The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Page 11

  “Ow,” he says. And he smiles.

  And I open my mouth, and I say, “You bastard, Roscarrick.”

  “But you were so beautiful, darling, your beautiful white ass.”

  “Marc.”

  “Though, truth be told, it is a little pinker now.”

  “But they all saw.”

  He smiles again. His breath is scented with wine. We are entwined. He kisses my nose and says, “And you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” His pale blue eyes are inches from mine; we are staring into each other’s eyes, maybe into each other’s souls. “Didn’t you? You enjoyed it a lot. Bad little girl.”

  I cannot lie. I cannot even shake my head. I just want him inside me. I just want another delicious orgasm. Like the prosciutto rolls at the Gambrinus. These orgasms are so more-ish.

  “Make me come.”

  “Sì sì, bella donna.”

  He descends once more and pushes my thighs apart; his expert tongue touches me there for about seventeen seconds and then I simply orgasm. Just like that. Seventeen seconds. I am grasping the air, my toes tighten, I remember the spanking, and the climax is intense. And oh so easy, so easy.

  What is happening to me? It used to be so hard for me to come, so difficult with my boyfriends; now it is like the best kind of childish trick, this is all you do, you see, this is the knack, the way you ride a bike, the way to juggle, just this, just this, just here, just like that, there, you see? Ahhhhh.

  Silly, X, silly. It could have been like this all along. All you needed was a handsome, expert, Anglo-Italian billionaire aristocrat; you could have gotten one at the drugstore.

  And now I am exquisitely tired.

  “Good night . . . Good night.”

  He kisses the tip of my nose.

  “Piccolina.”

  I am slipping into sleep on Marc’s vast white bed. That music is still playing. Choral and sublime. It is now a lullaby. Sleep comes, quick and demanding. I have final thoughts. Sweet, final thoughts. For the first time in my life, I am going to spend the night in Marc Roscarrick’s bed. The sensation is of infinite luxury; cool, clean sheets, and a distant yet profound satiation.

  I WAKE TO bright but filtered sun. Marc is sleeping next to me, tanned and handsome with his tousled hair. A stripe of sun illuminates his dark shoulder. I see he has a small scar there: a curious, subtle, curving scar, like a minor knife wound.

  Now the memories return, surging and urgent. I try to calm the renewing fight between guilt and happiness inside me. Did I really let Marc spank me in front of his servants? How on earth did that happen?

  And yet it was a turn-on. It just was.

  Public submission. Is that really the first of the Mysteries?

  If it was, the Mystery is: I feel liberated. Something has unknotted inside me, a psychic tension has been released, a complex knot has been unraveled. So I was naked, and very sexual, and submissive in front of others? So what, who cares, what gives?

  Marc sleeps on. I rub my eyes, yawn hungrily, and gaze around the bedroom, seeing it for the first time in real daylight.

  It is not what I expected. I’m not quite sure what I anticipated: four-poster beds, Louis XIV chairs, gilding and paneling and lion paws? But Marc’s bedroom is decidedly modern.

  The bed is huge and low, dark and wooden. The walls are pale, painted a northern creamy-gray, inset with acres of windows, partly shuttered. Marc must have had these new big windows knocked through. The main table is an entire cross-section of a tree—exquisitely polished—and decorated with an abstract, hand-blown glass sculpture. Minimalist yet expressive.

  A few neckties lie discarded on the parquet floor; just the right amount of disorder. The rugs might be from London, modern blocks of color.

  My eyes eat it all up greedily. Two Barcelona chairs stare at me from the distant corner. I may not know my Baroque and Renaissance so well, but I know modern art and design. These are surely original Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe.

  A large bookcase stands against the opposite wall—full of reassuringly well-read, spine-cracked books. Two sizable and carefully framed photos decorate the wall above me. Are these Gursky? Andreas Gursky? It is all subdued and personal and modern—yet supremely comfortable. You could sleep here for a year, only to be woken by Vogue Interiors come to have a look.

