Chapter 6

Andrew passed the afternoon in the usual manner, writing to the various people in his life. Since he wasn’t over at the library he skipped calling anyone and instead wrote letters to his Grandma, to Maggie and Tony, and to Leslie and Julian. They were brief as they were the most up to date with his life. By far the best letter and parcel was the one to Mandy. She had an acceptance, conditional on three ‘A’s in her A-levels. Andrew had let Pedro know on the drive down to London and so he sent her the final scarf as planned. A belated birthday and congratulations present all in one. It was by no means certain that she would achieve the results but he was pleased that she had got so far. Suzanne’s letter was odd in that he missed her. He had hoped to get up to either Glasgow or Edinburgh during the term but had not factored Saturday morning hockey games into that plan. With all the missing OTC weekends he felt he couldn’t just jet off to Scotland on one of the other weekends. The letters to France were variations on the same theme. Andrew led a very much quieter life during term time than any of them did. He found himself writing about hockey practice and the OTC weekends just to have something to write other than ‘I studied a lot’. Frankly he was surprised they kept up the correspondence. Chiara’s were the briefest, in both directions and the established model, who now had a second stage of her career, was the most obviously moving on. Heloise had a career as well before she met him, and indeed was more famous than Chiara. But she was also coming to terms with everything and the vulnerable tall gangly girl of her childhood still peeked through. But she was ever more comfortable with her celebrity and her chosen career path. Of the three models Renee was the one that Andrew wrote the longest letters to. Why Renee, even over Heloise? They were probably the most similar despite being different in every way. He knew that made no sense but they had the same outlook on life. Renee, despite her recent and current success, was damaged by modelling. It had made her question herself and so this current success, well she treated it as if it was a mistake, and that ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ were, would realise and take it away. She was mentally preparing for life after modelling, or at least life after full time modeling. And in that they were very similar. There were many occasions when he had to stop and think about the ridiculous series of events over the last two years. But he only had three more shoots to go. The coming summer and the following one, together with a two week shoot at Christmas. He could see the end of his life as model in the distance.

The letters to Manon were friendly, catching up on each other’s lives but hers were the ones where Andrew found out how the campaigns were being received. And they were always in arrears as well. So the campaigns she would refer to involved the shoots in September, so him and Mathilde, the bullfighting with Renee, even the one where he and Heloise kept their clothes on. Cyprus was being kept until springtime. But it was disconcerting to separate all the different campaigns. Manon would talk about how pleased Hermès were with the shoots all the while talking about the public campaigns which were older shoots. His one disappointment was he would be unable to attend her wedding. It was scheduled for the Saturday before the start of his exams. Even one week earlier and Andrew would have considered attending but he was not going to be in France the day before his exams started. They understood but Andrew was still disappointed.

His letter to Nikki and Fran was always the most honest and complete. They tended to get more background to what was going on in his life. It was not as honest as with Leslie when he was growing up but he would write to them about how Meredith was good for him, keeping everything drama free. But the one person Andrew didn’t write to them about was Ara. It was unfair to them and their relationship with Suzanne to talk about her with them. He was more and more facing up to the reality that everyone else was dalliances but Suzanne and Ara were different. At the time he would have accepted answers on a postcard as why that was.

That afternoon Andrew’s last letter was to Lilja. He had been taken aback at her level of candour in the letter waiting for him at College when he returned. They had agreed that they needed to be more open with each other so as not to put the other in an awkward position if they tried to meet again. But having called Lilja on her exhibitionist tendencies, the first letter to him was as if she was talking to a therapist. The one thing she emphasised in the letter was how he had verbally slapped her in the face with the description of the sex show in the Reeperbahn. She still had the fantasies but she also realised that they would forever stay as fantasies. HIs description of the setting and crowd and made an indelible imprint on her mind. But with that dealt with her first letter, the two subsequent ones had talked about being naked as an actress and how she was excited at the idea. She talked about successful dates and awful dates, how she was terrible at identifying the difference ahead of time. And her letters were also full of the mundane, trying to survive in the flat with Venla until the end of the year. Passing on hellos from Saara and Malva. Andrew’s own responses? The stability of Meredith and the mutual benefit they got from not confusing love with lust. The sense that everything was on hold until he had graduated. But he didn’t mention either Suzanne or Ara and or mention the modelling, even although it was clear that it was something that Lilja was considering. Did he imagine Lilja in a Hermès shoot? What do you think.

So the afternoon passed in a flurry of letter writing. The evening? After ambushing poor Helena at brunch payback was having to go for a walk with her after dinner.

“You are a real bastard; do you know that? I had pretty well given up on any of those kinds of fantasies and you just casually tell me that you had had a threesome and that it was great. How the hell am I meant to concentrate with that vision in my eyes. I know what it is like to fuck you Andrew, I spent all afternoon lying on my bed thinking about what it would be like to be fucked by you with someone else there. Bastard.”

Andrew knew the whacks had only been delayed. But once they had been administered then she calmed down.

“You never talk about your sex life, we all know that and yet you mentioned this. Why?”

“I don’t know. It was an impulse just to tease you. It was not very nice when I stop and think about it. Plus I didn’t really say anything at all.”

“Other than it was fantastic!”

“Well true.”

“Why Andrew?”

He sighed.

“When you told me you were single I couldn’t help myself. When I was doing it at the time I thought of you. Neither of the women reminded me of you in any way but both at the time and afterwards it made me think of you. Sorry.”

