Black Silk (39 page)

Graham pulled her up against him as he kicked the door closed, then backed her up against it. He kissed her insistently, but through her half-closed eyes over Graham’s shoulder she caught a glimpse of Henry’s wardrobe. It stood behind him, eight feet tall and six feet wide, a dark mass of almost black mahogany.

“Graham—” She turned her face to the side. His mouth followed. She turned the other direction. He found her neck. She flexed, bringing her shoulder to her cheek in an effort to make him stop. She whispered, “I think we should go some other place—”

He took hold of her jaw and backed off three inches, a distance from which he stared her directly in the face. “Yes, it’s Henry’s room,” he told her. “And, no, I won’t go anywhere else. It’s Henry’s house, Submit. It means nothing. It’s walls and furniture. Now will you stop worrying whether everything is perfect? It’s perfect enough.”

“It’s not that—”

He put two fingers over her mouth. “It is. You’re frightened and you don’t like to lose control, so your mind starts inventing excuses. Submit, listen to me. There are probably good reasons why we shouldn’t be together. But the overriding fact is I love you, and you love me—you
need
me. I can keep your life from becoming hopelessly earthbound. And I need you, as sure as leaps in the air need gravity.” He took a breath. “In the future, there will be times when I count on your guidance, times that call for a cool, rational head. There will be other times, though, when I expect you to trust me. We’ll do things my way because I’m better at letting fly than you are.” Very firmly, he said, “Now not another word, do you understand? I’m going to push you over the edge.” He laughed. “Without mercy or compunction. I’m going to make love to you in ways that, if you stop long
enough to think about it, will make you cringe. So turn your little mind off. It’ll only get you in trouble.”

If she could have found words to answer such a lecture, she didn’t get a chance to. He kissed her open mouth and began to pull her toward the bed. With a foot and a knee, he knew how to manipulate the structure of her dress. He had no trouble getting under and into it, or unfastening crinolines and corsets and corset covers. Submit took his expertise in, as she fought her own odd moments of conditioned resistance. The adeptness with her clothes, she discovered, was not the sort of competence that made a man less attractive. As each hook gave, as his hands slipped closer and closer to the skin of her midriff, her breasts, her buttocks, the mild alarm of each invasion piqued a warm, expanding delight. A yearning deep in her belly began to squirm and become active. She caught a glimpse of Henry’s four-poster, then felt Graham’s hands, several fingers heavily encumbered with rings, move into the little recesses of open clothes. He touched her bare back, and every other awareness went blank.

His fingers ran up the hollow of her spine until her shoulder blades drew together involuntarily. The movement thrust her breasts out. She wet her lips as his hand took a breast. He lifted the small weight in his palm, then took her nipple between his thumb and the side of his hand, pinching and tugging in a movement vaguely akin to strong suckling. He bent his head.

“Gracious Lord,” she whispered. She would never recover from this, she thought, the feel of Graham’s mouth on her breast combined with the odd, particular pattern of Graham’s touch, the feel of heavy gold warmed by smooth, inquisitive fingers grazing her belly and buttocks. She wanted to collapse from the joy of it. Then she felt his fingers go between her legs. She felt the delicate movement of his turning a ring with his thumb, and he used the edges of the facets against her.

“God in Heaven,” she murmured. Her muscles contracted.

At the bed, he tried to lay her down gently, but she wanted suddenly nothing that left her nearly so passive. She refused to lie back but remained on her knees, pulling his face down to her. Her whole body strained toward him as she began kissing him and touching him. She was filled with wonder at the power in her: the power of letting herself want him, reach for him, be surrounded by him.

Graham twisted his head to take the kiss deeper. As he stood by the bed, he lifted her slightly to be hip to hip, searching, then finding that incomparable fit, male to female. They kissed with deep, thirsty ardor, arms, mouths, bodies. Submit couldn’t believe he wanted her like this, that she could make him shake and shudder and pant for breath, that he couldn’t control his response to her.

