The blinds in the bedroom are drawn, the bed has not been made. He lays her down on the rumpled mounds of the duvet. To give herself up to the inevitable, without hesitation. He lifts her black dress and helps her take it off. Her legs are bare, several brown hairs are sticking out from under the edges of her panties. He takes off his shirt and trousers, lies down beside her, squeezes one of her breasts, his mouth pressed against her cheek. He is there, he wants her. She runs her hands through his hair, kisses his forehead, yet her body holds back, her insides petrified. All these weeks, and now, when all she has to do is to let herself go, this stupid resistance. She hates herself. Stop the commotion in her head, chase away the irrational anger. He isn’t the other one, he’s himself. She feels his hand move down over her stomach, his fingers slipping in under her panties to stroke her crotch. Not to think, not to think about the pink room. He finishes undressing her, there’s the sound of a packet being torn open, she feels his soft hot skin everywhere against hers. She wants him, she has to want him. His lips press against hers, his erect penis is between her legs. He penetrates her. Clasp him to her, push him off, give in to his rhythm, refuse, enjoy, scream. She grits her teeth, struggling not to struggle. He moves gently; a wave of desire rises up in her, from the bottom to the top, as though towards the surface of the sea. Follow the current, leave her brain behind on the shore, plunge, with her bones, her muscles, her flesh, her blood, deep into the other person. No longer to be millions of little selves lost in all the painful minutes of the past; to be one now, at one with oblivion and him. Long moans simultaneously escape from their bodies, one embedded in the other. A terrible weight crushes her chest; she can’t hold back her tears.
He is stroking her hair; watching her intently with anxious eyes. She sniffles, tries to swallow whatever is stuck in her throat. She wants to shrink from shame. He is waiting for the explanation. This time, she is going to have to talk.
He had been her favorite adult. Ever since she was a child, ever since they all used to go to the country house on weekends. He took the trouble to ask her questions; the others preferred to let her play quietly with the objects they gave her as presents every year. Perhaps she was not an easy child to talk to. She was not cute or cheeky, she possessed no particular talent likely to amuse them. But he would talk to her and, unlike the others, he would listen so as to engage only with her. At first, she had been suspicious of these attentions, which were in such contrast to those of the rest of the clan, then she had come to appreciate them, to seek them out. At meals, she did all she could to be seated next to him. When he went for a stroll in the park with his walking stick, she would skip along beside him. She adored being with him. One day, early in adolescence, she had begun to wish that the first boy who kissed her would look a little like him. After that, the thought never left her. Her first love would be a younger version of this man, since it obviously couldn’t be him because of their family ties. That was what she thought, without anyone ever having explained things to her. The others seemed unaware of the growing affection she started to feel for him. They went on making sure that she ate properly, that her bowels were regular, without worrying about where her newly pubescent heart was leading her. At a certain point, he started coming up to her bedroom, or at least that was what she supposed, since she couldn’t remember an earlier period when he didn’t come to her bedroom while she was there. He would come to the pink room, the one with the piano, when she went up there to practise her music. He would come when she had already started to play. She would turn her head without stopping, would smile at him, delighted to have an audience at last and that the audience consisted only of him. He would motion for her to keep playing and then close the door behind him. The others would be around, busy, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the garden, but never in the room with her when she was playing. Perhaps the music wasn’t to their taste or she didn’t play well enough, they had never said. He must have liked music. She enjoyed thinking that it was above all her way of playing that he liked. He would sit down on the bed. He’d say, that’s lovely, carry on, lowering his voice so that it wouldn’t disturb the bubbling notes that flowed out from under her fingers. She would put her whole self into it; she never played better than when he was there.
The window was open that day. She could hear their indistinct chatter from the garden where they were finishing lunch. They had given her permission to leave the table, their conversations bored her. She had gone up to the pink room, eager to feel the docile, tightly sprung keys under her fingers again. She began warming up with a series of arpeggios. He would be there soon, she was expecting him. When he came in, she had noticed red blotches on his cheeks. She assumed they were because of the wine he’d been drinking out in the sun with the others. Without knowing quite why, she blushed when their eyes met. Midway through a Beethoven waltz she had been working on for several weeks, as he was sitting on the bed as usual, she had heard the bedsprings groan. She hadn’t looked in his direction at that moment, but she knew that he had stood up. She sensed him approaching, and that set off a rush of nerves in her, which increased her fear of making a mistake. She didn’t want to stop, though, because she was sure that he wanted to look at her hands more closely, in order to appreciate her dexterity. She was proud of the interest he took in her.