Beg Me (30 page)

“Then why should I come racing to the rescue?” I asked.

“You think about it,” he said, and munched down on a roll.

So I’ll admit here, because after so much death there has to be more truth, that, okay, yeah, I think if something bad happened to Simon Highsmith and he was in major, major shit,
real
trouble, yes, I’d probably come running to get him out of it. I probably wouldn’t even know why myself when the time came.

He’d never let me live it down if I did, of course.

He was not the guy who becomes your husband and holds the basket for you at the A&P while you choose the right eggplants for dinner. If I ever ran into him again, a sure bet was that it would be in a shantytown of Haiti or a back alley in Marseilles or in another African market, probably with trouble on four wheels following.

I had met the one I could have shopped for dinner with. And then she was taken from me.

Simon said to me before he drove to the airport, “It won’t hurt less in the future, but after a while you think about their life more than their death.”

I didn’t know I’d been leaking my grief so badly.

He used a neutral
their
—didn’t know who it was I had lost. This was the first time he had ever worn his compassion so openly.

And I couldn’t even respond, just standing there while he got in his car and drove away.

AFTERPLAY

L
ondon. Didn’t tell anyone I was coming home. Three days after I got out of Heathrow, Helena swung by to water my plants and found me in bed at two in the afternoon. Big tip-off that I was in a terrible state. I hadn’t showered for a day. I was in my half-T and a pair of ratty panties, and I won’t even talk about my hair.

I was in this black hole, and I didn’t feel like climbing out, and I bloody well didn’t have to if I didn’t want, because Jeff Lee had paid me very well and I would be comfortable. So I had stayed in bed until Helena found me.

She asked, “Are you sick, darling?”

No.
Staring at the wall, no. When I dragged myself out of the bed to politely make her a cup of tea, she noticed the remaining bruises and marks on my ankles and wrists. Of course, they’d fade.

“Darling, did you get…?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish it.

“
No.
No, nothing like that. Rough case,” I said, mumbling like a child.

“Can you tell me? Do you want to tell me?”

I looked at her. I was still stuck on:
Can you tell me?
No. Can’t. Not now.

Tell you about this beautiful girl I think I genuinely loved? Can’t debase her with stupid clichés like
sweet
and
innocent,
because she wasn’t, but she had a brilliance to her and a purity.

We looked at each other for a long moment. To be more precise, she looked at me while I stared vacantly out the window. All her questions sounded as if I were hearing them through a funnel, muffled, as if I had earphones on.

Can you tell me?
Oh, God, I wish. I wish so much…

Helena’s become my best friend. And, like any best friend, she knows when to stop asking questions, which can be a way to satisfy stupid curiosity, and to just move on and help. She rose, went into the living room, and placed a couple of calls. I didn’t bother to listen. I was past caring.

Helena ran me a bath, and an hour later I was shuffling naked back to my bed (she had changed the sheets, said they were soaking with what must have been nightmare sweats), and then the doorbell rang. She buzzed whomever to come in. I was on a crying jag again in my bedroom. I barely recognized Fitz. He’d seen me naked before, and the state I was in, I was hardly enticing. Then Helena hovered over me with a glass of water.

“Take these, darling.”

“What…?”

“They’re just a couple of sedatives.”

I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, I was on my stomach, and Fitz was massaging a calf muscle, his thumb popping all the bubbles of tension out. He did more work on my back, and Helena said later that when he did a bit of craniosacral work on the back of my head and my neck muscles, I cried like a child.

Trauma,
he’d explained to her. That was later. At the time, under his skilled fingers, I fell into a sleep that took me through the afternoon and late into the next morning.

I have no idea how Helena arranged to bring them both all the way to London. Maybe that’s the blessing of good friends. They take the trouble to get you what you need in your most desperate hour.

Busaba and Keith. All the way from Bangkok, finally getting their chance to see London.