She let her hands roam his vest, a vest covered in a raised profusion of silk-embroidered flowers. She dipped her hands inside it. He was so tactile. His watch chains swung and tickled against her elbows as she ran her hands up the starchy pleats of his shirt, then inside his coat and over his shoulders. She pushed his coat off, with him helping and clinging at the mouth, sucking, slathering the dryness of lips and tongue and teeth with the longest, wettest of kisses.

She tried to pull him down on her, but instead his hands dug into her buttocks. He peeled off the last of her drawers. Like a madman, he was throwing off his own clothing. Watches scattered. Submit tried to help. She pulled at his vest and stripped his trouser braces down over his shoulders.

The bed sagged as they fell onto it. Submit closed her eyes, arched her back, and slid her hands under the shirt they had only managed to get partially unbuttoned. His chest was heaven. Warm, furred, fluid with muscle. His belly was paradise. She ran her hands down him, tracing the fine,
smooth hair down the furrow of his abdomen to where it spread out and became coarse, a regular jungle. He groaned. He felt thick and resilient as she wrapped her hands around him. Hot, tumid, marvelous. Submit shivered, feeling sensations so strong they constricted her muscles till she coiled around him. She clasped him with her legs, shocked, entranced by the force of what was happening to her.

“Slow down.” He laughed, then spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Not so fast,” he said. “I want to savor this a little.”

She didn’t want to savor anything. Submit turned her head from side to side, fidgeting, twisting in denial.

He laughed again and pinned her back. She was like a spring that had to be stretched out. He laced his fingers into hers and forced her hands out by her shoulders, trapped her legs under his. He loomed over her, his face watching her. “Oh, God,” he breathed, “I love you like this. I never thought I’d see it.” He rocked and lifted his hips, nudging her between her open legs till awareness itself seemed to run into inky blotches.

“Graham,” she murmured, “I’m going to pass out—”

“Shh.” He laughed. “That’s not what it’s called.” He bit her lips, her cheeks, her eyes. For a few more seconds, he left her hanging there, pinned out on the bed, near demented.

“Graham—” She felt herself straining, trying not to give way to something that was about to roll over her. It felt like holding back a boulder on the incline of a mountain.

“Give in to it,” he whispered. “Let it take you.”

Anticipation, a second ahead of reality, made the warmth start to flood. Blood rushed down her veins into her fingers and toes, to the center, the apex of her body. Slick, swollen, she began to convulse at the one and same moment she felt him enter her. And the world bent, refracted, then disappeared entirely into the central moment of Graham parting her, pushing her flesh aside…
into wanting, having, loving him…into a spill of sensation that held nothing back….

Graham awoke before Submit to find himself lying quite peacefully in a place he’d only been partially aware of last night. What at dusk had seemed to him more Submit’s room was, by morning light, the bedroom of Henry Channing-Downes. The room was not precisely the same as he remembered it. Yet there was a sameness to its colors and furniture and draperies, all permutations of past ones. There was almost no evidence that Submit had lived here at all. Her possessions were packed away in the boxes in the corridor, Graham presumed.

Graham looked over at Submit. She lay beside him, naked, one knee up, the other dropped, any pretense to decorum wiped out by exhaustion. She was soundly asleep, her thick hair all over the pillows. His eyes lingered on her. She was covered in fine hair, silver-gold, velvety. Beneath him, an hour ago, he had wiped sweat from her temple into her thick, curling hairline. Let down, her hair dominated the tiny bones of her face. If he wove a palm next to the scalp, it was warm, as humid as breath. If he combed his fingers through the heaped mass of hair, it became as cool and impersonal as a heavy armload of soft yarn. Looking at her pleased Graham not only sexually but aesthetically as well—and gave him also a surprising, sneaking contentment. She lay there, ravished and decimated in Henry’s private bower.

He hadn’t meant to lie to her last night, when he’d said it meant nothing that this was Henry’s room. It was just that daylight always brought different perceptions. Graham couldn’t help but love the images of the night before superimposed now on the fact that what they had done they had done on Henry’s linen sheets, in the alcove of Henry’s bed-drapes and canopies and bedposts. Whether for ego or a
kind of exorcism, the sight of her there—so thoroughly loved—brought a solid satisfaction.

Graham kissed Submit lightly and got up.

