If the Shoe Fits (15 page)

The über-cool Steve arrived just then with a beautiful, narrow raku pottery vase filled with hot sake. He poured the fragrant liquid into two small cups of a similar pattern and handed one to Sarah. She nodded professionally to Steve, then smiled at Devon… for Devon… and took a sip of the steaming, sweet wine and looked as though she might swoon. She turned back to Steve, all business, and told him to bring whatever was freshest from the sushi bar and to keep the sake coming. He nodded his understanding to Sarah, gave Devon a brief look that might have been envy, and then snaked his way back through the crowd.

O-Zone, Freak Power, and the Crystal Method started pounding even louder in the background through the rest of their dinner. Devon was thankful for the contrived distance the music afforded, having given up on talking in her ear or letting her nip at his, lest he throw her on the floor and take her right there on the gritty, polished concrete. He liked the idea of it, that infuriating, pristine white cashmere turtleneck ruined, her jeans pulled down in haste, maybe to her knees, preventing her legs from coming up around his waist, and just lifting her hips and entering her and having her laughing up at him with abandon as waiters and students and commodities traders and busboys and lawyers were somehow, as in a dream, all around them and oblivious.

Steve appeared again, asking if they wanted anything else, and Sarah gave Devon a provocative wide-eyed look. Deferential. He had a momentary flash of Bronte and Max at breakfast at Dunlear—had that only been a week ago?—and his ridicule of Bronte’s doe-eyed gazing. He wanted that. He wanted that from Sarah.

And she saw it all. Was she toying with him? He couldn’t bring himself to worry too much about that, with the meal finally finished and the promise of the two of them in bed looming in the very near future. Devon could even spare a smile for the solicitous restaurant manager as he handed him his credit card and told him they were ready for the bill.

They flagged down a taxi on North Broadway and Sarah gave the driver her home address. She turned to face Devon as the car pulled into traffic. “I think we can dispense with the charade that you are going to be spending any time in that hotel room, don’t you?”

His broad smile was his answer as he wrapped one arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. After all that surging, techno-hip-hop foreplay, the backseat of the taxi taking them to her place was terrifyingly silent. He wanted her in so many ways, he was afraid to begin here on a cracked and worn, blue vinyl bench seat. She was holding his hand, hard. He looked down at their joined fingers and then brought the clasped pair to his lips, kissing her fingers and his own where they twined together. Devon was reminded of that childhood game where you grip your own fingers together and twist them in a contorted, backward fashion and then lose the ability to tell right from left, index finger from pinkie. He felt the same now, unable to differentiate where he ended and she began.

“You had better not do that,” she whispered into the dark silence.

“Why?” he teased, kissing her fingers again, her eyes blinking slowly.

“Because… I can’t… I won’t be able to stop myself.”

Good
, he thought. At least she wasn’t as all-knowing and in control as he had feared. If he was going to fall to pieces, best to do so in good company. He rested their joined hands in his lap and then pushed the back of her hand into his straining jeans. She groaned and he forced himself to look out the taxi window at the glittering city whipping by in cool, detached splendor.

***

The rest of the night had seemed diamond-bright, with each consecutive moment a precise jewel of exquisite discovery (when she bit him there, when he sucked at her flesh… just… there, the moments of gentleness and force, ferocity and farce, the byplay), and by the next morning, it was all flashing through her mind in shards of unreality. They had fallen into bed right away, but they hadn’t fallen asleep until the sky was just starting to turn a morose, pale gray. Devon’s firm hand held her, even in sleep, at the top of her thighs.

She started to wake up hours later, her hand still flung above her head at an unnatural angle, the weight of his palm still resting between her legs. She woke up wanting. Her sleep had been an interval, nothing more. They were right where they had left off.

He was such a heavy sleeper… might she just wriggle around under that perfect hand? Have a little something for herself, just to tide her over, then drift back into another interval of satiated rest. Was it masturbatory? Necrophilic? She didn’t need to ponder the depth of her depravations for more than a few seconds because, despite his ability to sleep through a demolition, apparently the slightest indication of her desire was enough to rouse him.

