Unfurl: Chapter 7

I’m towel-drying my hair when there’s a knock at the door. It’s probably Callum, my business partner. He’s the only person who can get through security downstairs without them calling up to me first.

‘Give me a sec,’ I shout, tugging a t-shirt on. That PT session in my home gym really took it out of me this morning.

But I needed it.

This week, my mind has been going places it has no business venturing. Places that have my fingertips skating over honeyed hair and limbs. My dick coaxing soft, pillowy lips apart, smearing them with pre-cum, until I can’t take the teasing from her soft mouth, her wet tongue, anymore and I bend her over that massive fucking dining room table in her parents’ apartment.

I can’t imagine how tight she’d feel.

I can, actually.

Like a velvet fucking vice.

So, yeah. My combat HIIT session with Darren was more necessary this morning than most Saturdays. I needed the release badly, and that was despite fucking a couple of women at the club last night.

God help me.

I rake my hand through my still-damp hair and wrench the door open, before standing stock-still.

Oh, Jesus fuck.

It’s her.

She’s a vision, backlit in the sunlight streaming through the lobby’s huge windows. Her long hair is smoothed into a ponytail, but the baby hairs framing her face are lit up in gold, and the golden outline around her body makes her look almost celestial.

More alarmingly, she has far too much skin exposed. She’s in yoga pants and what looks like little more than a sports bra, both in a pale blue that offsets the smooth, tanned skin of her arms and chest and stomach.

Holy fucking crap.

She’s even more fuckable like this than she is in her pretty, prick-teasing dresses. The workout gear leaves nothing of her perfect body to the imagination. Her face is bare of makeup, her skin glowing with health. But the look on her face is even more deer-caught-in-the-headlights than usual.

As soon as I throw the door open (admittedly more violently than I would have done if I’d known the identity of my visitor), she takes a step back from me, twisting what looks like a little sweater in both her hands.

‘Belle,’ I say. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi. I’m so sorry for disturbing you on a Saturday.’ The words come out in a rush, and she glances towards the building’s main staircase as if planning an escape.

‘No problem. I just finished a workout, so…’

‘Me too.’ She gestures awkwardly towards her sexy-as-fuck excuse for an outfit. ‘I mean, I just came from yoga class.’

Yoga? Jesus. Now I have visions of her folded into a pretzel shape, all long legged and loose limbed. I bet she’s limber as fuck. She looks like she would be.

I recover my manners. ‘Come in, come in.’

‘No, I—’ She pauses. ‘I have something I’d like to ask you, actually. Kind of like a favour. Or a—I wondered if you’d like to go for a walk? It’s a bit of an awkward conversation to have, so I thought it might be better to have it while walking. Only if you’re not busy, of course.’ Her hand returns to the sweater, and she wrings it again.

I press my lips together to stop myself from smirking. I’m not sure why seeing her this nervous is so gratifying. Maybe because her current gaucheness makes her even more adorable. Even more girlish.

Besides, she’s piqued my interest. A favour, eh?

Hmm.

‘Not busy,’ I tell her. ‘And I need a coffee. Let me get my shoes.’

We grab coffee from a kiosk at the edge of Hyde Park. On the short walk over here, we’ve kept things light. Small talk about our week, and how the rest of her evening went at Jean Georges, and how she’s settling into our building.

All the while, I’m calculating what she’s going to ask me. It’s about art, I decide. She’s come to follow up on her throwaway comment at her parents’ drinks party that I should stop by Liebermann’s. She could probably use some commission to impress the powers that be, and she wants to sound me out. Only she’s mortified by the prospect of having to do something as inelegant in her eyes as touting for business.

Little does she know I’d buy up the entire fucking gallery to put a smile on those rosy lips of hers. And also—yes, this makes me a total monster—to have her feel just the slightest bit beholden to me.

As we walk through the rose gardens in all their fresh-faced, early summer glory, I decide we’ve made quite enough small talk, and I’ve had quite enough of trying to keep my mind from going to that dark place in my head where I grab her glossy ponytail and wrap it around my hand as I push her to her knees.

