Vanity. Lucy Lord

waiter brought the bottle of schnapps to the table and they all drank their shots as one.

      ‘SKOL!’

      Eleanor was dancing on the table, singing ‘All That Jazz’ from Chicago. Everybody else cheered her on, and joined in with all the words they knew (basically, the song’s title!). The food, which nobody had touched, had been taken away about half an hour ago by the waiting staff after Lars had thrust several more hundred-dollar bills into their hands.

      Now, Eleanor was getting quite raunchy as she sang about ‘rouging her knees and pulling her stockings down’ – raising her skirt and giving a little shimmy as she twirled inexpertly amongst the glasses and bottles.

      Poppy, sitting next to Marty, was feeling a tad uncomfortable despite the neat liquor. Her boss had said earlier that mommies shouldn’t be ingesting poisons, after all. She turned to him and saw that he was roaring with laughter and applauding.

      ‘Sorry about Lars ordering the schnapps,’ she whispered to him.

      ‘Are you kidding? This is great! THIS is the woman I married.’ And, stumbling slightly, Marty got up to join his wife on the table. Alas, his greater weight was too much and the table collapsed beneath them. Husband and wife lay, roaring with happy laughter, amongst the absolute chaos of broken glass and no-longer starched linen.

      ‘I love you, Martypoos!’

      ‘Oh, Elliekins, I love you too!’

      And they had a very unseemly public smooch. Poppy thanked God that neither of them seemed to be hurt by the scary-looking green shards of ex-wine bottles that surrounded them.

      Poppy was dreaming that Ben was going down on her, his tongue expertly flicking her clitoris, his long-lashed blue eyes looking up at her mischievously. Even in her dream, she hated him, so she bashed his head, hard.

      ‘Owww,’ said Damian, who was the actual cunnilinguist. ‘I thought I was doing quite well.’

      Awake now, Poppy said, ‘Sorry, darling. Bad dream. Please, don’t stop.’

      Damian didn’t stop. He continued to lick Poppy’s waxed cunt until he could taste her arousal. She moaned, and Damian opened her up with his fingers, feasting his eyes and keeping her waiting for a couple of seconds, before sliding the first two fingers of his other hand inside her. He bent his head again and resumed sucking, licking, nibbling. Poppy bucked against him, moaning more and more loudly until, with a sharp cry, she came.

      He waited a second or two, then started moving his fingers in and out again, ever so slowly, sucking again to milk the very last drops of pleasure from her. Only when he felt her throbbing finally begin to subside did he withdraw his hand, then move up the bed to kiss her on the lips. Poppy kissed him back, liking the taste of herself on him.

      ‘Mmmm, thank you, darling,’ she said dreamily. ‘That was soooo good.’

      Damian leapt to his feet.

      ‘And now for the second course!’

      He walked to the kitchen of their apartment, which was pretty much the interior brickwork urban cool ex-warehouse in the Meatpacking District that Andy had envisaged. He returned bearing a tray heaped with eggs, bacon and mushrooms, waffles and maple syrup, freshly squeezed orange juice, bagels and smoked salmon.

      ‘Blimey,’ said Poppy, laughing. ‘Are we having guests or something?’

      ‘Just wanted to say sorry for last night.’ Damian looked up at her from underneath his lashes and she laughed even more. ‘Am I forgiven?’

      ‘Oh, you totally lovable thing. Thank you – it all looks completely yummy. Yes, of course you’re forgiven – this time. But you’re bloody lucky that Lars and Eleanor go way back. It could have been a fucking disaster.’ She tried to look stern but Damian looked so contrite, and she was feeling so blissfully post-orgasmic, that it was impossible.

      ‘Right, let’s dig in. Hmmm, waffles or bagels to start … sooo tricky …’ When Poppy remembered to eat, she had the appetite of a horse, yet never gained a pound. It was one of the many things that Bella envied about her.

      Chapter 6

      Sam tried to ignore the whispering and muffled giggles as she walked into the college canteen. She had dressed as unobtrusively as she could, in jeans and an enormous black jumper that she hoped disguised her boobs. Contrary to what everybody thought, the boobs were natural, a result of her catching glandular fever when she was 14, just as she was starting to develop. Sam would no sooner have taken a knife to her young body than she’d have taken a knife to anybody else’s body, but she’d grown tired of trying to explain. Practically everybody else in the glamour-modelling world had had ‘something done’, and she’d learned quite soon that protesting her chest was natural just got her the reputation of being a stuck-up bitch.

      At uni, she tried to disguise them, just as she played down the prettiness of her young face by half covering it in heavy-rimmed specs, and hiding her long dark red hair under unflattering baseball caps. She had an adorable face, peachy-skinned with enormous dark brown eyes and what Mark referred to as blowjob lips. Sam had got into glamour modelling by being discovered while walking the dog in a park near her parents’ home in Romford when she was 17, two years earlier.

      She had always wanted to go to uni, but now the fees were so high, it had seemed an impossibility until the seedy photographer accosted her in the park. Her mum and dad’s small catering business was barely afloat with this horrible recession and her little brother Ryan was severely autistic. Much though Sam loved him, she realized what a nightmare (and expense) he was to look after. There was no way she could burden her parents with anything else, and if there was a way for her to fund her own education, then she’d grab it with both hands.

      After the initial horror of taking her clothes off in front of men old enough to be her dad, she’d got used to it. Only a couple of them were lechy old pervs, anyway, and Sam was made of pretty stern stuff, rationalizing what she was doing in a clear-headed, logical manner. If this was what she had to do to get the proper education she craved, it wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t as if she cared what any of the people in the glamour-modelling world thought of her, after all.

      But she did care what her fellow students thought of her. Sam had always been very careful to keep her assets under wraps at uni, as she wanted to be admired for her mind (although she’d come to appreciate her body, which she had thought was freakish, now that Marky seemed to love it so much). Sometimes, in seminars, the tutor would actually say, ‘Could somebody other than Sam please answer this question?’, which made her secretly proud. She was only a girl from an Essex comprehensive, after all, and more than half of her peers had been to posh schools.

      But yesterday, horribly, one of the really posh ones, a smug wanker called Josh, had walked into the Union bar brandishing a copy of Nuts