Penny Jordan - Power Games

Down below, to the left of Jay’s bedroom window, Fifth Avenue lay under a haze of car exhaust fumes and heat. To the right the trees in Central Park were just beginning to lose the bright, fresh greenness of early spring. The temperature was rising, and with the approach of summer came an energetic and collective shedding of layers of clothing from women’s bodies, which should have rejoiced the heart of any red-blooded male, Jay acknowledged as his glance lingered briefly on the slim, golden limbs of a girl crossing the street below him.

Perhaps if he had been able to make his father see reason, bring him round to his point of view, he might have felt more inclined to join the general rush to welcome summer.

As it was… New Yorkers obviously had conveniently short memories, he decided cynically. In another six weeks’ time they would be moaning about the stifling heat of their city. In another six weeks…

On the surface his meeting with the Japanese had gone well enough; they had seemed to accept his careful noncommittal statement that he and his father both felt they needed more time before coming to a final decision about such a very important step. On the surface… Oh, they had been polite enough, but there had been that firm reminder that they would not wait for ever, that resources for investment were finite and there were other small companies in which they were interested. Like Jay they had other business in New York, and their comment had somehow sounded more like a warning than general conversation.

Another meeting had been set up for six weeks’ time. Six weeks—would that be long enough to bring his father around to his point of view? To make him see sense? To make him realise how very, very vulnerable they were, and how much they needed the kind of partnership the Japanese were offering?

Jay frowned impatiently as he continued to stare out of the window. What was his father doing—thinking—was he regretting not agreeing with him?

The familiar edginess and anger he always felt when he and his father were apart, when others were in a better position to influence him than he was himself, were beginning to make him wish he hadn’t committed to a two-week stay in New York. Damn. Jay silently cursed himself—and Plum. Still, it would be worth the wait just to see her face when he gave her her ‘present.’ Hers and everyone else’s, once they realised just what it was.

He was already regretting rearranging his dinner date with Nadia, but she had wanted to see him, or so she’d said.

Their affair had ended more than six years ago, and although he continued to hear, through mutual acquaintances, about her almost meteoric career progress, they had not kept in touch on a personal basis.

He glanced at the phone, wondering if it was too late to ring her and cancel their date for the second time, but then, if he did, he was grimly aware of the conclusions she was likely to draw.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a man who sulks,’ she had once told him pithily, after they had quarrelled.

‘I do not sulk,’ he had countered angrily, but she had raised her eyebrows and mocked.

‘Oh no? If you believe that, then you’re nowhere near as intelligent as you like to pretend to be, Jay. When it comes to handing out the silent withdrawal treatment you’re an expert. And they say that women are manipulative! The moment a situation comes along where you think you might not win, you don’t want to be involved. You back off and retreat into that cosy, safe little world of yours and you bar the door behind you.’

That had been just one of the quarrels which had ultimately led to the collapse of their relationship. In personality they were poles apart. Nadia was the great-granddaughter of Russian immigrants who had fled to London at the time of the revolution; her nature was passionate and volatile, and when she believed in something, she believed in it utterly and completely—and expected those close to her to believe in it as well.

When Jay had refused to do so she had denounced him as being too cold, too clinical, too good at using logic to deny real feelings.

But Nadia had had a logic of her own, a logic which had ultimately led to her ending their relationship. She’d told Jay that, although sexually he was a very good lover, the cost of maintaining their relationship was an investment she was not prepared to make. ‘Think of our relationship as a bank,’ she had told him fiercely. ‘I am the one who does all the emotional paying in, Jay. You are the one who is always drawing out, who makes no contribution emotionally.

‘I have too much respect for myself, too many things I want to do with my life, to burden myself with that kind of debt. I am not like your father, endlessly prepared to fund your emotional poverty. I have a need to make withdrawals of my own…to require my own support. Fucking you is heaven, but loving you would be hell.’

No, he mused, theirs had not been the kind of relationship which would allow them now to sit down comfortably together and reminisce over their shared past.

Not that Nadia had ever been the type to waste time reminiscing about the past. She lived in the present and worked for the future. Even while at London University she had been very clear-minded about what she wanted, where she was going….

‘I am a citizen of the world,’ she had been fond of saying. ‘The fate which has denied me the right to a country of my own has also freed me to live without any hampering emotional attachments to any particular country. My great-grandparents might have settled here in Britain, but they were always treated as outsiders. I owe no more loyalty to Britain than I do to anywhere else.’

‘But it’s Britain, the British people, who have given you your security, your education…your freedom.’ Jay had challenged her.

‘No,’ Nadia had countered fiercely. ‘These are things I have taken for myself…worked for myself…. I do not owe anyone anything.’

She had never made any secret of her ambitions, and now, by all accounts, she was well on the way to fulfilling them.

Half an hour later as Jay stood under the shower letting the spray hammer his flesh, he found himself thinking about her again.

She had been his first really serious lover, challenging and mocking him in the days before she finally allowed him to catch her, and continuing to do so even afterwards.

He had never discovered just how or with whom she had learned the sexual expertise which had made her such a skilled lover. Now, with hindsight, he suspected it had been with an older man—or men. She had certainly been confident enough to tell him quite clearly and firmly when he didn’t please or satisfy her as she wanted.

She had been the first woman, the only woman, when he thought about it, who had made it clear that she considered the act of cunnilingus one that she not only had every right to expect from him as a regular part of their lovemaking, but also one by which she judged the manner of a man.

‘Only a man who is ignorant of the true pleasure of sex thinks that all he has to do to give a woman satisfaction is to penetrate her,’ Nadia had declared scornfully after listening to a fellow male undergraduate boasting about the number of times he had “fucked” his partner in one twenty-four-hour period.

‘For a woman, penetration is nothing. It is the way a man savours and relishes the scent and taste of her, the way he lingers over every tiny lick and suck. There is nothing…nothing more erotic than having a man beg to be allowed to go down on you. Nothing.’

Jay had learned since that she had been both right and wrong. There were women to whom cunnilingus was everything, the only orgasmic pleasure, and there were also women who did not feel sexually satisfied unless they had been physically penetrated—and there were women who filled the distance between the two by desiring and enjoying an infinite variety of intimacies.