Tell Me More (12 page)

“A bit of a fib.” I opened the door. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

He got out and stretched as though sitting in the car for a few minutes had stiffened his muscles. “Spur-of-the-moment. Sorry. It was all I could think of.”

I felt ungracious then. “No, it’s fine. I would have offered anyway, but I was planning on going out tonight…. I can cancel it.”

“No, don’t change your plans on my account. I need a shower.” He grabbed his backpack and headed up the outside stairs.

“Will you… Do you think it’s safe?”

He stopped. “You’re welcome to come scrub my back, but I’ll be okay. And the fireplace and movies sound great. Thanks for the offer.”

He came back downstairs later, in clean sweats and a flannel shirt, and I settled him on the sofa with a quilt, two packs of frozen peas and my DVD and video collection. He seemed subdued, as far as I could tell, for someone who was fairly quiet anyway.

In the kitchen I rummaged in the freezer for the batch of soup I’d made a few weeks ago and a loaf of raisin bread. I didn’t intend to spend all night seeing whether his pupils looked abnormally large, but the least I could do was feed him.

As I carried the tray into the living room, familiar tinkling piano music met my ears.

He looked up, one hand on Brady, whose purr I could hear across the room. “You don’t mind, do you?” He motioned to the television. Of all the options he had, he’d gone for an old home video.

I shook my head and unloaded soup bowls, bread and butter onto the table. I tried not to watch the screen, but even as I sat my feet itched to turn out, point, move. My fingers moved, marking the steps.

“First-year recital,” I said. And then, “Why didn’t you hit him?”

He sat up, pushing cat and quilt away, fists clenched. “Because even if your dad is a jerk and an asshole and drunk as a skunk, you don’t want to see him bleeding on the ground.”

I’d opened a can of worms here obviously. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to push a button.”

He slumped back on the sofa and Brady settled on his knee, kneading his pants legs and purring. He stroked him and the purrs increased in volume.

“Chicken noodle soup.” I handed him a bowl.

He smiled. “Great. You’re all set up for bad-tempered invalids, I can tell. Sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. And yeah, it pushed a button, but you weren’t to know.” He hit the pause button on the remote. The small figure on the screen stilled into a blur of interrupted movement. “So, you want to hear the story?”

HE’D KNOWN SHE WOULD ASK, BUT LULLED INTO
comfort and serenaded by the cat’s purr, she’d taken him by surprise. Where to start, that was the problem, because how the story began was important; it colored the rest of it, and it definitely meant the ending might change. He wasn’t even sure if there was an end, because things went on and you did what you could, and hoped you wouldn’t screw anything or anyone else up.

He prodded at a piece of chicken in his bowl. “Good soup.”

“Thanks.”

“So, it’s not
Angela’s Ashes
or anything. Nice middle-class family near Dublin, we lived in a Georgian house, all decaying elegance with a ghost in the attic, and so on, with a bit of land. My sisters had ponies. My da’s a fellow at Trinity, mum’s a doctor, both smart, educated people. My da’s a great guy except when he drinks and then he’s a jerk. A violent jerk. And for all her fancy education my mother was like one of the women at the shelter, poor cows—she rationalized what he did and accepted it. I learned to fight so he wouldn’t take it out on me when he was drunk. And that was a mistake.”

“Why?” She paused, spoon halfway to her mouth.

“If he’d hit one of us kids, she might have left him sooner.”

“You really believe that?”

“I knocked him down one time and she flew at me screaming like a crazy woman.” He spread butter on a piece of bread. “She left him, and I came to the States. I’d met Elise the year before and we decided to marry. I thought I was making a clean break of it, but there’s never a clean break with your family.”

“I’m very sorry.” It was a conventional response but he felt a deep kindness behind the words.

“Thanks.”

“So that’s why you do volunteer work for the shelter,” she said.

“Yeah, atoning for my da’s sins. And I like the little kids. I’m missing my nieces and nephews growing up. There are eight of them. We’re a prolific lot.”

“And it’s why you don’t drink.”

“Right. Not a smart thing to do with my genes.” He put his empty bowl on the table.

