Sally

FREYA NORTH

Sally

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Heinemann 1996

Copyright © Freya North 1996

Afterword © Freya North 2012

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007462155

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007462162

Version: 2017-11-28

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

For Lynne Drew and Jonathan Lloyd

Hold on tight, chaps – we’re in for quite a ride!

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Epilogue

Afterword

Read on for an extract of Rumours

About the Author

Acclaim for Freya

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

She lay there, in a small heaven of sorts.

This is the definitive rampant fling.

She grinned widely, partly because her clitoris was being rubbed, partly because she suddenly envisaged her actions set down in type, immortalized, in a racy bestseller. I could sell these details to Jackie Collins, she thought, as her right nipple was being nibbled and her left was being kneaded. This kind of thing is right up her street.

Yes, nibbled nipples had a certain titillating ring to it (titillating, oh very droll), but would also look good on the printed page. In her mind’s eye, she inverted the ‘b’ and played with the ‘p’:

bb

pp

nibbled

nipples

and thought that Jackie C would really rather like them. So, while he left her nipples to traverse her body, she penned a few thoughts.

Dear Ms Collins, this is what happened. No, this is what’s happening: I’m lying on my back with my legs wrapped around the back of a most glorious superstud, his ‘throbbing manhood’, his ‘enormous dick’, his ‘stupendous cock’ is surging into me. My neck is thrown back and is being licked greedily. This man on top of me has the physique of a Rodin sculpture, Ms Collins, a Rodin sculpture with an insatiable sexual appetite.

I am grabbing on to a pair of buttocks so firm, so exquisitely honed, that it is only their warmth and a slight fuzz of hair which persuade me they are real and not perfectly hewn marble. We’ve been going at it, this fast-motion super-bonking, for the best part of two hours, so you see real people really can keep it up (literally).

Hello hello, I am now being flipped over and I am on top, in the driving seat. I am grinding down on him, now I am lifting myself off. Plunge, lunge, down I go again. I think I’ll sit upright and throw my head back alluringly – just in case he can see me through those eyes glazed with near-fulfilled desire. He is surging, making that ‘pumping’. He is abandoned to the sensation. And do you know what? I am doing this, I am making him feel this way. He is putty in my hands, but he is hard as a rock inside. A ‘rock-cock’ – now there’s a jaunty little phrase for you, Ms C. Oh, up he sits, a moment’s tenderness too. Kisses are slower, more lip, less tongue. He’s actually rather nice, sweet and gentle, but tonight I want wild and rampant. So, here I go, pushing him down, covering him again. Forget in-out, I’m rotating fluidly and what a pelvis I have! Ten years of ballet had its merits after all. Our legs are so entwined, so taut, that cramp threatens in my left thigh, but a potentially mammoth orgasm is very much on the horizon. Here it comes. Here I come. More more more.

Yes.

Jesus.

Oh!

Pure bestseller material, that’ll be me. I’ll give your previous heroines a run for their money. I’m coming to your rescue, Jackie. Oh!

As the regular throbs racked her body, her brain (which was really quite a good one, having gained a First from Bristol University) was working energetically too.

On second thoughts, Ms Collins will not have this, not for a while at least. No, this will be for me, this shall become my secret, my own touchstone. When I am either a) an aged spinster (she was 25 – the official age, she’d recently read, for spinsterhood to commence) or b) a good little housewife, cooking and breeding superlatively, then shall I derive much pleasure recounting to myself (be it in a rocking-chair or at a school play), the time I was an outrageous vamp, a shameless slapper, an utterly debauched nympho.

She came to her conclusion as he came to his. He started to pant raspingly and called out ‘Oh my God, oh goddo goddo Goh’ with enormous conviction. She felt rather proud of herself.

No, Mister Man, it’s ‘goddess’ actually, oh your goddess. For that is what I shall be. That is who I am for today, and for the times when I shall again allow you to experience such delicious sex with me.

Inadvertently, she gave out a little sigh, one of satisfaction, intellectual rather than physical. It was answered by a sucking kiss from the man whom she straddled. She smiled. He smiled. She smiled again, with ulterior motives. He smiled back, oblivious but ensnared.

Ho ho! So my secret is safe. Look at you, smugly grinning, proud as punch, purely because you think you’ve taken me to heaven and back. Which you have. But who was it who was in control? I shall strive hard to keep it that way, and I shall strive to keep it hard. I shall not fall in love with this man. I shall not day-dream wistfully of babies and scones baking in an Aga. Nor must you fall in love with me, only lust and long for me until you positively ache. Even if you marry and live in blissful domesticity, you will frequently think of me and surge inside on remembering the joy and liberation of sex with me.

