Runway

Adélaïde’s note was like many I’ve received. She was bored in her marriage and missed the exciting sex life she had once enjoyed. She related to the stories I had written about my long marriage lacking in intimacy. “My husband, too, is like this. Dull. It is more frustrating even because we have so many friends who like to party. I tell them I envy them.”

I offered her my condolences. As we corresponded, it became apparent that Adélaïde was fairly jaded. Everything seemed to bore her, she told me. “I hate to be so boring, always complaining,” she apologized. “Maybe it’s the summer, all the partying, so boring. I’ll be better when we get back to Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles does have its excitements,” I wrote. “Are you currently on vacation?”

“No, not vacation, really. We always spend summer in the Riviera, ever since I was a girl. It’s too much partying, always partying. It makes me so tired and bored.”

Adélaïde’s colossal ennui aside, I understood her frustration. Even the fabulous can be unhappy, of course, and it sounded to me that she was perhaps wrongly cast in her jetset life. She wrote me with great frequency, suggesting that our notes offered a more interesting diversion than any she could find on the Riviera. After getting to know one another a bit, I suggested that we trade photographs. I sent her a pleasant shot of my face.

She responded with a portfolio bulging with nudes. “Thanks,” I wrote. “These look professionally done. But I’m confused: did you make these photographs or is this you in them?”

“Yes, those are me,” she replied. “Years ago when I was a model. I’m fat now, so lazy in summer.”

“You were a model?”

“Yes, runways when I was studying dance, just like every other young girl in Paris. I am a cliché, so boring. Now I’m a lawyer, like everyone else.”

I looked through the portfolio. Horizontal poses emphasized her long limbs. Black and white images contrasted tones across her rich, dark skin. Her thin body turned in simple yet challenging positions. Always, her face was still, utterly implacable.

Had we not been corresponding for some time, I might have suspected that I was being fooled. A runway model on the French Riviera discovered my blog and struck up a correspondence? A runway model bored in her marriage and stunning, in the way that French runway models may be?

She had certainly roused my curiosity, so I asked to know more about her life. She was born in Algeria, she said, and adopted as a baby by a Parisian couple. Her father was a surgeon and her mother a popular novelist. When she was in her teens, she met a much older man who introduced her to sex clubs and dungeons. She found she craved the kinks he introduced to her. “Sadly, he died,” she wrote. “Actually, I fear I killed him. So demanding, always wanting more making love. I think he died happy in my arms. So then I got married and went to law school and found your blog.”

“That’s an incredible story,” I replied. Truly, I wondered how credible all of this could be. Yet she seemed genuine and her story held up to follow up questions. And then, there was the portfolio.

“All I want is to find someone who does what you write about,” she wrote. “But everyone is so boring, and so I am boring.”

I asked the inevitable question. “Are you ever in New York?”

“Of course, we are there, it’s famous. We are required to go to a birthday party in the city soon, but it will be short and I will be with my husband. Can you come to Los Angeles?”

“I’m there now and then. But I don’t have the frequent flyer miles I imagine you have.”

“This is true, I could send you a ticket for free. I did that once. I met a man in London and flew him to Paris. We had a good affair. That was long ago.”

A former runway model on the Riviera was proposing to fly me to Los Angeles to have “a good affair.” I supposed that I could do that. We continued to correspond and, as summer ended, she prepared to return to Los Angeles via the birthday party in New York. She would be in Manhattan for about twenty-four hours. “I understand that we can’t meet on this trip,” I wrote. “If you can get away for coffee or drinks, drop me a line. It would be nice to meet my correspondent.” She gave me the name of her hotel, and I gave her the name of my neighborhood.

I thought of her on the morning after her party, knowing she’d be off to the airport that evening. I had no expectation of actually meeting her then, and assumed I would next hear from her once she was back in Los Angeles. I made coffee and sat to work.

Mid-morning, I checked my email. She had written at nine-thirty-three: “I can see you today.” At nine-forty-two, she wrote: “Are you there? Can you see me today?” Just after ten, she wrote; “I am coming to your neighborhood now. If I see you, good. If I don’t, there will be another time.” She mentioned a local landmark, a small plaza. She didn’t know that the plaza was currently under renovation and possibly inaccessible.

