Scruples Two (29 page)

“Where did you come from, generous Miss Winthrop?”

“Seattle,” Billy said. “What about you?”

“Marin County, outside of San Francisco. How long are you here for?”

“Oh … quite a while … it’s my sabbatical year … I’m a teacher.” Good God, what had made her say that? She knew almost nothing about anything. Why hadn’t she said she was a sales clerk?

“What do you teach?” he asked, his nearsighted eyes intent on her face.

“French?”

“Is that a question? Because if it is, I feel sorry for your pupils. Listen, you didn’t mind being called ‘babe,’ did you? When I get to know you better, I’ll call you Honey, but right now … it sounds weird, like an … endearment, as if we really know each other.”

“No, I mean, that’s fine, babe’s fine. I definitely teach French. That’s why I took my sabbatical year here, obviously. But let’s not talk about it … it’s boring to everyone but me … studying the life and times of Voltaire at the Bibliothèque Nationale … you don’t want to know. Are you living in Paris or just visiting?”

“I’m not sure, babe. I’ve always wanted to come here, and this year I finally did something about it, found a studio to sublet in the Marais, around the corner from the Place des Vosges, and came on over. I don’t ever want to go back. This place has gotten to me. I wish I knew more French, though. Living here must be easy for you. I can get around, but I don’t have any ease.”

“It’s not hard to learn,” Billy assured him earnestly. She pulled her forgotten scarf off her head and was running her fingers artfully through her flattened curls. Christ, she thought, I’d promise to give this guy a crash course in French slang if he’d just shut the fuck up, drag me to his studio by my hair and throw me in his bed.

“You don’t look like a teacher,” Sam Jamison said, and, to his horror, found that he was blushing to his forehead, the redhead’s curse that he’d thought he’d outgrown. “That’s a dumb thing to say, isn’t it?” he added hastily. “How should a teacher look, anyway? It’s typical of the kind of remark men make that women hate.” How could anyone so beautiful waste her life teaching kids a language they’d probably never use? Look at the way she wanted to give him her precious bottle, look at the hideous way she covered her body—why, she wasn’t even comfortable accepting a sandwich from a stranger or talking about her work. She needed to be taught to be self-assured and even selfish, to demand whatever she wanted which would be no less than she deserved. A girl like this must want to be fucked, or there was no justice, no mercy, no use in being in Paris in the spring.

“Not necessarily,” Billy murmured.

“What’s not necessarily?” What had he said, he wondered. He’d lost track. She’d done something to her hair with her fingers that had taken his mind off his words.

“Women don’t necessarily hate being told that they don’t look like what they do. In my case, teach.” She’d never seen a man blush before. Or if she had, she hadn’t noticed. It would be heaven if she could get him to do it again. Absolute heaven. His skin was so creamy and fine-grained for such a tough-looking guy.

“What do women like to be told?” Did she not own a lipstick, or did she go around that way to tempt every man who saw her with the natural pink of her mouth? Could he ask her without blushing again?

“Ah, the old question. Even Freud didn’t know … especially Freud.” Why had she mentioned Freud? It sounded so academic, so musty, nobody even talked about Freud anymore. Jung maybe, but not that old creep Freud, who underestimated the clitoris just because he didn’t have one.

“He said he didn’t know what women wanted, babe,” Sam corrected her.

“A quibble. Wanting, telling, what’s the difference?”

“You’ve got me. Anyway, how about lunch? The restaurants are just opening.”

“Well … these sneakers …”

“We could find a bistro. A very small bistro.” Or a small hotel, for the love of God, with a very small room and a very big bed. “Or are you expected somewhere for lunch? Husband? Boyfriend?”

“Neither of the above. I’m happily divorced.”

“Me too. Kids?”

“A little stepdaughter, who lives in New York. What about you?”

“Nobody … just me and my work and Paris and generous Miss Winthrop. Come on, have lunch with me,” he pleaded, putting on his glasses and looking into her eyes with the intense scrutiny he had given the ivory bottle.

“I’m really not hungry right this minute, but I am curious about, well, actually.… as a matter of fact.… I’m curious.… about your work … I’d love to see it,” Billy said faintly, helplessly, her questing eyes downcast under the power of his gaze.

