Chapter 10

We overslept. Fortunately the hotel had envisaged this eventuality and breakfast was served until eleven. One thing about Nicola, now she was with me she was assiduously working on putting on weight. Any thoughts I might have had of a quickie to start the day were banished as she leapt out of bed and got dressed. She had bought designer jeans and a form fitting teeshirt over a teeshirt bra to fit her reduced dimensions. No quickie and a body revealed like that. Frustration!

"Come on!" she urged. "It's ten thirty. Breakfast!"

So in my shirt and pants from the night before, unshaved and unkempt, I accompanied her, wondering if they would let me in the dining room. They did, and we ate to our hearts' content.

Could that girl eat! Fruit juice (twice), grapefruit, cereal, full english breakfast (bacon, sausage, black pudding, egg, fried bread, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms), toast and marmalade – oh, and one of the two croissants I was managing to get down.

Since it was already eleven, we were drinking coffee. I could not have stomached coffee with a Full English: for me that needs tea and plenty of it, but I did think I was having a couple of croissants, and they do go with coffee. To be fair, she did go and get me another croissant (and yet another for herself)!

Check out was delayed like breakfast, but we had to be out by one, so we finished in the bathroom when we returned to the room. She showered and her nudity encouraged the idea we might just...

No time. We had to check out, and I had to shower and shave. More frustration, especially when she was in those sprayed on jeans. At least she put on a bra for the journey home.

She chattered about this, that and everything on the way home, as she always did when we travelled, but when we turned into the drive, she floored me.

"Kevin, I haven't forgotten. I hesitate to say it, but I know we have to talk."

You had to love her. She never ducked unpleasant chores.

I turned the engine off.

"Let's unpack and get some coffee, then we can chat over coffee and biscuits."

More coffee! What was I doing? Actually I knew she loved coffee in the morning, and it was only two hours past midday.

We sat on the sofa in the living room with our coffee and some biscuits (cookies). We ate a little, drank a little.

"So," I said, not knowing really what to say.

"So," she replied, which would have been humorous had she smiled. She didn't.

Silence. Then she sighed.

"Kevin I'm not blind and I'm not stupid, so let me tell you what I think is your problem with last night."

"I never thought you were stupid, Nicky," I said hastily.

"No, I don't think you ever did," she replied. "We did both go to university, didn't we? But perceptive? Common sense?" She laughed and her eyes twinkled.

"OK, go on," I prompted her, "the floor is yours."

I could see she was biting back a humorous rejoinder, and I'll swear we both were thinking that the floor, like the rest of the house, was mine. She took a breath.

"It's Carlton, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"The dancing and him being in our room?"

"Yes."

"Kevin, if we're to make a success of this, we have to be free to say what's in our minds. 'Yes' doesn't cut it. Spell it out to me, then I can understand."

I sighed. New Year's Day, and after a lousy party we were having a post-mortem.

"The way you were dancing with him. Pressed up against him, feeling him and more to the point letting him feel you up. It was almost sex on the dance floor. I just don't think that's the way you go on when you are in a relationship with someone else. People were passing comments, you know."

"Oh."

"Then you'd gone. Now don't get mad, but there is a history here of you dumping me for the jock of the class, and then more recently of you saying one thing and then everything crashing round my ears. So I hope you can imagine how I felt. It ruined my night.

"Then there's the business of stripping for him. Your underwear was seduction material, the knickers didn't exactly cover up your bum, and I assumed that was originally intended for my benefit. Nicky, it hid nothing. He was getting his shirt off: he knew what it meant. He shouldn't have been there at all. You didn't need him to 'support' you to your room. So there's the question, why did you?

"And then there's the instant accusation that Beth and I were up there to fuck ourselves silly. It looked like attack was the best form of defence – that you felt guilty as hell and wanted to deflect attention from what you were doing.

"I'm confused, you seem to be giving me mixed messages. I'm not sure of you anymore."

I drank some more coffee and she sat looking worried and upset. Was she trying to think of a believable story to cover herself? At length she sat up and turned to face me, her face creased with concern.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I can see that. You're right of course. None of it should have happened. It was stupid of me. I'll try to explain.

"I told you about my modelling jobs, but didn't go into details beyond the fact it was mainly for websites, mail order and advertisements. If you've ever looked at the women's wear pictures in catalogues or on line, you'll see that they use the same model for a number of different garments. They do her hair differently or use different makeup or a wig sometimes, different expressions, but it's the same girl. Cheaper that way.

"The actual shoot is hard work, very fast, and if you think that the model goes discretely behind a screen or to a cubicle to change, you're wrong. Some places do, but not all by any means. You just go over to a clothes rack and strip off, in front of the photographer, sometimes his assistant, and if it's really posh, a dresser – often male.

"You think nothing of it. You do get the odd slime-ball who tries to get off with you, but they don't push it – they'd lose trade if that sort of thing got around. Girls would refuse to model for them. Some of the photographers are fit guys, and I'm sure some girls fuck them. Not me. Not even when I was not in a relationship.

"That's not all. The same thing happens with some of the underwear shoots. You strip naked to put of another set in front of the men there. On occasion the buyer is there as well. What I'm saying is that I never thought anything of it after a while, so taking off the dress in front of Carlton wasn't a big deal. It never entered my head that he'd take it the wrong way, I simply never thought twice about it."

