The Seducer (16 page)

Realizing that their conversation was becoming too intimate, Ana shifted away from him, as if his glance had physically touched her. “I don't see the appeal of having sex with lots of people,” she said.

“How do you know if you like it or not? Have you ever tried it?”

“No, because I never wanted to. You don't have to bang your head against the wall to know it hurts.”

“So you've only been with your husband?”

“Basically, so far, I've only had two boyfriends. Well, the first one wasn't really my boyfriend. And then, once I came to America, I met Rob. In my country, we used to take virginity seriously,” Ana said with a sense of national pride that made Michael smile.

“Why do you use the past tense?”

“Because after the fall of communism, everything changed in Romania. Now people are just as dissolute there as they are here,” she replied wistfully.

“I'm glad you don't believe in cultural stereotypes.”

“I just tell it like it is.”

There was something about Ana's earlier statement, however, that aroused Michael's curiosity. “What did you mean when you said that your first boyfriend wasn't one?”

She fluttered her hand, to wave off the unpleasant memory. “I had a pretty bad experience.”

“How so?”

“A neighbor did something to me against my will.”

Michael's eyes flickered, but his tone remained calm. “He raped you?”

“When I was twelve,” Ana said quietly, averting her gaze. When she turned towards Michael again, he saw tears glimmering in her eyes. “If you don't mind, I prefer not to talk about this. If I could take a magic pill to forget that part of my past forever, I'd do it in an instant,” she declared heatedly.

“I understand.”

“Would you like strawberries for desert?” Ana once again relied on food to change the subject. “We also have apples and blueberries.”

“I'd love some strawberries, thanks.”

“I could never be seduced,” she announced seemingly out of the blue, returning to the table with a bowl of fruit. It struck her that her statement must have sounded absurd, given that she must have seemed pretty receptive to his overtures. But that was precisely why she felt the need to articulate some clear boundaries.

“Oh yeah?” he responded to her comment as if it were a dare.

“I don't put myself in those situations. For one thing, I don't like promiscuity. I never go out to bars.”

“Not all seduction takes place in bars. And not all of it leads to sleeping around,” Michael objected. “Sometimes you focus on just one person,” he fixed her with his glance, which was warm and reassuring.

“Even so, I don't fall for men's fake pickup lines,” Ana held her ground.

“But seduction isn't always fake,” Michael countered.

“Yeah, well, seducers tend to be transparent in their purposes,” she maintained.

“And what are those, might I ask?” he asked with a bemused smile, finding her frankness girlish and cute.

“To get as many women as possible into their beds.” Now he'll back off, since I've called him on his moves, Ana thought with satisfaction.

She obviously didn't lie about not having much experience with men, Michael observed with satisfaction. She doesn't even realize that it's rarely in their beds. More often than not, it's in the back alley behind the bar or restaurant; in the backseat of a car; at the movie theater; in a train; in the Men's Room, even in a freaking' church, he recalled just a few of his favorite venues. We'll see if she's as immune to seduction as she claims, he told himself. “It doesn't have to be about scoring. Sometimes it's about something much more special and magical. Like falling in love,” he said out loud.

“Perhaps, but that's entirely out of anyone's hands. You can't command love,” she expressed this truism with an air of wisdom.

“I can't argue with that,” he concurred.

Ana realized that she had opened up to Michael about aspects of her life that she hadn't even shared with some of her closest friends. I can't explain why I'm so at ease with this man, she searched for an explanation. In the past, I've avoided such “cool dudes” like the plague. But something's different about him, she told herself, without being able to identify the reasons behind her inexplicable attraction. “You know, I'm pretty surprised by how easily I can communicate with you,” she avowed. “Usually, I don't open up that easily to people I don't know well.”

“I feel exactly the same way about you,” Michael reciprocated, taking her words of encouragement as his cue to take the next step. He leaned over to offer her a strawberry, placing it close to her mouth. Once her lips wrapped around the red fruit, he felt a wave of warmth ripple through him.

Are you going to run away from pleasure all your life? A voice inside of Ana's head urged her to stop watching on the sidelines and finally taste life again. With a trembling hand, she returned the favor, slipping a strawberry into his mouth.

