‘Nice table,’ she said, studying her reflection in the shiny glass.

‘I like it.’

‘I can think of a good use for it,’ said Brooke.

‘Help yourself.’

She took some cocaine out of her bag and began to chop it up on the table. ‘Just to keep you bright and cheery for your wife,’ she said pointedly.

Belatedly Bruce recalled his duties as a host. He put on some music and fixed a couple of drinks. Now he was getting somewhere. He sat down beside her.

‘It’s so great that you liked my movie.’

Back on the damn movie. How the hell did that happen?

‘It really means a lot to me.’

He said it quickly, trying to coat his boring platitude in a cloak of sincerity. It sounded so lame. After all, he’d only known this woman for four or five hours and here he was trying to suggest that they had some kind of intellectual bond. ‘It really means a lot to me.’ Oh yeah? Why? He’d just won an Oscar, the entire industry had come together to honour him, and here he was trying to tell a nude model he’d picked up at the party that her opinion was of particular significance to him. Of course, Brooke knew he was bullshitting, and he knew she knew.

‘There was one thing I didn’t like about your movie,’ she said.

Bruce sighed to himself. He had provoked this gorgeous creature into feeling she had to justify herself intellectually. He’d told her that her opinions mattered to him and they both knew she’d had offered no opinion at all beyond ‘neat movie’. Now she was obliged to think one up. He would have to sit through some desperate, secondhand, pseudo artbabble about derivative imagery, or some such thing, culled from the cover of last month’s Premiere.

‘Here it comes,’ said Bruce trying to affect good-humoured indulgence. ‘I knew your enthusiasm was too good to last. What’s the beef?’

‘I didn’t like the sex scene.’

That surprised him. ‘What are you, a nun? That was the sexiest scene I ever made. I edited it with a permanent erection.’

Brooke shrugged and took a sniff at one of the little white lines on the table. ‘Sure it was sexy, sort of. But it wasn’t true. Everything else in the movie was so real – the guns, the attitude, the blood all over everything, the guy’s skull exploding when that big statue of Mickey Mouse fell on his head…’

‘That’s my favourite scene, by the way, because it’s all about irony.’

Brooke handed Bruce the straw and he too took a sniff.

‘So why couldn’t the sex be real too?’ she asked. ‘The only place overacting is still encouraged is in sex scenes. Did you ever see Nine and a Half Weeks? Jesus, you only had to tap that woman on the shoulder and she had an orgasm. Why can’t the sex be convincing? Convincing is sexy. Girls wear pantyhose, you know, not stockings. When they get laid they have to take off their tights. I never saw a girl take off pantyhose in a movie.’

‘That, I’m afraid my dear, is because pantyhose is not sexy. It is impossible to remove pantyhose in a sexy manner.’ Bruce rather regretted the ‘my dear’. It was verging on rude and Brooke was, after all, his guest. But really! Trying to tell him how to make movie.

Brooke snorted up the last of the lines and stared at Bruce for a moment. He wondered if she was going to ask him to call a cab. Instead she got up off the couch, stood before him and, to his astonishment, began to dance. The music was sexy and the lights were low and she was dancing. In fact it was more an undulation than a dance, a kind of slow shiver that seemed to go up her body from her toes to her head and then slowly down again.

‘Wow,’ said Bruce.

The standard of his conversation was actually deteriorating, but Brooke no longer seemed to care. She was into her own agenda. Her hands were on her thighs now, slowly massaging the exquisite creamy material of her dress, her long fingers gently clawing at the cloth, ruffling it up against her legs before letting it fall back into place. Except it did not fall quite back because she retained a little of the dress beneath the palms of her hands, pressed as they were against the splendid outline of her thighs. Bruce realized that bit by bit, a centimetre or two at a time, Brooke was drawing up the long skirt of her dress, very slowly revealing her legs. And such legs. Bruce was entranced as shapely ankle gave way to shapely calf, then delightful knees and on, up past her equally exquisite thighs. It must have taken her more than five minutes to bring the skirt up to her panty line. Somehow she contrived to collect the folds of the material about her hips in a bouquetlike cluster, and it looked for a moment as if she was wearing a rara skirt, or a rather flamboyant tutu. Then in one quick movement, almost a jerk, she brought the handfuls of cloth right up high, pulling the folds of skirt to just under her breasts, revealing all of her pantyhose and some of her bare midriff besides. Her hose was, of course, of finest quality. No ladders or frayed gussets here. Highwaisted, covering Brooke’s whole stomach (such as there was of it), ending a few inches below her ribs in a wide black, delicately embroidered waistband. Her whole lower body was now on show, from diaphragm, down past her navel to the shadowy halfhidden panties, her long legs and on down to the silver stilettos she wore. All encased in sheer black nylon splendour. Above all of which she held her dress in great silky folds. Not necessarily a very elegant pose, but undeniably sexy. The look on her face was slightly sullen, almost indifferent. Her legs were foursquare, feet about nine inches apart. She seemed to be saying, ‘This is what I’ve got. Do you want it?’ A bad little girl showing you hers.

Now she had her thumbs under the waistband of her hose and was pulling the material slightly away from her soft skin. Still contriving to hold up her dress, she began slowly, fold by fold, to wind her pantyhose downwards, not pulling, or tugging, but neatly peeling them floorwards, with elegant thumb and finger, one fold over another. The whiteness of her belly appeared first, followed by more black, the black of her panties, then white again as the very tops of her legs appeared, and then more perfect skin as the hose descended.

She stopped for a moment.

‘Go on, please!’ croaked Bruce. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anything so erotic.

Brooke raised one glorious limb and put her foot on the glass table. This caused the hose, which were now pulled down to a few inches below her crutch, to stretch out taut between her thighs, lending the tiniest suggestion of bondage and constraint to her sultry pose.

Her stiletto heel made a sharp tap on the table top. ‘Unbuckle it,’ she instructed Bruce. Her voice was cold and firm: it was an order. Bruce leant forward, his stomach pushing down on the top of his frankly spectacular erection, and did as he was bidden. The movement brought him so close to the partly revealed tops of Brooke’s thighs, crowned as they were by the bouquet of her dress, that he wondered for a moment about kissing the exposed flesh. He resisted the urge. She was in control. She would tell him what to do. Brooke brought the unbuckled shoe back to the ground, and with equal balance and elegance raised her other leg.

‘Again,’ she snapped. Again he obeyed.

She kicked off her silver stilettos and stood for a moment on the rug, holding her dress and the folded top of her pantyhose before folding the latter a little bit further towards her knees. Her arms were now at full stretch, so she could lower her hose no further by this method.

She sat down. In one athletic movement, she lowered herself to the floor, simultaneously pulling her tights down to her knees. As her bottom touched the soft carpet she continued her movement, rolling over on to her back, and bringing her knees up to her chest. Keeping her thumbs in the band of the tights all the while, she released her dress, letting its folds fall back on to her and on to the floor around her. Her backside pointed straight at Bruce like the centre of a silk flower. For fully fifteen seconds she let him stare at the triangle of black panties that separated the flesh of her rear upper thighs from the flesh of the small of her back as it curled down into the folds of her dress on the carpet.