Sophie’s Secret: Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Pleasure

  I took him by the hand and led him straight through to my bedroom.

  'Sophie, I…'

  'Shush. You mustn't speak.'

  We kissed. I adored Jake's boy smell. The clothes I was wearing made me feel sexy, dominant, powerful, and the feeling sent an electric jolt through my limbs. The moistness between my legs turned liquid and leaked from me, wetting my thighs. I pulled off his shirt and lowered the zipper on his jeans. He slipped out of his boxers and I pushed him down on the bed.

  There was a look of wonder about his features and the pink head of his cock stared up at me, big and restless. I held my finger to my lips and he remained silent as I removed my red leather jacket, dropped my damp panties and straddled him. I slithered up his torso and lowered by pussy over his face. His tongue pushed into my vagina and lapped impatiently at my clitoris. I kept his head locked between my thighs, his face hidden by the tartan kilt, and it was like sex with a stranger met passing in the dark. As he paused for breath, I rocked on, demanding more.

  My breath came in gasps. My heart was pounding. I nursed my breasts in my palms and squeezed my nipples through the sheer fabric of my bra. Waves of pure feeling were throbbing through me, through my arms and legs, from my toes to the tips of my fingers. He had taken a grip on my sides to hold me steady. I jerked up and down, faster and faster, drawing his tongue deeper and deeper. Air was trapped in my throat. I heard a sound, rumbling and distant, and realized it was coming from me. I moved up and down, from side to side. Then the wave that had been growing broke on the shore. I screamed as I exploded in a great roaring orgasm that took my breath away. Thick creamy juices flooded from me and I kept his head exactly where it was, squeezed in the vice of my legs as the last ripples gently ebbed.

  I slithered down his damp body and slipped his cock in my mouth. He sighed as it glided into my throat. I closed my eyes. I sucked long and hard, then he exploded across the roof of my mouth, his come warm and frothy like cappuccino. It spilled from my lips, trickled over my chin and down my breasts. I savored the taste, it was bitter sweet like aniseed and almonds.

  All rights reserved Chloë Thurlow 2012

  More information about me and my other books are at the end of this story.

  Sophie's Secret

  What sort of girl am I? What do I want out of life? Where am I going? Where do I want to get to?

  What about love?

  What about sex?

  What about…well, everything? The big stuff. The small stuff. All the stuff you had thought you were sure about and then discover you weren't just wrong, but totally wrong?

  I started asking myself these questions when I finished sixth form college and began working that summer to save for university. I was free, finally free, and it's hard to know what you're going to do with all that freedom, especially as I was going to have a lot more of it now I was free of my boyfriend Jake.

  It happened like this. I decided to make a surprise visit at his flat one lunchtime and found him in bed with Aisha Cummings, who had set out to sleep with every bloke in our year at college and had ticked them off one at a time – except at a party once, when she did a spit roast and managed two. As if fate was at work, Jake had succumbed to the Cummings as surely as it rains on Sundays.

  The bedroom door was open. Jake's little white bum was going up and down, up and down. The Cummings was huffing and puffing. It was the first time I'd seen other people having sex and could understand why half the boys I know sit glued night after night gaping at YouPorn.

  The Cummings was screeching like a jet taking off. Jake was about to come and that's when I slammed the door. He stopped like he'd been shot in the back and lay rigid as a corpse. The Cummings opened her eyes mid-gasp.

  'Bitch,' I said.

  Jake looked back, eyes big as saucers, his mouth open.

  'Sophie, I can explain…'

  'Don't bother,' I said, and glared at Aisha with her tossed about hair and swollen lips. She looked…fantastic. 'Bitch,' I said again, and slammed the door behind me.

  I cried my eyes out and was a relief to share my misery when I ran into Kate and Karen.

  'I really like him,' I blubbed.

  'Forget him. He's an asshole,' Kate said.

  'They all are,' added Karen.

  'Better off without them…'

  'But we were, like, really together,' I said.

  'I'd kill the Cummings if she did that to me,' said Kate.

  'It takes two,' added Karen philosophically.