“You know, there are support groups for adult children of alcoholics—”

“No. Absolutely not.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Jo, I tried it and there was only one other guy there, and half the women came on to me.”

She giggled. “Oh, come on.”

“I thought it was obscene. And adult children— God, I hate that term.” He saw an expression he couldn’t quite figure out pass over her face. “Sometime in your life you just have to suck it up and get over yourself. Everyone’s screwed up one way or another.” He replaced the bag of peas on the back of his neck. The cat investigated his soup bowl until Jo swatted him away, and then climbed onto Patrick’s chest, warm and heavy and purring.

“Push him off if you like. More soup? In a clean bowl,” she added. “How about some tea? I have Irish Breakfast.”

He accepted the tea, not sure what he was getting into. Elise always accused him of being a tea snob, which he wasn’t. One time she’d taken him to a place that had exotic teas from all over the world and he figured that the more the teas smelled like a damp basement, the more they cost. He liked the sort of tea he’d drunk all his life, strong enough to put hair on your chest, with a scant dribble of milk to give it opacity, what his grandmother called “a nice cup of tea.”

Amazingly, she got it right, serving it to him with a graceful bob into a cross-legged position on the rug. The girl must have great quads.

“Ah, the Irish tea ceremony,” she said as he sipped.

“Great. Thanks. Now tell me about your lurid past.”

She grinned. “I believe in having a lurid present.”

“No. That.” He gestured at the television screen, which had long since reverted to a regular channel and now provided a little background noise. “Tell me about being a dancer.”

“Ah. What makes you think it’s part of my lurid past?”

“The expression on your face when you came into the room. The way you tensed up. And honest to God, I wasn’t being nosy. I thought I was going to watch
Casablanca.
”

She stood and took the remote from the arm of the sofa. “Shit. I wonder where
Casablanca
is.” She clicked the recording back into life. The blurry figure on the screen came to life, twirled, leaped, stretched.

“You were good,” he said.

“Not good enough for New York and that’s what counts, but I was good enough to study here. The university has one of the better teachers outside of New York.” She mimicked the figure on the screen with scaled-down movements, precise and graceful. “Dance memory. Sometimes I think it’s written into my bones. I didn’t have the right sort of body.”

Your body looks absolutely fine to me.
If he’d said that aloud, would she have been offended or thought he had a concussion?

“I’m too long-waisted. My turnout was always crap.” She arranged her feet, heels together, toes out in a dancer’s one-hundred-and-eighty-degree position. “And I was overweight.”

“You were?” He looked at her and then at the figure on the screen.

“By about five pounds. Always. And that’s why I stopped.” She flowed across the room, arms arched, turned and snapped the player off. “I’d worked hard but I’d never been in this sort of community before, with girls who were so driven. All they did was dance and puke and their definition of a serious conversation was talking about toe-shoe maintenance or what brand of laxative was best. And the day after this recital I found myself looking at a bar of Swiss chocolate and thinking that if I ate it I could puke it up after.”

“Did you?”

“No, but it was scary. I ate it to prove I could, and then I called home and told my family I was changing my major. I saw my advisor the next day and changed to a major in history with a minor in communications. And then—” she grinned “—I ate chocolate and bread, and my God, what a sensual experience that was after all those years of denying myself. I’m ten pounds heavier now.”

“You look great to me.” That came out right, not too leering.

“Thanks.” She sat down again. “I responded to peer pressure, and that can be a scary thing. So we both have addiction in common. Isn’t that special.”

“Very.”

She giggled again. “Maybe a group hug would be appropriate.”

His dick woke up with a vengeance. He hastily rearranged the quilt on his lap and waited to see what she’d do next. Christ, why did he feel like a teenager around this woman?

The phone rang. She listened for a while. “Oh, hi. No, he’s here, with me.” She said to Patrick, “It’s Liz. She was worried because she didn’t get through on your cell or your landline.”

“Tell her hi and that I’m fine.”

“Sure.” Another pause. “She says she and Fred can come over with pizza if you’re up for it, and check out the size of your pupils.”