“Was it really that good?”

“It wasn’t really a threesome for most of it. I was fucking one woman while the other woman lay beside us on the bed watching. But then right at the end she leaned over and started sucking on the woman’s nipple. This made the woman I was fucking come and start to shout the place down so she let go of the nipple and kissed her instead. The combination of the two was. It was so much more than I expected. I found it hot. And I thought about you and the comment a year ago.”

Helena had listened in fascinated silence as he told her. Her next comment stunned him.

“So it wasn’t like the scene you whispered in my ear. Where you stretched me wide and made me wait half a second before you buggered me and made me come harder than I have ever come before.”

Andrew shook his head at the way her mind had taken the information.

“No Helena, it was nothing like I talked about with you.”

“Good. Come on you can buy me a drink for freaking me out all day.”

Later when he left the bar with Meredith Helena was looking at the two of them with a questioning eye. He had created a monster. Given all the things that he and Merry and had done in the term and half together it was surprising that they had never had a conversation about another girl. It was the last fuck of the night, slow and lazy with Andrew against the headboard and Merry sitting on his lap.

“Have you ever been with a girl?”

He didn’t expect to be whacked.

“Just because I go to Newnham?”

“Ouch. No. We have talked about most things and we had never talked about that.”

“Have you been with another man?”

He sighed. This was going well.

“No, I have not.”

“Why is it that men find two women together so attractive?”

Clearly the only way he was going to get an answer was to answer all her questions.

“Men are visual creatures, so there is twice as much to look at. It is a societal taboo, yet to men at least, is not threatening.”

“You have friends who are committed lesbians, yes?”

“I do. They are some of my closest friends.”

“So I am guessing you mean playing around with women rather than it being the way they are?”

“Yes, of course. We are lying here fucking on my bed. You have been pretty adventurous in the past and it occurred to me that we had never talked about this. That was all.”

Merry relented and smiled for the first time.

“It was fun to give you shit. Yes, I have played around with another girl two, no three times. First time was at school and we were both drunk on a school trip. It was all very vanilla, a little snogging and some wandering hands. The two were here at Cambridge, a one night stand in first year where we were both drunk and it was a blurry mess. But for a couple of weeks last year I ‘properly’ had sex with a woman. It has been the only time a woman has eaten me out or I have done the same to her. It was nice but it really didn’t do anything for me. I like men too much. Women can’t do what you are doing to me right now. So tell me the truth. What brought this on?”

Andrew didn’t want Merry to link Helena with his questions, at least not yet.

“It came up in a drunken conversation when I was at home for Christmas. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it until now but one of the women who I went to school with mentioned it. Like I said she was drunk that night and I think she was mortified that she had talked about it, even if only slightly, the next day. I had not seen her since school so I don’t think she was worried about me but some of the other people there she saw regularly. When she told us she was very matter of fact about it, like it was no big deal. And it isn’t a big deal but it was a surprise coming from her. I knew nothing about her sex life and it surprised me. I know most things about yours and I realised I didn’t know about this.”

He shrugged.

“Sounds like it was the same for her as it was for me.”

It was only later as they lay in bed having cleaned up that Merry suddenly turned and looked at him suspiciously.

“Hang on. You don’t care about me making out, or more, with another girl. It is not just two in the bed is it Andrew? What am I not enough for you?”

Fortunately Merry was smiling otherwise her words would have had him panicking. Andrew rolled her onto her side and spooned in behind her.

“I do love smart women.”

He kissed Merry on the neck and fell asleep.

It was 3.30 in the morning when he woke up groggily. As soon as Merry saw that he was awake she stopped sucking his dick and grabbed a condom.

“You dirty bastard, you got me all worked up. And then fell asleep like nothing had happened. Don’t say a word and fuck me. Now. And stop looking so fucking smug.”

Neither of them lasted very long and the condom was discarded to be dealt with in the morning. 20 minutes later he was fast asleep. Again. He wondered if he would face more questions when he got back from the pool but Meredith was gone as usual and the day was no different than any other.

So Sunday had been full of awkward conversations and great sex. The reality of the course beat that feeling out of him pretty quickly. That term Andrew’s favourite course so far at university was being taught, Fracture Mechanics of Materials and Structures, and that morning he was immediately immersed into Paris’ Law or whatever the topic of the day was. By the end of the day thoughts and talk of a threesome were nowhere in his consciousness. He skipped out of studying early so he could mail the parcel to Mandy Brown. He was standing in the queue at the Post Office waiting to get it weighed and stamped when he was aware of a woman two people in front of him looking round and staring at him, and not very subtly either. After a surreptitious check of his fly Andrew ignored her. Maybe she didn’t see many tall people. The parcel dropped off and paid for he stepped out of the post office to find the woman waiting for him. She had a girl in the 10 to 14 year old range standing with her.

“Excuse me. I am sorry to bother you but could I ask you an odd question.”

She didn’t look like a religious nutter but Andrew’s guard was up. He stepped out of the doorway and stood beside her and the girl who he assumed was her daughter.

“Er, sure. I may not answer but go ahead.”

Taking the girl’s hand the woman looked up at him.

“Did you go to a funeral for a cancer patient just over two years ago?”

He was shocked and it hit him that he had seen her twice before. Once in the ward before Christmas and again at her son’s funeral. This was Ron’s wife. He thought Peggy had said her name was Dot. Wow.