  I looked back into her eyes ringed in black makeup, her black–dyed hair hanging down over her cheeks in rat-tails, at her nose-ring and lip-ring and thought: what if your mum could see you now. Having discovered the punk girl band Tribe 8, Kate and Karen had become man-haters and discarded the first rule of femininity: make the most of what you've got.

  'Wanker,' Kate said, which said it all.

  She gave me a kleexex, I blew my nose and we hurried along Oxford Street. The three of us were working together as temporary staff at a store that sold the sort of things Kate and Karen wouldn't have been seen dead in, pretty cotton clothes made in China and sold so cheaply it made me wonder how much the people who made them were being paid. We usually managed to take our lunch break together and had been exploring Soho like virgins discovering forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

  Holes in the wall little bigger than shoe boxes are Aladdin's caves of the erotic, exotic and the esoteric: sex shops, bookshops, boot shops, shops selling whips and saucy underwear; tiny cinemas with only forty seats where the men lining up to get in always seemed to be wearing raincoats, even on hot summer days.

  All roads lead to Old Compton Street where muscular guys are bursting out of sleeveless shirts, and showbiz fans with autograph books and lost expressions hang around the back exits of theatres with pens at the ready and stars in their eyes. There were prostitutes: male, female, girl-boy, boy-girl; femdoms, trannies – before and after snip (whatever that means); drag queens, pearly queens, people wearing Sex Pistols tee-shirts with pictures of the Queen and drug dealers with baggies of smack, crack, scag, MDMA, LSD, PCP and one guy claimed to be selling the BBC.

  Once Kate and Karen discovered the tattoo parlor called The Eye of the Seventh Happiness – run by a Rasta named Rasta with a Jamaican accent and hair like a knotted bag of snakes – they began a campaign of self-illustration: matching Celtic rings on their left upper arms, an upside down cross between their shoulder blades, and a Devil's head between the knuckle and middle joint on each of their index fingers.

  Kate did consider having the Lord's Prayer backwards in a continuous circle down one leg, but Rasta said he was a born-again Christian and talked her out of it.

  'What about you, Sophie? Or are you scared?'

  'Yes, I'm scared….oooo,' I replied that Saturday when they had the red shadows added as a sort of highlight to their upside-down crosses.

  I wasn't afraid of having a tattoo. Of course my parents wouldn't have liked it very much, my dad being in insurance and all that. But I didn't have a tattoo because I didn't want one. Tattoos, to my mind, were just a fashion: denim shorts and black tights this year, naked midriffs and bum cracks last year, boobs next year. It seemed like designers designed stuff not to conceal a woman's body so much as to make the parts hidden appear more interesting, which of course they are. I wasn't sure how tattoos fitted into the grand scheme of female emancipation and had a sneaking suspicion that when I got older I'd regret it.

  'You have to live for today,' said Kate when I explained my reasons.

  'But I am. You can live for today without a tatt
oo, can't you?'

  'Yeah, but without one you don't belong,' said Karen.

  'Maybe I don't want to belong.'

  'Yes you do,' hissed K1.

  'Yes you do,' echoed K2.

  Did I? Do I? And belong to what exactly?

  It was the end of the week. Kate and Karen were going that night to a club called Pink and that's what they talked about as we walked back from the tattoo parlor.

  'You're welcome to come,' Kate said. 'But, you know…'

  'No, I don't. What?'

  'Well, it's all women for a start. You're, like, totally into Jake.'

  'Not any more I'm not. I'm over him.'

  'That was quick.'

  I looked back at Kate, her brown eyes like chocolate buttons in a lacework of red arcs and black flashes.

  'He's going to be studying sports management, I mean…'

  I shrugged. I wasn't sure what I meant. But I'd come to realize that week that it wasn't really going anywhere with Jake – cute though he was – and the Cummings had done me a favor if anything.

  'The thing is, Kate, you have to be…exotic,' Kate said.

  'Like us,' added Karen.

