Red Hot Lipstick Read online

  It all came back to Lauris as she unpacked the little parcel Paul had sent her through the post. There were stocking packets wrapped in black and red tissue papers, and Lauris stood by the window overlooking the winter park, experiencing an anticipative thrill at the refinement of Paul's taste, and how he had chosen the most translucent 10-denier stockings with Cuban heels, so that the fabric would be transparently weightless on contact with her skin. Paul differed from Lauris's first boyfriend in that his pleasure came from seeing her take off her stockings, in the particularly stylized manner adopted by fifties film stars like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, whereas her earlier boyfriend had preferred the reverse process of her slipping stockings on.

  Lauris watched a taxi hunt the avenue, a black amphibian cruising towards town. Some of the plane trees retained a crown of orange leaves, and there were red geraniums splashed in window-boxes all along the opposite terrace of houses which had been converted into spacious apartments. Lauris was unconsciously attracted by the idea that someone was watching her, and had been for a long time, perhaps months or years, as she went through the ritual each day of taking a chair to the window and with one leg lifted to the chair, adjusting first the right and then the left stocking, and in the process pushing her skirt tantalizingly up to her waist. In fact she went through the motions with the idea that a complicitous eye was observing an auto-erotic act.

  Lauris was anxious to try on the three different pairs of stockings that Paul had selected — Italian and French designs — and she slipped a hand into the bunched silk, exploring the expanding toe piece, and lightly brushing her cheek with the filmy silk, before placing her right leg on the chair, and with calculated suspense unfastening the stocking from a black suspender strap. She released the stocking tentatively, and with the timed delay of a virtuoso strip-artist practising for a club performance later that night.

  It was only after the stocking had bunched at her ankle that she removed her black stiletto, and ran her fingers under her arched foot. For Lauris, this was the moment of erotic excitement. She liked to think it was Paul's fingers mapping out the sensitive nerve-lines in her foot as a prelude to lovemaking. There was something about the stockinged foot which excited her to a point of empathetic identification with a man's sexual fantasies over this point of arousal. Taking the stocking off from the foot was like removing a glove. It was the denouement to a leggy ritual. And when Paul performed this act for her, she would come as the last shiver of silk escaped her toes.

  Having inched off her right stocking, and in a state of flushed arousal, she went through the same process with the left, only this time it was slower, and she brought herself to orgasm as the silk came clear of her foot. And now she would begin to acquaint herself with Paul's gift, and she hung the two stockings over the chair-back, and got distracted by two huge plane leaves floating off into the air like mottled stars. And in the time of watching them go, Lauris became aware of someone in the apartment opposite, a figure that seemed to have swum into view like a big fish streaking to the surface of a lake. Suddenly there was black hair, eyes, a nose, lips, and a woman's curvaceous body dressed in a black bra and black panties, black a !spenders and black stockings. For a moment Lauris thought she was looking at herself in a mirror, for the woman had also positioned a chair at the window, and with a mirror on the wall behind her, Lauris was able to view her from the front and from behind. She was voluptuously attractive, and the position of one gloved hand between her thighs told Lauris that she was deriving vicarious pleasure from the teasing strip-tease she had made into a daily ritual.

  Lauris felt no embarrassment at this voyeuristic union. On the contrary, she experienced a rush of excitement at the knowledge that she was performing to a solitary watcher, someone who might have been observing her stockings fetish for months, and experiencing a mutual pleasure at the conspiratorial pact.

  Their eyes had met, and Lauris was determined not to appear self-conscious, or to impart anything to her motions which would in any way indicate that she was exaggerating her pleasure for the sake of her accomplice. But inspired by her observer's state of undress, Lauris unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor like an orange flower. She delighted in the fact that she was wearing black silk panties like her neighbour, and a suspender belt of pink and black lace. She felt naturally exhibitionist, and turned her back to her watcher so that the woman could observe the compact roundness of her bottom, the curve of her hips, and the shapely elongation of her thighs. She stood like that for a minute, bringing her hands up behind her head and extracting the two pins from her hair so that the chignon released a luxurious stream of blond hair that tumbled to mid-back. Lauris felt unprecedentedly confident, as though months of rehearsal were culminating in the expert gestures she was about to perform.

