“Yes.” The gift of tongues.
“Is it true you’re paying everyone’s hospital expenses?”
Rusen. I shook my head.
“It’s not true?”
“No. It is true.” I just didn’t want everyone to know.
“And then I saw how you dealt with that rent-a-cop. And you, I don’t know, you looked different in a dress.” She poked at a shred of cabbage on her plate.
“You look different in shoes.” Inane. She seemed to bring it out in me. But she didn’t look up from toying with the cabbage and I understood that what mattered here wasn’t the words. I poured the last of the champagne. “I have more in the car. If you like.”
Now she looked up. “What, you always drive around with a six-pack of bubbly in the backseat?”
“Not always.” I stood, waited. She nodded.
Outside, I could still hear the hum of pub music from Murphy’s. Judging by the smell, someone across the street was getting high. I felt every stir of light Seattle air on my forehead and cheeks. The food was pleasantly present in my stomach, but did nothing to blunt the other, growing hunger.
I went back in. Definitely lamb. “It smells like Catalonia at Easter.”
“Never been there,” she said. “Been just about everywhere else, but never Spain. Or France.”
I put one bottle in the fridge and opened the other. I would have to buy her a champagne bucket. “Can you cook French food, too?”
“I can cook anything.”
I can cook anything. I studied her, one bare foot tucked underneath her, the other swinging back and forth, and remembered the scent of sleepy, naked woman.
She flushed. “It’s my job.”
“Yes,” I said.
“At least it is, now.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you come?”
I gestured at the food, but she shook her head.
“No. The first time. At three in the morning. Why did you come?”
Because she had stained her white coat and I wanted to know if anyone would wash it for her. Because she needed someone to bring her tea when she was tired, hold her when she saw her career falling about her in ruins.
And that wasn’t me. Couldn’t be me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know. I got the flowers.” She leaned forward. In the slanting light the tops of her breasts looked as if they had been dusted with gold. “But why did you come?”
She leaned closer, tucked her hair behind her ears. She missed a strand. I reached out and tucked it back for her. It felt as slippery as a satin camisole.
“Tell me why.”
I tucked hair back behind her other ear. “I was angry.” I reached for her hand. She tensed slightly, then let me lift it to my mouth. Her knuckles smelled of garlic and, faintly, that naked, sleepy, buttery-toast scent my back brain was already beginning to recognize. I turned her hand over. Blood bloomed under the skin of her breast and throat. I kissed the center of her palm. Her head fell back, and I caught it. The back of her skull felt as small and hard as a cat’s. I lifted her hand again, and this time kissed the inside of her wrist. All those nerves. She made an unconscious pushing motion with her feet on the floor. Her hips lifted slightly. I bent until my lips were inches from hers. Her breath pistoned in and out. Her eyes were black.
I kissed her. It was like opening my mouth to a waterfall; it fisted through me. I pushed the table to one side, picked her up, and laid her on the rug.
“God,” she said hoarsely. “God.”
TWO HOURS later I found myself kneeling on the floor next to the rug. The CD player had turned itself off. The wooden floor was cool on my shins. Kick was on her back, naked.
“God,” she said. She sat up. There was a carpet burn on her chin. She shivered.
“You’re cold.” I handed her a random assortment of clothes, hers and mine. She stared at them blindly. “Here.” I sorted through the heap, found her T-shirt. It was inside out. I pulled the sleeves carefully back through the shoulder holes. “Lift your arms.” Dazed, she did, and I slipped the T-shirt over her head. Her face emerged, blinking and puzzled, then frowning.
“Tell me you didn’t plan that,” she said.
I shook my head.
“You’re right,” she said. “Who the fuck could plan that?” She found her underwear. Paused. “The lamb will be ruined.”
IT WASN’T. It was more well done than lamb should be, but it was good, fatty and strong and grass-fed, and we ate, and talked carefully, and gradually she started to flush again, but when I reached out she tensed.
I put my hand in my lap and waited. “You don’t live here,” she said.
“No.”
She got up and closed the windows, and put on the kettle, and brought me a cut-glass plate of rich, dark French chocolate, and stood next to me, hip against my shoulder, and I breathed in her sharp, buttery wood-smoke scent and stared at the chocolate, and told myself it didn’t matter.
She stood, and I sat, very still, and the kettle began to rumble. I turned my face so that my cheek rested against her thigh. The faint vibration of her femoral pulse alongside her femur became a trip-hammer. Her legs shook. I put my arm around her waist.
I meant simply to steady her, but she softened into me, almost sagged, and my arm tightened, and my need, and she let herself go so that I was holding her up with one arm and pulling her pants down with the other.
“Bed,” I said, and my voice was tight and savage. She pointed at the stairwell, and I carried her.
THE SKYLIGHT showed a night sky of brass and acid. The thick scar that snaked through the crease between the top of her thigh and her hip bone looked dark grey, though downstairs it had been the color of raspberry sorbet. To my fingertips it felt like soft old leather trim. It was a clear, clean incision.
“How long has it been?”
“Two years.” She was very still, her face in shadow.
“Does it still hurt?”
I felt her shrug.
I kissed it. The skin under my hand moved as the muscles in her belly tightened. I slid on top of her. Kissing her was not like kissing Julia, who had been all length and plum softness, and whose messages had been very clear. Kick was like a powerful trapped beast. She stirred restlessly, one hand in the small of my back pulling me closer, one on my shoulder pushing me away. I eased to one side, weight on my right elbow, head propped on my hand. I stroked her belly. The muscle loosened. She sighed. The sigh sounded as though it had a smile in it. I smiled back in the dark. She ran both hands up my left arm.
“You have scars, too. But they all feel different.”
“That one was a bullet.”
She explored it carefully. No one had done that before. “When?” “Almost exactly a year ago. In Norway.”
“Norway.”
“Yes.”
“And this one?” She stroked the thin line just above my waist, on the left side.
“A knife. Two or three weeks before the bullet.”
She nodded. I dipped the tip of my little finger in her belly button, stroked my thumb over the jut of her bottom rib. Then the next one, and the next. I ran the back of my hand under the curve of her breasts. Her breathing was rhythmic and strong. I kissed her. This time both hands slid to the small of my back and tugged. I eased on top of her, slid my arm carefully under her head.
“Ummn,” she said, and began to move, and I moved with her. This time, when we were done, she was definitely smiling.
I lay on my back and she knelt by me and ran her hands up over my face, down the sides of my head, my neck, across my collarbones, down to my breasts, around and around, down to my waist, up again to my neck. The sky had softened to the color of old buttercup petals.