I’m thirty-six.

That makes her fourteen years younger than me.

If she was four years younger, she’d be half my age.

Jesus.

‘You were very mysterious when I answered the door,’ I tell her, shooting her a smile that I hope telegraphs you can trust me rather than I want to fuck your twenty-two-year-old cunt. ‘Spit it out, why don’t you? What’s this favour, and how can I help?’

She shoots me a look of pure terror.

Maybe I misjudged the predatory level of my smile.

‘This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,’ she confesses, and I can’t help but grin, because she sounds like a teenager.

‘I doubt that.’ I throw her a bone. ‘Is it about the gallery?’

‘The—what? Oh. No.’

Okay. I purse my lips in bewilderment and wait for her to spit it out.

She nudges her bottom lip against the takeaway cup, and I tense. Jesus Christ. She’s so beautiful. Her profile in the sunlight is sheer perfection. The gentle upturn of her pretty little nose. The delicate sweep of freckles.

That fucking mouth.

‘You have a club,’ she mutters against her cup, and her mouth is preoccupying me so much that I almost miss her statement.

‘Yeah—Alchemy,’ I manage. This was not where I saw the conversation going. Presumably she hasn’t asked me out to lecture me on morality?

‘Exactly.’ She clears her throat. ‘I wanted to ask you more about a, uh, programme there. Unfurl?’

Well, knock me down with a feather.

I stop, my brain whirring, and gape at her. ‘Unfurl?’ I ask more sharply than I’ve intended. ‘What about it?’

She marches on ahead, and I take a few strides to catch her up.

‘I thought it might be… suitable,’ she mumbles. ‘Like, for me. But I need more details.’

I’m hallucinating. I knew Darren had pushed me too hard this morning. There’s no way I’m strolling through Hyde Park with my too-young, too-gorgeous neighbour, the one I’ve been fantasising about while fucking my fist (and other people) this week, as she brings up my sex club, and one of its most pioneering programmes, and her interest in said programme.

No bloody way.

I cannot tell you how many people I’ve fucked, how cavalier I am about sex, but my voice is undoubtedly strangled as I force myself to say something in response.

‘Are you saying you’re… you haven’t had sex?’

I sneak a peek at her, and she nods into her coffee cup. That telltale flush has rampaged up her neck and marked her cheek. I tense my jaw, attempt to pull myself the fuck together.

‘Well, thank you for confiding in me,’ I say evenly.

Because this isn’t about me, or the perverted responses of my inner neanderthal to her innocence and her beauty.

It’s about her.

Even if that innocence just got a million times more alluring, because Jesus Christ.

She’s telling me she’s never been fucked. Luke or Carl or whatever godawful university boyfriend of hers I conjured up does not exist.

She’s intact. Ignorant of how transcendent certain parts of the human experience can be.

And, as motherfucking serendipity and celestial intervention would have it, she’s coming to me for help.

Someone up there has a sense of humour.

Or a sadistic streak.

‘Believe me, I’m mortified,’ she says now. ‘I can’t believe I’m even contemplating having this conversation.’

‘I promise I won’t abuse your trust,’ I say. ‘I may be a dodgy fucker, but Unfurl is probably the achievement I’m most proud of.’

It’s true. It is. My own first time may have been forgettable—and seriously brief, given how quickly I shot my load—but I’m well aware, based on the amount of women I’ve polled in my personal and professional life, that for girls, it’s usually pleasureless and uncomfortable at best and traumatic at worst.

Unfurl takes all that away and puts these women in the driving seat. It shows them just how much currency they actually have and how gloriously liberating it can be to spend it.

Belle wraps her spare arm around her waist. ‘Tell me a bit about it?’

‘You’ve read the blurb on our website?’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It was… enlightening, but it didn’t actually say much, if you know what I mean.’