“Oh. Sure. Absolutely. In fact. That’s a great idea. It’s in my studio … well.… obviously that’s where it’d be.” Shit! He could feel himself blushing again.

“Is it far?”

“No. Actually not … we can grab a cab …”

They sat silently side by side in the cab, walked silently up the five flights of stairs to Sam’s studio, silently entered his large, light studio, silently ignored the large geometric shapes that stood everywhere, and silently walked straight into his small, darker bedroom, where they put their arms around each other and began to kiss, standing up, with a violence and a yearning and a need that surprised neither of them.

They kissed for a long time, trembling violently, still without words, until finally Billy shrugged out of her raincoat and kicked off her sneakers and pulled out of his arms so that he could take off his jacket. Suddenly they had no more time for undressing as they were overcome with the mounting necessity of a desire so vast that it was appalling. They fell to the bed, Billy still wearing her sweater, ripping open her jeans and pulling them off, Sam managing to shuck his jeans and his shoes. He entered her without a word, without hesitation, severely, and she accepted him with a lack of control that met his inevitability, a wildly indecent openness that wanted him to fill her and take her without tenderness. He cared nothing for her satisfaction, she nothing for his, and together they met in a place of pure lust where they took what they needed, giving and taking part of one single act in which they lost themselves completely. When they both came at the same time, it was such a surprise that when it was over they lay laughing helplessly, for that wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, not ever, not without at least a modicum of thoughtfulness, and then they managed to cast off the rest of their clothes and fell asleep in each other’s arms, still without a word.

“Darling babe, if you’re not hungry now, you’re not human.”

Billy opened her eyes, blinked in confusion and realized that she was in a warm bed with a wonderful-smelling, naked man she’d met only hours before. That’s more like it, she thought lazily, good show, very very good show. Sam was rocking her gently awake, nibbling tenderly at her lips.

“I was hungry before, but I didn’t want to wait … I couldn’t … have lasted through lunch …” She yawned twice, groaning with the pleasure of it. “How could you keep going on and on about food?”

“I couldn’t just say, ‘let’s fuck,’ could I?”

“Why not? I couldn’t, but you could.”

“Why couldn’t you say it?” he asked, finding her breasts under the sheets.

“Old American tradition, man has to ask first. Now it’s my turn. Let’s fuck.”

Billy Ikehorn, widowed, divorced, rich, famous, always observed and judged, couldn’t say “let’s fuck” to anybody, but Honey Winthrop, schoolteacher on the loose in Paris, could say anything that came into her mind. Her students back in Seattle could hardly object. “Let’s fuck,” she repeated buoyantly.

“Oh, babe, let me see you first.” He pulled back the sheets and blanket, looking in the deepest pleasure at her body, a superb female body that had reached perfection. Billy had always possessed a secret lushness of flesh that was hidden in clothes because of her height. Naked, the rich ripeness and swelling, supple mounds of her soft breasts and the voluptuous span of her white thighs were astonishingly evident. Her nipples were so deep in color that they looked as if she had rubbed them with rouge. She was a cornucopia of intoxicating volumes and curves. For long, reverent minutes Sam ran his fingers over the shapes of Billy’s body, reveling in finding the soft places and the firm places, the succulent, throbbing bounty he had not had time to look at earlier.

“Oh, Sam, Sam, couldn’t you do that later.… or are you measuring me to see if you want to sculpt me?” Billy was proud of her body and she felt no false modesty, but if he kept touching her like this much longer, she risked losing her mind.

“I … do … nonfigurative … stuff,” he said, tracing the outline of her bellybutton in total absorption.

“Turn over on your stomach,” Billy suggested, dry-mouthed, filled with madcap inspiration.

“Huh? What?”

“Fair’s fair. I want to look at you the way you looked at me.”

