A Girl's Adventure - full length erotic novel by Chloe Thurlow

watching her. The man she’d unintentionally been following was studying her reflection in the mirror and she turned to meet his eyes.
    ‘A’right there, darling?’
    She dropped her hand to her side. ‘Yes. Yes thank you,’ she replied.
    ‘Got some nice stuff here, ain’t they?’
    ‘Very nice.’
    ‘Like that sort of fing, do you?’
    ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ she answered, although she thought she probably did.
    ‘What’s your name, then?’
    ‘Greta May,’ she replied.
    He nodded knowingly as if her name were familiar to him and she wondered if he had seen it on a playbill.
    ‘I’m an actress,’ she added.
    ‘I bet you are. And I’m a set designer.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Bill Longman, innit,’ he declared, and looked Greta up and down as men do with horses and used cars.
    She held out her hand. ‘How do you do?’ she said and he stared down at her extended fingers. He was scratching himself below the medallion lodged in the mat of dark hair on his chest and concluded these ministrations to take her by the wrist.
    ‘Not bad at all,’ he answered, and jerked her towards the door. ‘Listen, I fink we might have a little rehearsal. What do you reckon?’
    She was going to reply but didn’t get the chance and pattered out of the shop, her legs driven by Bill’s unseemly confidence and by the notion that Richard would clearly approve. They turned into a narrow alley lined with horse posts, the buildings leaning drunkenly together and blocking out the sun.
    ‘Got a place here, dead central,’ he said with a sniff.
    He ducked to enter a shadowy porch with innumerable bells and tawdry postcards with telephone numbers offering random services. She heard a key turn and followed him up a rickety staircase, the reek of lavatories and cheap perfume sliding under doors on each landing. She heard thumps and muffled cries, the distinctive snap of the whip, the urgent beat of colliding flesh.
    Her back was clammy with fear. Greta was tempted to turn and run back down the stairs, but she had become the girl in the horror flick who hears noises in the night and goes out to investigate with a dead torch and nothing on but a nightdress and knickers. She was watching the movie and had to see it through to find out the ending.
    The hollow sound of their footsteps made the hairs on the back of her neck rise as if from an electric shock and an icy tremor ran up her spine as Bill came to an abrupt halt. He jangled his keys and opened the door leading to an attic where half the space was taken up by a mattress covered by a stained rubber sheet.
    Bill took something from his top pocket and tossed his jacket over a cane chair with a sunken seat. It was a roll of five £20 notes held by an elastic band. He showed her how much was there, re-rolled the money, put the elastic band back in place and stuck the £100 in her pink jacket.
    ‘Ooo,’ she said.
    ‘That’s just for starters, Greta May,’ he told her. He sniffed again and his tone changed. ‘Now, come here.’
    He crooked his finger and she went obediently towards him. He undid the remaining two buttons on her pink jacket and it slipped from her shoulders to the bare wooden floor. Her full breasts were shuddering with the beat of her heart and he weighed them in his palms, nodding professionally.
    ‘Nice, very nice. Skirt,’ he said.
    She unzipped her skirt and wriggled it down to her feet. She removed her little Cartier watch, a gift from her father at Christmas, and placed it on the window sill. She folded the skirt and jacket because they belonged to Tara and put them neatly on the chair.
    When she stood before him again, Bill turned her round in her new bra and panties and she remembered being inspected by Gustav in his lovely apartment, so different to the attic with its smell of sewers and hospitals. The wallpaper had lost any sense of pattern and was held in place on the edges by packing tape and drawing pins. She could see glimmers of light through the