  She turned round and faced the chair. She could see that the woman opposite was standing in profile to her chair, waiting to adopt whatever pose Lauris was willing to dictate. And so it began, the easy exchange of rhythms, for the other woman had also bunched her previously taut stockings round her ankles, and was willing to respond to each of Lauris's improvised gestures, as she coerced Paul's gift over her sensitized left leg. Even though her greater thrill came from releasing the stocking, Lauris manifested a feline satisfaction in knowing that the other woman's stocking was similarly travelling over her leg, the cool film warming to the skin like pearls do to the throat. When Lauris looked across she could see the other woman spellbound by the synchronicity of their actions.

  She continued, and the idea of Paul stabbed across her consciousness. She set to wondering how he would respond to this situation, and whether his uptake would be one of sexual fascination or jealous repulsion. Lauris found herself overtaken by increasing pleasure, and she could hear a second and a third taxi reconnoitre down below, before cruising the length of the avenue towards town. Somewhere in her mind Lauris entertained the notion that Paul was expected in the middle afternoon, but that was a hazy concept which soon receded under the stimulus of increased sexual excitement.

  When Lauris looked over to her neighbour's apartment, she could see that the woman had switched the light on, and the additional clarity afforded by this brought her into even closer focus, and enhanced the detail of the woman's abundant curves. Lauris caressed the second stocking before coaxing it over her foot, and felt sure her provocation would be reciprocated. With the light on, she felt the winter day outside push at the window like a blue tide. Nothing mattered any more but this concentrated act, and her splayed red fingernails drifted to the gusset of her black silk panties, and brushed the moist pressure accumulating there. Her fingertips were light, and she opened herself petal by petal, as though her way led to the centre of a pink rose. She refrained from sitting astride the chair and working herself to ecstasy, but she was coming to that, and would reach it.

  Her neighbour too had her head thrown back, and was beginning the stages which would lead to convulsive climax. Her dark hair was clouded to a storm over her shoulders. Both women were building towards an autonomous excitement which would dispense with the need for inhibitions. Lauris had brought her silk stockings down from her suspender straps to her ankles. She had removed her blouse and her black bra, and was dressed in nothing but her suspenders and panties. She could hear a taxi pull up below, the motor idling while the passenger paid the fare, but she felt it was too early for Paul. The car negotiated its way into traffic, and there was a tugging of wind outside in the treetops. Lauris kept on thinking it was all like a hint, and that her ritual each day was removed from time. It was part of another reality.

  She sat in the chair and opened her legs wide. She didn't need to watch to know that the woman opposite would be copying her position. Lauris was resolved on reaching maximum pleasure, and that potential was heightened by the fantasies she nurtured of her neighbour in the opposite flat. Lauris contracted and the sensations made her scream with tremulous ecstasy. And if not once, then twice, a third and fourth tim
e she built to unrestrained pleasure. She stayed there for a time, head over the back of the chair, her body in a state of exhausted abandon. When she got up to draw the curtains, she noticed that the other woman had already done so. She was faced by a red-curtained blank. Lauris looked down into the street. There was a man staring up at the house from the pavement on the opposite side. It could have been anyone, but she knew it was Paul. He was wearing the familiar black woollen coat and emerald scarf He waved up, and she returned his gesture. She knew that within moments the buzzer would ring.

  Red Hot Lipstick

  Mostly it was at Harvey Nichols. But there were other stores he visited too –Selfridges, Harrods and Fortnum and Mason. His singular interest in these brilliantly lit emporia was the make-up counters. He was fascinated not only by the subtle palettes I it eye shadows, the dark blues and blacks of mascaras, and the red tonal vibrancy of lipsticks, but also by the girls who worked on these counters. He entertained the fantasy that he would make love to one of these lightly made-up assistants, and he would demand a different sort of application of make-up in the course of living out his mental obsessions.

