Black Lace Quickies 3 (6 page)

I walked past them. How could they not hear? How could they remain so insensible, pacing through life like this? Like horses with blinders, trotting past open fields; never seeing or knowing what they were missing. Never thinking about what could be.

The piano answered me, indifferent to anything but its own joy and its own wild pleasure.
Appassionato
.

At the room itself I halted outside. I wanted the music and what it promised: the careless longing, the sensuality. I suddenly didn’t want to see the player, just another miserable human eking out an existence except for this one instance of unrestrained joy. So I leaned again against the room doorway and listened.

I let the music beguile me, charm and whisper to me of golden damask sheets, of pillars twined around with vines, of red velvet and wine-sweet kisses. Of those aching, powerful moments of feeling that happened too few and far between the stretches of ordinary life. A look or a smile in the aftermath of sex. An unexpected touch. An instant of understanding without words.

There in that fusty little building with the mouldy ceiling lowering at me, I knew desire. And then it ended. Left me like a lover urgently called away. Chagrined, I bit my lip and frowned at the ceiling.

I told myself I should at least thank the piano player. He or she might be just a humdrum little
person
, ignorant of the voice and the longing in the music, but I could still show gratitude. A little moment of kindness on my part. So I pushed away from the wall and turned to enter the room. And found my way blocked.

He looked down at me and we said nothing at first, for there was nothing to say. I’d seen his face before, across impersonal, busy spaces among too many people. Somebody not part of my world. Somebody I had no reason to make part of my life, even though I had looked and looked again at that face: long proud nose and full mouth. Dark, rebellious waves of hair. Eyes the pale green of ivy leaves.

Now I looked full into his gaze and I spoke, and brought him into my world. ‘I heard your playing.’ I didn’t add that it was lovely, that it was rapturous. That it was any of the hundred foolish, mindless compliments I could have uttered. And he understood.

He smiled and lifted the fringed edge of my scarf; let the silky, woollen strands glide through his fingers. Hands like pale ivory, but with no hint of fragility. I was caught by that sudden, unlooked-for touch, netted like a stray fairy in a wizard’s garden, and I should have known then any chance of escape was lost.

‘I’m lucky you did,’ he said and let the scarf fall.

Such intimacy and such arrogance, brazen in his defiance of convention. But since he had
stepped
out onto thin air and dared me to follow him, I did. I took his arm as if we were old friends. We left the building, careless of the stinging rain that fought for our attention with each cold gust of wind. Now there was no reason to hurry. I wanted to savour the minutes and the rain chill and his warmth at my side.

We found a café; spent hours talking over something. Coffee, sandwiches. It didn’t matter. What mattered was his hands rubbing my wrists, his thumbs covering mine before tracing the lines on my palm. His pulse warm against mine. His green eyes and his smile.

But he didn’t kiss me that first night.

We circumvented each other for a long, wasted time, keeping our interactions chaste because we could rise above things like animal desire. All we needed was the meeting of like minds. We wanted nothing but long conversations and tranquil silences.

We shared confidences and thoughts and books. Traded recipes for stuffed mushrooms and chicken pot pie. He taught me how to make English trifle, and when my custard didn’t set and I fretted, he laughed and fed me strawberries. We drank all the sherry, ate the entire bag of walnuts and stayed up until morning.

I listened to his fears and he listened to my frustrations. He played for me while I sat beside him and listened, my head on his shoulder, my
eyes
closed. We promised each other that was how it would remain between us. Never would we fall into the trap of wanting too much.

There were promises to others: expectations and plans we could not simply throw to the winds.

‘Never,’ we said.

We were so stupid.

But he came to me first, after an evening of too much wine and too much poetry. After hours of meaningless social pleasantries; of mingling and smiling and small talk about nothing. Of listening to the party’s hostess read Neruda while we pretended not to notice each other. Ignored the heat when we stood too close. I told myself it was the alcohol, the crowded room. Told myself it was anything but his eyes following my every movement, or the way he looked at me and smiled for no reason at all.