Twenty years, he discovered, had seen Henry’s dressing room converted into a huge bathroom with a large porcelain tub and no faucets—there was a dumbwaiter, presumably in place of plumbing. Graham sent this down. To his surprise, it came back up a few minutes later bearing a bucket of hot water. Meanwhile, he opened heavy, musty draperies to let in some light. Over a basin, set in the middle of dark wallpaper (green and brown pheasants taking flight), he discovered Henry’s razor and brushes and soap, undisturbed. It occurred to Graham, by the way these were set out, that Henry had shaved his own face. Graham frowned, wondering when the change had come about. He could remember, growing up, a barber arriving every morning at eight. Like Graham, Henry appeared to have given the practice up, each man opting for the simplicity of serving himself. With the water, Graham began to shave in front of a large round mirror.

Graham paused, Henry’s razor in his hand, Henry’s soap all over his face. It suddenly struck him what it meant to be raised by Henry: that, for all his protests, his basis was Henry. He liked the same foods, the same music, the same plays—though Henry had never liked these quite so much as to want to leap onto the stage and be part of them. Graham knew he ran his house like Henry, kept his finances in the same sort of columns. He paid his servants on the same schedule, saw his tailor with the same regularity, though he bought considerably different items. They read the same books, though siding with different authors. And then there was the enigma of their strong attraction to the same woman. Wonderful, mysterious Submit. Like her vocabulary, he supposed, little syllables of Henry’s life had worked their way into him until they were indistinguishable—inextirpable—from himself.

He caught himself staring at the face in the mirror. In that moment, it was the twisted, serious mouth of a man trying to shave his jawbone without taking off his ear. Though even relaxed, it was not the face of a happy man.

Henry had not been happy, Graham knew, at least not when Graham had known him best. Then later with Submit, Graham suspected, Henry wore his happiness like a torment, afraid of losing it—to a younger man, to the frustration of a diminishing life span. To a sense of having found happiness too late or of not deserving it. To the worry of stealing his happiness from Submit’s storehouse. To the guilt over making a realist out of a romantic young girl.

Graham wanted to make Submit a romantic again. And he would like to be happy. All his life, it had been perhaps simply this: Not wanting to be different from Henry so much as wanting all he had in common with Henry to total a different sum—a happy existence.

He went into the bedroom, toweling off his face, and found Submit still asleep. Still utterly naked. He went over, thinking to cover her, then didn’t. Instead, he lay down beside her. He would wake her, he thought, and make love to her again. But neither he nor Submit had slept much last night. He had no sooner brought her into the crook of his body than he drifted off.

It was hours later when Submit opened her eyes. She opened them slowly, to the sight of a moss green canopy overhead, to the weight of a man’s leg over her, the sound of a man’s even breathing. For a moment, her sleepy mind fell backward through time. When she turned, she expected to see Henry. But she saw instead a dark, naked man of superior proportion. The sight was unsettling.

Against the tangle of sheets, Graham’s brown shoulders seemed out of place. His leg thrown so casually over hers looked foreign, as if she were a spy nested down cozily now
with the enemy who’d conquered the camp. A sense of alarm grew. She looked around a room that was quintessentially Motmarche. It was made up of stone walls covered in tapestries, marble floors covered in carpets; Henry’s taste first, only to become hers. Her eyes traveled over dark, heavy furniture, some of it as old as the name Motmarche itself. As she lay there trying to account for the previous night, she could bring back only wisps of the remembered euphoria—which promptly evaporated into a cloud of angst. The only clue to her feelings now seemed to be a sense of loss and guilt. Her unease was vague but more than an excuse, no matter how Graham might lecture; it was as solid as Henry’s wardrobe standing in the corner. Submit lay back and stared up into the shadows. She could not avoid thinking,
What in the world have I done?

She jumped when a voice beside her spoke.

“After such a wonderful honeymoon,” Graham said, “perhaps we should consider getting married.”

Submit groaned.

“Let’s not announce banns or anything else. Let’s go straight to London, get a special license, and have a magistrate do it.”

She threw her arm over her face.

“No-o—” He pulled on her arm, trying to roll her to him.

When she wouldn’t cooperate, he touched her hair and murmured, “What’s wrong?”