Michael was so distracted by other agreeable sensations that he could barely taste its tart sweetness. “It tastes even better when you close your eyes. That way you can focus all your attention on just one sense,” he suggested.

Ana hesitated.

“Come on!” he urged her. “Consider this an experiment. I promise it will taste better.”

This time the young woman obediently closed her eyes and parted her lips as Michael gently placed the tip of the strawberry into the oval of her mouth. She consumed it gradually, in little bites, then reopened her eyes.

“Don't cheat! Keep your eyes closed,” he whispered playfully into her ear, pressing the lower lobe between his lips, to warm her up with the heat of his breath. She quivered slightly. Encouraged, he gently caressed her waist and hip with his free hand, then fed her the strawberry with the other. He placed his lips upon hers and instead of a strawberry, he fed her the softness of his tongue, which she devoured with the same eagerness with which she had consumed the delicious fruit. As they were kissing, his fingers grazed the slightly humid fabric of her underwear, stroking it gently, until the wetness of her mouth became one with the moistness of her desire. Just as he was about to probe the situation further, however, Ana shifted away, obliging him to change focus. He brushed her long hair aside as his lips traveled down to explore the delicate curve of her neck, which made her twitch and protest that she was ticklish. Heeding her objection, Michael skillfully unbuttoned the young woman's shirt to reveal the voluptuous softness of her breasts, which he cupped into both hands. He began kissing them, taking each nipple into his mouth to taste it until it hardened to perfection.

I can't believe I'm doing this, Ana thought, feeling like she had become two different people through this sensual experience. It's as if part of her remained a prudent woman, a mother and wife, and another part, which she had struggled to repress for so long, completely overtook her senses and imagination. Only an external intervention could resolve this inner conflict. “Michael, please! We can't be doing this. My husband could come in any minute. He sometimes eats lunch at home,” Ana pushed his head away, her face flushed with a mixture of arousal and alarm.

“We'll hear the front door if anybody comes in.”

“We can't be doing this,” she repeated more firmly.

“Okay,” Michael gave in to her wishes, as before. His gaze passed with a territorial pride over her warm brown eyes, the soft lips he had just tasted, the pale breasts that seemed made for the hollow of his hands. In Ana's presence, Michael felt like he had just awakened from a long period of sedation. In one fell swoop, she had managed to reignite his senses as if, somehow, he hadn't fully tasted food, or felt pleasure or truly loved a woman before they met.

Karen's fingers ran rapidly over the computer keyboard. “Michael Rogers,” she typed in her fiancé's name into the search engine. She found about half a million entries ascribed to that name, 99.9 percent of which, she surmised, weren't about him. Having neither the time nor the patience to look over all of them, Karen narrowed down the search to “Michael Rogers,” “Detroit, MI.” She quickly located nearly a hundred entries on her fiancé. She read each and every one of them carefully, sifting through for some personal information that could function as a hook to liven up their conversations. For the past few weeks—in fact, ever since they got back together—Michael struck her as exceedingly absentminded. Although he still asked her about how her day went, often she had to repeat the same information several times and call out, “Earth to Michael, Earth to Michael!” before he actually paid any attention. Which left Karen completely baffled, since she was telling him things that, in her estimation, he should have been happy to hear.

She was taken aback, on the previous evening, when her announcement that she had lost the extra weight was greeted by an empty stare and a flatly delivered “Great.” That's it? Karen asked herself, upset by Michael's obvious lack of interest. She had to remind herself to calm down before she said, in her best impersonation of a suggestive voice, “If I lose five more pounds, I'll be fitting into that sexy black lace teddy you gave me on Valentine's Day.”

A vision of Ana in the black negligee crossed Michael's mind. “I'm impressed by how consistent you've been with your exercise program this time around,” he remarked.

“Yeah. I've been doing four hours of exercise a day. I divide it up between cardio, yoga and weight lifting, so that it doesn't get too monotonous,” she replied, encouraged by his sign of approval.

“How are your knees? Do they still hurt?'' He listlessly shifted the food upon his plate.

