The Quirk (13 page)

“Sure. You’re not rich huh?

“Far from it. I guess you could say I’m the next best thing to being broke.” Rod’s puzzlement increased. Despite the youth’s tough, low-key manner, there seemed to be something purposeful in his remarks. There had to be a point to this conversation or why were they having it? Rod’s first suspicion that it was leading to a sexual pass was clearly mistaken. He waited impatiently for a clue.

“I have a feeling we may be seeing more of each other,” the Frenchman said. “A lot of people have found François Leclerc a useful guy to know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You never know till the moment comes. A guy gets in a jam, needs a little extra dough, I have ways of making a buck that might surprise you. Keep it in mind. I’ll be seeing you around.” He thrust out a hand. Rod gave it a shake and turned brusquely and continued on his way, pursued by a vague sense of menace. He tried to think why he had started nodding to Leclerc in the first place; somebody must have introduced them, but he couldn’t remember who. He would ask Patrice about him. He shrugged him out of his mind as thoughts of Nicole brought the smile back to his lips.

He told Patrice that evening about the encounter. “Who is he anyway?” he asked.

“François Leclerc? He’s a
pédéraste.
I believe he is engaged in many illegal activities. There are other rumors. Some even say he is a secret agent, but nobody says for whom.
Ça c’est du cinéma.
I don’t think he is somebody we need to bother about.”

“He asked if you’d taken me to some club.”

“A club?” Patrice picked it up with sharpened interest. “What club?”

“He didn’t say. I didn’t bother to ask.”

“There are many gay bars,” Patrice said dismissively. “His mind runs on one track. Do you say that? Can you imagine me wanting to take you to a gay bar?”

Rod wondered why he had let Leclerc bother him, and his mind reverted happily to what had grown into the major event of the day. He told Patrice that he’d called Nicole and made a lunch date.

“You want her,
chéri?
” Patrice asked with a teasing smile.

“Possibly. I’m not sure she’s the sort of girl who’ll let anything happen.”

“With you? Then she must be made of stone. But I don’t understand girls. I have heard the name. A very good family.” Patrice was full of such bits of worldly knowledge, but Rod hadn’t placed him socially. Serving rich clients would require him to know of the people in high society.

“She looks it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m just going to show her the pictures.”

“Of course,
chéri.
And anything else she wants to see.” He laughed naughtily. The girls were beginning, and he found it exciting as well as disturbing. Rod was a man. He loved all of him and would love his having girls.

Two days passed while Rod’s keen anticipation of the lunch date grew more intense. At the appointed hour he went around the corner and stood outside the entrance of the hotel. It was already hard to believe that he had once lived here, but he was glad that he had chosen it for the meeting; he didn’t want Nicole of all people to know that he shared a place with a boy who was doubtless a notorious
pédéraste.
He hadn’t been waiting for more than a few minutes when she alit from a cab. She saw him and smiled a greeting across the sidewalk, and he had a moment to observe her while she paid. The quick dexterity of her graceful hands was one of the things he knew about her, as was the lovely line of her neck and the slim style of her legs. She was as quietly elegant as he expected and wore no hat on her intricately coifed hair. They met in the middle of the sidewalk, and she held out her hand to him.

“How nice to see you again. I hope those pictures are no longer giving you trouble.” She glanced over his shoulder. “This is where you live?”

“Yes. It’s pretty grim. Don’t worry. I’ll spare you the squalor of my room. Since I saw you last, a friend had lent me a place to work. We’ll go there after lunch.” He remembered something withdrawn and mysterious about her but didn’t feel it now. She seemed open and friendly and pleasantly pleased to see him. He took her to a nearby restaurant that Patrice had recommended. It turned out to be just the sort of place he would have wanted to take her, small and cozy with a fire in the grate, run by a motherly woman who made much of them when he mentioned Patrice’s name. He felt a little glow of satisfaction at showing Nicole that he knew his way around. He mentally congratulated Patrice for his unerring good taste.

They had an excellent meal that featured fish soufflés, and they were soon talking freely about nothing in particular–just like old friends. Nicole’s big wide-set eyes met his with intelligence and tranquillity. Her delicate mouth made Frenchified music of her English. He was stirred by her more acutely then before, although her physical appeal was muted and subtle. He could see sweet breasts under the smart dark green dress. He had never gone in much for brazenly sexy girls, with the brief exception of Jeannine, and he supposed (the thought depressed him) that he would always be drawn to “ladies.” His whole body tingled at the thought of feeling her against him. He wanted to lie on top of her. He wanted to thrust himself into her and make her his.

“I wonder why every time I see you I always feel I’m about to fall in love with you,” he said over coffee.

“Oh,” she replied with a shrug and a friendly smile. “That is some foolishness Lola has put in your head.”

“I’m not sure. What if I really do? That
would
be foolishness. Don’t let me.”

“I’m afraid I will have to leave that to you. You’re a very handsome man. Girls always like handsome men to fall in love with them.”

“But do they fall in love with the handsome men? I don’t think so, as a rule.”

“You’re probably right. They like to look at them, but they usually end up with some ugly little old thing who is safer. However, it is always a possibility.”

Their eyes met and held questioningly for a moment. Rod knew that his were telling her that he wanted her, but she must be used to men looking at her like that. Was she a girl he was ready to be serious about? Go slow. He wasn’t sure of the message in her eyes. Hadn’t there been some hint of a man in her life? He paid the smallest bill he had ever had in a Paris restaurant and again blessed Patrice.

“What a marvelous place,” she said as they were leaving. “How do Americans find places like this? I must remember it.”

