There was a wedding reception going on at a hotel in the centre of town. Jayne and Rolf. Jayne was a good-looking 22-year-old brunette, elegant and cultured, and desired by many a man in this small community. And none more so than Henk, a 25-year-old son of Swedish parents. The family had moved to England five years earlier and Henk felt almost English. He had mastered the language easily, had a good job in management with the same hotel and was popular, particularly with the girls, who wondered, as we all do about foreigners, if there was something different, something exotic and maybe kinky, about him.
He was so blond that his pubic hair must be fair too, although of course he would be shaven to the point of shininess down there. But he might have a smoothness about him, almost feminine, even though he was manly and muscular and had worked his way through a sizeable chunk of the eligible female population in the area.
Henk had met Jayne a week earlier. It wasn’t her hen night but it was the dying days of her single status. Henk sensed that she was having doubts about getting married, but then most people did, didn’t they? Cold feet, they called it in English. When you thought about it, it was perfectly natural. As much as you might love someone and want to spend your life with them, surrendering your right to have a relationship with someone else was a drastic step.
Jayne was indeed feeling like that. She was a strong, independent woman with a reckless streak that had seen her fall crazily in love several times, even eloping once when she was 17, spending a riotous, passionate, draining week in a cheap hotel in London before running out of money and realizing that there was at least one way in which she wasn’t ready for it.
So she had strolled back into her parents’ home as bold as brass and resumed her education and her normal life, but with a drunken, borderline pornographic episode on her CV.
Two years later she had met Rolf, who was ten years older and running his father’s car dealership. He had money, confidence and a certain worldliness that she found irresistible.
He was also, she had to admit, an arsehole: a domineering, opinionated jerk and it was infuriating to her that that side of him didn’t turn her right off - in fact it kind of turned her on. Being as headstrong as she was, maybe it was true that she needed someone more powerful than herself.
Whatever, he had wined and dined her, taken her on expensive holidays and generally made her feel like the woman of the world which she wasn’t, I fact, not yet.
When he proposed to her she said no, but he just laughed and asked her again a month later. And a month later. And eventually she could see this guy wasn’t going to give up and she reasoned that there were worse fates for a girl to suffer. And he knew his way around a female body, so she never went unfucked, unsatisfied.
Jayne researched the issue methodically, looking up strong female characters online, from Lord Nelson’s Lady Hamilton to Jerry Hall, with whom she felt more affinity. Hall was a serial tamer of wild men. Jayne could identify with that, and if this was to be just the first of a string of marriages, then so be it.
And when Rolf grabbed her the moment she entered the house, wrenched her clothes off and fucked her over the settee, she didn’t feel subservient. He was a man who needed a gutsy woman, and it gave her a thrill to be “taken” like that sometimes. At other times she would sit on his face and when she had pissed in his mouth he had responded with a granite-hard erection and the determination to fuck her to insanity.
And yet, and yet, and yet…
Cold feet didn’t even begin to describe it. She was angry at herself for being pulled down this road, angry at him for doing it and petrified of a future that sometimes seemed like a straitjacket.
And then her strong side kicked in again and she told herself it was a means to an end, and she did love him, whatever that meant.
The wedding took place in a chilly old stone parish church which kept both sets of parents happy. Then down to the hotel and Rolf was knocking back the champagne like it was protein shakes. And flirting with every woman in the room. She saw her life flash before her and wanted to stop it. But the deed was now done.
Swilling her fourth bucks fizz she excused herself from the little group she was with and headed for the toilets, but walked past them and down the stairs into the large lawned courtyard. It was early April, sunny but crisp. None of the guests were there, because the smokers had a better alternative at the front of the hotel.
Jayne sat down on a cold steel park bench. She felt free, alone, relieved of her burden. Little did she know she had been spotted. Henk had seen her from his office window, watched her emerge furtively and flounce over to the bench, swinging her big white wedding dress with disdain. It’s funny how all women look beautiful in their wedding gown, he thought. Or attractive, anyway. Fuckable. And this one didn’t need sartorial help. She was gorgeous in the first place. He imagined her sweet, smooth, shapely body beneath all that fabric.
Henk found himself heading down the stairs before he had even decided what to do. In seconds he was standing in front of her and they were smiling shyly at each other. Henk began some small talk but Jayne cut him short. With a flash of madness and that reckless certainty of hers she said,
“Shit, it’s colder than it looks here. Can we…?”
“Of course,” said Henk. “Come to my office.”
His office was a converted bedroom on the third floor.