“Great.” Although he enjoyed the company of Liz and her husband he was slightly disappointed that he was not to enter into a group hug, or anything else, with Jo.

“And we can watch
Pride and Prejudice,
” Jo continued. “That okay, Patrick?”

He nodded his assent and wished he hadn’t as both sides of his head ached.

She replaced the phone on the receiver. “That’s okay, isn’t it? Or were you hoping for
Casablanca?
”

“No, that’s fine. I like Jane Austen. Movies, at any rate.”

“Wow. A guy who likes Austen.” She gave one of her sudden huge grins.

“So, do you miss it?”

“Miss what?” She bent to pick up his tea mug. She gazed into his eyes and he hoped it wasn’t purely to check out the size of his pupils. “Dance? It was the greatest loss of my life, up to that point. I cried for months after, and it was the damnedest thing—I actually lost those five pounds for a while. But like you say, you suck it up and you move on.”

Liz and Fred arrived shortly after, full of concern for him and for a moment it reminded him of being with his sisters and their families, a real girly evening, what with the
Pride and Prejudice
marathon ahead, but he didn’t mind.

“Don’t change your plans, Jo!” Liz cried. “If you have a date, go out. Have fun. We’ll stay here with Patrick.”

“Look, you don’t have to—” he said, embarrassed, and then remembered the one thing he’d got out of that awful support group meeting: that he shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help. By extension, he shouldn’t turn help down; asking for it might be some way off.

Jo picked at a piece of pizza and caught him watching her. “I don’t want to reek of garlic,” she said with a slightly defensive air as though she regretted telling him of her flirtation with bulimia.

“So who is it, Jo? You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone,” Liz said.

She shrugged. “Just some friends. Nothing special.”

Shortly after she left the room and he heard the sound of water roaring in the pipes and tried not to imagine her having a shower. He yawned, feeling unaccountably tired. He supposed it was the aftereffect of shock, after having so much adrenaline run through him.

“You okay, Patrick?” Liz said, patting his hand.

“I’m fine. I’m not lapsing into a coma or anything. Just wondering whether I should press charges against Yolanda’s dad. The cops wanted me to.”

“You should.”

“The poor bastard’s in a shitload of trouble without me adding to it. If Yolanda was my kid I’d probably go berserk, too.”

“You probably wouldn’t be high or violent.” Liz returned her attention to the screen. “Oh, I love this bit, when Mr. Collins gets into the cart.”

Jo came downstairs, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and sparkly earrings that probably weren’t diamonds. For some reason he was reminded of Cinderella, the early versions where she was given jewelry by the fairy godmother, a pair of bracelets. The earrings seemed incongruous with the rest of the outfit, but what was a mere guy to know.

Her cell phone rang—some musical phrase that he didn’t recognize—and she waved goodbye to them and left.

“Well, well.” Fred peeked out through the blinds on the front window. “A stretch limo.”

“Cinderella goes to the ball,” Liz said. “She didn’t look dressed for a stretch limo-type event.”

“She can look after herself.” Patrick knew Liz was thinking of pimps and drugs, the sort of problems the women in her shelter encountered, and for the most part, why they ended up there. And he knew that a middle-class background and education, even well-meaning supportive friends, meant nothing if a woman were involved with the wrong sort of man.

He didn’t like to think of Jo in trouble. And while it might not be any of his business, he saw in himself the urge to rush in on a white charger and save her. But he wasn’t going to do that anymore. He put the white charger firmly back in the stable, shut the door and immersed himself in the genteel problems of the Bennet sisters.

“HEY, JO.”

I couldn’t tell who it was in the dimness of the limo but I recognized his voice.

“Ivan?”

“That’s me.” He placed a hand on my knee which made me feel uncomfortable. Weren’t we supposed to not acknowledge each other outside of the Great Room? We’d seen each other that afternoon and passed each other as though we were strangers. “Looking forward to tonight?”

