Nicola Griffith - Always

“Your champagne,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s delicious, a very good choice. But this evening is for you. I’m here to make you happy.”

She rested her palm, very gently, on my belly. If I let her, she could make me very happy. All she had to do was turn her hand and her fingers would brush between my legs. I took her wrist, and I meant to put her hand away, to say something, to explain, but I couldn’t help it, I turned it palm up and leaned forward and kissed it.

She arched, until her throat was inches from my mouth. “Tell me what you want,” she said, and I watched myself take her head in my hands and kiss her. I hadn’t meant to, but then I found her mouth hot and sliding under mine and I couldn’t stop. I folded down next to her and, hands still in her hair, eased her flat on the carpet and knelt over her. She reached for my leg and tugged, gently, insistently, until I lifted it, and straddled her. Her dress rode up over smooth, golden legs and a tight curving belly. She was small in my arms, and her heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s.

She reached up and brushed my left nipple through the silk very lightly with the back of her hand, and I groaned. She blinked at me, very slowly, and touched my top button, and undid it, and touched the next one, and unfastened that, and the next, and I didn’t stop her, and she freed my left breast and held her palm beneath it, not touching, until I lowered my breast to it; and she drew her hand down another inch. Again I bent, until my breast was three inches from her mouth. She moved her hand. Her breath was feathery, her lips red.

“Give it to me,” she said, “make me take it,” and opened her mouth.

I wanted to stop. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make her take my whole breast in her mouth and slide off my trousers and straddle her naked belly, hot and soft.

Someone knocked on the door. She went very still beneath me.

“Aud, it’s me.” Dornan.

I couldn’t think. I felt dazed, too hot and swollen for my clothes.

“Aud?” He knocked again.

I sat back on my heels and took a ragged breath, and then another. I fastened a couple of buttons. Isabella closed her mouth and ran her hands through her hair. I breathed some more and stood.

Isabella sat up. “I don’t do couples.” She pulled herself onto the sofa and tugged her dress into place.

Dornan knocked again. “I’m not going to go away until I know you’re all right.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand—her lip gloss smelled the way all makeup does, waxy and womanly—and walked to the door and opened it.

“I’m sorry,” Dornan said, walking in. “I should have remembered earlier. ” I closed the door mechanically. “We were in a bar in Ballard, and these men came in dressed as Vikings. So I said, What’s going on? And someone told me it was Syttende Mai, and I said, What’s that when it’s at home? And they said, May the Seventeenth, Independence Day, and so I thought of you, and how you must be feeling, so I…”

He saw the champagne, the two glasses, and stopped, puzzled. Then he noticed the woman on the sofa with smudged lip gloss and no shoes, and turned to me and took in my half-buttoned shirt, my still-flushed cheeks, and swollen eyelids.

“I see,” he said. “I find I’ve been foolish.” He spoke slowly, in the educated, guarded accent he hadn’t used with me for years. “It seems I’ve been making unwarranted assumptions. Well. I apologize for the interruption and will be out of your way as soon as I may.”

He nodded politely to Isabella, gave me a distant, measuring look, said, “I really don’t understand you at all,” and left, stepping briskly.

Isabella ran her hands through her hair again, then picked up her champagne glass and took a hefty swallow.

I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign and locked the suite tight. For the first time since her wrap had slid into my hands and her smell had punched into my brain, I could think, and I did. “A friend,” I said. “I’m very sorry about him bursting in like that. Please finish your champagne and let me pour more.” In her world, unplanned interruptions no doubt tended to have dangerous repercussions, and I needed her relaxed and willing to take a risk. “You’re safe with me. You can leave anytime you like. However, I’d like the chance to make it up to you, if I may. We could talk a little, and relax, and later I’ll order us dinner, if you’re willing.”

“I would love to talk,” she said, with only a fractional pause. Whatever it took to make me happy. Twenty-two hundred dollars was a lot of money, and satisfied customers were more likely to return. She patted the seat beside her. “Sit with me.” The myrrh was back, the promise of damp skin and tumbled sheets and hoarse cries in the dark.

I sat, and sipped, and she took my hand and held it, and looked at me with those honey and amber eyes.

“Let me help you relax,” she said.

“You’ve had a fright. I feel bad about it. You’re not under any obligation.”

“But I want to. Being with a woman is different. Special. It’s not like a job, not at all. It’s pure pleasure.”

It was a lovely fiction, and she told it so well. She read the temptation in my face and smiled.

It’s nonsense that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. The smile tells all. Broken people can lift the corners of their lips and crinkle the skin around their eyes, but the center is always missing: the tiny muscles at their brows and beneath the eyes, at the curve and bow of mouth, the hinge of the jaw. The smile is empty.

I lifted her hand, put it gently on her lap, and let go. “I don’t want sex,” I said. “I want information.”

She looked at my hard nipples and then between my legs where the silk was dark, and laughed. She put her arm along the back of the sofa. “Certainly we can talk first, if you like.”

“I’ll rephrase. I will not have sex with you. I want information.”

“What do you want to know?” She touched the back of my neck. You know you want me, her hand said, and I’m paid for.

I stood up. “Excuse me one moment.”

I closed the bedroom door behind me, found underwear and jeans. Even while I pulled them on, part of me was listening, heart beating high, hoping she would tap on the door and I would open it to say no, and she would kiss me and crawl onto the bed, and then lift her face from the sheets and turn back to look at me, and I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I might even be able to make her feel good. What was so wrong with that?

And now the extent of my self-delusion was obvious and pitiful. The lack of underwear, the open door—good manners, yes, put Isabella at her ease, yes, lull her suspicions so she would give me what I needed. Give me what I needed. A way to have sex without guilt: She made me do it, Officer, I couldn’t help myself.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Seattle as a city was closed to me. I needed a way in.

I laughed at myself, fastened every button, and went back in.

“Five thousand dollars,” I said. "You give me a name and address, and anything else I need to talk to the man or woman who sets things up for you.”

“I’m an independent.”

Perhaps that’s what she liked to pretend, but a hotel with a client list like the Fairmont would not deal with a random service provider. They preferred the reassurance of organization; the kind of people who could short-cut my search for whoever was trying to devalue my real estate. “Who gets a cut of your price?”

She didn’t like that. “It’s a referral fee.”

I opened the drawer under the TV and pulled out a brick of cash.

“Five thousand, cash, on top of the twenty-two hundred I’ve already paid, and not a soul will know the information came from you.” Which meant no one would take their cut.