He took me home and stayed, shrugging off his jacket and hanging it up in the closet as if it belonged there. Letting the dog out and then coming to find me where I stood, arms folded, beside the darkened garden windows. Always that’s how it was. I can look back now and see that I was ever the one to pull away first. To run.

Yet that night, when he rested his head on my shoulder, slipped the straps of the evening dress down and kissed the hollow just below my shoulder blade, I yielded without a thought.

‘I’ve looked at you all night. I’ve wanted you,’ he said.

I nodded, unable to answer, and he kissed the pulse beating in my neck. He cupped the darkrose satin dress over my breasts and stroked the flesh through it. My nipples responded to that steel-ivory caress and rose to meet it, wanting more. I was his instrument and his art, craving his touch. Craving him.

I turned and pulled his mouth to mine. I kissed him and stopped halfway though, confused. There was no demand in his response, no bid for power. Instead, I felt him relinquish control; all that he was and felt and knew into my keeping. He gave himself to me that night.

Hard cock. Hard, tensed muscle in his legs. Soft hands. Soft skin on his thighs, his stomach, his ribcage: everywhere that I touched and licked and sucked. Naked and offered up for my taking.

I made him suck my fingers and ran them – still wet – over the head of his cock. Stroked it. He licked the tangy drops of his own arousal from my skin before I slid my fingers into him, and then I caressed him from the inside while I teased his cock with my tongue and my lips. He cried out with pleasure and arched his hips upwards, fighting release.

‘I want your wet pussy,’ he said. ‘I want to fill you.’

‘You will, love,’ I said. ‘Be patient. You will.’

I fucked his ass with my fingers and I sucked
his
sweet cock until he came, thick and hot on my tongue, and then I licked the sweat from every inch of him until he rose again for me. He had his wish then, filling me and stroking my breasts, my neck, my shoulders while I knelt over him, my hips moving with his rhythm. And I wondered through a haze of orgasm and joy why I had ever, ever thought I didn’t need him this way.

That first night. Such magic. Every night was magic, every morning and afternoon and instant of time I was in his arms. It was the times in-between. When we worried about who was watching and what they thought. Disapproving glances. Curious, harpy stares from those who styled themselves colleagues and acquaintances or, worse yet, friends.

I glowed when he touched me, but I cringed when others saw it, when I saw their lips curl in mockery or disdain. I didn’t understand envy; I was too ashamed of my own unruly weakness. We both were.

Only the music tore away barriers. Listening to him play in the hot, navy-shadowed dusk, I closed my eyes and forgot the outside. I forgot reputations, and the now obsolete romantic attachments that still clung and brought twinges of guilt. I didn’t think about the wasted expectations and the gossip left in their wake.

While he played, I was inside the music. The raw notes left me tired. Only his playing could
pare
me down like that, and strip away my pretences. His playing. And his fingertips on my skin.

Until the last day. It should have rained that day. There should have been skies of steel with an icy wind or perhaps russet, falling leaves whispering of loss. Something poetic. Instead we had humid air, muggy with the aftertaste of smog. Traffic and lines at the airport. Tasteless coffee in green and brown plastic cups with white lids.

He sat quiet, drinking his coffee and watching the planes inching by beyond the windows. Not sulking, merely accepting when he knew any more opposition was just a waste of time. He reached out, touched my shoulder, his eyes focused on the lace at my collar as if he contemplated an unfamiliar instrument.

‘I’ll miss you.’

Simple. Stated without guile or motive. Just a fact.

I looked up, trying to seem brave and matter of fact, trying to hold back treacherous emotions. ‘Yes. And so will I. But …’

His fingers moved to cover my lips. ‘You don’t need to explain it any more, love. I already know.’ A sad smile. ‘I hope you’re right, I hope it gets better with distance.’

The intercom pinged. We listened to them call my flight for the last time.

‘It will.’

* * *

But even now, here in this house that still seems strange to me, I find that neither time nor distance has healed the wound. I was wrong. All I thought I knew turns out to be nothing.

A space of silence while the CD changes. A click before the music picks up again, filling the emptiness. Mendelssohn. I lower my head onto my folded arms on the back of the sofa. I don’t want to see the rain. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to hear those chords, stirring the ache inside, the futile longing for kisses and knowing fingers. I am too strong to cry and too proud to pick up the phone. So I sit here with only the sounds of piano and rain.