  The sole touch of historicity—the only sign you are in a Bourbon-era palazzo—is an eighteenth-century portrait of a beautiful woman in a billowing and sumptuous blue dress on the final wall. It looks English. It could be Gainsborough; hell, it probably is Gainsborough.

  I wonder if that is Marc’s great-great-great-whatever grandmother. Probably it is. She’s beautiful and slightly sad, framed by her dark room, with a human skull on the table next to her. Symbolizing mortality? Her cleavage is very visible and her lips are very red. Symbolizing sex? There is a riding crop on the floor, too. Symbolizing flagellation? Was she the first Roscarrick initiated into the Mysteries?

  Intimations of anxiety begin to needle me. I rise, embarrassed by my nakedness, and cross the room. I’m looking for the bathroom. Here? Or here?

  There are two bathrooms. One is darker and masculine. full of aftershaves and razors and shaving mirrors and badger-hair shaving brushes by “Geo Trumper of Curzon Street Mayfair.” I see fencing masks and two swords stacked in a dark wooden cupboard. So that’s how he keeps fit. Fencing. Dueling. Swordplay.

  Then I step back out and walk into a second, much more feminine bathroom, which is almost as big as my apartment. Grabbing a bathrobe from the hook on the door, I investigate—feeling a little guilty as I go. And wondering just who else has been in here.

  The bathtub is maybe a yard deep; you could wash sheep in it. The fittings are bright and sparkling, the enormous mirrors glitter with decorous lighting. I open a few cupboard doors. The soaps are new and from Firenze, the towels are possibly laundered in heaven. It is like a five-star-hotel bathroom, only nicer.

  Maybe Marc could let me live here—just let me live in the bathroom. That would be fine. I could have sandwiches brought in.

  I shower under the half-meter-wide showerhead, grab one of the many spare toothbrushes, clean my teeth, dry my hair, then slip into the robe again—still feeling slightly awkward, like this is a hotel but I haven’t paid. I step back into the bedroom.

  Marc is standing there, also in a bathrobe. He smiles and crosses to my side, then runs his fingers through my shower-wet hair and kisses me deeply. He draws back.

  “Good morning, X.”

  I hesitate. I speak.

  “Buongiorno, Marc.”

  We kiss. We kiss again. Three times. He smells of soap and shampoo and himself. The disturbing desire for him returns. The warm sorbet inside, melting sweetly. Wanting to be licked.

  Be careful, X. Be careful.

  Then I notice that breakfast has appeared, and sits on the bed on two shining trays. This is just as I imagined it. Silver carafes of pink grapefruit juice, silver jugs of dark, rich coffee, two tiny silver juglets of gorgeous cream. And plates of brioche, sfogliata, pain au raisin, and various fruits—mango, white peach, and tiny wild strawberries.

  “God, I’m hungry,” I say reflexively. We are both sitting on the bed now, divided by the breakfast tray.

  “You are?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Is that wrong?”

  “But . . .” He sighs. “All you had to do was lie there, over my lap.” He is gazing at me, his face expressionless. “It’s not like you burned a lot of calories.”

  I look at him. What is he saying? I realize—belatedly—that he is joking. I throw a chunk of brioche in his direction. He laughs, and tuts.

  “I had to do all the work, X.”

  “Marc!”

  “My right arm might never recover. Do you think I should see an osteopath?”


  He laughs again. And his laughter is genuine and contagious—and somehow a very serious relief. The tension in me instantly subsides. Now I laugh with him, and I crawl across the bed and push him back onto the pillows, and then I climb up and straddle him. I am pinning him down, his chest under my thighs, and I laugh as I lean down and kiss him, and he laughs as he leans up and kisses me. And then I say, “You were pathetic, anyway, Lord Roscarrick.”

  “What?”

  “Call that a spanking? I barely noticed.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Really,” I say. “I think I actually fell asleep at one point.”

  He smiles and sits up higher, but I am still straddled over his groin. I can sense his arousal, hard under me, as he looks at me. His eyes are blue, yet dark with desire, as he says, “Show me your breasts, Miss Beckmann.”