I must, she decided, become an enigma. Remain one. To everyone, henceforth. A wave of absolute exhilaration coursed through her. This is it; this is not a search for self but the creation of it. I shall play and I shall act and I shall have much fun. I shall be the conductor. The baton is in my hand and the balls are in my caught.

She rushed to the bathroom with Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ careering around her head. Predictably, the orgasm had sent urgent messages to her bladder and, sitting in the silence of her bathroom, she contemplated the release of pee versus an orgasm on the pleasure scale. Today, peeing came second. She checked it was really her in the mirror.

Gracious Good Lord! It is me! Sally Lomax, what on earth have you just done?

I’ve just had rampant sex.

She smiled hugely, winked, said ‘Go for it, girl’ out loud, and flushed the toilet with triumphant force. The phone had begun to ring. Sally gave herself another beaming smile and then sauntered, positively swaggered, to answer it. It was her mother, officious as ever, voice shrill, no time for a greeting.

‘Darling I’ve been ringing for hours, I thought you’d be busy marking essays?’

‘No, I had to be elsewhere, something far more pressing,’ Sally said truthfully.

‘What?’

Oh, you know how it is, Mum. When there’s six foot of beefcake in your bed, more handsome and brawny than in your most incorrigible dreams, great hands, a wonderful mouth and a dick to die for; obviously marking a ten-yearold’s ‘What I did over half term’ rather pales into insignificance.

Taking a sharp bite on her tongue, Sally, however, did not speak her mind. My, how she would have relished the ensuing stunned silence of matriarchal disbelief. How she would have loved to have breezed straight on with mundane enquiries about the health of the cat and the younger sisters (in that order). Today, though, decorum won. The ravaged Rodin was diplomatically replaced by an old friend who would have been quite compliant had she known the circumstances (she was, in fact, holidaying in Tunisia).

‘Daph is a little low, so I’ve been with her.’

‘Darling, did you remember Aunt Martha’s seventieth?’

Sally had forgotten.

‘Is blasphemy really necessary? I suggest you phone her right this minute.’

So she did. Sally, sweet Sally; the prettiest of the nieces, the dutiful, good-natured Sally, chatted to Aunt Martha for a full and enjoyable ten minutes. She was careful not to mention her late uncle, and remembered to ask if the cold was causing the dreaded arthritis.

‘Arthur Ritus comes to us all in old age, it’s to be expected, I’m not one to complain …’ But she was and she did. Sally ummed, ahhed and tutted at the apposite moments and Aunt Martha, as she hung up the phone, took down the silver-framed photo of her husband and declared to it that Sally was a gem and would make a treasure of a wife.

Sally gazed at the replaced handset.

Do I feel guilty? Should I? For what? For forgetting Aunt Martha’s birthday? For lying to my mother? Or for having performed a carnal act of such outrageous proportions? Guilt, show me thy face! I’ll give you three seconds!

Right then, off I go, back to my boudoir, quick-change into my doppelgänger, the temptress, the vixen, the wicked lusting girl. Woman! Hardly a lady, hardly a girl. Today I am suddenly the sort of person I thought I was not and yet today I really feel like Me. Pure and simple, this is who I am.

She entered her room and any purity simply vanished. She flew on top of the knackered male form and kissed it outrageously with a scheming and lively tongue.

ONE

Such a lovely girl, what an angel, isn’t she wonderful, such a good girl. Sally Lomax was adorable and adored. She was extremely polite, tirelessly friendly, always amiable and genteel. She was chatty and respectful to the elderly and a much-loved teacher of youngsters. She kept herself trim, never let the ends of her hair split and always folded clothes away at the end of a day. She cooked well, cleaned well, and although she could not knit, she made enviable things on her sewing machine. When in her car, a spotless if noisy six-year-old Mini Cooper, she was courteous and never lost her temper, never overtook on the inside and slowed down well in advance of pedestrian crossings – even on a deserted Sunday. Just in case.