He gripped her tighter and she breathed with a strained relief. How was he able to do that? Before this, before him, in her ignorance, she had assumed one sexual completion (alone or with someone else) was fairly interchangeable with the next. The buildup, the peak, the after effect. Et cetera. Et cetera.

What an idiot.

It was like thinking Froot Loops were interchangeable with foie gras. Just food.

But the thing that Devon was doing with his index finger right then, for example, taunting her, leading her on, was maddening and brutal and cruel. Delectable.

“You are such a tease… you think you can just lead me on—” she ground out through clenched teeth, then gasped when his finger became more demanding.

“I
am
feeling a bit bossy, now that you mention it. Would you let me… I mean, may I have my way with you for a while, just be a little controlling on a Saturday morning, as it were?”

His wicked grin suggested far more than a
little
anything. She wanted so much, but she was also a little afraid of her ignorance.

“How bossy is bossy?” she asked, out of breath, not even trying to hide how much she wanted to find out.

“Really, downright bossy. Like, you don’t do anything without my permission, no gasping, no arching”—which drew attention to the fact that she was doing both right then, so she froze. “Okay, maybe a little gasping,” he said with a grin, then he did something taunting with his fingers and she clutched at his flexed upper arms and gasped in anticipation.

He stilled.

“Especially no climax unless I say so… when I say so… when I give it to you…”

“I couldn’t help that…” she pleaded. “I want to be good… I’ll be good…” She wanted to laugh at the game, but it was so all-encompassing, there didn’t seem to be any room left to distance herself even momentarily enough to acknowledge her nonsense. She was already far past laughter. She wanted to feel the extent of how far he could take her, how attenuated, how protracted, before he broke her or released her.

Raised her.

“You had better not be imagining anything naughty.” His voice gave him away. He was totally on fire, hardly the controlling master he hoped to be.

She opened her eyes slowly, then dragged her tongue across her upper lip. “May I speak?”

He had mistakenly believed that a little dominant play might give him a sense of authority, a modicum of control over this… situation.

Stupid.

Even pinned beneath him and asking his permission to utter a word, she had him in her thrall. That little bit of tongue.

“Don’t do that with your tongue.” His voice was a tad harsh. Her eyes flashed with a hint of fear and then… God protect him… power. She knew.

She knew everything.

***

Sarah’s heart stopped when he barked that command. Then raced with fever. She knew nothing. She didn’t even know her own body. But Devon knew. He knew exactly what to do.

She spent the next hour in a heretofore unknown world of carnal enchantment. He brought her to peak after peak of near-satisfaction only to pull away at the last possible moment. She took great satisfaction in both his grimace of restraint and her ability to endure the knife edge of pleasure upon which he kept her balanced.

When her release finally tore through her, she must have screamed or roared, because the residual silence crackled and sizzled through the room. The popping fireplace noises were magnified against her sensitive ears, interwoven with the sound and feel of Devon’s thick, satisfied, hot breath in the crook of her neck.

At the last possible moment, he had released his hold on her wrists and her fingertips were gloriously free: feeling his hair and skittering across his back and marveling at the new growth of beard along his jaw (that he had used earlier to such devastating effect against her inner thigh). The very tips of her fingers were both starved and gluttonously full.

“You are a tyrant,” he ground out, as his breath still worked to find a more natural pace.

She laughed so hard at that. She threw her arms around his back and nipped at his ear. “You know,” she began whispering in a happy rush, “only you could perceive an inexperienced woman who just spent the last… what? hour?”—she lifted her head to look at the gold French clock on the mantle over the fireplace, then let it drop with a thud back onto the pillow—“pinned beneath you—forfeiting speech, obeying
you
, subjecting herself to you—as tyrannical. Still beneath you, come to think of it.”