“I guess so.” I moved away from him and tried to see out of the dark tinted windows. We made one more stop to pick up a woman called Judy, who cuddled up with Ivan and talked to him in whispers for the rest of the journey. We were going west into the mountains, I knew, because my ears popped a little as we gained in altitude. I wondered if anyone had smuggled in a GPS to discover the destination; it could be done easily enough if you owned one. I’d tried with my cell but lost the signal. And what exactly went on on the second floor of the house?

The limo continued to climb and then made the turn onto a driveway and made another turn to take us to the side entrance. We went into the chilly locker room where a few others were changing. We were mostly quiet. It was as though we assumed our snarky, bitchy personae inside the Great Room; here we merely prepared. Ivan snapped the elastic of his boxers and preened in front of a full-length mirror. Judy leaned to apply mascara at a mirror.

I stripped off my jeans and socks and sneakers. I wore a pair of my fancier underwear, red silk with black lace, and no bra beneath my black T-shirt. Part of me wanted to be home, snug on the sofa with Patrick and Liz and her husband, watching videos and laughing. I hoped Patrick was okay, that little Yolanda had recovered, for the time being at any rate, poor kid.

“Move it, Jo.” The door was flung open by Pete. “If you’re late, there’ll be consequences.”

“Bite me,” I responded, already feeling the stirrings of naughty insubordination, and strolled through the door he held open, taking my time.

It was mostly the same crowd but in different combinations of twos and threes. The fire crackled invitingly and the snack table was stocked with a gorgeous cheese-and-fruit assortment. As we entered, a female staff member, dressed in black, was putting the finishing touches to it. She took no notice of us.

I helped myself to some wine and joined in the Scrabble game with Pete and Ivan and Lindy, who had been punished so humiliatingly the other night, and who wore only a thong and a skinny camisole tonight. Pete seemed to be in a heterosexual mood tonight, stroking Lindy’s thighs and breasts, while she mostly ignored him and Ivan, shoving their hands away when she wanted to put pieces on the board. I wondered if it was a tactic to view their pieces, or, more likely, a conspiracy to trick someone—myself, for instance—into doing something stupid.

“You don’t think Jo’s feeling left out, do you?” Pete asked at random.

I smiled and used my
Q
on a triple word score. Sometimes a high Scrabble score was the best revenge.

“I think you’d better take care of her,” Lindy said.

Ivan moved over to my side of the board and laughed when I turned my pieces facedown. “What are you worried about, babe? You’re winning. And it’s not your pieces I’m interested in.”

He nuzzled my neck. “The best defense is to masturbate yourself senseless before you come. Come here, that is.”

“You don’t know much about female sexuality, do you?” I looked at the board. “That’s not a word, Lindy.”

“It is, too!”

Pete wriggled his fingers under her thong. “Mmm. Someone’s getting wet.”

“You going to challenge her, Jo?” Ivan slid his hand under my T-shirt.

“Do you think I should?” I stroked his cock through his thin cotton pants. “Perhaps I’ll make you come instead.”

Lindy ignored us. Pete’s fingers were inside her thong, their mouths joined in a deep kiss.

A few people strolled over to watch, and Jennifer, who’d invited me into the bathroom last time, knelt to caress Lindy’s breasts. Pete disengaged his mouth from Lindy’s, and he and Jennifer pulled her camisole off over her head, revealing full breasts with a tattoo of a dragon curling around them.

“Pretty,” Ivan said.

Lindy fell back against the Scrabble board, legs spread wide, scattering pieces as Pete and Jennifer nibbled at her breasts. Pete’s fingers pushed in and out of her tiny thong, which was darkened with her juices.

Ivan’s cock hardened beneath my fingers, and when he slipped his hand into my panties and rubbed my clit I didn’t stop him. “Damn,” he said, his breath tickling against my ear. “Damn if they’re not going to make her come. You want me to do you? Be quiet and you’ll get away with it.”

“I don’t trust you.” My hips bucked to his rhythm. “Hey, I take it back. You’re not that bad at female sexuality. You’ll tell. I won’t come.”

“You will.” He licked my neck and nibbled beneath my ear. “You will, honey. Let it go, you won’t get another chance like this. Look at Lindy. She’s a big sexy mess.”

