Chapter 13 #2
On Friday evening, Claire raced home from work and packed her overnight bag.
She had the whole weekend off work, and was going to spend it with Luca.
It was worse than packing for a holiday.
She didn’t want to freak him out by bringing too much, but there was a certain amount of stuff she needed.
Going through her clothes last night, she had realised she was ashamed of her underwear, and had dashed around at lunchtime buying new bras and knickers – not overtly sexy, but pretty and feminine.
She made sure to cut all the tags off before packing them in her case.
She didn’t want Luca to know she had bought them specially for him.
She toyed with the idea of buying new nightwear too.
She usually slept in a ratty old oversized T-shirt or pyjamas that were built more for comfort than to get a man’s pulses racing.
But in the end she decided nightclothes wouldn’t be required when she was staying with Luca, so she decided not to bother bringing any.
After work she went to Marks & Spencer and bought thick peppered steaks, huge baking potatoes, fat brown mushrooms, crème fra?che and chives, bags of salad, punnets of raspberries, thick double cream and a couple of bottles of red wine.
She was on a mission. She suspected Luca didn’t usually eat very well, and she wanted to cook him a really good dinner tonight.
He had done something so nice for her yesterday, and it seemed only right to return the favour.
She got a bit carried away once she started food shopping, picking up blueberries, Greek yoghurt, eggs, sourdough bread, orange juice and coffee for the morning.
She felt a little frisson of pleasure as it dawned on her that she was shopping for a lovers’ tryst – a seduction dinner and a morning-after breakfast. She was finally taking part in life, instead of sitting on the sidelines watching it pass her by.
She took a taxi to Luca’s and arrived laden with shopping bags and her wheelie case, hoping it didn’t look too much like she was moving in. Luca grinned at her as he opened the door.
‘Ready for your sleepover?’ he asked, grabbing her case and waving her inside.
‘I brought some stuff for dinner,’ she said, holding her shopping bags aloft as she followed him up the stairs. ‘I don’t know if you had any plans…’
‘I hadn’t thought about it, really,’ he said absently. ‘I figured we’d just get a takeaway or something.’
‘Well, I thought I could cook,’ Claire said. ‘I brought lots of food.’
‘I’ll leave this here for now,’ Luca said, leaning her case against the couch when they got into the flat.
He led her through to the kitchen and took one of the bags from Claire.
‘Steak, cream, raspberries, wine,’ he said, as he unloaded it onto the counter.
‘Are you trying to seduce me?’ He grinned at her.
‘If you’d rather get a takeaway…’ She hoped he didn’t think she was acting like a girlfriend – buying groceries, offering to cook for him.
‘God, no. This looks amazing! I can’t remember when I last had steak. You can come and stay anytime. But you know I’m a sure thing, right? You don’t have to spend your money on me.’
For a second the unspoken words hung in the air between them – more than you’re already spending.
‘Well, I have to eat too,’ Claire said.
‘Okay,’ he said breezily. ‘Let’s get the oven on. I take it you were planning to bake these?’ he said, holding up the potatoes.
She nodded, grateful that he wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Luca turned on the oven and popped the potatoes in, and they stashed the rest of the food in the fridge.
‘They’re going to need a head-start,’ Claire said, waving at the oven. ‘Maybe we could discuss our arrangement while we’re waiting. We still haven’t hammered out the details properly.’
‘Or we could have a quickie?’ Luca said, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
Claire smiled. But she wanted to get some things straight before going any further.
She needed to know exactly where she stood with Luca so there would be no more uncertainty.
‘Let’s discuss our arrangement ? like what times I come here, and how long I can stay.
’ She didn’t want a repeat of yesterday’s awkwardness.
‘We can play it by ear,’ Luca said.
‘I don’t want to intrude on your life.’
‘I’ll let you know if you’re in the way,’ Luca replied drily.
‘As long as you promise to tell me the minute you feel I’m crowding you. I don’t want you to be afraid of hurting my feelings.’
‘No need to worry about me being too much of a gentleman.’
‘Okay. Now, about the timeframe – I know you said you’d give me as much time as I needed, but this can’t go on indefinitely.’
‘Right. And this Mark dude won’t wait around for ever. Presumably you’re putting off sleeping with him until you feel you’ve achieved the desired sex-bomb status?’
‘Until I feel I’m ready, yes,’ she said primly. ‘I don’t want him to be disappointed.’
‘So basically your deadline is before Mark’s balls turn blue.’ He chuckled.