He walked her to the rue de verneuil and ushered her into the apartment and reminded himself not to refer to it as home. He took her coat and shed his own. She stood beside the sofa and looked around. “You really
are
clever. What a wonderful room to work. How do you find friends with such a place? I would give a great deal to have something like it.”

“I’ve been damn lucky. The guy who owns it is out all day. I hardly ever see him. Come sit here.” He pulled a chair over near his easel under the skylight. His interest was firmly fixed on her person, and he was anxious to get the showing over with. She was so elegantly aloof that he felt ready to devote months to plotting her surrender to him; having her now would save him from getting hooked by her and letting her disrupt his life.

He selected five canvases from those stacked against the wall and put one on the easel. In a moment it was clear that she didn’t have Patrice’s eye or concentration–or perhaps the pictures were of secondary importance to both of them. She commented on significant details but looked at him as much as the canvas. Nothing about her suggested that she would be an easy lay, but an exciting tension was growing between them that might soon exclude his work.

“I think I see something,” she said while she was looking at the second. Her eyes strayed to him and dutifully returned to the canvas. She looked at the third. “Yes. If this is American painting, I understand why you were angry when I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

“I don’t know if it’s American or not. I’m an American, so I guess that comes into it, but there’s so much American painting.”

“Yes, but I think I see a difference. The French have become decorators. This isn’t decoration. It’s difficult for me in English but–it’s so positive, like a statement. An affirmation. I’m afraid I can’t say it right.”

“Thanks for trying. You’re not only beautiful, but you’re also an art critic. I
will
fall in love with you.”

“You mustn’t make fun of me or I will be shy. You made me shy last time.” She was no longer speaking to him as a painter. They were flirting.

“Is that what the trouble was?” he asked with a playfully insinuating smile. This was familiar territory, a move in the mating game, thrilling with expectation but without the sharp little edge of the unknown and the illicit that had marked his recent experiences. An ingredient he might find he missed? “I’m not making fun of you. What you said is all I’d want anybody to say. Anything else is literature.” He brought the showing to a decisive end by removing the last picture from the easel and turning back to her.

Her eyes were on him. A current immediately leaped between them that tightened her expression with something like alarm. She rose slowly. He felt her desire like a shameless exposure of her body. He hadn’t been so eager to get out of his clothes in months. She touched her lips with her tongue, but when she spoke her voice was cooly self-possessed. “I’m grateful that you allowed me to see your work,” she said, looking up at him warily as if she expected him to spring. “I think you’re a true artist. I’m deeply impressed.”

He held her eyes with his for a moment. “Enough to let me kiss you?”

A small smile twitched the corners of her mouth and was gone. She looked up at him gravely. “Yes. Enough for that.”

The instant their lips met, he knew that she would offer no resistance. He was going to have her. Her responsive mouth opened to his. He was briefly astonished that it had happened so quickly and then totally absorbed in taking advantage of his good fortune. He put a hand on her hair and found pins and pulled them out. He fumbled with a zipper at the side of her dress and opened it and unfastened her bra. His hand on her naked breasts wrenched their mouths from each other with simultaneous gasps. He looked down at her and was stunned by the transformation he had accomplished. Years had dropped away from her. She was a child in distress, half out of her dress, her hair coming down but still partly caught up in the elaborate coiffure.

“You’re not–not a virgin, are you?” he stammered.

She looked up at him with all guards discarded, her breath rapid. “How sweet of you to ask. Two others before.”

“We have nothing to worry about? No problems about–?”

“No, no. You won’t make me pregnant. It’s all right here? Your friend–”

“Don’t worry, we have plenty of time,” he said hurriedly, spurred by shared desire. He couldn’t figure out how her dress worked, but she helped him with it and stepped out of it and discarded the bra. She was a gorgeously provocative sight, naked to the waist and still in shoes and stockings. Her breasts were as exquisite as fine porcelain, the nipples hard and rosy. She lifted her arms to complete the release of her hair, and he bent to tender flesh. She began to tremble at the touch of his lips and dropped her hands to his head.

“I must sit down to take off my stockings,” she said in an urgent whisper.

He straightened, and she stepped out of her shoes. He led her to the sofa. He was out of his clothes in seconds and found nothing lacking in the familiar experience of being vigorously aroused by a desirable naked girl. His erection looked too outrageously aggressive for such a delicate creature, and he wished he could hide it as he faced her. In another second they were tangled together on the sofa. She wanted him. She made no effort to disguise it. They moved up and around and over each other, their bodies performing extraordinary contortions in a passion to wring the ultimate ecstasy from each other. They slid across each other like snakes, their tongues provoking little cries and moans of anguished delight as they found and savored the most sensitive parts of each other’s bodies. The sinuous ritual accelerated. Her hands gripped his sex and placed it against herself.

He glanced down to recover his bearings. “God, look at me going into you.” He groaned with pleasure.

“I’m feeling it. It’s heavenly.”

She rode up his thighs, her legs gripping his hips to take all of him into her. She lay back in his arms, as wanton and shameless as a street girl and worked her hips on him. They rocked together and cried out to each other in a delirium of excitement.

“You like it, don’t you?” he gasped with triumph.

“Yes, yes, I like it,” she agreed breathlessly.

The sofa became a confinement, and they slid from it, still joined, and rolled about on the floor finding new joys in unexpected juxtapositions. When he could no longer bold back, he grappled her to him and used her without restraint. Her eyes were blind with ecstasy. A curtain of hair whipped about her face in the fierceness of his possession of her. She arched her body up to him, her legs in the air, and became an instrument for his satisfaction.

When he had spent himself in her, he pulled himself to his knees and gathered her into his arms and lifted her and lay her out on the sofa again. He dropped down and covered her with his body, belly to belly. They lay still in the lethargic aftermath of orgasm.