The Englishman (47 page)

He hears my softness, but he also hears the mockery. The tension around his mouth relaxes, and he smiles.

“‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that I’m having a tough time keeping my hands off you?’”

The sentence echoes in my memory and I have to laugh. “Much better.”

I step up to him, glad of the high heels that have been pinching me all afternoon, because they make me tall enough to wrap one arm around his shoulders while I kiss him. On the mouth, and just deliberately enough, I hope, to send a spark into his belly.

You play me, I play you.

“More,” he murmurs when I try to pull away.

“Giles, somebody might—”

He is not interested at all.

Very fuzzily I make a deal with myself: the second he begins to push me through the half open door of my room, I will push him away. Only he does not. He slips his hands underneath my coat and draws me firmly against himself, and although I could hazard a guess that it is not his phone that is hard below my navel, he is very still, as our lips and tongues slow down, find their pace. How much you can learn about someone by kissing him! I already had an idea that Giles Cleveland is a man who enjoys kissing, and enjoys it for the intimacy it allows. He is kissing me now to get to know me: my mouth, my tongue, my body and their responses to his. My courage. I want to do everything with him, I told Irene, and it is absolutely true.

“He said
what?
Noooo! And then what did she say back?”

“What did she say? What did she
do!”

Loud, cheerful voices cut into my consciousness like a blade into skin. I jerk my head back and gasp for air, now listening hard. Voices approaching along the hallway. Voices about to turn the corner.

“Go!” I push him away frantically, push him into the direction of his room. “Go, go, quickly!”

“Anna…”

He could easily overpower me. I feel it in his body’s resistance, in the way he clasps my upper arms, glances along the hallway and into my room.

“No, Giles!
Go, now!”

And I tear myself away from him, dive into my room and slam the door.

The moment I hear the latch on my bedroom door, my rejection impulse is overcome by remorse. What have I done? What the hell have I just done? But I cannot be seen French kissing Giles Cleveland in a conference hotel hallway! I might as well fingerpaint it onto my forehead!

I slammed a door in his face.

Shame, as keen-edged as the panic before, rushes through my body like hard liquor.

Why did he give up so easily? Is Giles Cleveland a quitter? He certainly didn’t stand by his woman, just now, and I am
furious
he didn’t! He might have propelled me into my room, out of sight, easily!
Why didn’t he?

Maybe because I told him that I wouldn’t enjoy this evening if it was all about getting me into bed.

Maybe because he doesn’t want to have sex with a woman who has to be dominated and coerced into it, like a bashful virgin.

Damn!

Damn caution! Damn my career! Damn this constant, constant anxiety!

Do something.

Get drunk. Find a night club, drown in the noise. Dance your way through this need to stop thinking. I need to be part of something simple again.

My heart is beating hard and fast in my throat. I can’t. I shouldn’t.

I should take another shower. Flush the anger and the need out of my body.

It’s a good shower, this. A big showerhead, a full, yet soft spray of water, hot, as hot as I can bear it.

I can’t bear it.

I’ve never felt it so keenly, the two-edged sword of temptation. It cuts both ways. Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. I never knew that. Supposing I had an affair with Giles Cleveland. My career would crash and burn like a Japanese plane on the flight deck of a US destroyer. But what if my plane from South Bend to New York crashes tomorrow, and I die without ever having been naked with him? What if my plane doesn’t crash, and I die in my bed at the ripe old age of eighty-three, like my grandmother, without ever having been naked with Giles Cleveland?

Chapter 26

I
F
A
NY
E
VIDENCE
W
ERE
N
EEDED
that I did not come on this trip with any thought of seducing anyone, my pajamas would do it. Baby-blue flannel with white sheep. Thick woolly socks. You never know how warm or cold these hotel rooms will be, and I hate cold feet.

Out the door, down the mercifully empty elevator, into the hotel lobby. It is past midnight, and residents have retired to bed or the bar. The receptionist is on the phone to a friend, talking in loud, over-emphatic cadences. No one notices me as I stroll nonchalantly toward the restroom. Like a child sneaking out to buy candy in a corner store, I clasp my coins in my hand. I have loose change enough to buy two.

Two, in different colors.

Hand deep in coat pocket, as if I had stolen them, I sidle back toward the elevator. Again I am lucky; no one rides up with me. I pad along the carpeted hallway, half-expecting to see Kathleen round the next corner. But the hall is silent and empty. And now…

I knock.

I knock, and the door gives a little, as if the door hinges were loose, or as if someone had very carefully not quite closed it. One false move and it will latch. I so dread being seen in the hallway that I slip in and quickly close the door behind me before I realize that there may already be two people in the room.

Why else would the door not be shut? Careless.

I force myself past the cubicle formed by the bathroom toward the dim pool of light round the corner—and there he is, lying in bed, propped up on his elbow, reading. Like a boy.

Not reading now, of course. He is watching me, waiting. He does not look as I would if I had just heard someone enter my hotel room in the middle of the night. Did he leave the door open for me? That must be nonsense, and yet it adds to the poignancy of the situation, because I know that in a pathetic kind of way this whole thing is about me wishing someone would leave the door open for me.

Giles closes his book and puts it on the bedside table. He is wearing a white t-shirt, and the light of the lamp shimmers on the knobbly bones of his wrist and elbow and on the long strands of muscle that connect them. He looks like a boy waiting to be tucked in, and at the same time it is one of those moments in which I am overwhelmed by how big he is. The swell of his shoulders and the sudden bulge of his bicep as he bends his arm to lift the corner of his blankets.