“Oh Lord.” He looked down the length of her body with something like contrition, then slid his weight off her. Her eyes were already drifting closed and she grinned and hummed like a little child about to nap when she felt the sheet and then the down comforter come floating down upon her skin, then tucking lightly around her. He must have gone to the bathroom for a few minutes, because her last memory before the delicious sleep finally overtook her was the abstract weight and warmth of his body as he removed the pillow in her embrace and replaced it with himself.

When Sarah woke up hours later, Devon was returning from the kitchen with some cold green apples, a package of cheddar cheese, and a pitcher of ice water, two wineglasses held with casual confidence in one hand. He had showered and put on his jeans, but his bare feet and bare torso looked glorious. And then he caught her out in her appraising perusal and she pulled the sheet up over her head in guilty embarrassment, then pulled the linen back down just to stare.

“Hungry, love?”

She nodded.

She hadn’t thought much about love.

She loved this or that. (This: the bent control of the two, sure fingers into the rims of those wineglasses. Or that: the perfect skill with which he was now slicing the bitter skin away from the apple; his deft touch.) Or when he tagged the very word to the end of a sentence, like a little peck, it gave her heart a pleasant skip. But she hadn’t thought about being
in
love
. Wasn’t that what a girl was supposed to do? To think about it? To pine?

She thought not. Not with Devon at least. He wouldn’t want that from her… he was all loose and free and careless. His whole life was one big ride. Not that he (or she) could stop her feelings if they were fully realized, but like a seedling, inhospitable surroundings could prevent any deep emotions from taking root.

From everything she had read and heard and eavesdropped about love with a capital
L
, it was a gory mess. She thought of her classmates in high school, the young women at the International School in Paris. What better place than Paris to explore your youthful passions, right?

Wrong.

They all seemed miserable. Well, perhaps not
all
, but most. Sarah might have been aloof or alone most of the time she was finishing up high school in Paris, but at least she wasn’t suffering any of those emotional bouts of misery. Bronte was practically unable to function after she and Max split up the first time. Sarah conceded that had turned out well enough.

Nor did it seem to get any better once people got older. Sarah’s father still missed her mother twelve years on. Jane loved Nelson more than he would ever love her. It just seemed like those deeper emotions were a dragging weight on what was an otherwise delightful enterprise.

As for the physical side of it all, Sarah had always felt young for her age. She
had
been
young. During those years of working like a machine at Louboutin, she had always been an outsider. Too young to be hanging out with her more experienced colleagues. Too old to be hanging out in bars all night with her high school friends who were now in university. Too inexperienced to be having affairs. She didn’t feel like she was the right age for anything.

But now?

Devon made her feel like she was exactly the right age to be getting on with all of this
getting
on
. He started to come toward the bed with the small round tray of food he had just prepared.

“Let’s go in the other room,” Sarah said, sitting up and letting her legs dangle off the side of the mattress. “I’ve been in this bed too long.”

“Never say
that
,” he scolded.

She smiled, slid off the bed, stood in front of him (so naked!), and kissed him on the cheek. She felt the warmth of his gaze on her back as he followed her into her closet, where she grabbed an ivory silk bathrobe that was hanging on a hook, then continued through the dressing area to the bathroom. “Go on into the little front room.” Sarah pointed toward the open door on the other side of the shower stall. “My grandmother insists on calling it my boudoir, but it’s really just a little den. Let’s eat in there. There’s a fireplace too, if you want.” She gave him another chaste kiss on the cheek, then closed the door behind him.

A few minutes later, teeth brushed, hair brushed (as much as that was possible with all that toing and froing against the pillows), face washed, Sarah found herself standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed over her chest, marveling at the phenomenal Devon Heyworth.

He had made himself completely at home in her world. He was sprawled out on the daybed, having left a nest of pillows to one side for when she got there. The television was on, and he had the remote control in one hand and a half-eaten slice of apple in the other. He had put the tray of food on the tiny round table near the bay window and set it within arm’s reach, in front of where he sat.