“No. I'm giving them a break by swimming instead of walking this week, remember?” Karen couldn't believe her eyes. Here he was swishing around the meal that had taken her over two hours to prepare. Earlier that afternoon, she had made him fresh yellow fin grilled tuna with seared potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, black olives, anchovies and garlic, covered in a fancy Dijon vinaigrette. Now all that was left of her culinary masterpiece was the dark yellow sauce mixed with the colorful vegetables making a chaotic abstract expressionist painting upon the whiteness of the plate. “Don't you like the fish? It's very fresh,” she assured him.

“It's delicious,” Michael said, demonstratively taking a bite. “But I'm not that hungry. I had a big lunch.”

“Where did you go?”

“I went to this Greek restaurant on campus where I had some baba ghanoush,” he conveniently incorporated the actual meal he had with Ana.

“You like eggplant? Then I'll make you an eggplant dish for tomorrow!” Karen offered, glad to have found an easy way to please him. As luck would have it, she had just learned a new recipe for Mediterranean vegetable casserole. In fact, following her mother's motto that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, ever since they had gotten back together, Karen had thrown herself headlong into cooking, using most of her free time to prepare his favorite meals. She had learned how to make veal scallops; sautéed beef tenderloin with black pepper; sautéed chicken, along with all sorts of pasta dishes filled with fresh herbs and vegetables, healthy and delicious, just the way he liked it.

“I won't love you any less if you don't spend hours a day cooking for me,” he commented, adding to himself, nor any more.

“I know, but I like cooking. And, more importantly, you like eating,” she replied with an ingratiating smile.

“That's nice of you,” Michael replied, having abandoned the effort to change her. You either love a person as she is or you don't, he recalled the conversation he had with Ana. Ever since they began living together, he was struck by Karen's dry, methodical manner, which he couldn't help but contrast with Ana's freshness and spontaneity. Whenever Karen set her mind to any goal, she threw herself into it with a determination that he had never encountered in anyone else. Out of all of the American women he had met through the French program at the university, Karen was the only one who spoke French like a native. “Did you have a hot French boyfriend?” he had asked her when they first began dating. “No,” she replied. “I watched T.V. a lot and posted vocabulary words all over the apartment, to make sure that I absorbed the language and its correct pronunciation.” In retrospect, Michael found this approach typical of Karen. Only she would go to France, the country of romance, and instead of finding herself a nice native boyfriend, or at least a couple of friends, she spent the year decorating her apartment with vocabulary words. Everything she does, he observed in retrospect, has method but no madness. Michael couldn't help but smile when he recalled her innuendo about the black lace teddy. Had he shown any enthusiasm for it, he was willing to bet that Karen would buy a dozen different items of lingerie. Her pliability to his will flattered him. But none of her compulsive behavior, he thought, could make up for the quality she lacked, which he had in excess: an insatiable appetite for pleasure, which could be best summarized as
joie de vivre
.

“Why are you grinning at me like that?” Karen asked, noticing his smirk.

“I was just thinking about how when you put your mind to something, you really do it. Like the way you learned French.”

“That much is true,” Karen replied, pleased that Michael seemed to appreciate her drive. He'll never find someone like me, she told herself. Nobody will love him like I do or put as much effort into our relationship. The problem was, it occurred to her, that what should have been smooth and easy now took so much energy. The effort to please him left her feeling drained and insecure at the end of the day. And yet, she couldn't imagine any desirable alternatives. The break-up with Michael had made her realize that she didn't want to spend her life without him. It's not even that I'm scared of being alone, Karen gazed wistfully at Michael. It's just that I want him and nobody else. She had seen what other men were like. Her own father was an alcoholic who neglected his wife. His sister's husband behaved like an overgrown frat. boy, who preferred leering at women, beer and sports to spending time with his wife. That's what most men become after a few years of marriage, Karen extrapolated. Michael was different. It's true that he enjoyed leering at women and drinking beer as much as the next guy. But at the same time, he also had manners, could be as sensitive as a woman and liked to engage in meaningful conversation. This train of thought led Karen to attempt to probe, once again, those deeper layers of their psyches. Which is why she decided the following morning to do a little research on her fiancé and find out more about his past activities. That way, she hoped, Michael would be more interested in their communication. Besides, she thought somewhat cynically, how could I possibly go wrong with this strategy? Everybody likes to talk about themselves.