Pretty obvious how they happened to show up now, but like Helena, they didn’t know the actual reason for my depression. Unlike Helena and every other English friend I had—so achingly self-conscious about avoiding The Awkward Moment—Busaba came straight out and asked me bluntly what was wrong. She and I were on the Embankment, and I stared out at the Thames, wondering whether to burden her with this.

“I miss someone,” I explained. “That’s all. Her name was Violet. She’s dead.”

Busaba nodded, her beautiful golden Thai features respectfully blank for a moment, and then she smiled a little sadly, and there was something in her almond eyes that told me she was quite perceptive. “Let’s go back to your home, and I’ll hold you,” she said.

Busaba borrowed my cell and called Keith. He would join us later. We got on the Tube and rode back to Earl’s Court station. Busaba asked if we could stop into a Body Shop close by, and I waited outside in the drizzle—couldn’t muster the interest to go in with her.

When we got inside my apartment, she made no sexual overture, merely whispered a suggestion that I should sit down and relax while she made us cups of tea. I sat down on the couch, halfway to catatonic, and barely noticed when she brought me a mug of chamomile and began to massage my feet with the tiny bottle of massage oil she’d bought minutes earlier.

I was pulled out of my reverie by the pleasure of strong thumbs working my heels, small hands gripping my arches. Hands not my own on my bare feet, and it stirred such a primitive core feeling, the special raw euphoria a child feels when held by a parent. Security. Safety. I thought of Anna. Violet. Busaba held my feet as I sat in the chair, and though clothed, I was more naked than I’d been in all the time in that house. I felt a sudden electric tingle in my spine, and then I burst into tears.

“Let it come,” she said. She said something else in Thai, forgetting herself for the moment, something consoling.

I grabbed a tissue, blew my nose, and then, with a brave smile, stroked her face. She urged me gently to sit back. She undid my slacks and peeled them off me, taking my panties with them. She stripped off her shirt and her bra and, like a small animal, laid her head in my lap for a long moment. The silkiness of her black hair on my thighs was pleasant, and as I looked down, I felt arousal over the lovely golden canvas of her smooth back, the divide of her buttocks coming out of her pants, a thin line of panty waistband.

Busaba nudged my legs open, and her hands urged me to slouch, presenting myself to her. I felt the softness of her breasts for a tantalizing second, and then her teeth softly sank down on the inside of my thigh. She knew exactly when to stop, when the sensation no longer captivated. She slithered up to me and kissed me, led me to the bedroom.

She casually pulled off my top and undid my bra but didn’t bother to shed her pants, merely yanking her belt from its loops. We lay down on our sides, her behind me, spooning into me, holding me tight for a moment, until her fingers strayed down between my legs and began to play with my clit. I felt her crushed little breasts against my back. I sucked on one of her fingers as her other hand played with me and played, until all at once she urged me to roll facing her, and my vagina greedily took in three fingers, in and out with a furious rhythm, knowing exactly what to do as I sucked on her right breast.

Violently coming, convulsing in unbearable grief, but she didn’t relent; she took me up the curve again, my face already hot and tears streaming from my eyes, and I shuddered once more. With sudden inspiration, she ducked down, pushing my knees up, and her perfect pink tongue lapped and probed and flicked in a shallow depth in my vagina. She reared up, sitting back on her knees, powerfully erotic like that, naked to the waist in her slacks, and I gasped,
“Come here.”
I needed to suck her breasts. I needed all at once to steal my hands into her slacks and feel her bare ass. I hugged her close and kissed her, losing myself in her skin, her smell, unzipping her pants to take the back of my fingers and nestle them in slow stroking caresses in the wedge of her fur. A perfect triangle of trimmed black down framed in the
V
of her unzipped white trousers, shadow of a hip-bone across that golden terrain.

