“Don’t tell me you don’t want it.”
“I do. I do, but I don’t want you.”
“You’re denying yourself.”
“I don’t want you!” She shouted this last sentence and the neighbouring couples looked over, their swaying interrupted.
“Miranda!”
“I want a man who’s very like you, John. A man with your looks and your charm and your…sex appeal. But he needs to have more. He needs qualities you don’t have.”
The dance ended and the master of ceremonies announced the start of the banquet.
“Listen, sweetheart,” John hissed, holding her by the wrist, his words streaming into her ear while the throngs parted around them, swarming towards the tables. “I don’t know what makes you think you’re so special. If it was just sex I was after, I could get it anywhere in this room, a hundred times over. I’m conferring an honour on you. Stop being such a girl and give yourself to me.”
“I want a real man,” insisted Mimi, her eyes filling with tears. “You aren’t one. You have too much missing.”
“But I have psychic-linked you. You have to be mine.”
“You haven’t earned me.”
John made an incoherent noise of pure frustration, dropping her wrist and pushing past her to the banquet tables.
He had been placed opposite Mimi, between a famous columnist and a former pop star-turned-pop-culture commentator.
He smiled radiantly at each in turn, expressing his belief that this was the luckiest night of his life, and poured them a glass of wine, leaving Mimi to sort herself out.
Smarmy git, she thought viciously, watching him flirt shamelessly with the columnist, whose mask of thick makeup and sparrow-boned wrists gave the opposite impression to the insouciant youthfulness they were intended to convey.
He leaned over her, hemming her in with the force of his attention, occasionally throwing a glance over his shoulder at the blonde former pop star in reply to one of her let-me-in remarks. As John charmed and his neighbours fawned, Mimi grew increasingly jaundiced, downing too much wine and ignoring the exquisite dishes that appeared regularly beneath her nose.
“You’re such a brilliant man!” gushed the columnist, playing with her summer fruit mousse rather than eating it.
Mimi snorted audibly, causing both females opposite to regard her with shocked disdain.
“Mimi, have you had quite enough to drink?” John moved the bottle out of her reach, but she snatched for it, missing and thumping the table hard. Cutlery rattled. He mouthed something to the other women that looked to Mimi like “Drink problem.”
She lurched to her feet, pointing angrily at John.
“He’s a charlatan,” she ranted. “Listen to him at your peril. I’m not going to anymore.”
Her dignified flouncing was marred somewhat by the staggering steps she took out of the banqueting hall, but at least she was out of sight of the other guests by the time she tripped, stumbled and sank down on a sofa in the lobby, falling immediately and ingloriously into openmouthed sleep.
When she came to, one diamond drop was digging into her cheek and her head felt jammed with marshmallow glue. Her eyes didn’t focus for a while, but her ears worked, and they could hear some strange noises.
Grunts, gasps, broken words, the creak of springs. Put them together and what have you got?
“Where…?” She sat up and squinted around herself. This wasn’t the hotel. They were back at John’s house, in his huge front room. Mimi had been dumped on an armchair, while over on the rug by the Victorian fireplace… Oh.
She looked away, blinked, looked back to make sure.
It was real.
John had his hands squarely on the naked shoulders of the pop star girl and was pumping in and out of her from behind, a blur of sweat and industry, while the columnist, sated in a silk dressing gown, reclined on a nearby armchair, sipping cognac.
“Oh, you’ve joined the land of the living,” she hailed condescendingly. “I expect you’d like a nip of this, would you? Perhaps not such a good idea.”
She shot Mimi a sickly-sweet smile.