It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Twenty-eight




Mad, brain-scrambling lust was one thing, but once it was over, wooden floors weren’t very comfortable to lie on, no matter how much Ellie wanted to savour the afterglow.

Besides, she knew how the rest of the scene would play out. She’d be unable to make eye contact and David would do that thing where he shut down all facial expressions and pared his conversation to only clipped monosyllables. She moved away from him because the floor was hard and his chest was too bony to make a good pillow, and also now that the passion wasn’t clouding her brain they both smelled kind of ripe. Slowly she managed to stagger to her feet.

David looked up at her from his recumbent position. She should have been mortified because she was naked, legs clamped together, and from where he was on the floor every lump and bump, freckle and mole was visible, but he didn’t look as if he found the sight of her repulsive. On the contrary, his eyes rested briefly on all Ellie’s main attractions, then travelled up to her face, which was rosy red, and he smiled like it was all good and as if, hard wooden floors notwithstanding, there was nowhere on earth he’d rather be.

His slow, lazy smile made Ellie get over her post-coital nerves and she was able to casually say, ‘I’m going to have a shower.’

‘Is it big enough for two?’ David asked. When Ellie said it was and that, unlike a lot of showers in Paris, it had superior water pressure, he asked if he could join her.

It wasn’t the kind of shower you could have sex in. There was nothing to grab onto and the floor wasn’t grippy, but they could kiss and lather each other up and Ellie could point out, rather drily given the circumstances, that her breasts probably needed a lot less attention from the bar of soap than other parts of her.

David snaked his hand between her legs. ‘Like this intriguing place?’

Ellie wasn’t ready to go again so she twisted out of his grasp, warned him not to touch her hair with his hands because she didn’t know what effect almond soap would have on her straightening treatment, and sank to her knees.

David was hard as soon as Ellie dragged one soap-slicked finger along the big vein that ran down the underside of his cock and she was happy to alleviate his agony, because she was nice like that. She placed one sweet kiss on the head of his dick before she took him into her mouth.


She thought about drawing it out, teasing him as payback for the heinous way he’d behaved earlier, but he’d already started to moan and the grooved floor of the shower cubicle was agony on her knees. There was a thing that she did with her tongue but now she settled for hollowing out her cheeks and rewarding the way he said her name so desperately by cupping his balls.

He tasted clean, a little soapy. Then Ellie tasted him, salty and slightly bitter in her mouth, and she knew all his secrets but still wanted to know more. David’s hands fisted in her hair when she sucked him deep and it was hardly the time to tell him to cut it out, not when he was coming in her mouth with a startled cry.

Later, much later, Ellie dumped the ready-cooked chicken, a roughly sliced baguette and some cherry tomatoes on a huge platter and they sat cross-legged on the rug in the living room and ate dinner with their fingers. Then David kissed the red marks on her shins left from kneeling too long in the shower.

And later than that, as Ellie was standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes and wondering when she was going to wake up because this had to be a dream, she heard David come up behind her, then he was the one dropping to his knees. ‘Don’t turn round,’ he said in that growly voice that thrilled and scared her in equal measure. She yelped when he pushed up the skirt of her pale grey maxi dress. ‘And for God’s sake, don’t break one of those glasses.’

The glasses were probably commissioned especially from Lalique so Ellie tried to keep very still as David’s hands firmly parted her thighs and his mouth licked across her *. She just had time to place the glasses very gently on the draining rack, then she was gripping the side of the sink and grinding against his mouth as he sucked hard on her * while his fingers twisted deliciously inside her. Suddenly she was coming, almost falling over from the ferocity of it, only the hard bite of his hands on her hips keeping her safe.

It was too hot to sleep in each other’s arms but they slept side by side in Esme’s ridiculous bed, and every time Ellie stirred during the night, David seemed to sense the exact moment she was teetering on the brink of wakefulness and worry, and he’d open his eyes, mutter, ‘Please go back to sleep,’ and she did.

Saturday morning there was sleepy sex on the fluffy angora wool rug on Esme’s bedroom floor because they both agreed it was morally reprehensible to have sex in one of their hostesses’ beds. Then they left the apartment to get breakfast in the café downstairs before they headed out to the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, though David was sure they’d be closed ‘because it’s August and everything in Paris is closed in August. Apart from the tourist traps.’

‘You’re a tourist,’ Ellie reminded him. They were pressed tight together on a crowded Metro, but she didn’t mind. David smelled much nicer than the man on the other side of her, who’d evidently bathed in bouillabaisse.

She didn’t even mind that David was dressed in his suit trousers, work shoes and a brand-new navy-blue T-shirt, which he’d bought during a trolley dash round M&S before he caught the Eurostar. He was looking slightly fashion challenged, but how could she mind, when he smiled and kissed her forehead and said, ‘I’m not a tourist. I didn’t come to Paris to see the sights. I came to Paris to see you.’

