Girl-on-mannequin loving is the new trend on the high street.
On Bath Street there’s a shop – Azi – which sells French clothes, and the girl who works there – let’s call her Azi too – well, one day she… No, I can’t tell it like that. I’ll try another way.
I park at the multi-storey and walk to work, so I pass this shop where the sales assistant… No, not like that either. Perhaps I need to be drunker. A lot drunker. Anyway, it was out of character for me. Although I’ve had a couple of girl-on-girl encounters and they were fun, I thought all that was in the past. I’m with Stephen now and we have a good relationship, good sex. Very good.
But this girl… Azi. You had to see her to understand. She was tall and curvy with breasts that were wide and deep, strong thighs. A mouth made for kissing. She wore that matte café-au-lait lipstick a lot of Black girls are into now and on her it looked good. No nail extensions; I suppose they would have made it difficult to dress the window display, but I’ve always found acrylic nails a bit creepy so I was pleased about that.
Pleased. What am I saying? It sounds as if I seduced her when… OK, I’ll tell it as it happened and you can make up your own mind.
I saw her every day, fiddling with the window; checking the flowers in the vase, changing the mannequin’s necklace, adding a scarf. There was something subtly different every day, you see, so people got in the habit of looking. I suppose it brought them more trade.
After a while she began to smile at me, and I would smile back. I never wear French stuff myself – I prefer Italian styling and French clothing is too self-consciously cute; daisies embroidered on buttonholes, that kind of thing – not the right image for me.
I sell sound-systems to businesses, putting together TV, broadband and laptop applications with scrambler systems and state-of-the-art user interfaces, so business people can talk in confidence. So I’m not, you know, stupid. I have an engineering degree. Drunk, yes, but not stupid.
Then I notice this girl’s hands – I’ll have to keep calling her Azi – when I pass by. She strokes the models’ plush contours, she spreads her fingers over their velvet breasts and squeezes gently, looking me in the eye. One day she’s kneeling with her head pressed to the place where the mannequin’s thighs would join – if it had thighs – while she fastens a belt around its waist. Sexy. Provocative.
And I’m thirty-two, you know? I have my own flat and my own car and I’m wondering if the rest of my life will be like this, or whether I will rise to the dizzy excitement of moving in with Stephen and maybe even – gasp – buying a cat! So when I see Azi grazing her nails across a mannequin’s ribs from behind as she winks, slowly, almost challengingly – well, I just push on the shop door…
And it’s locked. I look at the sign. They don’t open until 9.30 and it’s 8.48. While I’m still wondering why Azi gets to work so early, she unbolts the door and takes my hand. Just like that. Her thumb running over my palm, nail digging in a little, right in the centre, her eyes dark and soft and her lips curling up and away into a wide smile with nothing innocent about it.
So I hear her bolt the door again. She tugs me into the shop, which is small and smells of vanilla, and as we pass the window I reach out and touch one of the mannequins. They are old and faded – just torsos covered in velvet the colour of weak tea, but there’s something quite enticing about them. They have collarbones, breasts, navels and a V-shaped fold where Azi had pressed her head that day. No arms or heads or legs though. Which makes them both sexy, and creepy.
She drags me into the changing room. Instead of some tiny plywood partition with louvre doors, it’s a real room. It has a chaise longue covered in green velvet. They really like their velvet, I think to myself. And there’s a cheval mirror.
Azi wears a white cotton dress and a woven leather belt I’ve already heard creaking as she walks. She unfastens the belt and unbuttons the dress, standing between me and the mirror so I can see her, front and back. She’s naked underneath. Her pubic hair is rich and curly and shines like leaves in a rainforest; the dress, pooled around her feet, is like fallen blossom. She steps out of her heelless leather slippers and comes to me. Her hands are softer than the mannequin’s velvet flesh and hot, as she takes my jacket and lays it across a chair, stands in front of me and unbuttons my shirt, tugging it free of my waistband and lifting it from my shoulders to hang it up. She unzips my skirt and sinks to the floor with it so I can look down on her and admire the length of her spine before it widens to her buttocks like a river running to the sea. Which is the last coherent thought I have for quite some time, because she tips her head back and smiles at me – that wide knowing smile, and then tips it forward again and presses her smiling mouth against my panties, breathing out deeply to flood my already hot flesh with moist air. It feels as if my underwear should simply melt under her mouth, dissolve like mist when the sun rises, but instead I feel her fingers behind me, slipping under the elastic, and my memory superimposes the image of her kneeling in the window, fiddling with the belt she was fitting to the mannequin, and in a sudden and unexpected rush of excitement, I come.