She was so generous, so loving. She was there for me, her own pleasure ignored. Only once did she seek satisfaction, and it was still for my sake. She got on all fours over me, and as her fingers brought me to another feverish pitch, she masturbated to keep me turned on. I watched her little white teeth bite her lip, watched as her thighs quivered, her legs starting to buckle. Her rhythm to pleasure herself held me spellbound, and then the wave of ecstasy forced her to collapse by my side with the smallest whimper, her eyes shut tight, my body racked with new spasms and endorphins flooding me in sympathetic unison.

I hugged her close. We dozed. I was conscious of her resting her lips on mine like tiny pillows, brushing them, kissing me in butterfly pecks. I was conscious of her caressing my hair, always so fascinated with it, touching my fur below and marveling again at its texture. I didn’t want to cry anymore, so instead I shook and shivered, and she held on to me. She spoke in Thai again, perhaps knowing the words didn’t matter, only the tone, the unintelligible words like faint music outside my window.

I knew then I was going to be all right.

I told them about the case. I never talk about cases, unless it’s to Helena. It felt right with them. I told them about beautiful doomed Violet and that bitch Danielle, about Ah Jo Lee and Anna. I confided how I didn’t know what to think about tortured Isaac, more than the others. He was a villain, but not a villain like others I’ve encountered, ones it was easy to hate and to mess around with for the sake of my client’s check.

“I remembered what you told me about Tiger Woods,” I said, looking to Keith. “How Thai people were thrilled and greeted him like one of their own.”

“It’s very true,” said Busaba, nodding.

My eyes were still on Keith. “And I think about you living in Bangkok and…” I trailed off. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

“I understand,” he said with a faint smile.

Look for the irony, but keep in mind it also comes looking for you.

Keith had gone to Thailand by choice, lived there by choice, could have left quietly if the place had treated him badly or it wasn’t to his liking. How much he felt like an alien in America, the country of his birth, was a separate issue, but Asia…Asia for him was a choice. And the love he had found with Busaba was a small miracle of its own. But for Isaac…

For Isaac, the union of his parents, no matter how tawdry or committed or whatever it had been, had been a curse, making him a prisoner of culture, a refugee of time. And, sweet Jesus, how many other Isaacs were out there struggling with their self-loathing, I wondered. Feeling they weren’t black, being told they weren’t Asian? No safe harbor of identity. How many of us have missed the quiet traps thanks to the precious, bloody plodding progress of a few decades?

“Brother never had a chance, you know what I’m saying?” said Keith. “I don’t know what to tell ya.”

“That’s okay,” I said. We were all quiet for a long moment.

“You miss Violet,” said Busaba.

“Yes.”

We listened to the birds in the park.

“Is Wimbledon far?” she asked out of the blue.

I smiled. “No, not far. We can get there by train or Tube. But the tennis is over, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Busaba smiled. “Oh, no. Not that.”

Keith put an arm around me and said, “I don’t know if any of this is gonna be comfort to you, Teresa, but we have an idea.”

“What is it?” I asked, my voice dead. I was numb.

“We should go to Wimbledon,” said Busaba.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

I shrugged, clapped my hands, and said, “Okay, we’ll go to Wimbledon.”

“We must go to this place,” she told me, holding out an address on a scrap of notepaper.

I didn’t understand until we took the District Line to Wimbledon Park. Busaba was cheerful, linking her arm through mine, and I brightened, infected by her joy. Keith held on to my other hand as we made the short walk to Calonne Road. Busaba had done some checking around and found Wat Buddhapadipa, a genuine Thai Buddhist temple right here in London.

We strolled through the gallery of astonishing murals that had come all the way from Thailand, and I found myself stopping at the one where Buddha defeats the ultimate bad guy, Mara. Then Keith and Busaba led me into the shrine room for the real purpose of our visit. Busaba had bought an offering of flowers at the convenient stand, and now she placed them in front of the golden statue. And then black woman, black man, and golden girl knelt to pay homage.

I didn’t know the words, didn’t know what was expected of me. It didn’t matter. I watched the two of them bow forward three times on their knees and did likewise. Then they showed me how to light a candle and pour water over an altar image for the spirit of Violet.