  Karen was a shorter, plumper version of Kate, and to make sure she was even more exotic, she had the spike through her bottom lip and a nose ring she was forever touching. I was sure it must have felt like she had something up her nostril and was constantly tempted to pick it out.

  'It doesn't open till eleven,' said Kate. 'We'll be in the Coach and Horses before, it's up to you.'

  Having being denied access to Pink before I'd even tried to get in, that night I used a protein treatment on my dark hair, shaved my legs and bathed in a bottle of Paul Smith Rose. I used pale green eye-shadow to bring our the dark green of my eyes, a pretty shade of pink lipstick and turned up at the pub at ten wearing a black skirt, medium heels, a fitted white shirt with a frilly front and a pink jacket from Zara.

  Their mouths dropped open. I mean literally, like in a cartoon.

  'Jesus,' said Karen.

  'I don't believe it,' said Kate.

  'You look like a secretary,' said Karen.

  'What's a secretary?' said Kate.

  My giggling punk companions looked like two zombies raised from a chilly grave: black make-up, studded collars, chains hanging from low slung black jeans, black tee-shirts with illustrations by Salvador Dali on speed. They looked like anti-capitalist demonstrators straight off the steps of St. Paul's, everything the Tory Party (and my dad) would liked to have seen hung, drawn, quartered and stuck on spikes around the Tower of London.

  We drank a round of rum and coke and they stared at me as if I had just told them I had cancer, or I was pregnant. We then wandered up from the Coach and Horses and turned into a narrow alleyway where the name Pink in brilliant pink neon lit the metal steps leading down to a throbbing hot basement.

  About a dozen girls in what I thought of as fancy dress were being inspected by two women in skin-tight leather suits, one red and one black, like the colors on a roulette table. The girls shuffled forward until we three remained. Bubble, bubble. Toil and trouble.

  'Sure you wouldn't be happier in Polka?' the red leather bouncer asked me.

  'Or Soho House,' sneered the black one.

  'Or Groucho's,' added the one in red.

  'Or the Chelsea Arts Club,' the black one shot back.

  They slapped palms and roared with laughter. I was happy they were having such a lovely time.

  While I was being inspected like an illegal immigrant with two heads, Karen and Kate each passed over £20 to a cashier behind a tiny arched window and slipped inside. They looked back with I told you so expressions on their black painted lips and were swallowed into the encroaching darkness.

  'Sorry, darling,' the black bouncer said. 'You're not going to be happy here. You look like a secretary.'

  What is it with secretaries?

  I was livid. I looked absolutely gorgeous, well, as gorgeous as I could look, and went home on the 14 bus to Fulham feeling rejected and depressed, Cinderella without a Fairy Godmother. What the hell went on at Pink that was so special Kate and Karen were let in and I was kept out?

  What I needed was my own pair of glass slippers and that's what I set out to find on Sunday. I went to Camden Market where my eyes were drawn like magnets to a pair of black ankle boots with leather straps that buckled at the side and had steel decorations hammered into the heels. I'd read stage actors establish their character by first finding the right shoes. It makes sense. We dress from the bottom up, just as we undress from the top down. Well, I do, anyway.

  It's odd, but the moment I tried the boots on, I felt different. The heels gave my back a faint inward bow, my shoulders grew straighter and I was three inches taller, a commanding 5' 10" that made me tower over the shop assistant. It wasn't like I had been one person and now I was someone else. I was still me, but another part of me. I'd learned in biology that our brain is divided into two hemispheres, one side is frivolous and creative, the other structured and pragmatic. There's a river between them and that day in Camden Market, I crossed over the invisible bridge. I stood there studying my reflection and a pulse like a shot of electricity ran up the inside of my legs. My throat went dry, I took a deep breath and plunged head first from the invisible bridge into the invisible river.

  As my gaze moved up the mirror, I met the eyes of the shop assistant. She smiled and nodded her head.

  'Super,' she said.

  'How much?'

  She looked at the label on the box. 'Not bad, 69.99,' she replied and I gasped.

  'I'll take them,' I replied. My heart was racing.

  'Going somewhere nice?' she asked as I was paying.