It was nearly eleven. “If you get this note, I am meeting you,” I typed quickly. “I’ll be in a navy jacket.” I hurried to put on shoes, grabbed my jacket and raced out the door.

“This is insane,” I thought, walking around the high plywood walls that shut of the construction in the plaza, wishing I had asked for her cell phone number. I looked along the crowded sidewalk, realizing that not only had I never seen Adélaïde in person, I had only seen her photographed nude. Then, turning a corner, I caught a glimpse of her. She was walking away, but there was no question in my mind that it was her. Her hips swayed with studied nonchalance with the landing of each graceful step, her straight hair moving side to side along the length of her back. She stood in bold relief from the mortals she towered above.

I ran to catch up. She stopped to speak to a security guard, as if to ask directions. I slowed my pace and walked to her side. “Adélaïde?”

She turned and looked at my face, then down my body, and back to my eyes. “Thank you,” she said to the guard, her eyes not leaving mine. “I don’t have much time.”

“My apartment is nearby,” I smiled, indicating the direction with a sweep of my hand. “Shall we?”

She began to walk, still staring at me. “Are you from Wales?”

“Um, no. Well, yes, my family is, but we left in the seventeenth century.” I hoped I didn’t sound nervous. “Or sixteenth. I forget.”

“So you are a typical American?”

“Yes,” I laughed. “Very typical.”

“Good.” She said. We walked to my place without further conversation. I replayed her biography in my mind. She had referred to being fat, but she had the ultrathin body of the runway model she had been. She had referred to things she had done long ago, but she was clearly not yet thirty. She was tan and made up, wearing a loose top and tight jeans, obviously designer, and stepping in sandal heels that added several inches to her already impressive height.

I felt at once decidedly normal and incredibly apart, as if her reflected glamour at once attenuated and enhanced my own appearance. A taxi slowed so that the driver could admire her. She seemed not to notice.

I showed her into my apartment. She walked into the living room. She put down her bag and turned her head to me. Her body followed, her hair carrying the motion into space. “Well, you have me for only one hour,” she said. She held her chin high, apparently defying me to make proper use of the hour she was granting.

I smiled. “Then let’s not waste time on words.” I stepped forward and kissed her. She opened her mouth slightly. I took her jaw in my grip and lifted her face. “Lose the shoes,” I growled, pushing my mouth into hers. She fumbled with her shoes, kicking off one and then the other as we kissed. Once she stood flatfooted, inches shorter, I lowered myself from standing on my toes.

As one hand gripped her neck, the other moved around her body, getting familiar with the stranger I now had for one hour. Her breasts were firm yet clothed. “Hands up,” I ordered. She offered no resistance. I lifted her top over her body, exposing her bare torso. She looked at me waiting to be admired, but I had no time for that. I unzipped her jeans and pushed them down her hips, stopping midthigh. She wore no panties. I barely registered her body in my mind before shoving two fingers into her pussy. “Nice and wet,” I said, and then kissed her. “You came here to get fucked, didn’t you?”

“I have no other reason to bother,” she shrugged.

I took her hair in my fist and pulled up into her cunt. “Come,” I ordered. I walked backwards down the hall, pulling inside her body as she waddled behind in her lowered jeans.

I took my fingers from her and pushed her onto the bed. I tugged the jeans from her legs. “It’s a shame your husband waits,” I said. “This means I can’t mark you. I’d like nothing better than to beat you.”

She pulled back on the pillows, turning on a hip and extending her legs. Her eyelids lowered to her body then looked up to me. “Is that all you can think to do to me?”

I opened a drawer and pulled out a condom. “I’m full of ideas for what to do to you.”

I undressed and put on the condom. She watched, assessing me, and continued to size me up as I entered her. I can’t speak for her, but I was keenly aware of the artifice of the moment. She was probably the most conventionally beautiful person I have even seen nude, much less fucked. She would have been perfectly at home in a Playboy centerfold or walking Dior down a runway. I looked her over as I fucked her, taking in her perfectly tan breasts—implants, large for her frame—her flawless skin stretched over precise bones, the tiny sliver of pale skin a remnant of the thong she had worn all summer, the freshly waxed slip that now swallowed my cock. This girl had been admired her entire life for her exoticism and her beauty, and as we fucked, she must have expected those things to be the source of my pleasure with her.

