Belle - Lesley Pearse [170]
‘Come and lie down on the bed with me,’ she suggested, taking him by the hand and drawing him out of the chair.
The most disconcerting thing about Bernard was not his inexperienced fumbling or his tiny penis, but the way he didn’t speak. He’d talked so easily over supper in fluent English, chatted through the interval at the theatre and on the fiacre ride back to the hotel, but since asking her to undress he’d said nothing. This was something she’d never come across before; in fact she’d found men with tiny penises were usually inclined to talk more than other men. Not only did they claim it was small because they’d been drinking, but very often they were the ones who liked to talk dirty too. He remained silent, however, even when she began to undress him.
After an hour Belle seriously considered offering Bernard his hundred francs back, thanking him for the supper and theatre and making a rush for the door. She had tried so hard to get him to ejaculate, but nothing, rubbing him, licking him, worked. His cock remained flaccid, and he was still silent.
The good supper and the wine they’d had with it, then the champagne since they got back to his room were making her sleepy, yet she was cold too from being outside the bedclothes. Finally she felt she had to concede she was never going to make it happen, and sitting up in the bed she drew him to her breasts to cuddle him, with the intention of admitting she was defeated.
But all at once he began sucking at her breast like a hungry baby, and when she slid her hand down the bed towards his penis, she found it had suddenly grown hard. He groaned as she touched it, and sucked harder at her nipple. Belle was so encouraged that she held it more firmly. She thought there was something a bit unhealthy about him responding only to the combination of breast suckling and masturbation, but she was so relieved that she’d finally found the secret to get him going that she didn’t care why that was.
He came within a few minutes, and it was only then that he found his voice and called her ‘nurse’. When she looked down at him he had tears in his eyes.
Within ten minutes he was sound asleep, still with his face pressed to her breast. She wondered who the nurse was, and how old he was when he’d had a similar experience with her. Belle had a strong feeling he’d never had ordinary sex with a woman. She wished then that she had asked him earlier if he was married and had children. She knew nothing personal about him.
She waited until quarter past twelve, then wriggled away from him, got up and dressed herself. She scribbled a little note for him, thanking him for a lovely evening, and left it on the pillow, then silently let herself out of the room.
The doorman on duty was not the one who’d directed her to the dining room earlier that evening or opened the door when they came back from the theatre, and if he thought it odd that a woman was leaving to go home alone so late at night, he didn’t show it. He helped her into the fiacre, smiled warmly when she tipped him, and so Belle thought that maybe it was commonplace to him.
But as the fiacre rumbled along the deserted streets Belle felt happy. In one night she’d earned far more than most women earned in a month, she’d had a lovely supper and been to the theatre too, plus she’d managed to give Bernard what he wanted. Respectable people might consider that distasteful and sinful, but she didn’t care what they thought. As far as she was concerned, helping an inadequate man with sexual problems to find some release was a good and kind thing.
Chapter Twenty-eight
January slipped into February, then on into March, and Belle was still at the Hôtel Mirabeau, and still earning a hundred francs each time Pascal arranged for her to meet a gentleman.
She had moved into a bigger and sunnier room on the first floor which had a tiny wrought-iron