She was. Above her, Jennifer kissed Pete while each of them manipulated one of Lindy’s hard nipples. Lindy’s own finger moved on her clit now, her legs raised and parted, her drenched thong pushed aside to reveal the dark pink folds of her pussy.

“Oh, God,” I said. I wanted Ivan to stop, I wanted him to continue. I wanted to close my eyes and succumb to the orgasm that awaited but at the same time Lindy and Jennifer and Pete demanded my attention.

Ivan’s mouth teased at mine and his tongue slipped inside, a gentle suckling. His other hand pinched my nipple while that sweet manipulation of my clit went on. And on. “Come,” he whispered. “Come, I dare you.”

I broke the kiss to see what the others were doing. Most of the inhabitants of the Great Room had gathered to watch. Jennifer knelt between Lindy’s thighs now, thrusting her fingers into her pussy. Pete knelt over Lindy, stroking her breasts with one hand, the other pressed against his cock.

“He’s going to come on her tits,” Ivan murmured. “And she’s going to come. She’s a noisy girl. They won’t notice if you do. God, you’re so wet. You’re dripping. You like that?” He pushed his finger inside me. “Like some more?”

His fingers moved in and out of me, his thumb grazing my clit. “Do it,” he murmured. “No one will see.”

My thighs tensed. I knew I shouldn’t trust Ivan, any of them. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I allowed myself to come, but with every stroke of his hand, every clever pinch to my nipples, I drew closer and cared less for the consequences.

And then I came to my senses and rolled away. “You bastard!” I screeched and grabbed for the nearest missile, which was the velvet pouch that held the Scrabble tiles.

He ducked the shower of tiles, laughing, as applause broke out. ‘Nearly got you, there, Jo.”

Jennifer, Pete and Lindy had meanwhile disentangled themselves, all of them red in the face and out of breath, but grinning stupidly.

“And I was winning! Look what you did to the board!” I continued.

“Look what you did to the tiles, honey,” Pete said. “If we’ve lost any, you’re in for a spanking.”

I got onto my hands and knees to gather tiles and wagged my butt at him. “Exactly how long am I going to be the new kid on the block? I’m tired of this already.”

“Now, don’t be mad,” Jennifer said. “You—”

A bell rang and Pete jumped to his feet. “Okay everyone, look pretty.”

People arranged themselves in sexy postures on the furniture. I sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by the debris of the Scrabble game and finished my glass of wine. I knew I didn’t look pretty—I looked bad-tempered and flushed and my hair probably stood on end.

Angela, or Mrs. Danvers in black leather, opened a door I’d barely noticed before, quite near where I sat. It wasn’t the door we used that led to the locker room. This one had a keypad, and, I now realized, must have led to the main part of the house.

Pete came over to talk to her and then he beckoned to Lindy, who stood, tugging her camisole back down to cover herself. She looked excited and proud, and the room erupted into a chorus of whistles and applause.

“Go, Lindy,” someone shouted, while Ivan crossed over to the piano and started to bang out an approximation of the Elgar piece used at graduation ceremonies.

Pete kissed Lindy’s cheek and slapped her bottom in an affectionate sort of way. Angela fluffed Lindy’s hair and straightened her camisole, frowning. “She’ll do. Come along, honey.”

I watched Angela as she punched in a code in the keypad and was amused to see it was the same one we used for the station library, following various disasters with people getting locked out or leaving important personal items inside, or, worse, jamming pieces of cardboard in the door. It didn’t rely on a sequence of numbers but a manual pattern—diagonally top right to bottom left, and then the remaining two numbers across. That could come in useful.

Lindy waved goodbye and stuck her tongue out at Pete, and then she and Angela left.

Ivan stood to open the piano bench and pull out some music. When he sat at the keyboard again he played a Chopin nocturne, a soothing accompaniment to my task of finding, sorting and counting the Scrabble tiles. None were missing. I tipped them carefully back into the velvet pouch and saw the room had settled back into its usual routine. I strolled over to the piano and watched his hands on the keyboard, and, although I was no musician, I knew enough to follow the printed notes as he played.

I reached over his shoulder to turn the page.