‘Well, he lives in London, so that’s not so much of an issue – at least for now. Plus I told him I have a five-date rule so—’
‘A what?’
‘A five-date rule. You know, I won’t sleep with a guy until we’ve been on five dates.’
‘Seriously? Girls have those?’
‘Apparently, yes. Yvonne told me about it. Lots of girls have them. Sometimes they’re three-date rules.’
‘Huh! No one’s ever used that on me,’ he said smugly.
Claire ignored him. ‘Anyway, that gives me more time, but I’d like to get as much done as possible in the next couple of weeks. I’ll have more free time while my mother’s still in the nursing home.’
‘Okay, then. You can come over as many nights as you want to for the next two weeks – as long as you check with me first.’
‘You’re sure that’s not too much? I’d pay you more.’
Luca shook his head. ‘No need for that. Consider it a fixed-price job. Five hundred to turn you into a sexpot or your money back.’
It didn’t seem fair when she would be taking up so much of his time, but Claire could tell he wouldn’t budge on this.
Maybe she could find other ways to pay him extra – she could buy him groceries, give him presents…
‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Now, one last thing – I made a list,’ she said, bending to fish it out of her bag.
‘A list?’
‘Of things I want to learn.’ She had typed it on the computer and printed it out. She unfolded the sheet of A4 paper and smoothed it out.
‘Okay, let’s see,’ Luca said, taking it from her. To her mortification, he began reading the list out loud. ‘Basic sex, hand job, blowjob, positions, e.g. woman on top, doggy style, sixty-nine… How much of this stuff have you done before?’
‘I’ve had sex – I told you that. But I don’t think I was doing it right.’
‘Okay.’ Luca’s lips twitched as he placed a tick beside ‘basic sex’. ‘Hand job?’
‘Um… same thing. I tried it, but it didn’t work.’
‘It didn’t work? What exactly happened?’
‘I tried to do it, but I wasn’t any good at it. The guy… he kind of gave out to me.’
‘What? You were giving him a hand job and he gave out to you?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘I think I was doing it too lightly. He kept telling me I didn’t have to be so gentle, but I was scared of hurting him.
Plus, I don’t have great upper body strength.
My arm was aching and he just kept complaining, so…
well, I just gave up. He was really pissing me off.
I mean, I was doing my best. He didn’t have to be so critical.
’ Her cheeks flushed. She could still feel the burning shame. It had been so humiliating.
‘Arsehole!’
‘Well, I suppose it’s like you said – if he’d faked it and pretended he was enjoying it, I’d have just kept doing the same thing.’
‘He didn’t have to fake it. He could have just shown you what to do, given you a bit of encouragement.’
‘Anyway, I just left ? got out of bed there and then and never saw him again.’
‘Serves him right.’
‘I don’t think he’d have been crying after me, considering,’ she said. ‘He was probably happier on his own.’
‘Wankers usually are.’
‘I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me, by the way. You have to tell me if I’m not doing something right. I want to learn.’
‘I’ll be firm but fair.’ He grinned. ‘Was that the half?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You said you’d had sex three and a half times.’
‘Oh, yeah. That was the half.’
‘What about positions? What have you done?’
‘Just missionary.’
‘Blowjob?’
She shook her head.
‘Well, we can start off with this fundamental stuff, and later on, when you’ve got to grips with the basics, we can move on to more kinky things, like on your blog.’
‘You’ve been reading my blog?’ she asked, disconcerted.
‘Yeah, of course. I needed to get an idea of what we were working towards.’
‘Oh!’ It felt like he had been reading her diary, discovering her deepest, darkest secrets and fantasies – which was ridiculous, since the blog was public. But that was different. Luca knew her. He knew she had written that stuff, and she felt exposed.
‘Hey, don’t look so scared,’ he said, smiling. ‘I thought it was great. Some of that stuff was shit hot!’
‘But none of it’s real,’ she said.
‘I know that.’
Oh well, at least now he knew what a gulf there was between the person she wanted to be and the reality. ‘I know it’s a hell of a leap…’ she began, hoping he wouldn’t be scared off by the enormity of the task ahead of them.
‘I love that you have such a kinky imagination. It makes me think my job is going to be very easy.’
Claire was encouraged by that.
‘Okay, if that’s it, why don’t you unpack your bag and then we’ll finish getting dinner?’ he said. ‘I’ve cleared some space in the top drawer in my bedroom if you want to leave some stuff here. And I’ve emptied a shelf in the bathroom too.’
‘Thanks, Luca,’ she said, touched that he was going out of his way to make an awkward situation as easy as he could for her.