When Sally was a child, she was angelic in physique and character. Skin as smooth and opalescent as her prettiest Bakelite doll, features and figure doll-like too, her demeanour open and engaging. Sally at six was altogether flawless, faultless. It was as much a pleasure for her parents to invite ageing relatives for tea, as it was for them to venture out of retirement bungalows to be sung to and danced for. At tea-time, Sally never stretched over, never ate with her mouth open, and always asked if she could have some more with a ‘please’. At her birthday parties she never snatched her guests’ presents and was always keen for the entertainer not to show her any favouritism. But Sally was simply everyone’s favourite.

At twenty-five, her skin is still flawless and, though we would be hard-pressed to call the Sally we’ve just met angelic, it took very little hard pressing for the Rodin to deem the ways and wiles of her body thoroughly heavenly.

Well, where do we find Sally today? It is the day after the Big Bonk. She is spending Sunday afternoon by herself, in the one-bedroom flat she rents in Highgate. He had stayed for breakfast-cum-lunch and had thus deprived Sally of her sacred hour with the Observer, so she is reading it now. Her routine is out of sync, she really should be ironing. It will wait a week. Today Sally is not flustered by such a thing, today she is enjoying aloneness. Today she enjoys the self-condoned liberation from the previously self-imposed Sunday schedule. She is very proud of herself and finds she frequently bursts into an ecstatic smile.

What does it mean, this smile, what does it mean?

Her answer is defiant.

I feel wonderful. It was good. It was a good thing to do.

She laughs at the paradox. In the clear light of a November day, and looked at objectively, she had indeed committed a wanton act of slack morals and shameful lust which, justifiably, could be categorized by most as Bad. Yet Sally feels good and can see nothing to be ashamed of. She feels elated, happy and downright proud.

My flesh might be ravaged, my mind sullied, but Gracious Good Lord do they feel the better for it!

Sally knows what she wants, and what she must do.

It’ll be a swift and easy transition, and it must start, quite simply, with a change to my wardrobe. I shall do Ms Collins proud and move with one fell swoop from Laura Ashley to Whistles, from Marks and Sparks undies to none whatsoever. Hampstead here I come, cheque book at the ready.

Should I be ironing?

No.

I should be buying clothes that are Dry Clean Only.

TWO

Sunday in Hampstead, silver winter sun making everybody look beautiful. The Barbour Brigade are out walking retrievers who have never retrieved in the countryside because the Heath suffices. The Young Trendies are here in force, hanging out, hanging about, sipping cappuccino at the pavement café, queuing for crêpes, looking around all the while to catch sight of their reflection whilst spying out anyone good-looking to look good for.

There is a young woman who weaves in and around these two species. She is smiling; it is a smile of energy and ease and it is infectious. She seems simultaneously absorbed in her own world yet aware of, and enjoying, her surroundings. And the shopping, by the looks of the two bags she swings. She is of average height, of slight build and her hair is a nothing-special brown, mid-length with a kink that is natural and nice. Her skin glows and there is a sheen to her very good cheekbones, a becoming blush to her cheeks, an endearing rosiness to the edge of her chin and the end of her nose. Her hazel eyes glint and dance. Her lips, naturally full, are soft red – Sally always uses lip balm during the winter months. And, though her legs would not see her to a Levi jeans commercial, her walk is a sexy, assertive stride. As a package, she looks very pleasingly put together. She is not stunning but she is radiant and heads turn.

Sally jigs past a boutique, one selling excessively expensive accessories. Two strides later (and unknowingly witnessed by at least three envious Hampstead Darlings), our erstwhile ballerina performs a fluid halt, heel-spin, about-turn, and floats effortlessly into the shop. Inside, the opulent aroma of fine leather envelops her, the hand of a skilled interior decorator is much in evidence and her senses are solicited at once. The rag-rolled walls in Homes-and-Gardens hues of ecru and taupe, and the polished wood floor covered here and there by a jaded kelim, provide a splendid setting for pieces of old furniture over which cashmere throws and finely woven woollen shawls are nonchalantly draped. Belts hang from a fabulously gnarled piece of driftwood; from leather trunks, suitcases and holdalls, a carefully spewed selection of socks and silk camisoles accost the eye. But Sally, who thinks the current fashion and hefty prices for bashed, blemished, artistically distressed leather goods somewhat daft, has made a beeline for the old Welsh dresser where the hats are displayed.