  “No.”

  “Per favore, signorina. Take pity on a humble billionaire.”

  “Sorry. I need my breakfast. Then I have to go do some work.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I say. “We can’t all sit around in our Barcelona chairs, wearing Gieves and Hawkes suits.”

  He looks up at me, shrewdly.

  “I am gratified.”

  “Why?”

  “No one ever noticed the chairs before.”

  “They’re original, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Purchased them at auction four years ago. I’ve never . . . well . . . since my wife died. There’s never been anyone who really understood . . . anything. Not my life, not my interests, not anything.” His smile is sweet, almost boyish. And tinged with sadness.

  “Well, I’m hungry,” I say—though I am glowing a little inside. Climbing off him, I return to my breakfast. He drinks juice and coffee and checks his phone for messages. I eat, happily, and drink coffee, and taste those wild strawberries and sweet brioche. Because I really am famished. Who knew that spanking could be so appetizing? As well as arousing?

  “So,” I say, swallowing a mouthful of buttered brioche, “Marc. Tell me. Was that the First Mystery?”

  “Yes.” He drops the phone on the bed. “The First and the simplest.”

  “But what’s it meant to prove? I don’t get it. I mean . . .” A faint blush rises to my face. “It was erotic, Marc, don’t get me wrong. Surprising, but, yes, erotic. Very erotic.”

  “I gathered.”

  “But I don’t see how they fit . . .”

  “The Mysteries are public and often sexual, and to complete them you must show an ability to submit. You passed.”

  “I did?”

  “Oh yes. Top marks. Alpha plus.”

  “But, God. My bare ass!”

  “Is divine. You are Venus Callipygia.”

  I squint his way.

  “Sorry? Venus callywhat?”

  “Venus Callipygia. Venus of the beautiful buttocks. Venus of the gorgeous bottom.”

  “She’s a Greek goddess?”

  “Yes. And you are her avatar.”

  He is reaching for me. I giggle and rise, skipping away from his grasp.

  “I have to get dressed, Marc. I really do have work to do—studying. Where are my clothes?”

  He sighs, semi-seriously. “They’re in that wardrobe. Cleaned and pressed.”

  Of course. Why wouldn’t they be cleaned and pressed? He has about six hundred staff, he probably has a whole team of valets, ready to sew new buttons on old shirts overnight.

  Opening the closet door I find my jeans and my sneakers and my white socks—and my Victoria’s Secret panties. All wrapped in delicate tissue paper. I had thought these black lacy panties were a touch of luxury, of subtle eroticism—now they feel rather stupid and gauche. But I don’t care. I am feeling good, verging on gleeful. Emancipated.

  Alexandra Beckmann, the Virgin of New Hampshire, has been exceptionally naughty. And I like it.

  When I am jeaned and shirted, I turn; Marc is half-dressed in jeans and another immaculate white shirt, with another aristocratically frayed collar. I have questions.

  “Marc . . . what happens next?”

  He buttons his white double-cuffs with silver links and looks me straight in the eye.

  “The Second Mystery takes place in two weeks.”

  I chirp. “What happens this time? Do you spank me in a soccer stadium? Do we dance naked on TV?”

  He is not smiling.

  “X, you should know . . . The Second Mystery is. . . .” His expression darkens. “More challenging. This is where it really begins.”

  And then that flash of sad anger appears on his handsome face, just briefly. That tragic but menacing anger. And my heartbeat flutters with anxiety and confusion. And my soul is full of helpless and stupid desire. Because I am scared, and I am also falling in love.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT’S BECOMING A cycle, I see it now. Or perhaps a kind of courtly eighteenth-century dance, a cotillion, or a stately minuet, where the dancers—the man and the woman—advance toward each other, then retreat, advance, then retreat, but each time they advance they get a little closer, until at last they are united. Forever?

  Right now, lying here in my room, clothed but barefoot, staring at the shadows of the sun on the ceiling of my apartment, and otherwise reading a scatter of books, I am pretty sure I am in retreat. Because I am reading more about the origins of the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta.