He gave me a quick, surprised smile.

There was something about Ivan I liked, despite his most recent dirty trick—maybe because he was the only person I’d seen in real life, outside the Great Room, that is, and I liked his smile (and his touch, too). Before all this, the Association and Mr. D., Ivan might have been the sort of guy I’d consider dating. Besides, he played the piano well, and I’m a sucker for musicians.

He came to the end of the piece. “You play?” he asked.

“No. You’re pretty good.”

“Thanks.”

I wondered if I could trust him, and decided to take the risk. While he had his hands on the piano and not me, that is. “So, Ivan, tell me how this works. How you get to graduate.”

He played a few idle chords. “Okay, you’ve got to get a balance. They—” nodding up to the balcony “—will notice you if you stand out. If you’re proactive, if you engage with the rest of us. They like to see us punished, but not too much. Some people really get off on getting punished and if that’s what you’re into, that’s fine.”

“How long does it take to graduate?”

He shrugged. “Some people get to go upstairs within days. A week, maybe two.”

“What happens upstairs?”

“Whatever they want, at first. Then you get to be one of the decision makers.”

“So if you graduate, you stay upstairs?”

“Some of us like it here. Pete likes playing boss. He’ll stay down here for as long as he can, before he gets too old. They don’t like anyone in the Great Room over the age of thirty and he’s pushing twenty-nine.” A few more chords, a riff of Ellington.

“Have you ever gone upstairs?”

“Yeah.” His hands stilled on the keys. “I…I didn’t have a good experience. So now I stay down here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Babe, don’t waste too much time feeling sorry for me. I’ll be tricking you again soon enough. And you’ll be doing something mean to me.”

I gazed at him, wondering what sort of hurt he concealed, and whether we might ever be friends. I sat next to him on the piano bench. “I like you, Ivan.”

“Hey, I like you, too, or I think I do. Thing is, are we worth breaking the rules for?”

“You know the rules are legalistic garbage,” I said, borrowing Patrick’s phrase.

“If you’re here long enough, you’ll take them very seriously,” he said. “And after a while, what goes on in here seems more real than anything else outside.”

I looked back over his shoulder at the room and its inhabitants. “Yeah, but it’s boring down here, apart from the fooling around.”

“It’s set up to be boring.” He gave me a sweet smile. “If we had internet access or our cells here, or even cable, we’d all ignore each other.”

He flipped the pages of the book of music and started on another Chopin nocturne, while I wondered if tonight I had some sort of sign plastered on me that announced I was safe for confessions. First Patrick, now Ivan.

I wandered over to the bookshelf and chose a tattered paperback mystery, and settled myself into one of the oversize armchairs with a plate of cheese and crackers and another glass of wine. Jennifer perched on the arm.

“What are you reading?”

I showed her the cover.

“Is it good?” As I ignored her, she bent forward and touched my breast. “Let’s take off our tops and make out.”

“No, I want to read.”

“Frigid bitch!” She flounced away while I tried not to giggle.

The way I saw it was that a blatant transgression of the rules—and I’d have to pick my moment, when a large group of onlookers was gathered on the balcony—followed by a punishment, was the best way to get upstairs. And apparently I wanted to get upstairs, to progress—some latent competitiveness, which I thought was safely dormant since my time as a dance student, had emerged. Even if I didn’t know what I was getting into, I still wanted to meet the challenge. Sure, it was a game, but it was one I was beginning to take seriously.

Mr. D. would understand when I told him, but to be honest, my experiences in the Great Room seemed more real, more vivid, than what I experienced with him. So did my friendship with Liz and my…whatever it was I had with Patrick. I missed Kimberly at that moment, which was ludicrous. She was no prude, but what would she say? I’d mend the breach, I decided. One of us had to.

I stole a look at the forbidden door again, feeling like an idiot heroine in a fairy tale. First Scheherazade, now Bluebeard. I could get through. I could take a look around upstairs and see what was going on and then decide whether I really wanted to stay in the Association. What was with the masks anyway? I should have asked Ivan, while he was in a talking—rather than a foreplay—mood.