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The takeover bid continues
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The memory lurked like a dark monster, dimly glimpsed in gloaming shadow. Had it even happened? At this distance, it was hard to countenance. His body knew it though.
He'd been brought around by the late morning sun slicing through his eyeballs, dredged up from a Mariana-Trench-deep sleep, drool moistening the cotton sheet pressed to his mouth. The hotel bed looked like he'd been wrestling a crocodile, and his body felt like it too, his head sore and fretful.
But his dick. His dick was hard, and not just morning glory hard, but begging-to-plunge-itself-into-anything-tight-and-moist hard. Chambermaid, room service, vacuum cleaner nozzle; each was as enticing as the next.
The flight home had been a torment: sexy air hostesses wiggling their tight bums and carefully concealed breasts at him, begging to be fucked, just begging for it, while his fellow passengers slept. He'd slipped it in from behind with each of them in turn, screwing them over the drinks trolley, sticking his face between their butt cheeks as they wiggled past, and been woken by the ding of the seat-belt sign, sweaty and stiff from his fevered half-dream.
In the weeks after, googling like a madman, he tried to make sense of what she'd done. She'd claimed she'd doped him with an aphrodisiac that would rewire his neural network. He'd scoffed, but the frenzied sex and its effect on him since had left him wondering. There was Vyleesi, the FDA-approved aphrodisiac PT-141, but a slightly heightened sexual desire this wasn't, unless it was her other-worldly skills that had done for him. There was more to what she'd drugged him with than that though, he was sure, and his brain was being warped. He read unverified stories of experiments the KGB had conducted with nerve agents dispensed by honeypots in the 1960s. There were rumours the programme had never been discontinued, but instead had grown in sophistication under the auspices of the FSB, with new technologies like gene editing. Either way, he suspected that, like a super-charged Viagra, whatever she'd given him had simply worked in symbiosis with her skills.
It didn't subside but grew and grew. Sex. Like a hormonal teenager, he smelled it everywhere. His wife got the worst of it, night in, night out. Rampant, rough, raging, he took it out on her. Sore and perplexed, she banished him from their bed. So he took it out instead on the young intern at the office, the sexy little thing that was desperate to get on. Job insecurity was a wonderful thing. It lined his pockets and it polished his dick. She didn't know what hit her. A smile here and an angry word there, and before she knew it she was taking it up the arse.
And the dreams. Drifting on a raft, becalmed on a flat, clear ocean, and the girl rising naked from it to drag him into the depths. Snuggling with her in a deep, deep bed of cloud. Her slowly fucking him as she removes his organs and places them in the bowl beside the autopsy table. The girl. Dragging it out of him with exquisite pain. His sperm. Sticky on his stomach and sheets.
He had to get a grip.
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Anna Brightman smiled at him as he strode into the board room. It gave him the creeps. He knew what she thought of him, and they weren't on smiling terms. He was on his own with her too, while they waited for the rest of the Board to join them. They'd have to make a pretence of civility for the next few minutes, but the air was rancid with their mutual loathing. Everything about her riled him: her buttoned-up, presbyterian clothes, her hair scraped back into a tight knot, the minimal makeup and sparse, carefully weighed words. That modest appearance and unassuming demeanour were just cover for preening self-regard and vain ambition. Apparently, she thought herself his equal - no, his better even. What a joke. He'd show her soon enough.
There was an awkward silence as they took their places at the long table, Nigel at the head. He could see her weighing up how far away she could sit without appearing intimidated. She sat closer than he'd like, shuffled the papers in front of her and looked up with an unreadable expression.
"Are you feeling better after your trip to Moscow? I hear you got more than you bargained for."
"What do you mean?" he replied, trying to affect a care-free tone to hide his sudden alarm. She couldn't know, surely?
"Brian told me about your food poisoning and the cancelled meeting. I heard the Osco Board rearranged though and were surprisingly receptive to your opening offer."
A wave of relief washed over him. "Yes. Although nothing surprising about it whatsoever. They know their robotics division needs Haverstone's AI to go anywhere, and, more importantly, they need me."
"I'm sure that's the clincher."
He knew, and he knew she knew he knew, that the comment was rank with sarcasm, but there wasn't a hint of it in her voice. He'd make her pay for that and every other smart-arse remark she'd ever made. He squeezed his hand into a tight fist beneath the table and imagined it slamming into her prissy face, crunching her delicate cheekbone and leaving her sprawled at his feet, sobbing.
At that moment, Brian appeared at the door. Good old, rock-solid Brian. He hesitated momentarily, straightened his Carlton Club tie, smoothed his pin-striped jacket lapels, stiffened and saluted.
"Captain!"
