The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour Read Free Book Online

all that engaged in pleasing me. N arranges us on the bed side-by-side and sets to work on us, dipping his head between our thighs like a bee after honey.
    But our friend has clearly had too much to drink. It’s only a few hours until she has to be off, anyway. We sleep, she and N on the main bed, me on a fold-out on the side. I wake to the sound of him taking her from behind and her animal grunts. ‘Want to join in?’ N hisses over her shoulder.
    ‘No, thanks,’ I say and fall back asleep.
    There’s just enough time in the morning for a cup of tea. ‘What, no breakfast in bed?’ she jokes. N gives her a lift as far as the next Tube station and takes me all the way home. We spend the rest of the morning half asleep, half entwined in my bed.
    samedi, le 16 octobre
    Was waiting for N outside an overground station. I had just come from meeting a client out of town. A young man next to me was looking up and down the road for buses, headphones plugged into his ears, the music far too loud. I tapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘I like that song,’ I said.
    ‘Oh?’ He looked surprised. ‘You like ‘‘Alice in Chains’’?’
    I smiled. Yoof of today can keep their Fred Durst and their Linkin Park and their Avril-bloody-Lavigne. Watered-down metal for kiddies. Back in my salad days, disaffected middle-class teenagers shuffled their ill-fitting jeans to the likes of The Mission and Sisters of Mercy. Because, frankly, baggy was just too cheerful for the pain in our souls. Sit down, sit down, sit down next to me? Begone.
    The young man smiled back. ‘When was the last time someone told you you’re gorgeous?’
    ‘About forty minutes ago.’
    N’s car came up to the kerb. ‘Nice dress,’ he said as I got in. ‘When I drove up I thought, Well, she can’t be the cute one in the dress.’
    ‘You’ve seen me in this before.’
    ‘Have I?’ We’d spent an afternoon in Berkshire with a friend of his, on a boat. ‘That was months ago. You look sweet, anyway.’
    Went back to mine for a cuppa. He leafed through my magazines. I took off my shoes and rested my legs over his lap. We started fooling around, but his touch felt strange, almost ticklish. I was very premenstrual and slight touches were uncomfortable. But I didn’t want to be treated roughly, either.
    We grappled on the sofa for a bit before he gave up. ‘Not in the mood, are you?’ N asked. ‘That’s okay.’
    I felt bad. After all, I’d just come from fucking someone. But work sex feels different, is not tied to interest or desire.
    But I knew why I wasn’t especially interested. It was not only the slightly disappointing threesome we’d had, nor fatigue from having just seen a client. ‘You know what this month is to me?’
    ‘I know what it is.’ N put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You’re not over him, are you?’ He didn’t mean Dr C, he didn’t mean the Boy. He meant the one before that. And he was right. Whenever I am between men my thoughts always turn back to him. I might think that this or that event has helped me move on – the shenanigans with the Boy last year, for instance – but it never does.
    ‘I don’t miss him.’ N gave me a doubtful look. ‘I barely remember what he was like now. I miss the idea of him.’ An idea I had written off as nonsense, until I met him. The idea that there is one person you fall in love with, one right person, and you will spend the rest of your lives – or a sizeable portion of them – together. So maybe he turned out not to be the one. At least meeting him helped me believe the one might exist.
    He split with me the night I thought was going to be the first night of the rest of our lives. And unlike all my other friends N never told me to shut up about him and get over it already. Because when I met N, part of what made the sex between us so explosive – and the friendship so deep – was that he was nursing similar wounds inflicted by a girl called G, who’d dumped him just as