Maxim Jakubowski - I Was Waiting for You

It was a wet spring and the thin rain peppered the Latin Quarter pavements with a coating of grey melancholy. Flora had departed for the countryside and her grandparents’ villa where a family reunion was taking place and left Giulia on her own in the apartment for a few days. Initially, she had looked forward to the prospect but now felt herself particularly lonely. When she was not busy and frantically exploring the city with other casual acquaintances, memories just kept on flooding back.

She was sitting reading a book at the terrace of Les Deux Magots, sipping a cappuccino, half-watching the world pass by, women who walked elegantly, young men who looked cute but would surely prove dull in real life, she thought, when she heard the seductive voice of the bad man across her shoulders.

“That’s a quite wonderful book, Mademoiselle,” he said. “I envy you the experience of reading it for the first time. Truly.”

Giulia looked up at him.

He looked older. How could he not be?

Cornelia much preferred ignorance. A job was a job and it was better not to have to know any of the often murky reasons she was given an assignment.

Had the target stolen from another party, swindled, lied, killed, betrayed? It was not important.

Cornelia was aware she had a cold heart. It made her work easier, not that she sought excuses. She would kill both innocent and guilty parties with the same set of mind. It was not hers to reason why.

She had been given a thin dossier on her Paris mark, a half dozen pages of random information about his haunts and habits and a couple of photographs. A manila folder she had slipped between her folded black cashmere sweaters in the travelling suitcase, to which she had added a few torn out pages from the financial pages of The New York Times and a section on international investment from The Wall Street Journal to muddy the waters in the event of an unlikely snap examination of her belongings by customs at either JFK or Roissy. He was a man in his late forties, good-looking in a rugged sort of way which appealed to some women, she knew. Tallish, hair greying at the temples in subdued and elegant manner. She studied one of the photographs, and noted the ice-green eyes, and a steely inner determination behind the crooked smile. A dangerous man. A bad man.

But they all have weaknesses, and it appeared his was women. Younger women. It usually was. Cornelia sighed. Kept on perusing the information sheet she had been furnished with, made notes. Finally, she booted up her laptop and went online to hunt down the ‘ clubs échangistes ’ her prey was known to frequent on a regular basis. They appeared to be located all over the city, but the main ones appeared to be in the Marais and close to the Louvre. She wrote down the particulars of Au Pluriel, Le Chateau des Lys, Les Chandelles and Chris et Manu, and studied the respective websites. She’d been to a couple of similar ‘swing’ clubs back in the States, both privately and for work reasons. She’d found them somewhat sordid. Maybe the Parisian ones would prove classier, but she doubted it. Cornelia had no qualms about public sex, let alone exhibitionism — after all she had stripped for a living for years now and greatly enjoyed the sensation, but still found that sex was an essentially private communion however effectless it could be. But then she’d always had an uneasy relationship with and perception of sex, and at a push would readily confess to decidedly mixed feelings about it.

Would sex in Paris, sex and Paris prove any different she wondered?

She rose from the bed where she had spread out the pages and photographs, switched off the metal grey laptop and walked pensively to the hotel room’s small, pokey bathroom. She pulled off her T-shirt and slipped off her white cotton panties and looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

And shed a tear.

Sometimes, it just happened. For no reason.

The bad man had no problem seducing the young Italian woman. He had experience and a deceptive elegance. Anyway, she was on the rebound from her Peppino and a vulnerable prey. Had her first lover not warned her that no man would ever love her, touch her with as much tenderness as he? And had she not known in her heart that he was right? But falling into the arms of the Frenchman was easy, a way of moving on, she reckoned. She knew all he really wanted to do her was fuck her, use her and that was good enough for now for Giulia. She was lost and the excesses of sex were as good a way of burying the past and the hurt as any other course of action. This new man would not love her; he was just another adventure on the road. So why not? This was Paris, wasn’t it? And spring would soon turn into summer and she just couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Rome and resuming her Ph.D. studies and being subsidised by her father.

She rang home and informed her parents she would be staying on in Paris for a few more months. There were protests and fiery arguments, but she was used to manipulating them. She was old enough by now, she told them, to do what she wanted with her life.

“Respect me, and my needs,” she said. Not for the first time.

“Do you need money?” her father asked.

“No, I’ve found a job, helping out in a bookshop,” she lied. “But Flora’s parents say I can keep on living with them.”

The Frenchman — he said he was a businessman, something in export/import– ordered her to move in with him and Giulia accepted. She couldn’t stay on at Flora’s without revealing her new relationship.

At first, it was nice to sleep at night in bed with another person, a man. Feeling the warmth of the other’s body, waking up to another naked body next to her own. And to feel herself filled to the brim when he made love to her. To again experience a man’s cock growing inside her as it ploughed her, stretched her. To take a penis, savour its hardening inside her mouth, to hear a man moan above her as he came, shuddered, shouted out obscenities or religious adjectives and feel the heat waves coursing from cunt to heart to brain. Of course, it reminded her of Peppino. But then again, it was different. No fish face at the moment of climax with this new man, just a detached air of satisfaction, almost cruelty, as he often took her to the brink and retreated, playing with her senses, enjoying her like an object.

Day times, he would often leave her early in the morning and go about his work and Giulia would explore Paris, fancy free, absorbing the essence of the city in her long, lanky stride. For the first time in ages, she felt like a gypsy again, like the young teenager who would live on the streets of Rome and even enjoy sleepless nights wandering from alleys to coffee shops with a cohort of friends or even alone, drinking in life with no care in the world. In Belleville, she discovered a patisserie with sweet delicacies, near Censier-Daubenton she made the casual acquaintance of a young dope dealer who furnished her with cheap weed, which she would take care never to smoke at the man’s apartment off the Quai de Grenelle. As with Peppino, she knew older guys secretly disapproved of her getting high, as if pretending they had never been young themselves. Neither did they appreciate The Clash, she’d found out… He would leave her money when he left her behind but she was frugal and never used it all or asked for more.

And at night, after her aimless, carefree wanderings, he would treat her to fancy restaurants — she’d cooked for him a few times at the flat but he was not too keen on pasta or tomato sauce or seemingly of Italian food altogether — and then bring her back to the bedroom where he would fuck her. Harder and harder. As she offered no resistance and her passiveness increased, the bad man went further. One night, he tied her hands. Giulia allowed him.