The Red Collection by Portia Da Costa Read Free Book Online Page A

all a bit clichéd. But then I think about some of the stupid stage costumes that I wore, which played around with fetish looks. I must have looked a complete berk. Especially as I hadn’t the faintest idea in the beginning what it all meant. These people aren’t famous, or particularly glamorous, but at least I get the feeling that they understand kinkiness and perversity in a way that I never did. I was just playing. These dancers are for real.
    I’m just about dragging my jaw up off the dance floor at the sight of a truly gorgeous drag queen – who, disturbingly, also makes my prick twitch a bit – when a female voice pierces the cocoon of booming sound.
    ‘Do you come here often?’
    My heart jerks. It’s a voice I recognise, despite the music.
    I turn, and it feels like slo-mo. Surely it can’t be her? Why would she be here?
    But it
is
her. She’s here. And I feel kind of sick inside from a mix of shock jumbled up with guilt … and regret.
    ‘Do you come here often?’ repeats Maria Lewis, a woman I once dated in London. A lovely girl who I really didn’t treat well.
    ‘Maria?’
    An oblique smile, not unlike that of the barman, curves her soft pink mouth and, before I can say anything else, she reaches out and places her fingertips over my lips, to shush me.
    I’m semi-speechless anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. But the warm contact of her skin almost makes my heart stop.
    Fucking hell, she looks amazing.
    I didn’t know her for long, but she was always pretty, and in a far more refined way than a lot of the Z-list slappers that I went through.
    But now, oh hell, she’s just beautiful. Blue eyes brighter. Hair shorter, but blonder and wilder in a sort of sexy shag cut. Her perfect heart-shaped face has an inner glow of mystery, of life, of supreme confidence. And her body?
    Dear God Almighty, her body is just perfection – the stuff of every wet or waking dream I’ve ever had.
    She’s become every inch the superstar that I aspired to be and never was.
    ‘Let’s dance,’ she purrs, the tip of her forefinger pressing heavily on my lower lip for a second, dragging it down.
    I feel as if I’ve just been struck by lightning. And my cock, which was formerly just perky, has turned to iron.
    It’s a wonder I don’t fall arse over tit into the mass of dancing people. I just can’t take my eyes off her delicious bottom as she walks ahead of me, parting the swaying, gesticulating throng like a queen on a progress. Like I said, her body is perfect. And her bottom is more than perfect, if that’s possible. It moves and sways and lilts as if she’s dancing before we’ve even found our spot. As if she hears the music in her bones and in her heart.
    Was she always this gorgeous? I suppose she must have been, but I was either just too wasted or too full of my own self-importance to appreciate her.
    But I’m appreciating her now. Bloody hell, am I appreciating her.
    Appreciating that marvellous firm arse, those long, long legs in a sleek, short, but elegant little black dress, and her superb breasts, as she turns towards me and gives me that narrow, cryptic little smile again. A smile that seems to combine with the staccato beat of the heavy, Latin-influenced track that’s playing and wind itself around my dick like a serpent.
    Shit, I’m in trouble.
    And then we’re dancing and I feel like a terpsichoreally challenged farmhand with seven left feet, instead of the pretty slick mover I once was. Seeing Maria again has rendered me helpless, almost infantile.
    But she moves like a goddess. A wild, uninhibited poem of graceful syncopation. I can’t remember if we ever danced together when we clubbed in the old days, but if we ever did, I’m sure she never danced like this.
    She commands the space we’ve found ourselves in, carving out more and more with the sheer force of her personality and the energy with which she twists and turns and sways. Her sinuous body seems to interpret subtle rhythms and