  'I'm not sure yet,' I told her.

  With the boots in a bag, I wandered on feeling glazed and satisfied. I was not competing with Kate and Karen, but I wanted to get into that club, just to find out what the hell went on down in the basement.

  Ah, perfect.

  I had spotted a second-hand red leather jacket hanging from a stall. It was small, like it had been made for an anorexic, but the moment I saw it the frivolous part of me just had to have it. I'm skinny with decent-sized boobs and, given the right accessories, they are very perky, very perky indeed. The jacket fit as snug as a, well, I was going to say glove, but it was actually as tight as a condom, but I reckoned if I didn't wear anything underneath except a bra, it would be purrfect.

  'How much?'

  'Let's say twenty-five quid?' said the stallholder. He was Indian with a South London accent and a red spot on his forehead.

  'Let's say twenty,' I replied.

  'Twenty-two-pounds and fifty pee.'

  'You must be joking?'

  'Twenty-two.'

  'Oh, alright.'

  So, boots and jacket.

  What next?

  Now that I'd dipped into my university savings, I felt like a drug addict in need of another fix. I was bored watching every penny, cutting corners, going without, buying sandwiches half price a minute before the expiry date. I calmed my racing pulse with a moment's meditation and splashed out on black lace top stockings, suspenders, a matching new bra and sexy little panties from Victoria's Secret. They were silky, sexy, super, stunning, sensual, so many things beginning with s my brain was hissing. The moment I tried them on, I came over all tingly and had a mad desire to run out in the street screaming look at me, look at me, look at me. I mean, why do we buy sexy underwear if we don't want to be seen?

  The assistant, a girl with a French accent, must have read my mind.

  'You would like to, you know,' she said and shrugged. 'Keep them on.'

  'No, you can wrap them,' I replied breathlessly. 'I'm going to...'

  It was my turn to shrug and she finished my sentence for me.

  'I know,' she said, and she said it again. 'I know.'

  Sexy underwear. How delicious. Sex was in the air, you could smell it, and what it smelled of was flowers, joss sticks and the
canal meandering by with a coating of algae floating on the surface. Girls half-dressed and half-naked perched on the wall; boys had their shirts tucked in the backs of their jeans, muscles glossy with sweat. A barefoot girl in a tube top was playing the Lady Gaga song Born This Way on an acoustic guitar and people sitting on the wall were joining in. Everyone was broke and cheerful and London when the weather's warm makes you feel happy to be alive.

  I made one more purchase, something I wouldn't normally have been seen dead in: a kilt. But this was different. It wasn't a kilt like the kilt I had worn at junior school. It was more a concept, a handkerchief, a banner, a strip of red tartan about as wide as a belt with an overlarge safety pin holding the fold together.

  I stared at myself in the mirror.

  'You can definitely get away with it,' the assistant said; she was English this one, a redhead with violet blue eyes and a nice smile.

  'You think so?'

  'You've got good legs.'

  I looked at her. 'Thank you,' I said.

  'I'm not trying to make a sale. I mean it. What are you going to wear it with?'

  'Black ankle boots, a red leather jacket that won't fit if I eat as much as a bag of crisps and underwear to die for.'

  'Sounds great. Going somewhere special?'

  'I'm not really sure, to be honest. I just want to try and get into Pink, you know, the club.'

  'Never been there. Not that way inclined myself.'

  'Neither am I,' I shot back, and she shrugged as if she didn't believe me.

  The redhead wrapped the skirt in a dozen sheets of tissue before placing it in a bag big enough to carry all you need for a hiking trip in Nepal. As I walked back through the market, I came over with that wondrous lightness of being you get when you buy new things, the bags as your swing your arms like wings that make you float just above the ground. Old things make you think of the past, all that's happened, or not happened, all the disasters and things that have gone wrong. New things make you think of a future that's rosy and hopeful and happy and special.

  That's when my iPhone rang. JAKE. I stared at the name on the screen. He had called ten times a day and sent twice as many texts, which I had resolutely ignored. Now, on a whim, I transferred all my bags to one hand and answered.