I laugh. We’re walking at a fair clip now. She’s upped our pace, and I can see why it might be easier for her to speak frankly like this on what is rapidly becoming a power walk than face to face. I consider how best to frame this pet project of ours in a way she’ll get. In a way that won’t have her running a mile.

‘The first thing to say,’ I begin, ‘is that Unfurl is meant to empower people who don’t feel empowered for whatever reason, usually because they’ve had few or no sexual partners. That can mean that they don’t know exactly what they like, or they don’t have the experience or the language to communicate their desires. Maybe they do know what they like, but there isn’t a person in their life they can trust to deliver it. Sex is so intimate, and yet, for a lot of people, the communication around it is diabolical. That make sense?’

I glance over at her long enough to see her nod her assent.

‘We also don’t want to patronise anyone who comes through the programme,’ I continue. ‘They may not have had much real life experience, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a vibrant inner life of sexual fantasy. It’s kind of like saying the intern at a company is the stupidest person in the room. They may be the most ignorant right now, but they may have more future potential than the CEO.

‘We take a similar approach. We want to help people find their potential, unlock their latent desires, rather than focusing on what they haven’t done to date.’

‘Makes sense,’ she whispers. A glance tells me she’s staring fixedly at the path.

‘Good.’

‘But what does it… entail? I mean, who does the stuff to—with—the participant, or whatever you call her? Is it professionals?’

I pause to select my words carefully. ‘They aren’t professionals, no, but they’re long-standing members who have a lot of experience, and our team handpicks the members who’ll assist each participant in the programme. That said, everyone on our team gets automatic membership to the club, and let’s say most of them play that dual role enthusiastically.’

She hums nervously and keeps walking, and I allow myself to trail a step or two behind her, just to have the unearthly pleasure of checking out that glorious figure in its second skin. That peachy arse. The slick ponytail that sways with each step.

I wish I knew what she was thinking right now.

‘So, I’m right in thinking it’s… hands on?’ she says. ‘Like, these sessions are about actual sex. They’re not just theory.’

Our eyes meet. She looks away first.

‘They’re definitely not just theory,’ I affirm. They’re pretty much the farthest thing from theory I can imagine. They’re intense. Carnal. Sweaty. And sweat isn’t the only bodily fluid spilt. Not by a long shot.

‘So… people come out of the programme having had sex.’

‘Yes,’ I say carefully, ‘if that’s their end objective. We also have participants who’ve had penetrative sex before but want to grow in confidence, or broaden their horizons, without jumping head first into the orgy that is Friday night at Alchemy. The best way to think about it is that the programme is completely tailored to you.’

I wonder what she’d go for.

The thought crystallises before I’m fully conscious of it. I get a vivid image of Belle curled up on a sofa in her parents’ flat with our questionnaire on an iPad, her tiger eyes widening in disbelief or arousal, that plump lower lip cushioning the stylus as she reads the option upon option of pure filth that awaits her. It’s less a menu than a dirty, decadent smorgasbord for her to feast on.

This was not what Ben and Lauren intended when they asked me to keep an eye on their precious princess during their absence.

‘Could you… give me a run-down of, you know? The basic structure?’ she asks me, and it’s a real effort not to make my smile wolfish.

‘I could,’ I tell her, ‘but it really is different for everyone, and I’m so desensitised to talking about sex that I’m not sure I’ll be… euphemistic enough for you. I don’t want to scare you off.’

I don’t want you clutching that pearl necklace Daddy probably gave you for your sixteenth birthday and crying into your pillow because the bad man got too graphic and told you about how much more fun you’d have if you agreed to a blindfold. To silk ties against that soft skin. To upping your instructors from one to two. Four. Six, even.

Fuck. Shouldn’t have thought about Belle with a pearl necklace. Jesus. Shouldn’t have thought about her spread out on a bed, men lapping at her most sensitive parts.

‘Oh,’ she says quietly.

‘Look. If you’d feel more comfortable, I can set you up a chat with my co-founder, Genevieve. She can answer the questions I suspect you don’t feel right asking me. And if you want to proceed, the questionnaire she’ll give you is very comprehensive, and it’s confidential.’

