

“Lord Barnes has taken a real shine to you Andrew.”

This was Mary.

“Why?”

“I helped tutor his daughter several years ago. They had fallen out badly over her failure at maths but once I started tutoring her they reconciled and then she passed the Higher so he is grateful to me. Plus you heard about the story of the evening with Allison and how he dines out on it so although he is in his fifties he thinks of me as a friend. I struggle a bit with that, not the whole concept of being a friend more his position rather than him as an individual.”

“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

Brian was looking at me curiously.

“I have several older people who I think of as my friends. They all have mentored me and helped me grow as a person. You and Mary obviously, but Julian’s Dad, Harry Strachan that owns the farm I worked on while at school and even Doug Somers, although I am sure he thinks I am a naïve fool. Lord Barnes, who keeps trying to get me to call him Jim, just seems different. I am not sure I can explain it.”

“So much else happened that night I somehow forgot about the story. You took an 18 year old young woman out to dinner, while you were still 16, dressed like she was walking the red carpet at the Oscars.”

Andrew nodded.

“In Edinburgh.”

He nodded again.

“And when you got there you ended up having dinner with Lord Barnes, a senior Court of Session judge and Freya Moray, the number two civil servant at the Scottish Office.”

He laughed but nodded again.

“And you were 16.”

More nodding.

“She helped.”

He might as well drag someone under the bus with him. Mary looked at Leslie.

“I went dress shopping with her, it is true.”

Mary looked at him.

“Why?”

Andrew shrugged.

“She deserved it. She needed to know that she wasn’t just a brainy, plain nerd. You always want what you don’t have. She never felt like a glamourous woman, so that night I opened her eyes. I wanted her to command the attention of the room. And she was brilliant. It was her idea to invite Lord Barnes to sit with us, her dad is a lawyer and she wanted to tweak his nose. Me I am just a romantic fool with too much money.”