Dressed to Impress. Elizabeth Coldwell
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is OK, that even if she is puzzled about how he got the photos, she isn’t angry with him. And she knows just how to prove it.
When Amy gets home that night, she takes three more self-portraits, each in a different style – one stereotypically ‘sexy’, one classy and the other explicit – because she doesn’t know what Howard would like best. That remote shutter gadget she thought she’d never use is certainly coming in handy. After a quick shot of whisky for courage, she sends Howard an email, attaching the three original photos that he has already seen, and the new ones she’s just taken.
To: Howard Venn
From: Amy Jenssen
Subject: Photos
Attachments: Amy.zip
Here’s the complete set. If you like what you see, meet me at Pirelli’s for dinner tomorrow night at 8pm.
We missed you this week.
Amy
Howard has spent the last four days in his apartment, too ashamed to go to work, trawling the internet for advice on appropriate wording for an apology card. He sees Amy’s email immediately, and his stomach lurches. He’s sure the attachment will be a copy of the complaint Amy plans on lodging with management. Not that he blames her. He is thoroughly disgusted with himself.
He has to read the message three times before its meaning sinks in. She won’t be making a complaint. She missed him. She actually wants to see him again. With a shaky hand, Howard downloads the photos. He is of course intimately acquainted with the first three, but not with the others. Exhibit 4: Amy, straddling a chair, biting her lip seductively, dressed like a schoolgirl in a plaid skirt and white cotton shirt tied up to expose her midriff. Exhibit 5: Amy, drink in hand, blowing a kiss to the camera, in a semi-transparent chiffon peignoir that hints at the bounty beneath.
And finally there is Exhibit 6: Amy, wearing only her birthday suit, bent forward over the desk, looking back over her shoulder into the camera and winking. Howard makes a strangled sound. He can see right between her plump thighs to the blonde-furred crease in between. The lips of her sex look swollen, and he knows she was aroused when she took the photo. It is only with supreme effort, and some differential calculus, that Howard manages to get his libido under control. He’s saving himself for Amy.
When he arrives at the restaurant, Amy hardly recognises him. His usually tousled hair is swept back; he wears a suit and expensive Italian shoes. He searches the room for her anxiously, and when their eyes meet a broad smile transforms his usually serious face. She stands to greet him and his eyes widen at the way her red dress clings to the flare of her hips.
‘Hi, Howard, I’m really glad you came.’ Amy winces at her double entendre. ‘Um, I mean, I’m so happy you’re here. You look great.’
‘Thanks, my brother gave me some advice on what to wear.’ Howard blushes. ‘I don’t go out much.’
Once the waiter is out of earshot, he starts to apologise. ‘Amy, I’m so sorry about everything, I –’
‘It’s OK, Howard.’
‘No, you have to let me explain,’ he insists, and the next words come out in one long rush of a sentence. ‘I saw you at the print shop that night, but I was too shy to say hello, and then the assistant interrupted you and you got flustered and you forgot to stop the machine and it just kept on printing. It had already printed those photos before I stopped it, and I couldn’t just leave them there. And then, last Monday when you …’ Howard finally pauses, not for breath, but because what can he possibly say that would make things all right?
‘It’s fine, honestly –’
‘It’s so not, what I did was wrong, it was –’
‘Howard,’ Amy interrupts, ‘I said it’s fine. I’m grateful it was you who found them, not some random weirdo. So stop apologising. And … about that other thing … well, it’s my right to be upset or not. And I’m not.’
She slides a hand up Howard’s thigh.
‘Now, let’s start our date for real.’
To Howard’s delight, Amy continues to make physical contact with him throughout the evening, playfully slapping his arm when he makes an unexpected joke, letting her hand linger on his when she passes him the bread basket. He insists on paying, even though Amy demurs. He is old-fashioned, he admits. But it’s the least he can do, under the circumstances.
He thanks her for a lovely evening and sees her to a cab. He makes no assumptions that Amy will sleep with him. But Amy is feeling bold. She knows what she wants; it is within her reach; she wants Howard. When he opens the door for her, she whispers in his ear ‘Come with me, I want to show you my studio,’ then pulls him into the cab with her.
It’s only a short trip to her house, where Amy removes her glasses and pours them some wine, and Howard follows her into her study.
‘This is it,’ Amy says. ‘Look familiar?’
Howard’s throat goes dry. He definitely remembers the desk, although, when he saw it, Amy’s delectable body was draped over it.
Here goes nothing, she thinks, unzipping her dress and letting it fall to the ground with a hush.
Howard also recognises the lingerie Amy is wearing. His collar suddenly seems too tight. When she strips out of her stockings, her corset, her bra and her panties, all the air seems to leave the room.
‘Amy, you’re –’
‘Yes?’
‘– so lovely.’
She spins, slowly, showing off her peach of an ass. When she bends forward over the desk and looks back at Howard, the expression on his face is pure unadulterated lust.
Howard approaches lovemaking as he approaches most things in his life, with the precision required to achieve the most desirable outcome. His trembling hands move over Amy’s body slowly, calculating the degree of her response to each touch, assigning each a value weighted in proportion to her pleasure.
But when Amy shimmies her hips in desperation and pleads, ‘Howard, lick me, please, put your tongue in me,’ she undermines any goal of orderly erotic progression and forces him to act on instinct instead. Gone are the carefully measured caresses of before. He falls on her with an intensity both thrilling and frightening. The man Amy thought she knew is gone. This man, behind her, who traps her against the desk, who growls when she tries to turn around, is some other person entirely.
Howard’s hand presses down on the small of her back, and she feels his long tongue snaking into the hot wet core of her, his nose pressing against her anus, his fingers worrying at her clit. She comes on his face before he’s even taken his coat off.
When the aftershocks have died away, he helps her to her feet.
‘Wow, Howard, just, wow.’
Amy starts to undress him now, a reverse striptease of coat, tie, cufflinks, shirt. He keeps his eyes open when she kisses him, as if he’s scared she’ll disappear. That just makes Amy hotter. When she pulls his belt free and pushes his trousers and pants down, though, she is taken aback.
‘Sweet fucking Christ, Howard! That’s not a cock, that’s a club!’
Amy is too shocked to watch her language. She knew it was big – she had seen his member in the half-light of the storage room, before he had turned away from her – but she didn’t know it was this big. Nothing had quite prepared her for the sight of that magnificent thing, emerging fierce and flushed and swollen from the dark blond thatch of his pubic hair.
Howard looks embarrassed.
‘It’s OK,’ he says, ‘we don’t have to, you know, go all the way.’
‘Uh, excuse me? Of course we’re going all the way.’ Amy strokes the prominent ridge running