  It was a Thursday. He always associated Thursday with whiteness and the sea. As a child he had lived in a town where most shops closed on Thursday afternoons, and he associated the particular white glare in the sea sky with dragging a green deckchair down to the lazy surf line, and spending the afternoon there doing nothing but thinking and watching the curved bottoms of girls in minimal bikinis as they sauntered across the beach. He watched for the little white skin marks in those places where the two triangles were particularly close fitting. I le liked girls with copper-coloured bodies and white bottoms. It had excited him to think of laying a whip across those untanned buttocks, or leaving a bite on the left-hand cheek which would colour like a mauve tattoo. And he hoped always that their bodies were entirely shaved, for a depilated pubis could also wear the mark of his own distinctive kiss. Why shouldn't a beach girl go home with a love-bite on her pussy?

  When he got to Harvey Nichols, his voyeuristic eye having already caught sight of a flicker of black panties underneath a mini-skirt on the escalator up, he was fired for the hunt. His life as a painter allowed him the freedom to regulate his working hours as he wished. He strolled into the make-up department, and found it agreeably quiet. There was no insistent crush of tourists obscuring the display counters. He had the freedom to move in on the attractive Japanese girl working on the Shiseido counter. She had made up in beiges and ivories, but her lips were a Matisse red.

  He began with his usual ritual of looking at lipsticks, but with such an intimate knowing eye that the assistant would assume that the product was intended for him or someone whose features he knew particularly well. He began with Dragon's Fire, that purple lipstick which still contains a red pigment, and with sexual gestures he pointed the colour up, and instead of testing it on the back of his hand, he applied it meticulously to his lips. The traditional reserve of the Japanese girl didn't break. And with expertly textured mauve lips, he looked direct into her eyes and smiled. 'I need a tissue,' he said, 'as I want to try the red called Vermeil.'

  She provided him with a tissue, and asked, 'Are you an actor, or a musician?' He had noticed that this was always the way women qualified men who wore make-up. It made them feel instantly better if the man said, 'I'm a ballet dancer or a stage artist.'

  'I'm neither,' he said. 'I just find it's such a turn-on to women. When women see men in red lipstick it makes them feel, well, sexy.' The girl laughed shyly as he made a dramatic flourish of removing one colour for the hectic red he was about to apply. He knew that with his white face and high cheekbones, the red would stand out as an attractive flourish.

  'Are you a painter?' the girl laughed. 'Your technique seems pretty good.'

  'I'm just that,' he said, working the lipstick to a thick base on his lower lip, and drawing the line thinner on the upper, in order to make a pronounced bow. He took a long time, for he wanted the act to be a sort of courtship: as he predicted, the girl was fascinated by the finesse with which he made himself up.

  And all the time he was thinking how later tonight he would tickle her pussy. He would run an adept finger over the moist ridge of her thin panties and watch her eyes mist as he inserted it beneath, all the while guiding her fingers with his other hand to the taut bulge beneath his zip. He might even have her place chopsticks either side of his shaft as her small mouth closed over his head. She would suck him in with the same delicacy she applied to sushi. Little by little he would he engorged by a silk tongue and, impossibly, his huge desire would be accommodated by her elastic mouth.

  He was thinking of this all the time that he was trying the fell ill the mirror she held up for him. She was clearly interested in a man who was willing to display such temerity in public. This simply wouldn't have happened back home.

  'Which colour do you prefer me in?' he said. 'It's up to you, as be wearing it for you tonight.' And again he was imagining her pelvic rhythm and the constriction of her narrow vaginal muscles as he opened her body to pivot on his cock. 'I'd like to kiss a girl like you, in his scarlet one,' he reflected.