He followed her wish, and intoxicated, in a dream, Billy straddled him at his waist so that she could run both of her hands down through his hair and along his spinal column. She trailed her fingertips over the tenderness of his sides, drifting over the wonderfully smooth skin that ran down from his armpits to his waist, brushing him there with her burning touch until she could hear his breath come more and more roughly. Now she shifted her body, sitting across his lean, muscular thighs. She traced a light line of fire very slowly from his waistline to his coccyx and back. He moaned and shifted on the bed, lifting his ass quickly and spreading his legs slightly apart before he lay back again. Billy slid down so that she was sitting on his calves and looked her fill at the juncture of his legs. His penis was already so hard that it had risen up under his stomach, but the heavy globes of his testicles lay on the mattress between his legs. Lawlessly she bent forward and hovered over them, her mouth dry as she realized how completely he trusted her. Finally, with an open mouth, she began to puff little teasing breaths just above his testicles, warming them and watching the clenching of the muscles of his ass as he cried out in wordless desire.

“Now turn over,” she whispered as she released him from the weight of her body. He obeyed, lying utterly exposed, his eyes closed, all of his taut, thin length revealed. Billy intended to touch him slowly and lingeringly on all his most sensitive parts, his furrowed forehead, his temples, under his jaw, inside his elbows, his nipples, all the places that men love to have caressed as much as women do, but when she saw how rampantly distended he was, she instantly abandoned that idea. She had to have his cock in her again, right now, and she moved lithely, flinging one of her legs back over his body and balancing on the bed on her knees while she held his robust penis, swollen savagely now, in both hands so that she could guide him inside her. His eyes were open and he watched her face until the tip of his penis just nuzzled at the lips he’d entered so brutally before, watched as she gradually pushed him into the warm, quivering place between her legs. He didn’t stir as Billy gradually eased the pliant column of her body down until he was enfolded deep, deep into her flesh. She lay forward on his chest so that her head was pillowed in his neck. He allowed her to set her own pace, rising and falling above him for a few crucial inches, using his penis as her plaything, her possession. He held himself back brutally and gave himself utterly to her, delighting in the increasing rapidity of her movements, avidly watching the purposeful, building tension of her body as she drove herself closer and closer to the sought-after moment after which there was no turning back. At last she threw back her head in sightless ecstasy, her whole body shuddering uncontrollably, gasping in a fine heedlessness, until she collapsed back onto his chest, pulsating in the still spasmodic aftermath of her orgasm. Only then did he lift her in his powerful arms and turn her over so that she was lying on her back, only then, like a heathen worshiping a deity, did he smoothly reenter the pasture of her body and, with an exquisite concentration and sternly controlled fierceness, slowly allow himself to possess her again.

“Order something you can eat with one hand,” Sam told Billy, “because I’m not going to let go of this one.”

“Not even if I promise to let you have it back?”

“No. I don’t trust you that much. You’re a bossy babe.”

“Is that why you picked a pizzeria?”

“Maybe. Or maybe because there are four of them on this street. I eat in this one almost every night.”

“The French would call it your
cantine.”
Billy was divinely disheveled, although she’d tried to do something about her hair with Sam’s hairbrush. She had managed to brush her teeth with his toothbrush, and take half a bath in his tiny tub. She wore one of his sweaters, an ancient, yellow, V-necked Shetland that covered one shoulder and fell off the other. It was cinched in at the waist with an old blue tie she’d found in his closet, but nothing had erased the traces of lovemaking that left her cheeks patched with red where his whiskers had rubbed her and her lips swollen and her dark eyes huge and bright and heavy with gratification.

“I knew you’d get around to giving me a French lesson if I waited long enough,” he said.

“Don’t count on it, I have other things planned for you.”

“Could you describe them?”

“Not here, Sam, not in a public place.”

“Nobody’s listening. Anyway, they’re all French.”

“Do you want to get hard again?” Billy’s voice was soft and certain.

“It’s not about want. I
need
to eat two or three pizzas … but after dinner, yeah, that’s just exactly what I want.”

“After dinner, Sam—if you think you can handle it.”

“Are you sure this is a sabbatical year, or were you run out of town by the PTA?”

“You’ll never know,” she laughed. “I have my little secrets.”

“Babe, let’s go to your place first, wherever it is, and pick up anything you need to spend the night and tomorrow and tomorrow night and—”

“Oh … no … let’s not. That would … oh, you know … take too long. There’s a drugstore open at the corner. All I need is my own toothbrush and a comb. I have simple tastes.”

“You look better in my clothes than in yours.”