I glanced round to see if anyone else was listening or coming out to shut them up, but the doors and windows in the little campo stared blankly back. They looked rusty and dusty, as if they hadn’t been opened for years. Well, it was February, and foggy, and freezing cold. Only one was open, with a red curtain billowing out like a tongue over a box of geraniums.
I was imagining it. I started to stand up, but then a woman’s voice murmured something, and her lover answered, his voice harsh with lust. Individual hairs started to rise on my neck, on the crown of my head, along my arms. The noises were excruciatingly intimate, making me blush, but they were also turning me on.
Now there was a creaking of bed springs and they started to sing slowly, in an unmistakable rhythm. I started to rub my hands up and down my thighs. It was time to go. But I was pinned to the spot by the noises. Also I had no idea where I was, or where I was going. The ragged moans rose, became closer together, stretched into wordless gasping, sounding so close to fear or pain but we all know it’s perfect pleasure, panting in time to the creaking bed. My nipples, already cold, stiffened instinctively, my silk camisole clinging to the hard points. I covered my ears, but moisture seeped into my knickers. How desperate did that make me, getting aroused by someone else’s fucking? After my empty stalker fantasy, this was torture.
But the square was so silent. These were the only sounds. It was like I was in the room with them, seeing them through all the stages of whispering, kissing, touching, arousing each other in their bed right through to the fucking. I knew the man was inside her now, because every few seconds he gave a groan just like a tennis pro serving an ace, and that was what turned me on. The square reverberated with the rhythmic sounds, their animal groaning as the man’s cock thrust again and again into the woman with those glorious two-tone moans. Why did nobody else hear? The bed was banging against the wall and they were almost shouting now, the moans rising to that uninhibited pitch where pleasure meets pain.
I realised I was rocking, too, on my damp seat, cold hands rubbing at myself under my coat, fingers creeping under my skirt to find my crotch, sliding inside my knickers, one finger matching the heady rhythm echoing from the window, running up, running down my crack, making it wet, making me jealous, I could picture the sex-soaked scene through that shuttered window, the rumpled sheets, the bed thumping against the wall, their mouths open, his cock pulling out, big and hard and glistening with her juice, her pussy pink and open and wet, then him slamming her back against the pillows as he thrust inside.
Like a wildlife film when you see lions humping. They were hard at it up there. My fingers rubbed faster across my crotch and then the woman was straining for breath, hissing, ‘Yes, yes.’ I vaguely thought, surely it should be ‘si, si’? Maybe she was riding him, breasts bouncing, hard nipples catching between his teeth, his fingers digging into her haunches to keep her rammed on to his big cock. Everything was rising to a crescendo. A ball of excitement rolled and tightened in my stomach as the creaking of the bed grew more violent. I moaned out loud as my own pussy sucked at my fingers and then I came, quickly and quietly, my knees weak as I shivered there on the stone well, cold and exhausted and even more frustrated than before.
Upstairs the groaning and panting stopped, regained a second momentum with a kind of desperate shriek, then died.
It was as if everyone was holding their breath, daring each other to be the first to move. Why does masturbating make you feel so alone? No one to hold or touch after, that’s why. I got my own breath back and fumbled for my guidebook as if someone was watching me accusingly. Suddenly the door beneath the window opened. I pretended to study my map but glanced over the top of it to see what voluptuous, sated creature was emerging from the house.
But instead of a dishevelled Monica Bellucci lookalike in a fur coat and stilettos, with messed-up tendrils of black hair and scarlet lips, a slim, plain-looking figure with short fair hair in a long grey dress, thick tights and flat black lace-ups hurried out into the wintry light, fastening a billowing cape in a bow at her neck. Then, as she stepped backwards to call something up at the window she pulled a white cap and then a grey veil over her hair and fastened it with kirby grips. That woman in flagrante I’d been eavesdropping on, the afternoon adulteress, or whore, or honeymooning wife was actually – a nun!
I stifled a snort of laughter. Maybe she was in disguise. In fancy dress?
She put her hand up beside her mouth and called again. ‘Carlo! Answer me!’
The man refused to come to the window. Some kind of row going on?
‘For God’s sake!’
Finally a man’s hand pushed through the geraniums in the box and flung some cash down to the ground. Maybe she was a tom, after all?
‘Bastardo! I don’t want money!’ the nun half hissed, half screamed, waving her arms out of the cape. ‘I’m not one of your tourist groupies!’
Her accent was almost perfectly English, the smoker’s sexy rasp totally at odds with the prim exterior.
‘No?’ He shouted down. ‘Well, then you should start acting like a proper girlfriend and stay the night with me for once, instead of sneaking off after I’ve given you one. Oh, just fuck off back to your little prison before they notice you’re missing.’
‘Don’t you dare! You know my situation there! You know I can’t –’
I still couldn’t see her face, but I could see that she was shaking. Her hands, raised in the air as if to try and reach up to him, smacked back down to her sides, the fingers furiously twisting and bunching up the thick material of the cloak.
‘Well, I’m fed up with waiting. Plenty more where you came from.’ He was at the window now. All I could see was a head of dark, curly hair and a navy sweater rolled up over big strong arms. His hands were curled into fists on the edge of the windowsill. A livid red scar ran round one wrist like a bracelet. ‘Use the money to buy yourself a new prayer mat, or a Bible, or a nice fat candle, or whatever you use in there for kicks.’
‘Vaffanculo!’ she screeched, making the pigeon flap up in alarm. ‘Go fuck yourself!’
She turned on her heel, threw the hood over her head, and rushed out through an archway on the far side of the square from where I’d entered. As I levered myself stiffly up from my damp seat, Carlo caught sight of me. His black eyes glittered furiously as if I’d done something wrong. Then he stopped, and looked right at where my coat was unbuttoned, my skirt still hoicked up round my thighs.
‘You’re all tarts!’ At least I think that’s what he said. Maybe it was ‘Your last chance!’ Either way I felt a rush of shame, followed by a rush of fury that he’d made me feel that way. He slammed closed the shutters and suddenly his window became as blind and deaf as all the others in this ethereal city.
I could hear her footsteps tapping away into the distance. Silence and darkness were gathering round me again, along with lanky tendrils of fog. I started to run after her. She was the only human being I’d seen in the last hour, after all. Not counting the stalker, who I reckoned wasn’t human at all. Worse than that, I had no idea where I was and it wasn’t funny any more. At least she’d be able to tell me the way back to my plush hotel on the Riva degli Schiavoni.
‘Scusi! Signorina!’ I called out, careering out from under the archway and on to a narrow, slippery pavement beside a sliver of green canal. There were no railings, and I nearly splashed straight into the water. As I fell back against the wall, heart juddering, I caught sight of a tall dark figure standing on the other side of the canal, framed by another archway. The hat shaded the face. All I could see was the high collar of his coat and the sharp chin turned sideways. In the dusk he was a whole lot spookier than in last night’s fantasy. Downright scary. And he was, like me, intently watching