AT 4:32 , there was a confident knock on my door.
“I’m Isabella,” she said, in a voice like myrrh, and I let her in.
She took it all in—the chilling champagne and two glasses, my bare feet and still-damp hair, the lack of underwear beneath silk shirt and trousers, the closed inner drapes in the sitting room and the bedroom door standing ajar and showing a hint of shadow and candlelight—in one sweeping glance, and said, “Thank you,” when I offered to take her wrap. It slid from her bare shoulders into my hands like an offering. Her skin smelled of heat and spice. I carried the light wrap to the closet, and took my time hanging it.
The cash was gone when I returned, both piles.
She looked out over the city while I poured the champagne, and when I sat on the sofa, she sat at my feet as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and laid her hand on my thigh.
“Aud,” she said, “it is very good to meet you,” and I wanted to believe her. Her eyes were sunlit honey. Summer eyes. Nothing to do with frost or snow or death.
“It’s very good to meet you, Isabella,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because her hand had started to stroke my thigh, almost absentmindedly, and she was looking at me as though I were her queen.
“Aud, it’s an unusual name.”
“Yes.”
“Are you visiting from another country?”
It felt like it.
“Aud. Am I pronouncing it right?”
“Yes. It’s Norwegian, after Aud the Deepminded. She founded Iceland.”
“Iceland,” she said. “I hear it’s a beautiful country. Contradictory. Ice and glaciers and molten lava. And hot springs.”
And so controlling of its citizens: only certain things on television, certain names legally allowed.
“You have such lovely muscle here, such strength.” She stroked down, paused thoughtfully, stroked up, ending just a fraction higher than she’d started. Her cheekbones shimmered, as though gilded. Through the thin silk of my trousers her hand was warm and alive. “Do you like to work out?”
“Um?”
“You work out?”
“Yes.”
She propped her cheek on her fist and went on stroking. “Swimming? Or perhaps some other kind of sports.” She knelt like a handmaid, eyes never leaving mine, waiting for a signal. “Tell me what kind of sports you like.”
“Competitive.” I tried to organize my thoughts but she was calling heat from me as effortlessly as flame from a lamp, and my mind was drowning.
She bent and pushed off her shoes—her scalp was white and clean, her hair smelled of attar of roses—then leaned across me for the champagne. Her breasts plumped warmly on my legs for a moment and then she topped up my glass. I should be doing that. I should be doing all sorts of things. But all I could focus on was her hand.
“Your champagne,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s delicious, a very good choice. But this evening is for you. I’m here to make you happy.”
She rested her palm, very gently, on my belly. If I let her, she could make me very happy. All she had to do was turn her hand and her fingers would brush between my legs. I took her wrist, and I meant to put her hand away, to say something, to explain, but I couldn’t help it, I turned it palm up and leaned forward and kissed it.
She arched, until her throat was inches from my mouth. “Tell me what you want,” she said, and I watched myself take her head in my hands and kiss her. I hadn’t meant to, but then I found her mouth hot and sliding under mine and I couldn’t stop. I folded down next to her and, hands still in her hair, eased her flat on the carpet and knelt over her. She reached for my leg and tugged, gently, insistently, until I lifted it, and straddled her. Her dress rode up over smooth, golden legs and a tight curving belly. She was small in my arms, and her heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s.
She reached up and brushed my left nipple through the silk very lightly with the back of her hand, and I groaned. She blinked at me, very slowly, and touched my top button, and undid it, and touched the next one, and unfastened that, and the next, and I didn’t stop her, and she freed my left breast and held her palm beneath it, not touching, until I lowered my breast to it; and she drew her hand down another inch. Again I bent, until my breast was three inches from her mouth. She moved her hand. Her breath was feathery, her lips red.
“Give it to me,” she said, “make me take it,” and opened her mouth.
I wanted to stop. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make her take my whole breast in her mouth and slide off my trousers and straddle her naked belly, hot and soft.
Someone knocked on the door. She went very still beneath me.
“Aud, it’s me.” Dornan.
I couldn’t think. I felt dazed, too hot and swollen for my clothes.
“Aud?” He knocked again.
I sat back on my heels and took a ragged breath, and then another. I fastened a couple of buttons. Isabella closed her mouth and ran her hands through her hair. I breathed some more and stood.
Isabella sat up. “I don’t do couples.” She pulled herself onto the sofa and tugged her dress into place.
Dornan knocked again. “I’m not going to go away until I know you’re all right.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand—her lip gloss smelled the way all makeup does, waxy and womanly—and walked to the door and opened it.
“I’m sorry,” Dornan said, walking in. “I should have remembered earlier. ” I closed the door mechanically. “We were in a bar in Ballard, and these men came in dressed as Vikings. So I said, What’s going on? And someone told me it was Syttende Mai, and I said, What’s that when it’s at home? And they said, May the Seventeenth, Independence Day, and so I thought of you, and how you must be feeling, so I…”
He saw the champagne, the two glasses, and stopped, puzzled. Then he noticed the woman on the sofa with smudged lip gloss and no shoes, and turned to me and took in my half-buttoned shirt, my still-flushed cheeks, and swollen eyelids.
“I see,” he said. “I find I’ve been foolish.” He spoke slowly, in the educated, guarded accent he hadn’t used with me for years. “It seems I’ve been making unwarranted assumptions. Well. I apologize for the interruption and will be out of your way as soon as I may.”
He nodded politely to Isabella, gave me a distant, measuring look, said, “I really don’t understand you at all,” and left, stepping briskly.
Isabella ran her hands through her hair again, then picked up her champagne glass and took a hefty swallow.
I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign and locked the suite tight. For the first time since her wrap had slid into my hands and her smell had punched into my brain, I could think, and I did. “A friend,” I said. “I’m very sorry about him bursting in like that. Please finish your champagne and let me pour more.” In her world, unplanned interruptions no doubt tended to have dangerous repercussions, and I needed her relaxed and willing to take a risk. “You’re safe with me. You can leave anytime you like. However, I’d like the chance to make it up to you, if I may. We could talk a little, and relax, and later I’ll order us dinner, if you’re willing.”
“I would love to talk,” she said, with only a fractional pause. Whatever it took to make me happy. Twenty-two hundred dollars was a lot of money, and satisfied customers were more likely to return. She patted the seat beside her. “Sit with me.” The myrrh was back, the promise of damp skin and tumbled sheets and hoarse cries in the dark.