I don’t mention that I’ll get to read it. I can’t imagine how many times I’ll have to get myself off, or have someone else get me off, when I read the innermost fantasies of sweet, golden Belina, named after a virgin martyr, for fuck’s sake.

‘That sounds good.’

‘Great.’ I nod.

That’s all sorted, then, and I can take myself home and let rip. Too bad the club doesn’t open for another—ooh—ten hours.

‘I have one question, though.’

I look up from my coffee. ‘Shoot.’

‘On the website it suggested…’ she hesitates. ‘Multiple people? With me? That sounds—I dunno—a bit full-on, considering why I’m interested in the programme in the first place. And a bit… immoral, I suppose.’

I stop walking and, putting a hand on the bare skin of her arm to halt her, I turn to face her. This is important.

‘Answer me one question,’ I say. ‘Two, actually.’

She chews her lip, but she doesn’t drop her gaze.

‘First. Do you think part of the reason you’ve held off this long on being sexually active is because of some guilt? I know your parents are pretty religious.’

She nods. ‘Definitely.’

‘And do you think that’s something you can get over, or at least work around enough to get out of your own way, going forward?’

She nods again. ‘I think so. I’m hoping so. I’ve over-thought this way too much, but—ugh. It’s hard. I don’t believe that the things they taught me at school were right, but I still—it’s difficult to let go of all that shame around sex, you know?’

She’s looking at me, clear-eyed and trusting, and it hits me in the gut. I nod softly. ‘Yeah. Believe me, I know. I went to Loyola, which I think your mum mentioned to you, so I know how powerful that brainwashing can be. I went the other way—became a total deviant.’ I grin to show her I’m kind of joking, even though I’m not, really.

‘Look,’ I continue. ‘I can’t tell you what’s right or wrong. You have to do that for yourself. But the fact that you’re here talking to me about this stuff tells me you have the courage to claim your own sexuality. Right? You’re an adult, Belle. The nuns and the priests and your parents can’t tell you what to think anymore.

‘I also know that former Catholics are some of the kinkiest people I know. Just an observation. There’s something about all that shame and guilt they teach us, all that repression they practice, that has us enjoying the pleasure of letting go more than most other people.’

She’s nodding like I’m onto something, so I push on with my final point.

‘And if you’re serious about this, then I have a suggestion. Take it or leave it. If you take away any preconceptions about romance, or morals, or societal expectations, and you just make it about you and your body and seeing what it’s capable of, then the maths is pretty clear. Four mouths on your body are better than one. Eight hands are better than two.’

I shrug as she gapes at me. There’s mortification on her face, but something else is there, too. ‘It’s just basic arithmetic. So the more you open your mind up to less vanilla ways of maximising your pleasure, the more fun you’ll have. And by fun, I mean the more you’ll lose your fucking mind in ecstasy.’

I have no idea how I just delivered that statement without getting a boner.

Zero.

What I don’t say, because apparently I have herculean amounts of self-control, is that she should forget the programme and just come home with me.

Because I swear to God, I could teach her more than she’s ever dreamed about the capabilities of her body with just my hands and my mouth and my cock.

We walk back home in relative silence.

I think I’ve broken her brain.

I bid her a calm farewell, promise to hook her up with Gen, and bolt my door behind me. The second I’m alone, I tug my t-shirt off over my head, shove down my jogging bottoms and fist my cock, hard as I can.

And as I proceed to empty myself violently into the soft cotton of my t-shirt, pretending it’s Belina Scott’s fine-boned hand around my cock and not my own, I repeat these words to myself.

She’s a virgin.

She’s a virgin.

She’s a goddamn fucking wholesome, intact, sweet-as-sin virgin.

Leave her alone.

I let my head fall back against the door. The words in my head are so engrained they come easily.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

I have already sinned against this girl in so many ways I can’t even begin to list them.