And tonight she was going to have him. Again.
A sharp, erotic sensation coiled in the pit of her stomach at the thought of him. A longing. A craving.
Tonight I am going to have you. Again and again and again!
Her past receded in the rear-view mirror with every kilometre she covered. The forest of winter-brown pines that lined the autobahn streaked by on both sides, along with road signs, turn-offs and other, slower cars. She was in a hurry to get there. Her heart beat with excitement, with danger. Her pulse raced. She had been running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours, but she wasn’t tired — she was wide, wide awake. Going into the unknown. Going to meet a man who had been a total stranger until just a few weeks ago.
His photograph, which she had printed from the jpeg he had emailed her, lay on the passenger seat of her elderly grey Passat. He was naked. A tall, muscular guy, semi-erect as if teasing her to make him bigger. A tight stomach, nearly a six-pack, and she could already feel it pressing hard against her own. He had brown hairs, thick and downy, on his chest and on his legs, and she liked that. Trevor was white and bony, and his body was almost hairless. This man was tanned, lean, fit.
Hans.
He looked wild, like a young Jack Nicholson, his hair thinning on the top. He looked just the way he had sounded on the Internet chat room when she had first been attracted to him.
Feral.
The background to the photograph was strange. An enclosed, windowless space that might be the engine room of a ship, although she had a pretty good idea what it really was. Like everything about him, it excited her. Shiny, floor-to-ceiling metal casings, beige coloured, with dials, gauges, switches, levers, knobs, winking lights. It could be some kind of control room in a nuclear reactor? Or a mission control centre?
She felt on a mission very much under control!
Who had taken that photograph, she wondered? A lover? Had he taken it himself with a time delay function? She didn’t care, she wanted him. All of him. Wanted that thing that half-dangled, half-rose. Wanted to gather it deep inside her again. Wanted him so badly she was crazed with lust. Mosquitoes got crazed with blood lust. They had to land, take in the blood, even if it killed them. She had to have Hans, take him into her, into her body, into her life, even if that killed her, too.
She didn’t care. For now she was free. She had been free for two whole days and that was longer than she had been free for years.
Over the scratchy reception of the car’s radio, struggling through the occasional interference of someone talking in German, Bob Dylan was singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’.
They were. They really were! Flecks of sleet struck the windscreen, and the wipers cleared them. It was cold outside and that was good. It was good to make love in the warmth when it was cold outside. And, besides, the cold had plenty of other advantages.
I will never let you go, Trevor had said. Never. Ever. He had told her that for years.
Hans explained to her precisely what he was going to do to her. Exactly how he would make love to her the first time. And he had done so just the way he had described. She liked that Germanic precision. The way he had studied every detail of her photograph. The way he already knew her body when they met. The way he told her he loved her hair, and had buried his face into it. Into all of it.
My name is Hans. I am thirty-seven, divorced, looking to start a new life with a lady of similar age. I am liking brunettes. Slim. Excuse my bad English. I like you. I don’t know you, but I like you.
I like you even more!
She would be forty this year. Hans would be her toyboy, she had teased him. He had laughed and she liked that; he had a big sense of humour. A wicked sense of humour.
Everything about him was totally wicked.
She looked OK, she knew. She’d never been a beauty, but she understood how to make herself look attractive, sexy. Dressed to kill, plenty of men would look at her. She used to keep in shape with her twice-weekly aerobics classes, then, when Trevor had gone through one of his particularly nasty phases, she had turned to binge eating — and then binge drinking — for comfort. Then she enrolled in WeightWatchers, and the fat and the flab and the cellulite had come off again. Her figure was good, her stomach firm — not a distended pouch, like the stomachs of some of her friends who’d had children. And her boobs were still firm, still defying gravity. She’d like to have been a little taller — she’d always wished that — but you couldn’t have everything.
Anyhow, Trevor, who was much taller than her, told her the very first time they had made love that people were all the same size in bed. That had made her smile.
Trevor used to tell her that nothing you do in life is ever wasted. He was always coming up with sayings, and there was a time when Janet had listened to them intently, adored hearing them, filed them away in her memory and loved repeating them back to him.
Loved him so damned much it hurt.
And she hadn’t even minded the pain. Which was a good thing because pain was something Trevor did really, really well. The knots, the handcuffs, the nipple clamps, the leather straps, the spiked dog collar, the whips, the stinging bamboo canes. He liked to hurt her; knew how to cause her pain and where to inflict it. But that had been OK because she loved him. She would have done anything for him.
But that was then.
And sometime between then and now he had changed. They had both changed. His horizons had narrowed; hers had widened.
Every system can be beaten. That was one of his sayings.
He was right.
Now she was a lifetime away. So it seemed. And one thousand, two hundred and twelve kilometres away, driving through spartan December pine forest. Click. One thousand, two hundred and thirteen. And, in a few moments, travelling at one hundred and thirty klicks an hour, with her life in the two large suitcases jammed on the rear seats, one thousand, two hundred and fourteen.
‘Hagen 3.’
The turn-off was coming up. She felt a tightening of her throat, and a prick of excitement deep inside her. How many villages, small towns, big cities had she driven through or passed by in her travels, during her life, and wondered, each time, what would it be like to stop here? What would it be like to drive into this place as a total stranger, knowing no one, then check into a hotel, or rent a small flat, and start a totally new life?
She was about to realize her dream. Hagen. So far it was just images she had found when she had Googled it. Hagen. The thirty-seventh largest town in Germany. She liked that. A population of two hundred thousand. On the edge of the Ruhr. A town few knew about outside of its inhabitants. A once important industrial conurbation that was now reinventing itself as a centre of the arts, the websites had proclaimed. She liked that. She could see herself in a place that was a centre of the arts.
Up until now, she had not had much contact with the arts. Well, there had never been time, really. During the week she was always on the road, driving from place to place as an area sales representative for a company that made industrial brushes. Finishing brushes for the printing trade. Brushes for vacuum cleaners. Brushes for the bottom of elevator doors. For electrical contacts. She would miss her flirting and banter with her clients, the almost exclusively male buyers at the factories, the component wholesalers, the plant hire and hardware stores. She was missing her comfortable, new, company Ford Mondeo, too, but the Passat was OK. It was fine. It was a small price to pay. Tiny.