And then I hear the muted snick of the front door, opening and closing. I did not lock the door. This place, a little town in a distant country, doesn’t warrant locked doors. Amazing, I think, that such a place should still exist. I look up, expecting to see a neighbour, or maybe the vet’s girl with the week’s prescription. But instead my heart leaps and somersaults like a schoolboy on the first day of summer. Even though I cannot command a single other muscle to move.

He stands in the doorway, raindrops caught in his hair and on his clothes. We look at each other, saying nothing. I, because I think he can be nothing more than a figment of my imagination. He should be a world away. It’s where I left him.

He walks forwards, staring at me with such intensity I don’t know whether I want to run
away
and hide, or let myself be pulled into the storm promised by that icy green gaze. He sinks to the floor at my side, rests his cheek on my thigh, and closes his eyes. A penitent and a pilgrim come through fire and trial, overcome at the shrine for which he has so long searched.

His hand rests on my velvet swathed knee, and I shiver as if the cloth did not exist. As if his musician’s fingers, fine boned and strong, touched my bare skin. A touch both electric and sensual, like cold white wine drunk too much and too fast.

‘You came all the way here. Why?’

He looks up at me, apologetic and burning all at once and I regret the sharp edge to my tone, the tinge of resentment that I’ve been without him, without even the consolation of his words or his voice so long. No matter that it was my own fault, my own wish that the break be clean and final.

‘I tried, love. I’m sorry, I did. But I can’t forget how it feels.’ He sighs, shifts. ‘I need to talk to you; I need to fuck you. I can’t do this.’

I look out at the watery world, trying to ignore the impulse to stroke the droplets from his damp hair, to curl my fingers in the darkened strands.

‘We broke the rules before. We broke them and didn’t care,’ he says, frowning when I turn to him.

‘And part of the reason I left was to stop …’

‘But it’s hurting us. You told me it was an addiction, like any other kind. So why should we care about what the right thing is now anyway?
Why
?’ His voice rises, quavers in frustration and pain. Throwing my own demand to know back at me.

‘Good question.’

I know he’s still looking at me, stung by the indifference in my voice, but I avert my gaze. Find safety in watching water run in a haphazard trickle over some irregularity on the window frame. I’m still fighting the longing, fighting him. And I don’t even know why.

‘How can you be this cold?’

I shake my head. The rain falls in staccato needles, and a harp has joined the notes of the piano still pouring from the stereo speakers. I think I will break apart from longing and guilt.

I feel him move and I close my eyes. I know what will happen; it doesn’t matter how cold or cruel I try to be. Yes. Yes, love, this is an addiction.

His hands turn my face to his, and my limbs betray me, taking me to the edge of the sofa, my arms going around him. His lips are rain cold and sweet; his clothing damp and chilled. But heat rises within him like a song, growing in tempo and sound.

He opens me. His hands search beneath my skirt, find the silken edges of my panties. He pulls them to my thighs, my knees. He slips them off one ankle and then another and, still kneeling, holds my feet together in his lap. Beneath his jacket and shirt his stomach is warm, vulnerable, and I rub my toes against that yielding, intimate
space
. He closes his eyes, cups my calves and massages them slowly.

It hurts to be shut out, even for a moment, and I whisper to him to look at me. I’ve already shut myself out for far too long. He smiles, obeys and bends to kiss my knees, trailing kisses down to the ticklish skin at the arch between knee and calf. Licking tiny, wet caresses up the undersides of my thighs as he pulls me forwards. As he takes my skirt off with practised ease. Tosses the cloth aside and turns to my belly. Water drops from his hair and piccolo kisses falling on the curve under my navel, the curve of my waist, up to the edges of my ribs.

This time I cannot help burying my hands in his hair. Arching under him and crying out as he makes love to me with these simple, soft kisses. Art without effort. But no, this isn’t lovemaking; this is far beyond the simple, carnal weakness I was so afraid of once. This is worship and sacred song. It’s as close to magic as I’ll ever know.