She has never worn a hat but she is trying them on with the jaunty confidence of one who would not entertain going out without one. The black felt cloche suits her well but makes her look too cutesy, the trilby is too butch and the beret too ordinaire. She looks stunning in the claret bowler but feels best in the black velvet. It is soft, floppy but beautifully cut. It hugs her skull and the brim, up the front, falls gently around her face and drapes elegantly at the back. She looks at herself in the mirror and the shop assistant, usually pushy, looks on too. She makes no attempt to goad her customer; she watches, slightly jealous, from a discreet distance. Sally is intrigued to find that the shape of the hat accentuates her bone structure and appears to lengthen her neck; under the black velvet, her eyes turn from hazelnuts into freshly shelled conkers.

I look really rather good, sort of alluring, feminine and vampish all at the same time.

It takes Sally but an instant to decide the hat must be hers; costing, though it does, a day’s pay.

At the Tea Pot Shoppe, Carlos was clearing the mountain of froth-stained cups from one of the outside tables, pocketing a mound of gratuitously small change left as a gratuity. It was nearing the end of his first month in England, he was tired and slightly homesick. It was a thankless job for a nuclear physics graduate, and the tips were lower than he’d been led to believe. Then he saw her, caught in profile as she started to cross the road, a pretty face framed perfectly by a sumptuous black hat. Suddenly, life in this strange country of offish Barbours and oafish Trendies had a plus to it. This, Carlos realized with a great deal of excitement, was his first glimpse of an English Rose. He gawped transfixed; watching the cars slither and toot while she danced and laughed her way between them. There is a zebra crossing a hundred yards ahead but today Sally prefers to jay-walk. Bella, bella! The hat, the face, the rosiness – and here she is, ordering a cappuccino and a Danish pastry.

Sally graciously accepted the compliments of the waiter. Soon she was deftly scooping up the chocolate-dusted froth and thinking of nothing in particular as it fluffed into nothingness on her tongue. The pastry was absolutely heavenly and she even closed her eyes as the first mouthful revealed to her tastebuds apple, crème patissière and the lightest of pastry. By the second sip and third mouthful, Sally was happily recalling the details of her decadent afternoon. A coffee-brown lambswool blazer; two silk shirts, one olive, one cream; a pair of exorbitantly expensive designer jeans; and a short (was it too short?) black devoré velvet skirt.

When on earth am I going to wear that?

You will.

She had indulged in garments of the finest fabrics, and at the most exorbitant prices. The whole experience had been so pleasurable, the looking, the touching, the trying on; the decision-making so effortless. Finally, it had been a joy and well worth the money to watch her acquisitions being coddled in tissue paper and then handed to her so reverently.

As she pressed a determined fork against the last flakes of Danish, she pondered for a moment; common sense versus decadence. Sally, you must understand, had spent her rainy-day money. Frequently she put a little aside ‘for a rainy day’, not really knowing when that would be. But it was definitely today and common sense had a place neither in her scheme of things nor her purse.

Today, she told herself as the brisk November breeze reddened her nose and chin a little more, today it is pouring.

Despite the pavements being dry and no umbrella in sight, Sally decided that it was the rainiest day in ages and the spending of pounds amassed from hard-saved pennies was utterly justified. These purchases, after all, were an investment. She turned to look for her waiter, and in doing so felt a whisper of velvet against her cheek. Its caress felt wonderful and, as the waiter was nowhere to be seen, she kept her head still a moment longer.

Over her second cappuccino, Sally indulged in recalling, moment by moment, thrust by thrust, the athletics of the previous night, and if one can feel light-headed between the legs, then that was how Sally was feeling.

Never have I been worshipped like that, never have I been so aware of my body, what it can do, how it can feel, how it can make another feel.

Perhaps it was because she had consciously watched, analyzed even, a man totally absorbed in her, so hungry for her, that her own physical awareness had been heightened. The sex seemed so much more fulfilling, the orgasm so exquisite. New. Sitting there, in Hampstead, with the light growing thin, a November navy replacing the afternoon silver, Sally decided to recast herself as a fly on the wall of her replay and ran the whole sequence again, this time as a series of film stills. Vivid in her mind’s eye was the interlocking of two bodies, the various formations and patterns, firm flesh, the spaces in between; Rodin’s marble; Henry Moore’s bronze.

Carlos found himself unable to resist. The English Rose, smiling carefree out loud, was compelling, magnetic. He was helpless in the face of her. As his luck would have it, she turned to him with that very smile as he presented the bill to her. With his very best English, he let go:

‘Señorita, your smile, it makes my day. Is so very beautiful. In you I see the English Rosa. If I was Shake His Speare, I write a play for you. You are foods for my ’eart and a vision for my eyes. Is so very lovely. I am breaking open for your smile of pretty innocence.’