  I am determined to keep reading because I am determined not to forget the reason I came to Naples, however bewitching my affair—my liaison—my passion—my swooning foolishness—what is it?—with Marc. If I gave up my academic vocation and my projected thesis, I would be abandoning myself entirely to him, somehow.

  Besides, I am interested in this history, because I am interested in all history.

  But the more I read, the more I wonder about Marc, in a bad way. Opening one bookmarked page I frown, and reread an underlined passage for the third time this morning.

  The Garduña was a secret criminal society in Spain, which originated in the late Middle Ages. Initially little more than a prison gang, it grew into a more organized entity, involved with robbery, kidnapping, arson, and commissioned assassinations. The notorious statutes of the Garduña are said to have been approved in Toledo in 1420; according to some historians, the secret criminal clan later evolved into the Neapolitan Camorra during the Spanish dominion over southern Italy.

  My eye alights on this paragraph in particular:

  A Calabrian folk song provides evidence for this Italian legacy. It tells the story of three Garduña “brothers,” or three Spanish knights, who flee Spain in the seventeenth century after brutally murdering the seducer of their beloved sister. The three men are shipwrecked on the island of Favignana, near Sicily. The first man, Carcagnosso, protected by St. Michael, makes his way to Calabria and founds the ’Ndrangheta. The second, Osso, devoted to St. George, makes his way to Sicily and founds the Mafia. The third knight, Mastrosso, a devotee of the Virgin Mary, makes his way to Naples and founds the Camorra. . . .

  I pause and listen to my own heart, softly beating.

  Marcus Roscarrick.

  Lord Marcus Roscarrick.

  Lord Marcus James Anthony Xavier Mastrosso Di Angelo Roscarrick.

  Inside I shudder, just a little. Is that mere coincidence? Why would Marc have a name that links him to the Spanish Garduña, the alleged precursors of the Camorra? If his family intermarried with the Bourbon nobility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then that meant intermarrying with the Spanish as well as the Italians, because the Bourbons were originally from Spain. Just like the Camorra were from Spain—or so it is surmised.

  I put down the book and listen to the noises of Naples outside. The ferry for Ischia is hooting in the sun, the taxis
are honking furiously on Via Nazario.

  I pick up a different book: the etymology of Neapolitan life. Here is a passage I have already scored and underlined, twice.

  Guappo (plural: guappi) is a word in Neapolitan dialect, meaning thug, bully or braggart. While today the word is often used to indicate a member of the Camorra, the guapperia (or guapparia; i.e., the guappo culture) predates Camorra and was originally very different.

  I bite a fingernail and think.

  The street kids who assaulted me in the Quartieri Spagnoli called Marc “guappo.” I dismissed it at the time, as just some dialect insult. Indeed, I would dismiss it now, if it wasn’t for the following passage:

  The word derives from the Spanish guapo, meaning a bold, elegant, and ostentatious man, and it probably and ultimately derives from the Latin vappa. The word might, alternatively, be derived from the Garduña, a criminal organization in Spain. The Garduña was composed of guapos, generally good swordsmen, daring assassins, and committed bandits.

  Swordsmen. They were fighters and swordsmen. Moreover:

  The figure of the guappo is not necessarily synonymous with the Camorrista. He is also and uniquely a historical figure in the Neapolitan area, distinguishable by his dandylike appearance and his ostentatious poise. The guappo could be subdivided in turn, into the “simple” or “upper-class” guappo, according to the clothes he wore: the former preferred extravagant attire, while the latter preferred to dress in clothes from the best tailors in Naples.

  Does this fit Marcus? Yes, maybe; no, surely not? Yes? Marcus Roscarrick is not some aspiring dandy, some silly, swaggering, suited-and-booted hero of the barrios; he is a true aristocrat. He dresses with exquisite taste but it is subtle, unostentatious, discreet, apparently effortless—like an English duke, as I imagine it. Indeed, he dresses like the Anglo-Italian lord that he is.

  Yet the kids used the word guappo, quite definitely.