  She laughed in the nervous way that Japanese girls do, repressing the full emotion and translating it into an embarrassed giggle. But he knew that he had her now. She was too fascinated to resist his advances, and he said, 'I'll buy the red one for our date tonight. I'll give you my card. Please come to dinner at eight. I'll be expecting you. I think you're very pretty, and maybe you'll want to wear the Dragon's Fire for me tonight.'

  He could see the girl was marginally confused, but she wasn't going to reject him. 'Do come, I really like you, and would like to meet you outside your place of work.'

  'You're very different,' she commented. 'Are you sure you're interested in women? You're not gay?'

  'Come and find out,' he smiled, repeating his sincere request for an evening rendezvous.

  'Okay,' the girl said. 'It's all out of the ordinary, but I'll come at eight.'

  He went off with his purchase, not even bothering to remove the lipstick he had applied, got into a taxi in order to avoid hostile scrutiny on the street, and went home. He was already fantasizing about how he would apply lipstick to her slit, and make it up with all the attention given to lips, adding a bow as perfect as any worked into a satin finish by Lana Turner. He would excite this girl with the point of the lipstick, running the tip of it over her clitoris, and listen to her subdued scale of pleasure break slowly into more demonstrative notes. He would use the lipstick as the tiny cosmetic penis which would leave her delirious for his eventual entry. He imagined tickling her anal bud with it, and extending his artistry to the soles of her feet, and the mauve areolas round her nipples.

  But chiefly he liked the idea of chopsticks delicately holding his erect penis.

  In order to control his sexual excitement, he spent the next few hours painting. He was working on an abstract canvas incorporating mauve and blue forms, and some impulse within him articulated a pair of scarlet lips as central to the composition.

  When the girl arrived at exactly eight, he was surprised by the risks she had taken in appearance. Her lips were the pronounced mauve of Dragon's Fire, her face was powdered white, and her eyes were emphasized with black. She wore a mauve silk blouse, a very short black leather mini-skirt and sheer black tights. She was clearly prepared for the unusual nature of her date.

  He poured her the whisky she requested, and watched as she arranged her silk legs like two flowers. His eyes rushed over the expanse of her exposed thighs. She was telling him how back home in Tokyo she was an art student, and that she had come to London for the summer break in order to improve her command of English. Knowing so much about the aesthetics of colour, it had seemed a happy option that she should work with Shiseido or Kanebo. She seemed relaxed in his company and without a trace of the formal characteristics which are traditionally a part of Japanese women. She made no self-conscious attempts to ad
just the hem of the tiny skirt she was wearing. On the contrary she seemed to delight in the fact that she was an oriental girl dressed in almost nothing. And he could see that her legs were good ones, and that two thin black seams ran down the back of her tights. She asked for a second whisky, and to his excitement he caught sight of the violet triangle as she recrossed her legs. He liked girls who wore mauve panties, and he knew instinctively that soon he would be exploring the intimate contours of her body. He suggested they go upstairs to his studio, so that he could show her some of his recent work. Out of courtesy he allowed her to precede him up the steep flight of stairs, and by following he could gain a partial view up her skirt. His erection triggered. It was hard to restrain himself from reaching out and tickling her as she walked in an unhurried manner up the stairs. She even removed her shoes halfway up, for the latter were unmanageable stilettos, and the intimacy of this act, and the sight of the black heels and toe pieces of her stockinged feet, lit him up with sexual heat. He was longing to place his red-lipsticked mouth over her clitoris.

  They never even got to the studio. He offered to show her a recent painting which he'd hung in his bedroom, a temporary location before it went to a client. And as she stood there looking at the blue composition, the unthinkable happened. He placed his hands around her from behind, pressed his lips into her neck, drew her bottom over his straining erection, released it momentarily, unzipped her tight skirt which fell to the ground like a crumpled leather flower, and there she was standing in her seamed tights and violet silk panties, his hand slipping between the divide of her legs from the back, and her mouth open suddenly in a passionate O.