Grahame, Lucia (26 page)

As I grew weaker, he closed his knees around me, supporting me.
His fingertips began to sketch little crescent moons upon the smooth fabric
that only half shielded my breasts. My eyes fell shut.

At last he let his hands glide downward to the bottom edge of the
stays. At last he crossed that dangerous border. He slid the tip of his index
finger under the satin and ran it slowly along my skin. I felt my long-standing
protection, that arid tightness within me, begin to loosen again alarmingly. I
pressed my knees together, as if I imagined I could hold back the waves.

The hands drifted downward, the fingertips slipped beneath the
band of the claret-silk drawers I still wore. I held my breath, fearing and
willing those fingers to venture onward, into deeper regions, but they did not.

Instead my husband released me from his thighs, flattened his
palms against my skin, and pushed the drawers slowly down my hips. They
slithered to the floor. My body clenched in anticipation—was it a welcome or
the last shred of resistance? I could not tell.

But it did not matter. The hands merely glided back to the place
where his fingers had earlier tattooed those slender crescents. Idly he
retraced their outline. His thighs closed round me again.

My unruly longings seemed about to choke me, but either my husband
did not notice or else he did not care. He returned his attention to the lines
of whalebone. His touch was even lighter now, almost absentminded, almost as if
he were preparing at any moment to dismiss me with a yawn.

The fear that he might do so gave me an intense and shattering
thrill.

He withdrew his hands. The thrill gripped me even more violently.
I half dreaded that he had suddenly tired of these diversions. But he had not.
He dropped his palms to my waist once again and again let them glide upward.
This time they did not stop when they reached the top of the green satin. He
spread his hands over my outthrust breasts, capturing my nipples between his
fingers and pinching them lightly. They had grown firm long before, and now
they tightened and swelled so violently that I knew myself to be on the verge
of losing every shred of self-control.

A tiny sob broke against my closed lips and shook me. I could no
longer hold my back straight. I fell forward like a broken doll, bracing my
hands against my husband's knees.

His right hand deserted its post at my breast, drifted down my
spine like a falling leaf, and then softly began to nuzzle into the moist heat
between my legs.

This time my lips opened as I cried out.

He took his hands away.

I struggled in vain to part my thighs, to invite another tender
invasion, but his knees held me like a vise, and I could not.

I continued to writhe in that iron grip for a moment, laboring for
breath, and then gave up.

"There," he said, releasing his hold. "I know this
has been difficult for you. I won't ask too much of you all at once. You may go
now."

I stumbled forward. I was facing the doorway through which I had
come earlier, but I was now so weak with hunger for all that I had barely
tasted, as well as with the shock of disappointment, that I could have reached
it only by crawling on my hands and knees.

I turned around unsteadily. My husband, reclining comfortably in
the depths of his chair, wore a challenging look that conveyed a clear message.

He was daring me to disobey him.

"Good night," he said.

I glanced at the door behind me and then back at him.

"Take the dressing gown, if you like," he said
indifferently, pointing toward a scarlet peignoir that lay at the end of the
rainbow on the bed.

Modesty ought to have made me cover myself with it, but those
casual and insinuating hands had driven away all my pretensions to modesty. I
lifted my own hands to pull the pins from my hair and let them drop. I let my
gaze drift back slowly toward my enthroned husband. His face showed nothing. I
felt my skin grow brighter. I shifted my eyes and glimpsed my own image in the
looking glass on the wall behind him. I was too drunk with desire now even to
feel much amazement at who was caught there—that other woman, the one whose
flesh had once burned so wildly that, long ago, unable to hold her pose for the
man she loved, she had been driven to assume an even bolder one.

And now it was worse. Like that abandoned creature of the
paintings, I was offering myself, not to my beloved Frederick, but to a man I
did not love, for whom I had ceased to care in even the smallest way, and who
now seemed bent upon teaching me how to hate.

The painted lady was real.

My husband watched me steadily. His expression did not change.

Not knowing what to do, how to curb my reckless impulses, and half
swooning with desire, I dropped to the floor. My knees sank into that soft
Chinese carpet, that thick expanse of blue as dark as the nighttime sea. My
eyes came back to his rock-hard gray ones, and a tumultuous yearning, utterly
unfamiliar, utterly debilitating, swept through me.

I closed my eyes. My hands began to move, as if of their own will,
over my body, touching every spot where his hands had lingered earlier and
where his adventuring fingers had probed. Thus, in the language that has no
words, I recounted to him every fleeting delight he had inflicted upon me and
avowed my hunger for more.

I no longer knew myself.

I had never imagined what it would be to fall so completely under
the spell of another's sheer sexual power. My old self, even that long-ago self
beloved of Frederick, the one he had called his
fleur du mal,
was a
pallid and conventional creature compared to the woman I had now become,
kneeling on the carpet before my enemy and proclaiming in this mute and urgent
fashion my desperate longing to give myself up to him.

All that came back to me was stillness and silence.

At last I heard the sigh of a necktie being pulled free, the
whisper of starched, boiled linen and soft wool falling to the floor, the click
of a diamond stud striking a button....

"Come here," said my husband huskily. He sounded shaken,
no longer cool.

I opened my eyes and lifted my damp face. My husband was standing
before the chair; his clothes lay at his feet.

I had never seen him naked.

As he had pointedly reminded me only a short time earlier, I had
always insisted upon having the lights put out on the few occasions when we had
made love.

