Carrion: A Story of Passion Read Free

and her cream French knickers. The sight of her nipples through the fine oxford cotton entrances me. I wonder if she can see mine. The thought makes me feel slightly shy. I’m wearing the silk pyjamas we brought from the boutique around the corner yesterday. This has been Alexander’s solution to my captivity - we have brought as I have needed. His wardrobe now plays host to a small essential (designer labelled) set of clothes. His bathroom now stores my toothbrush, a bottle of my favourite perfume and a Dior compact travel set. There is something liberating about stripping down to the bare materials in life. I apply this new found thinking to my family as well as goods.
    I really should really ring my mother.
    I sent her text a couple of weeks ago informing her that I was going away for a few weeks. In a way it wasn't a lie.
    When Celia leaves us, we split to different parts of the flat. Alexander starts taking down the doors of the kitchen cabinets and I sit, curled up on the end of the large leather Chesterfield, reading a gloomy novel by Camus. He has a very intense taste when it comes to literature. His bookshelf is full of dusty old volumes that he has picked up in charity shops; it’s like a miniature Battersea for dead, miserable and mostly forgotten authors. He doesn't have a television; he streams everything he wants to watch - although I don't get the impression that he wants to watch much. He says, “Fantasy is for living, not for watching.” He says that most television is stupefying: Soma for the masses.” I don’t entirely disagree, but sat in the quiet of the flat with nothing more than Camus or watching raindrops race down the window for entertainment, I crave a bit of Soma.
    Every now and then there is a clatter from the kitchen (he's not really the D.I.Y type) I look at him, working in his grey sweats, his naked torso, tightly, precisely defined. He's wearing his hipster Prada glasses so that he can see the screws. His hair is still holding from the amount of oil in it last night. He is irreducible complexity; each component beautiful and singular that should it be removed he would cease to be anything other than ordinary, yet together... he is a rare and pretty specimen. There are some people who walk into a room and everybody instinctively bows to the new emperor – this is Alexander. I am his subject, and I am devoted.
     
    Sunday afternoon slides by in rain and grey light: in silence and in beauty. The real world is knocking on the door. Tomorrow the alarm will go off, and the routine will begin. I will go to work and dream of this place until the clock hits the hour and I can come back.
    "What are you thinking?" he asks, handing me a cup of fresh coffee from the stove pot. He has sweetened it with honey and cream.
    I look out of the small, dirty window onto a grey sky and sigh. "I'm thinking I don't want to wake up, because waking is death and dreaming is life."
    He chuckles and bends down to kiss me, slipping his hand under the silk of my pyjamas. It travels over my shoulder and down onto my breast. His lips brush my ear and I think that he will lead me to bed but he doesn't and I'm left suspended by desire. I read. Alexander sits at the kitchen table on the MacBook with his headphones in. Hours pass.
    At eight. o. clock, he tells me to dress as we are going out for dinner. I'd been thinking about bed and the six-thirty morning alarm call. There isn't time for protest as he's already left the room and the shower is running. I break the spine of his book purely out of rebellion and leave it on the sofa.
    Deciding what to wear isn't a challenge; I have a choice of two dresses (not including the Marie Antoinette number) and one pair of evening shoes. Back at my flat the process would have involved at least an hour rummaging through mountains of cheaply produced, high-fashion decisions. I would have choice of colour, of cut, of connotation. Here, I have the choice between a black lace long-sleeved