Free The Blue Guide by Carrie Williams Page A

kind of delirium, I knew I had to have you.’ He looks deadly serious as he speaks. ‘You are, in many ways, very similar to Carlotta. Carlotta is an extraordinarily passionate woman.’
    We fuck again, on the way back to his hotel, this time with me astride him, riding his lithe brown hips. The subject of what we are going to do when Carlotta is back – whether this is to be an ongoing thing – isn’t broached, and when he drops me off on my street on his way to the airport to fetch her in the very same limo in which we have been screwing like fury, I have no idea what is going to happen next.
    At home I listen to my phone messages as I shower: there are two from potential new clients, enquiring about availability later in the year, and one from my best mate.
    â€˜Ally,’ I hear her say through the jets of water that are pummelling my shoulders. ‘It’s Jess. I am, needless to say, absolutely creaming my pants to find out how it went with that gorgeous hunk of a flamenco dancer. So call me back the very second you get this. Love ya. Bye.’
    I climb out of the shower, dry myself with a toweland slip on my silk kimono. Part of me is dying to talk to Jess, to tell her what’s been going on in my life. She was there for me when I was on my big downer about Daniel, and I even told her about the incident with Kip; in fact, we had a good laugh about it over a bottle of plonk or three at Gordon’s Wine Bar one girly night. She’s the first person I turn to when I need an ear, or a shoulder.
    Yet I can’t bring myself to pick up the phone and dial her number. I’m not ashamed, as such, but I am confused, and I’m thinking she might confuse me still more. Or rather, I’m thinking that she will raise blue murder when she hears what’s happened, will demand that I put an end to it straightaway.
    She’s right, of course, but I don’t want to hear what’s right. I want to feel Paco’s hands on me again, feel his dick parting me like a ripe fruit, surging into me. Just one more time, I say to myself. I’ll just do it one more time, and then I’ll stop. And in a couple of weeks he’ll be gone and I’ll forget the whole thing. It will have been no more than a strange but beautiful dream.

8
    IT’S MIDDAY, AND I’m standing in the lobby of Paco’s hotel, waiting for Carlotta to come down. My hands are shaking a little, and I’ve half a mind to leave a message that I’m in the bar and go and calm myself with a few stiff vodkas, when she appears. Her hair is freshly washed and she has on a leaf-green halter-neck dress and gold stilettos with straps that wind around her shapely ankles like those of ballet shoes. Yet she looks morose. I know the reason for that: Paco told me on the phone that she didn’t get the part she was auditioning for.
    He called last night, his business-like tone indicating that he was with her. He would be in rehearsals all the following day, he said, but would like me to take her out for the afternoon, to cheer her up after her ‘bad luck’. It was strange to be talking to each other in such a detached formal way after the night and day we’d just spent together, and I felt my first pang of jealousy towards Carlotta, for being the one who would get to share his bed that night. For being the one who shared his bed at all, I reminded myself, since he had not conferred that privilege on me the previous night despite having just fucked me on the chair right next to it.
    I tried not to give myself over to the luxury of self-pity: I’d known the score, I told myself, when I offered to bring myself off in front of him a second time, and I couldn’t complain now. To ward off the return of the blues that it had taken me months to dispel, I made ahot chocolate and busied myself preparing some tours arranged for the weeks after Paco and Carlotta’s departure. There was life, I