My flannel knee looks childish on the edge of his mattress, and he could touch it without moving his hand more than a few inches. But he does not. He is so grave he almost looks forbidding. No smile, no flippant remark to relieve the tension. Waiting. Watching me with those light green eyes. There is a low crackle of plastic in one of the pockets as I let the robe slide to the ground. But I still don’t have the courage to climb into bed with him—the enormity of what I’m doing has rooted me to the edge of it. His eyes crease in a slow, wary smile, his shoulders relax, and his hand is warm and hopeful around my knee. The temperature in the room rises. He sits up and bunches his pillows against the headrest of the bed, scoots up so that he can lean against it and lifts his comforter to reveal blue-and-gray-striped pajama bottoms. I crawl up to him, into his naked arms, unsure of how fast this is going to happen. One arm is around my waist, and he pulls me onto his lap, astride, facing him. So near, suddenly. So close. So hard.

He slips his hands under my pajama top, up my back to my shoulders, his fingertips hard in the tense muscles, and for a swooning moment all blood drains from my brain. His eyes are glowing with pleasure at what lies ahead. His whole face is glowing, and I’m so nervous.

How difficult it is not to hide from what I want so much.

“I have to switch off the light.”

Comprehension registers in an incredulous shake of his head. I understand the disappointment, but not the flash of fear that hardens his face when my words sink in. But I am afraid, too.

“You can’t do this with the light on?” he asks in a tight voice.

“Not—tonight.”

“Not with me.”

“No.”

He seems to shrink into himself, and his hands lie still on my pajama’ed thighs. He stares, without seeing, at something there. The back of his hand, my knee in flannel.

“I don’t like that.”

He sounds defeated, but I can’t explain, and I can’t argue. The truth is, I need to do this in the dark and in silence. I grope for the switch of the bedside lamp, and the room is dark. Not quite pitch dark; after a while we are able to make out the white patches of each other’s eyes. I shrug out of my pajama jacket and wrap my arms around a phantasma. It is warm to the touch, substantial and alive, this fantasy of mine, and it smells like Giles Cleveland. It kisses like Giles Cleveland, too. Like a grumpy Giles Cleveland, at first, because he is annoyed with me, unresponsive. I love that he wants to see me, but I can’t allow that. Can’t allow him to see…me. See how much I want him.

The memory of the connection we made earlier is still glowing in his belly, too, and soon he is kissing me like he kissed me in the hallway. Only now I drive him on. He wants to be tender with me, but I cannot allow myself to feel the tenderness. There is nothing for me here except the fierce ache of lust. Impersonal and anonymous, in the dark, this naked male body, and I want to make it mine. This body is my fantasy of Giles Cleveland, and a fantasy is all he can be to me. I want to blurt out words, words to tell him what this feels like, what I feel for him. But the Sinatras are right. I won’t go and spoil it all.

I draw him toward me, away from the pillows, so I can lean over him and pull his t-shirt up and over his head. So much naked skin, cool in the night air but heated from inside. One male body should be much like the next, shouldn’t it? But this is the one I want. I lift his hands and cup them around my breasts, and he squeezes them lightly and chafes the tips with his palms. Half-heartedly, it seems to me.

“Too small?” A pointless question, but I can’t help it. This is an insecurity I thought I had mastered, but apparently not. Not in this case. He gives a low spurt of laughter, and of course I can’t tell, now, what it means, because I can’t see his face. The top of his head brushes along my chin, then my left breast contracts almost painfully, his mouth is so hot and so deliberate in its caress. It feels like the ache of fear, and I know why: if he is going to touch me like this, I will lose it.

We grapple in the silvery darkness, and with this phantasma I can be bold in a way I could not be bold with Giles Cleveland.

“No, don’t!” He pushes my head away. “I won’t—last. Please. Please.”

The skin of his belly is smooth and vulnerable under my lips, between my teeth; the soft, wiry hair tickles my cheek, and I simply
have
to take him back into my mouth. I wish I could be rough with him, just make him come fast and fierce, all control mine. Suck his brains out. I know I can make him come, and judging by the state of his hot, hard shaft, it would take about thirty seconds.

He scoots away from me, out of my arms, and jumps out of bed. Is he angry? What man gets angry when the woman he invited into his bed offers oral sex to him? He disappears into the bathroom and I hear him rummaging in a bag with a zipper. What is my cue? Should I just leave? When he returns, he makes for the window and opens the thick curtains with one swift movement so that the light from the street lamps illuminates the room enough to see the outline of furniture and bodies. Enough for me to see that he has left his pajama pants in the bathroom. Enough to see that he has not gone off the idea of having sex with me. Not at all.

Naked and erect he stands in front of the bed, waiting for my reaction. He doesn’t want this to be the anonymous encounter of two naked bodies in a hotel room. I can’t be mad at him for that.

“You do it.” He holds out his hand.

Oh!
That’s why he went into the bathroom.

He reaches past me and takes something off the bedside table. There is a faint bleeping sound and then the display light of his cell phone dimly illuminates the scene.

And what a scene it is—the most beautiful cock in the world. Its length and thickness are in perfect proportion, the shaft is velvety and without blemish, and it is so hard that the foreskin has receded almost completely from the head, which rears up like a snake from the sheath it is shedding.

I scramble onto my knees and crouch in front of him; it is too, too beautiful, so hard and proud against the pale skin of his belly, and then like a smooth, lambent torch in my hand, and in my mouth.

“Anna—it’s not as if this weren’t a dream come true, but—”

This confession makes me grin, and with a plopping sound I release him. Gingerly I tear open the sachet and do what I have not done for almost a year—what I have never done in my life. I roll a condom over Giles Cleveland’s cock. Admiring my handiwork, I cradle his balls in my hand. This is almost the most intimate caress of all, holding a man’s testicles. So curiously heavy, so soft. So vulnerable.