As they explored the stalls of the Marché Vernaison and the smaller Marché Antica, ate crêpes for lunch, then headed back to Le Marais so they could laze on the grass at Place des Vosges, David’s head in her lap, Ellie felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience. Or that she was watching an actress who looked like her, talked like her and walked like her starring in the movie of her life.

Ever since she’d been a flat-chested, frizzy-haired teenager Ellie had always dreamed about a time when she was older and chicer and had a lover who took her to Paris; having a lover was so much more sophisticated than having a boyfriend. She’d spend French lessons imagining Paris with her lover by her side and how they’d walk hand in hand along tiny cobbled streets and sit outside cafés whose names would be written on their awnings in big art nouveau fonts and they’d eat a lot of cheese and drink red wine and have sex like people did in French films where it would be all intense and their bodies would make strange shapes and they’d stare at each other without speaking for long, long moments.

The future was now. She was living her teenage dreams. Well, the essence of her teenage dreams because she still didn’t have boobs. She was in Paris with her lover. David Gold was her lover, which was unbelievable. But he was there, by her side, holding her hand and swinging her arm as they slowly walked to Chez Omar late on Saturday evening, to see if they could get a table for dinner.

It was perfect. But they couldn’t stay in Paris for ever or preserve the weekend under glass so they were trapped in the moment without real life being able to intrude. Real life was snapping at their heels and in real life David was Billy Kay’s lawyer and she was Billy Kay’s daughter, and there was no fudging those two facts.

Above all, he was still a man who could break her heart.

Ellie didn’t want to ruin their golden Paris hours by thinking about what could go wrong, and anyway, listening to David trying to order couscous in perfect French but without even the slightest attempt to try a French accent was distraction enough. ‘The dead languages are much easier,’ he told her after the waiter had gone. ‘Latin and Ancient Greek don’t require much in the way of an accent.’

There was still so much that they didn’t know about each other, Ellie thought, but David had his hand on her knee under the table, tracing figures of eight on her skin with his fingertip, and that was all she needed to know.

They drank red wine and ate couscous with lamb and root vegetables in a rustic broth. The large family at the next table kept shooting them indulgent glances when Ellie stroked the back of David’s neck or he stole a lingering kiss, because they were in the city of lovers, and everyone loved lovers. Except when Ellie was single, and then she found lovers indulging in PDAs really quite annoying.

‘You realise that one of us is going to have to learn how to cook,’ David suddenly said, when the waiter had removed their main courses largely untouched because it was too hot to eat anything that came in a rustic broth. ‘One person without any culinary skills is OK, but two people who can’t cook suggests that we’re—’

‘Slatterns?’ Ellie suggested, and she tried not to think about what he was really saying. That he thought they’d be together long enough that neither of them being able to cook would become an issue.

‘I don’t think a man can be a slattern. I was going to say a couple who can’t cook suggests that we’re lazy, profligate and don’t eat nutritionally balanced meals.’

‘Oh, I think you can eat nutritionally balanced meals even if you can’t cook,’ Ellie argued, because Ari had been excellent at chopping up celery and carrots that were going cheap from Inverness Street market at the end of the day and serving them for dinner with pitta bread and hummus.

‘I’m just saying, we’re going to have to add a couple of basic meals to our non-existent cooking repertoires,’ David said earnestly like he really meant it. ‘How about I learn to roast a chicken and you do something vegetable-based in case we have some vegetarians round for dinner?’


‘A stir-fry? That can’t be hard. I just put vegetables in a pan and stir and fry.’

David kissed her on the nose, much to the delight of the older women at the next table, who actually clucked at them. ‘It will be your signature dish. Shall we order some mint tea and a box of the little pastries to take back with us?’

He smiled as Ellie ordered in stilted French that would have had Madame Westcott, her arch nemesis from her GCSE days, shrieking ‘Mon Dieu’. ‘I think you mixed up a couple of your tenses,’ he told her when by some miracle the mint tea turned up as requested. ‘But you’ve definitely mastered the Parisian shoulder shrug.’

It was then that Ellie decided not to worry. Or it might have been when they got back to the apartment and they were trying to f*ck standing up, Ellie pressed against the wall in the one blind spot in the living room that couldn’t be seen from the huge picture windows front and back. It wasn’t as easy or as hot as it was in theory or in the movies. Ellie kept knocking her head and David’s cock kept slipping out and bumping against her *, which wasn’t entirely unpleasant. In the end, David turned them round and slid down, until his back was against the wall, his legs bent and Ellie could brace herself against his thighs and ride him to a furious and messy finish.

