I was eighteen when I met Mark, nineteen when we set up home together. He was fifteen years older than me. My family despised him.
But I loved Mark unconditionally, like life itself. In fact, he was my life during the three years we were together. But when I look back now, I can see how seamlessly he manipulated me, how cleverly he introduced me to that world of his. Before I met him, I could never even have imagined his kind of people existed, never would have dreamed anyone capable of such things.
We'd only been living together six months when he began banging on about how he wanted our relationship to be more open, and how I should be more accommodating of his needs. When he suggested a threesome, I realised what "open" really meant, what "accommodating" entailed. The scenario he had in mind was to bringing some pretty little thing back to our home so he could fuck her while I straddled her face.
Mark's idea of a romantic night at home was lesbian porn streamed through his laptop onto our giant T.V., and I would sit and watch in stunned silence like the good girl he expected me to be. He'd ask me which of the girls on screen appealed the most, and to tell him the things I'd like to do to her.
Other times he'd say he was going to pimp me out to strangers, or that he would like to see all his friends fuck me, one after the other — Mark had many, many of friends. But it would upset me when he said he wanted to see me with other men. The only thing I needed in life was for him to love me — unconditionally. I wanted to be a precious thing to him.
When he saw my tears, he told me I meant the world to him, and that he loved me more than any girl he'd ever known, and that all the things he said were a kind of game. Just sex-talk to get him in the mood.
But when he was on that track, gangbangs instead of the lesbian stuff, he'd stream his favourite footage: an hour-long spectacle of degradation involving twenty or so blokes using a girl who looked no older than I was. I still recall the utter repulsion that gripped my heart the first time he played it for me. I felt so sad for the girl, was horrified that someone so young and beautiful could debase herself in such a way.
And yet, after repeated viewings over months and months, another part of me began to find the spectacle intensely arousing. All those men. Jeeez! Mostly horrid specimens with eager leers and impatient erections. I wondered how the poor thing coped with all their cum. It astonished me to see it seep from every orifice, how she endured it all without vomiting. I hated cum —and like it little better now, and can no longer swallow the stuff like I once could. These days I always spit.
But back then, in spite of myself, I found the depravity unfolding onscreen spellbinding. I would watch the eager scrabble of hands tearing at her clothes, and the shoal of fingers swarming over her peach-fresh, teenage flesh, and it filled me with a yearning I was unable to rationalise. The spectacle of such a young and pretty girl getting fucked by one man after another while taking a cock in her mouth and simultaneously giving hand-jobs to two more men . . . . What can I say? Watching it became my guilty pleasure. I would often view it when alone.
But Mark's real obsession was the lesbian stuff, and so that was mainly what we watched. And yet I never warmed to girl-on-girl stuff like I did the gang-bang footage. All the same, I'd indulge him, tell him how much girl-on-girl turned me on, even though I wasn't altogether altruistic when I strung him along like that, teased him by saying what he wanted to hear. I've always had a flair for words, and they could do little else but work their magic. And so when we'd had one of those evenings in front of the wall-mounted plasma, drank too much wine and watched clip after clip of girls with girls, I'd say how much I loved it, and how very much I wanted to be with another female. When I said that stuff, Mark would fuck me like Armageddon had been announced on News At Ten, due at midnight.
One time he asked me which girls I fancied in the real world, and I had to think long and hard. I ran a film show in my head of all the girls in my life; my friends and acquaintances, even colleagues. I quickly realised I didn't fancy any girls in the real world at all. Not one.
But he pushed it. So I said Lucy was lovely. Lucy worked behind the bar in The Stag and Hounds.
And she was beautiful. I could say that as an aesthetic statement of fact, not one of sexual interest — though I suppose deep down her beauty appealed more than I was willing to admit. Why else had I mentioned her?
I remember the time we visited the pub together after I'd told Mark I thought Lucy was beautiful. We'd just arrived and were looking around for a seat when I saw Lucy watching us. She said something to Bev, the other barmaid, and they both looked at us in this weird way. Bev said something back to Lucy, and they turned away. Even from where I Stood, I heard Bev's laughter.
We found a seat and Mark told me to go and get the drinks in. I'd never done that with Mark, he'd always gone to the bar himself because he liked to flirt with Lucy, Bev too if she were on, though she did not do as many hours as Lucy.
Lucy stopped what she was doing, stood and studied me as I walked towards her. She had a curious glint in her eyes, a slyness in how she asked, "What can I get you tonight, babe?" Then the tip of her tongue momentarily appearing, subtle between her glossed lips. I wanted to look away, but her large and heavily made-up eyes widened and drew my attention in spite of myself.
For a moment I couldn't speak, she had pinned me like a butterfly to a mounting board. There was something about her that hinted at secrets shared, an archness that I thought spiteful. Finally, I managed to say, "Pint of Stella and a White Lightning, please, Lucy."
She continued to hold my gaze as she pumped Mark's pint. I was determined not to let her see how she affected me, and so I endured it in silence. And that is when the memory of what I had said to Mark about her flared in my mind like a heat rash on fair-skin. I blushed like an adolescent.
She placed Mark's pint in front of me on the bar and then fetched a White Lightning from the cooler. When I handed her the money, she winked as she took it. She returned from the cash register, and I pocketed the change and picked up the drinks.
Then I just stood there unable to break free from the irresistible pull of her eyes. I knew that look only too well: it was the one too many men gave me far too often.
Lucy was only two years older than me, but she had the confidence of a forty-year-old. I suppose serving beer to loads of guys five nights a week grows you a personality, and a personality was something, even at nineteen, I had yet to acquire. Later I learned she'd worked on cruise ships, sang and danced in cabaret, and had once assisted a magician in Vegas.
I do not remember breaking out of Lucy's orbit, the walk back to our seats still a blur. As I put the glasses down on the table, Mark asked, "Now tell me, Lauren: how's your girlfriend tonight?"
********************
Even after all the porn, the talks, and then Lucy's wink, what invaded my world the following weekend was like sexual blitzkrieg. Poor me, I had no idea war had even been declared.
It was Friday night and Mark had gone out with his mates. I no longer waited up for him to come home, as sometimes he and his friends would go into town, and then it would be the early hours before he'd roll in, usually pissed.
This night, though, I think I must have only been asleep thirty minutes when I was awoken by him gently shaking my shoulder, his hushed voice telling me I had to get up. It took me a few moments to be back in the room, emerging reluctantly from a now forgotten dream. He was insistent that I come downstairs.
I turned from him and whined into my pillow. " Maaaark! I was asleep. Can't it wait until tomorrow?" Without waiting for his reply, I buried my head under the duvet.
He pulled the covers back to expose my naked flesh, leaned over me and hissed in my ear, "Listen, you stupid girl. Opportunities like this don't happen every day. I've spent ages setting this up. Now put your robe on and come the-fuck downstairs."
I curled into a ball, but he grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me up into a sitting position. I just stared at him stupidly. "Mark," I said "What's going on? What's this all about?"
"Lucy — It's about Lucy."
"Lucy from the pub?"
"You know very well which Lucy."