But I knew her from her letters. I had one hour and the meter was ticking.

I took her legs over my shoulders, grabbed her arms and fucked into her, hard. She missed rough sex and I was going to fuck her roughly, using her, reminding her of what it had been like to kill a man with her pussy.

She closed her eyes, her head bouncing back and forth on my pillows. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “What’s the matter? Don’t I turn you on?”

“Are you taunting me?” I grunted. “Seriously, Adélaïde, husband or no husband, I will slap the shit out of you.”

She pulled up a shoulder, even as her body moved under my thrusts. “You will do what you have to do,” she sighed, affecting boredom.

“You fucking hole.” I pulled back and slapped her cheek. “You fucking plastic hole. Did you come here to insult me?”

“No.” Her face was already reddening when she turned back to me. “I came here to get ‘fucked,’ as you say, if you don’t mind.”

I felt the artifice fade. This runway model had come to me to get fucked by a dominant named Jefferson. I happened to be that dominant, or at least, to write him, and I know damned well how he fucks. If that was the lady’s pleasure, she had forty-five minutes of it coming.

I fell onto her body and grabbed her shoulders. I fucked her roughly in every way I knew, in ways I had observed my friends fucking, in ways I had picked up in other places. I flipped her around. I chewed her feet. I mauled her fake breasts. I shoved fingers into her ass and alongside my cock inside her pussy. I slapped in her ways I hoped wouldn’t leave marks.

She looked up at me. “I’m thinking you don’t like me.”

I spit in her face. “What the fuck did you say?”

She wiped at the spittle. “I think I don’t turn you on very much.”

My cock wilted inside her. Maybe she was right. Perhaps I was well outside my league. Who knows what runway models do in Paris sex clubs? She was probably remembering times when she was coked out of her mind with porn star men who left her feeling precisely how she wanted to feel under the direction of a man she would later murder with her headline beauty. I kissed her lightly and rolled off her body, panting.

“I don’t know.” She extended a foot in perfect pointe and wrapped a hand around her thigh. The thumb approached her forefinger. “Maybe you don’t like me because I’m fat now.”

I looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes. “I refuse to go there with you,” I said sharply.

She turned on the pillow. “What do you mean?” Just then, “The Ride of the Valkyries” began to play, tinny and distant but getting louder. “Oh, my phone!” She jumped from the bed and ran into the living room. I heard her speaking casually in French. Her voice got more heated and she hung up. She was agitated when she returned to the bedroom. “That was my husband, I am late. He is so angry. I must go.” She picked up her jeans and tugged at the legs.

“No.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “What you must do is suck this cock.”

She looked at me and shook her head. “No, really, he is already waiting. I’m late.”

I lowered my voice. “On your knees, Adélaïde. Suck my cock.”

Her arms dropped. Her jeans rested against her bare legs. “Can you do it quickly?”

I looked her in the eye. She understood my answer. She dropped to her knees and began to suck me.

I don’t hold out much hope for the blowjobs of pretty women. They know that men will get off on their beauty, so they may not have bothered to think seriously about working to get a man to orgasm. This was not the case with Adélaïde. Here was a runway model who had seriously sucked cock and who knew that each moment she spent with my dick in her mouth was another moment she would have to explain to her waiting husband.

I took full advantage of her beauty, her skill and her anxiety. I fucked her face hard. Finally, I announced that I was going to cum. “Oui, mon Dieu,” she whispered. I grunted and heaved as I came on her expensive face. She leaned forward to feel me as I streamed on her cheeks. “Oh, God,” she rasped. “I thought you didn’t like me.”

I was still catching my breath when she left. She hadn’t bothered to fix her make up, saying she would do so in a cab. She washed up quickly, pulled on her clothes, and was gone. I wondered if this experience would warrant me “a good affair” in Los Angeles.

She contacted me when she was home, saying she had had a good time. Her notes came at the usual pace and then tapered off as she got back into the routines of partying.

A couple of months later, she wrote to tell me she was pregnant.

She had been pregnant when we met, actually, but she had not known it. “I’m sure the baby will be healthy,” she wrote. “After you fucked me so hard and all the partying I did in LA, this baby is proven to be invincible! I am very happy, dear man. This baby is my life and changes everything.”

“That’s right,” I replied. “A baby can change so much.”