Now I saw what I had always suspected: that my husband's lean and
lightly muscled frame was as beautifully sculpted as any of those marble pagan
gods and mythic heroes I had once admired in the Louvre.

He took only a half-step toward me, then halted. I came to my feet
and moved forward slowly. Although he had not laced me tightly, my lungs felt
starved and my breathing had a terrible, jagged urgency.

Only a few inches of carpet separated us when I reached the point
where I could not go on without some sign of encouragement, some assurance that
he would not simply fold his arms against me and rebuff my advances like a
stony wall. I knew he had the strength to do that, in spite of the evidence of
his own desire, if all he really intended was to teach me the cruel lesson he
had hinted at, only days ago, in his study.

We faced each other, silent and immobile.

He took the final step and closed that tiny gulf. He brought his
hands to my shoulders and bent his head to mine. His hair fell across my cheek
like a curtain. My mouth melted under his demanding lips. Hours—or
seconds—later his hands moved to my breasts.

I nearly stumbled with the shock of my response.

He drew backward and sank into the chair again, pulling me with
him. Holding me by the waist, he lifted me slightly, as he forced my legs apart
with his knees; in a moment I was straddling his thighs. His hands dropped to
my hips and pulled me closer still. I brought my knees up, opening myself to
him as he entered me. He used none of the restraint that I had come to expect
from him. I didn't mind. He lifted his hips beneath me and then let them drop.
The pleasure was nearly intolerable; I could no longer hold myself still. I
thought he would object to this. Instead, I felt a whisper of soft laughter
stir my hair, as he altered his rhythm slightly to mine, spurring me on.

My breasts strained toward his lips, his tongue, and, as they
received his benedictions, my spine curved like a rainbow. Only his arms around
my waist prevented me from falling away under those scorching, suckling kisses.

His skin was damp and tropical; his breath was a warm southern
wind. There was no part of him that did not pulse and surge with fire. There
was no inch of flesh on me that his insistent and intrepid hands did not claim
for his own.

He showed me no delicacy now. His lips burned my ears with words I
never dreamed any man would dare to breathe in my presence; he called me
everything except my name and made my blood race madly. My body rose and fell,
mastered at first by what had seemed to be his will and not my own; yet my
every nerve responded so unhesitatingly and urged him on so strongly that I
could not have said for the life of me which one of us truly set the measure
for that headlong race.

Our bodies rocked together. His breath grew as ragged as my own;
the sound of it incited me further. I heard myself yield to the cries welling
up within me. I felt his excitement mount higher with each whimper of passion I
could no longer contain.

"And how do you like me now?" he whispered. Again I
heard that almost soundless laughter.

Sobbing, I bucked against the pressure of his arms, secure that
they would never let me go.

But in the end, of course, they did.

Almost as soon as he had released me, I retreated in disarray.

He had thrown his head back, his eyes were closed, and he was
breathing hard.

I staggered to the bed and pulled the scarlet dressing gown over
my damp, smoldering skin.

He lifted his head. His face was still flushed but now otherwise
icily impassive. I arranged my features likewise. I thought of the final taunt
he had flung at me, when I was so far gone that, instead of bringing me to my
senses as it ought to have, it had pushed me over the brink.

"Well," I said, "that's one out of the way. I trust
that it was everything you hoped for."

"Not quite," he replied. I bridled slightly, for I could
not imagine in what way I had disappointed him. "However," he
continued, his breath still uneven, "I will admit that you surpassed my
expectations." He pulled himself to his feet. "Good night.
Again," he said.

His eyes were as impenetrable as granite.

I half turned to leave.

"Take your things with you," he tossed over his shoulder
as he strolled off toward his dressing room.

I did not see him on the following day, but a terse little note in
his handwriting arrived with my breakfast tray. It told me that the coachman
had been instructed to deliver me that afternoon to Victoria Station, to the
train that would take me back to Charingworth.

Alone at last.

At Charingworth, I did not dwell upon my recent misadventures in
London. To have allowed—no, to have
encouraged!
—my detestable husband to
evoke that blazing response from me—I could not bear to think of it. I
preferred to occupy myself with visions of the future life which those
weak-willed antics would help to buy me.

In a month or two I could return to Paris. Surely the gardens and
boulevards which Frederick's death had so darkened and blighted would become,
merely by virtue of my freedom to walk in them alone, almost bright again and
lively. And with money enough to keep her, I could take Andromeda with me,
leaving nothing behind to regret.

But as the days grew longer and the empty nights milder, my mind
began to revert to what my husband had described to me as the culmination of
his revenge:
Then your punishment will have just begun.

Not a word came from him. I wondered how long the embargo would
continue, whether he was already planning his next sally, and what form it
might take.

The waiting became a subtle form of torture. I felt as used as a
maidservant tumbled one evening and forgotten the next by her heartless,
neglectful master.

Twelve days passed. Then, late one rainy afternoon, the sound of
carriage wheels in the avenue announced my husband's return.

I had adopted the habit, when my husband was absent, of taking
dinner in my sitting room. It was too depressing to preside alone over the huge
table in the dining hall, like a solitary mariner cast ashore on a desert isle.

On the day of my husband's return, I had already arranged to have
dinner brought up to me. I will admit that I
was
somewhat curious to see
my husband, but at the same time I was extremely reluctant to come face to face
again with the man who knew so much about me now, and all of it to my
discredit. Most certainly I did not wish to dine with him.