"And the dancing?"

"As a model very occasionally you get invited, if that's the right word, to evening receptions at an advertising launch. There'd be a meal and dancing. You chat during the meal and dance a little with the clients. Not in any sleazy way," she hastened to add, "just part of the evening.

"Most clients are well behaved, and hold you properly during slow dances, but more often than any of us like, you get characters who think models are prostitutes in all but name. They press up against you, you can see it in their eyes – 'Can you feel my big dick?'. They want to feel your tits against their chests.

"Well, they're clients, and it's not so bad. If they start to take liberties, then you politely put them off."

"What sort of liberties?" I asked. I had seen what Carlton got away with. She understood.

"If they stroke your hair, stroke your back, OK. If they fondle your bum cheeks, well OK. Tits, no. Hand down your front, no. Hand on a thigh pushing up skirt, no.

"You might let them get a quick feel, but then you stop them nicely. I've only had one guy in the whole of my time who wouldn't take no for an answer, and I left him on the dance floor and complained to the advertising company.

"Again you get so used to it that you let it happen. No big deal, and it isn't a turn on – even with a superstar like Carlton." Her distaste for the man was clear. "I didn't allow any more with Carlton than I did at those promotions, in any case he didn't really push it. He groped my bum, rubbed the side of my tits, he was whispering in my ear about what he'd like to do to me and he tried kissing my neck – I stopped him doing that. Then my heel broke."

She sighed.

"Kevin you just get used to going along with things, that's why I just let Carlton 'help' me to our room. He insisted, and I took the line of least resistance – it would only be until he overstepped the mark. Carlton didn't.

"That's all. I can't say any more than that, except I'm sorry to have upset you, and in front of your friends too. I should have been more sensitive to where I was. I wasn't at a promotion, I was with you."

So there it was, a reasonable explanation and a genuine apology. I could well imagine the scene at the photo shoots, and allowing limited liberties at a presentation party. However, there was a niggle that she was enjoying Carlton rather more than she admitted. What could I do? Start an argument over something which was in the past and no real harm done?

I smiled. "OK, it makes sense when you put it in that context. Let's forget it."

"I won't let it happen again," she said earnestly. "I won't forget. Are we OK?"

"Yes," I smiled. "We're OK."

Secretly I reserved judgement, the incident had unsettled me. We needed a lot more time together before I was sure that her habit of disappearing was simply an accident, and not a function of her libido. It wasn't that I didn't trust her, or at least trust what she avowed. We could live together for a while yet, so I could be sure. I needed to be absolutely sure of her. It was, and is, a growing fashion in Britain not to marry for years, but simply to live together. We could be like that.

What was I thinking? Marriage? Where did that come from? The day before Christmas Eve until New Year's Day – just over a week. Before that? One weekend in May. Before that? School. Forget school, that was years ago. How long have we been together? Twelve days! And the word Marriage cropped up in passing in my head! Forget that right away. Live for the day.

With that helpful thought I looked up to find Nicola standing before me. I hadn't felt her leaving the sofa.

Now that she had my attention, she slowly pulled her tee shirt up her body by the hem, slowly revealing that perfect waist, the rounded stomach with its indented navel, the rib cage still rather too evident, the plain bra. Her body elongated tightly as she pulled the shirt over her head and off, and cast it to the floor.

Immediately her delicate fingers went to her jeans, flicking the button, and pausing to show the suspicion of knickers beneath, before pulling down the zip to show more. Then her hands to each side and pushing over her tightly encased rounded buttocks, pushing, shimmying, all the way to her feet, bending forward and enhancing the cleavage her bra was making.

She turned her back, bending from the waist to slip them off her feet, which delineated every crevice of her sex, and the spot where her clitoris pushed out the flimsy cloth like a miniscule penis. The knickers were, like the bra, plain white, but a thong to avoid a panty line. Her achingly rounded bottom parted its cheeks to show the thin fabric pressed against her rosebud and perineum. Those thighs, the tendons of the backs of her knees stretched taut, those exquisite calves, those delicate ankles!

She stood and turned towards me. Rapidly she unhooked the bra and dropped it, her breasts hardly dropping at all, but heaving a little with her emotion, as again turning her back, she grasped the sides of her thong. Slowly she pushed down, and I watched as the fabric reluctantly pulled away from the cleft of her arse, away from the crease of her vulva, her legs apart to give me full sight of it. Then the journey to her knees, stretching out the material as her wide stance impeded its progress. Legs together, and the wisp of underwear dropped gently to the ground.

"For you," she said, "and only for you, I strip – really do a strip naked – show my most private self – only for you. From now on. I won't forget my darling."

She took a couple of steps towards we, and I realised I was hard. How could I not be after that display? Very much so, my pants tenting. Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she smiled with satisfaction at her own attractiveness. Her hands went to her hips, and she nodded at my groin area.

I undid and pulled off my keks and with them my boxers, raising my bottom and pushing them off. She fell to her knees and undid by shoes, glancing lovingly up at me under those long eyelashes, while denuding me of everything below the waist.