He was flipping through channels, pausing for five seconds here (basketball) or three seconds there (Nigella Lawson) or five seconds there again (the history of catapults). Obviously, he had mastered the electronics system, a feat that had taken Sarah weeks and still gave her the occasional headache. She hardly ever even used the surround sound system since it required a whole other level of technological confidence that she did not possess; he had handily figured it out in the time it took her to brush her teeth.

Devon had paused most recently on a French channel that Sarah had added to her cable package last year, thrilled to have the language wafting through her house, if only the rapid voice of a car salesman or the news on the latest taxi strikes in Paris. Best of all, on Saturdays, it showed classic French films and today was
The
Umbrellas
of
Cherbourg
.

“Do you want to watch this?” he asked.

She had started watching it, standing there in the doorway, not realizing that he had been watching her. She crawled up onto the daybed, fitting right into the little snug area he had made for her. He was already getting drawn into the story and absently fed her the remaining half a slice of apple that had been poised, forgotten, between his long fingers. Even though he was watching the television, it was as though he knew the location of her mouth regardless of wherever he happened to be looking at the time. The apple tasted like a symphony had exploded on her tongue, and she must have groaned with the tart, sweet, crisp pleasure of it because Devon (eyes still on the movie) said, “Particularly good apple, eh?”

“Mm-hmm.” She rested her head on his shoulder and he snaked his arms around her back.

They spent the rest of the afternoon just like that, with the fire sputtering and hissing, the French lovers singing and crying, and the two of them resting loosely around one another.

As the credits rolled after Catherine Deneuve’s desperate triumph, Sarah figured it was as good a time as any to break the bad news of her dinner plans. “So…”

“Is this the bad news?”

“Very funny. No. Well, yes. I have plans tonight that I couldn’t break.”

“Oh, I figured you would.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“Oh. Well. I do. Unfortunately.”

“Yes, it is unfortunate.” He gave her a firm squeeze around her shoulder.

“So. How much longer will you be in town? What’s the project you’re working on?”

“Nothing much. Widgets.”

“Widgets?” She wasn’t annoyed exactly, but his blasé attitude toward his own interests might wear on her over time. She liked to joke and have a laugh as much as the next person, but when certain topics always elicited a quip, she began to wonder.

“Nothing exciting.”

“So bore me.”

He started to reach for the remote control and she stilled his hand, holding his wrist gently in her smooth, warm fingers. She picked up the remote control and turned the television off. “Talk to me a little bit about what you do. It’s not fair that I am this open book professionally. I mean, you can Google me.” His guilty smile told her he already had. “And yet I know next to nothing about your real life.”

He wanted to blurt out that he was rapidly coming to the terrifying conclusion that she might very well
be
his real life, but he stuffed that back down. Hard.

“I’m not really comfortable talking about myself… professionally. I hate when guys are all on about what they do…”

“But I’m asking. Nicely.”

He looked at her, then out the window at the cityscape. It was almost dark again, even though it was barely the end of afternoon. The October days were short. He was stalling.

She continued, “Look, I’m not going to be a shrew about it. If you don’t care much about what you do during the day, nine to five and all that, I guess, whatever, but I just don’t see that. You have such an intensity—” She blushed.

He laughed and kissed her cheek.

She tried again. “It just seems curious to me that you’re not fully engaged, since you seem to live your life—what little I’ve seen, granted—with a kind of purpose. Even your repartee has a kind of design to it.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

“Which?”

“Design. I guess I am a designer of sorts. I’ve always enjoyed patterns and puzzles, codes… designs. But there were extenuating circumstances. I refused to be an academic.”

“I can relate to that!” she chimed in.

And she was so open and honest and wanting him to just be whoever he was, that it all sort of fell away and he told her all the bizarre, convoluted machinations—the designs—that had constituted his so-called secret life. The inventions, the mathematical equations, the inability to be anything but the faux-earl younger brother when he was out in society. He thought she must think him mad or immature or egomaniacal: hiding what must be, ultimately, an overinflated sense of his own importance.