I’ve never done that before, not like that, not without, you know, penetration, clitoral stimulation, a certain period of precise alignment of this and that to deliver an orgasm like a carefully planned meal. This is like fast food; swift, easy and damn the future. This is what I want now, right now!
I’m almost giggling as the after-ripples of pleasure strike, making my legs wobble. Why didn’t I know it could be like this? Azi finishes pulling down my panties and I step out of them, not very gracefully, but I don’t care, and she takes my hand again and leads me to the chaise longue. I’m following her at one pace distance, watching her naked body and trying to work out what the word is for the way her breasts and buttocks move. They don’t bounce, or jiggle, like it says in porn books, there is no word for that movement, but if you imagine a small boat riding the waves – a fluid movement, up and down, with a huge hidden power behind it, like the ocean, then that’s what she looks like.
I am ashamed of my tatty but comfortable bra – a bit grey, much too serviceable for a seduction scene – but Azi undoes it with care, reaching behind me as she gazes into my eyes, and laughing when the hooks and eyes unfasten. She’s like a kid – no shame, no judgement, just fun.
When she pushes me down onto the green velvet, I’m laughing too. And when her knee prises my legs apart, I open for her with a kind of glee I haven’t felt since I was six, and skipping in the playground at primary school.
She has strong fingers. Her face is serious now, as she presses her thumb against my clit, with two fingers deep inside me. Her other hand is roaming all over my body: shoulders, arms, waist, thighs – she even lifts my foot in her hand and cups my heel, before pushing my leg even higher, so my toes come to rest on her shoulder. I feel the beginnings of orgasm and push my hips so they rise into the air between us as though I’m made of nothing, as though I’ve been hollowed out by pleasure. Then I feel her wide mouth on my breast, sucking not just my nipple but as much of my flesh as she can get into herself as she pushes herself into me, and I come again.
The third time we’re pressed together on the narrow couch Her mouth is over mine, her lips and tongue investigating me, her hand is now folded, a soft fist, and the knuckles rub over my clit, so that I feel bump, pleasure, bump, pleasure, first side to side, then round and round, and I come into her mouth, my breathing becoming harsher, shorter, more demanding and her lips open to me, pliant, relaxing, taking my excitement and turning it into satisfaction.
Three times. Never before. Never in my life, not even the time Stephen and I tried amyl nitrate and I ended up with a nosebleed, never have I come three times, let alone in a few minutes. I laugh, about to tell her how wonderful this is, she is, but as I begin to speak she presses her fingers over my mouth and I smell myself on them and it’s exciting all over again. So I shut up and kneel over her. This time I’m sliding my hands over her body as she slides hers over me, but I focus on the moist lushness between her legs, opening her and feeling the slickness of her inner lips, as her hands continue to explore and learn every inch of my body.
She comes, shuddering, lips pulled back from gritted teeth, eyes slitted, a high fine sound coming from her throat like a bird singing. She looks like someone who’s won a victory; she’s fierce and wonderful. For a while we lie together, legs and fingers entwined, my head resting on her shoulder, then she lifts her head and kisses me again, so gently, so softly that I know it’s goodbye.
She clothes me silently, and I kneel to button her dress and buckle her belt, and we smile at each other, kissing one last time before we step back into the shop. She unbolts the door and I walk to work, checking my watch. It’s 9.27.
When I pass the next morning, Azi, the shop, has whitewashed windows. I stare in surprise and try to peer through the blind over the door, but I can see nothing. It stays that way for two weeks. When it opens again, Azi, my lover, is gone. There’s a new assistant, new shelves and a bright red sofa in the changing room.
Ok, so I’ve lost her. So it’s over. I can cope with that. I’m drunk enough now. Come with me, it’s not far to walk.
Ok – that’s the shop over there, Azi. Look in the window. See those mannequins? They’re pink, aren’t they? A gorgeous soft pink, like rose petals, and they’re silk, not velvet, right? Okay. Now look, if I stand here, right in front of one of them, can you see? It’s me, isn’t it? To the very inch and curve. All the time she was loving me, she was measuring me with her hands. She’s copied me and put me in the window. And what I can’t cope with, you know, is this – it’s wondering who the other one was, the one who had skin like velvet.