"At ease, Brian!" said Nigel, in that slightly indulgent tone he adopted with him, shoulders relaxing instantly at the arrival of his right-hand man. What he loved about him was how utterly dependable he was. Dependable and predictable. Predictable and dull. Exactly what he needed in his Chief Operating Officer. Brian took a seat and sat bolt upright as he neatly arranged the leather executive folder and glass of water in front of him, took out a printed agenda and began to read it out quietly to himself, point by point. No doubt Anna Brightman coveted the man's job as a stepping stone in her quest to depose Nigel, but Brian idolised him and had his back. They often had him and his wife over for dinner. She was like a 1950s throwback, a stay-at-home mum who baked cakes and held coffee mornings, and was as straight-laced as him. If if it weren't for their two children, it was hard to imagine he'd ever had sex in his entire life. Nigel supposed it was strictly missionary once a week.
"I'd like to open proceedings by congratulating our chairman on his successful Moscow trip," began Brian, once the Board had taken their places.
"Thank you, Brian." Nigel surveyed his gathered acolytes imperiously. "It's been a tricky proposal to negotiate, I have to say, but my personal visit to Osco headquarters clearly impressed them. I know some had their doubts about the wisdom of the bid and my ability to pull it off," he said with a slight chuckle and a pause to focus everyone's thoughts on who that was, "but I'm confident it will be hugely beneficial for both companies, and its successful conclusion reaffirm that our current leadership structure is the key to continued success." He scanned the table again, expectantly, and noticed Brightman looking disconcerted and struggling to form her words. The perfect moment to put her on the spot. "Anna, you were about to comment?"
"Yes. It occurs to me that negotiations are about to enter a critical phase and, to that end, you might like to be accompanied by someone with a keen grasp of the financials and some local knowledge. As you know, I speak Russian."
"Oh, you mean you!" he replied, feigning surprise and feeling rather pleased with himself that he'd turned her unexpected gambit into a dig at her. Did she really expect him to agree to that? "Unfortunately, the Russians don't mind a woman behind the controls of a T-34 but aren't going to negotiate with one. Besides which, we need someone there with a real grasp of the business. To that end, I have already arranged for Brian to accompany me."
Brian looked up suddenly as if it were news to him. Nigel had been considering taking him, but Brightman's intervention had made up his mind. Anything to frustrate the dried up shrew. The real reason, though, was that he wanted him there as his wingman. He wasn't sure what he might face, but he'd feel a whole lot safer with him alongside. Brian was such a straight-up, decent family guy, a bit of a prude, in truth, that nothing obscene could happen with him around.
This takeover was going to confirm his position once and for all, so he couldn't risk anything going wrong. The company's articles of association were clear: the only way he could be removed and a sale of shares notice issued were if his behaviour were deemed to have endangered the company. Brightman would know it too, of course. Hence the little morsels he'd heard she fed the Board, the hints at his incompetence. And she'd wanted to come to Moscow in the hope of sabotaging the takeover bid. Once he'd successfully pulled it off, he'd crush the bitch.
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Where was he? He'd been eating breakfast at the kitchen table with his wife and daughters, but they'd disappeared, so he'd gone to search for them, wandering the unfamiliar corridors of his labyrinthine home. He feared each turn was taking him further from them, and something dark waited.
Now it was here: the girl, standing naked before him. He tried to flee, but drifted towards her instead, drawn in by his cock. She lay back on the sheets and spread her legs. He continued to struggle, but his cock sought out her sex until it felt the caress of her vagina.
He looked down and saw his penis wasn't in fact inside her, but hovering in the perfect gap between her thighs. The sensation was coming from a black cloud that emanated from her vulva, pulsing like a magnetic field around his dick, before funnelling into his urethra. It tingled with increasing ferocity as it made its way along his shaft, his perineum and balls crackling with electricity. He could see by their glow that the black cloud was made of tiny germs, invading his body through his genitals, but it was too late to pull away. He was about to come, and her face was in his groin now. Her mouth formed a perfect circle, almost touching the tip of his cock, and began to suck like a vacuum cleaner hose. The pull was irresistible. He let go and sprayed his black come towards the hole in her face. Her cheeks grew hollow with the force of suction, her face taut and skeletal, as the vacuum sound turned into a howl.
He yanked himself out of it with a jolt, like he'd been stuck in mud. His upper body reared up from the bed, drenched in sweat, cold already where his bedclothes had been thrown aside. The sheet was glued to his stomach too. It had happened again.
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A bitter wind penetrated the upturned collar of Nigel's greatcoat, and he pulled it tighter around his neck as he hurried across the broad, desolate road that led to the huddle of shabby tenements in Otradnoye District. Their squat slabs of concrete loomed like ancient monoliths against a night sky robbed of any light by the gathering rain clouds, while the few, sickly street lamps barely illuminated his way. Had he taken a wrong turn? It was a strange place for a business meeting.
The negotiations with Osco had gone well that day, leaving him unexpectedly upbeat, considering the trepidation with which he'd approached his return to Moscow. On the day of his departure, he'd changed his booking from the Marriott Royal Aurora, where he'd stayed previously, to the Myasnitsky Hotel, a boutique place with an industrial finish, all exposed brick and bare concrete finishes that matched his dark mood. Hopefully, the sudden switch would thwart any plans to entrap him again. More than that though, he'd not rest at the Marriott, haunted as it would be by memories of that girl.