“You are so perverted!” she squealed with glee, clapping her hands together. “You’re a closet genius! I
love
that! Anonymously spreading your bits of brilliance around, like little crumbs across the Internet, across the world. Tell me more about the project you’re working on here. Specifically. Did you invent the widget? Tell me!”

He looked at her in amazement. He didn’t know what he had expected, but this sparkle of delight was not it. He told her about the arrogant architect who had let his own flawed design (“a gimmick,” Devon added with disdain) overrule Devon’s commonsense engineering. And all the details that he thought (that he
knew
) to be boring, she found hilarious or provocative or wonderful. She got up to check her cell phone, then came back into the boudoir, still smiling at him.

“You are a secret
lover
! It’s so fantastic. Most people, I mean, take me for example—I am a veritable exhibitionist, whoring my shoes around the world. I don’t want any personal glory—okay, maybe just a tiny bit—but really, deep down, I want to see a woman walking down the street in a pair of shoes I designed and to see that look in her eye: that she is power or she is lust or she is anger, whatever she might be at that moment, and I think, I am a part of that. I did that!”

He continued to stare at her. Her robe had loosened; her hair was wild; she held her cell phone in one hand and the door frame in the other. She was transitioning away from him. Getting ready to gear up for her dinner plans.

“What?” she asked all of a sudden, then, looking down at herself: “Oh, I am a fright.”

“You are many things, but you are certainly not a fright.” He started to get up from the daybed. “Let me get out of your way. I’ll head back to the hotel—”

“No!” she barked. “I mean—” softer now—“You should really stay. Why be holed up in one measly hotel room? I am just going out to dinner with my parents and some friends of theirs, so I should only be gone a couple of hours. I mean, if you want,” she added shyly. “After about a halfsecond of seeing you through the plate-glass window of the storefront last night, I realized it was the height of absurdity that you even got a hotel room in the first place. But…” He certainly wasn’t making this very easy for her. “Well, you do what you like.”

He settled back into the comfortable cushions, put his feet up where she had been sitting, clicked on the television, skipped back to the history-of-war-machines channel, and continued to look at the screen when he said, “I shall be right here when you get home from supper.”

She walked over to where he was reclining and gave him a brief, tender kiss on the lips. “I’m glad.”

An hour later, she came through the door from the bathroom. He had spent the entire time half-watching an interesting documentary about a new lightweight metal alloy and listening to the charming sounds of Sarah in preparation mode: drawers opening and closing; hangers sliding across the closet rod (no… no… no… yes); the shower turning on, the hinges of the glass door as she must have been stepping in; her light humming of the refrain from
The
Umbrellas
of
Cherbourg
floating out and over the steam; the shower off; the sink on and off; the blow-dryer; the jars and wands and sprays of makeup and perfume clicking open and closed.

And there she was. Transformed.

From the wild, wanton
tyrant
to the perfectly turned-out daughter.

“How do I look?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“No. I fret more about my appearance when I have dinner with my stepmother than I do before the hottest date. Not that there have been many hot dates, but still.”

“Well, you look… immaculate. I want to rip you to shreds. At least I am no longer jealous. There’s no way you would be dressed like that for a man.”

Sarah felt a zing of feminine pride: he had been jealous? Then she looked down at herself through his eyes. Her hair was as straight as she could make it, the black pencil skirt was a serviceable wool Armani, her top was a vintage Yves Saint Laurent black and white, silky chiffon blouse of her mother’s that tied at the neck, off to one side. She had on opaque black tights and a pair of her own Sarah James black patent-leather platform pumps that made her feel invincible.

“Much worse than any man… my stepmother.” Sarah’s shoulders shifted to defeat, almost imperceptibly. “I am a bit of a disappointment to her.”

“In what way?” Devon had stood up to say good-bye and was dangerously close now, circling her like a hungry animal. He used one finger to move the straight fall of her hair to one side, then kissed her at the nape of her neck. “You are hardly disappointing here,” he purred in her ear, then his hands made lazy circles on her behind. “Nor here.”