‘Next time,’ he said against her mouth, while his dick was still half hard and he shuddered each time the walls of her p-ssy fluttered against him, ‘next time we come to Paris we’re staying somewhere that has beds we can actually f*ck in.’

‘I’ll hold you to that,’ Ellie agreed breathlessly. ‘Going to mark it on my calendar.’

‘It’s also the first item on my to-do list when we get back to London. I’m going to have you on my Tempur mattress.’ David leered at her ever so slightly. ‘In fact, it’s all I can think of, because this position is really uncomfortable and don’t think it’s not nice to have you sitting on my cock because it is, but I’m running a marathon in a month and I don’t want to slip a disc.’

Ellie released him in an immodest scramble but later, as they brushed their teeth in the adjoining basins in the art-deco bathroom, she suddenly hoped that this was one of those rare instances when things just fell into place, no matter how complicated they were.

David even said as they tried to get to sleep with two foot of bed between them, ‘Next time we’re in Paris, it should be winter. We’ll find a hotel without central heating so we’re forced to huddle together for warmth. It will be romantic.’

‘Didn’t think you were a snuggler,’ Ellie said, lifting up one of her legs to bat away the bead of sweat that was tickling her.

‘I’m not. Only in special circumstances.’

She had to put it into words: her optimism about them, about their future, but also her doubt, because if you got too cocky, too convinced that everything was going your way, then inevitably it would all go horribly wrong. ‘You keep saying things like that, then I’m going to think that you’re too good to be true,’ she said lightly. ‘Don’t they say that things that are too good to be true usually are?’

David didn’t say anything at first but then he rolled over so he could see the anxious expression on her face even in the dim light. ‘Don’t, Ellie,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s not worry until there’s actually something to worry about.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. If you start looking for problems, you’re guaranteed to find some.’

Which was all very well … ‘Yes, but …’

‘Please stop it,’ David begged. ‘I’ve had more sex in the last twenty-four hours than I’ve had in months, and if you don’t let me sleep then I’ll be too exhausted to f*ck you on the kitchen worktop, which was what I had planned for tomorrow morning. It must be the only horizontal surface in this flat which isn’t an antique.’

Ellie had to smile. ‘Imported Italian marble, apparently. Remind me to give it a quick wipe down with a damp cloth before and after, though, will you?’

David chuckled just like he knew she would, and then he was reaching out to pull her to him, so they were spooning, sweaty skin to sweaty skin. ‘Go to sleep, Ellie. Even when you’re not talking, I can hear your brain whirring because you’re worrying about all the things you think you should be worried about.’

Ellie wasn’t worrying any more. Or, at least, she was going to try not to. She took a few calming breaths and wriggled in his arms. ‘It’s far too hot to snuggle,’ she complained, but her eyes were already closing and it was easy enough to match the beats of her heart to his and let the rhythm soothe her to sleep.





Camden, London, 1987

Billy turned up late the next afternoon. Didn’t say where he’d been and Ari didn’t ask.

He sat there, dressed all in black, pale and inviolate with a mocking smile as he took in the flowers and the squash bottles, the other mothers flushed and red-eyed, proud-faced fathers holding their progeny. Then he looked at his woman, but Ari only had eyes for her daughter.

Her heart had never loved until now …

‘You look different. Younger. Not sure I like it,’ Billy commented, which was fair enough as he’d never seen her without make-up before, but he should have been saying other things. Ari didn’t know how he could glance at the baby and not fall in love hard and in an instant.

‘You know, Billy, this is one of those times when you can drop the studied cool,’ Ari drawled, and when she held the baby out to him, like an offering, he stroked her cheek with a careless finger.

‘Is she meant to be that hairy?’ He took her from Ari and cradled her in the crook of his arm, didn’t even need to be told to support her head, and Ari was hopeful all over again. ‘We’ll call her Velvet,’ he decided.

‘That’s not a proper name,’ she said because, oh God, she’d already turned into Sadie.

‘Velvet Underground,’ Billy insisted, shushing the baby when she started to fret. ‘Let her have a cool name for a few days at least.’

Because soon she’d be Carol and Sidney’s, and they’d call her something boring and safe like Laura or Samantha or Alison.

Carol turned up almost as soon as Billy left with a vague plan that he might possibly come back later to take her home.

‘Give her to me,’ Carol demanded before she’d taken off her coat or put down her handbag or John Lewis bags stuffed full of frilly pink clothes. ‘Give her to me now!’

Ari wanted to cry because it physically hurt when she handed Velvet over. She didn’t trust Carol not to steal her away there and then, but Ari hadn’t signed any of the forms that the solicitor had sent her, or been interviewed by a social worker, and so Carol had to give her back, though she did it with a bad grace and a deep sigh as Ari settled Velvet back in her arms and kissed the top of her precious head while the baby rooted for her nipple.