“I’m already there with you,” Esmeralda whispered, and he kissed her. It felt like an electrical jolt, filling her body with dark energy. Her fingers clawed into his back, nails digging into his muscles through his stained, flimsy t-shirt.
Tommy reached for his bottle again, but she caught his hand and stopped him. He snarled again, threw her back on the bed and climbed on top of her.
Esmeralda couldn’t get her blouse off fast enough. Tommy ripped open her bra and sank his teeth into her left breast, and she cried out in pain and pleasure. She couldn’t get enough of him, and he couldn’t move fast enough to satisfy her. She shoved down her slacks and her panties together.
When he was inside her, the fear and the pleasure swept her away on the most powerful wave of feelings she’d ever known. His long, unwashed hair hung in her face, and she couldn’t get enough of his foul reek. Nothing else in the world mattered, just the glorious sweaty, heat igniting her body.
Later, he slept beside her, and she watched the smog-tinted orange sunlight burn away out the window. The boy was pure poison, she knew. Addictive poison.
She entertained her daily urge to leave the apartment and never look back, never tell Tommy where to come and find her, but that was a useless fantasy.
She closed her eyes.
Chapter Two
Jenny and Seth drank coffee in a small indoor garden on the Rue de l'Hôtel de ville, on the Right Bank of the Seine. It was a short walk from Notre Dame cathedral, but hidden enough that tourists were rare. Currently, the only other customers were a few elderly pensioners. The place had gourmet fair-trade coffee from all over Africa, and the price of one cup would have given Jenny’s father sticker shock. Even after a year of living in Paris, with a plentiful stash of money from Seth’s family, Jenny hadn’t fully adjusted to her new life. Happily, the city was so full of eccentrics and artists that the sight of Jenny wearing gloves and scarves in the summertime attracted no particular attention.
Now it was fall, and she had plenty of coats and hats. The colder the weather, the more fully she could wrap herself against the constant danger of touching others.
“What are we in for today?” Seth asked. “Another art gallery? Another play? Touring another old palace?”
“You sound burned out, Seth.” Jenny sipped her organic coffee from Sierra Leone. It was so delicious she couldn’t help sighing.
“Maybe if I had a better idea of what was happening at those things.” Seth said. His French was still shaky...and that was a generous description. Jenny was fluent, owing more to her past lives than her high school French lessons, though sometimes people would give her an odd look if she used an archaic word or expression.
“You should listen harder when I try to teach you,” she told him.
“I do try. But you’re so sexy when you speak French, how am I supposed to learn anything? My teacher’s too hot, that’s the problem.”
Jenny blushed slightly. Their French lessons did have a way of straying to other activities that, while still quite French in nature, weren’t entirely focused on building vocabulary.
“Only you could get tired of French wine, truffles, and palaces,” Jenny said.
“And the electro-techno-whatever music,” Seth added. “Please, God, make it stop.”
“Come on, we’ve seen some great shows. We just saw Pink at the Bercy.”
“Want to get cheesecake?” Seth glanced over the dessert menu.
“For breakfast?”
“How many times are we going to have this conversation?”
Jenny had a second coffee while Seth ordered his cake. He had a great system for burning off calories. He could eat cake for breakfast, then find an excuse to brush past an elderly or handicapped person on the crowded sidewalk, offloading the extra energy as a touch of healing. Jenny couldn’t touch anyone, but her appetite was usually small and her metabolism left her scrawny, as if she suffered from a deadly wasting disease.
They stepped out into the mid-morning sun and strolled along the Seine. The trees had turned their autumn colors, tender reds and golds softening the regal but austere Second Empire architecture. Jenny had mixed feelings about the magnificent and symmetrical look of the city. On the one hand, it was breathtaking to see an entire city remade as a single work of art. On the other, she missed the chaotic, twisting streets of the Paris she’d known centuries earlier. There was something disturbing about the idea of smashing and rebuilding a city where people lived, of a single vision imposed on so many individuals, thousands of whom had their homes razed to make way for Napoleon III’s dream city.
Jenny slowed as they entered the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, a vast outdoor sculpture garden tucked alongside the river. She loved this park. Jenny had plenty of time to work on her pottery and clay sculpting, and even intended to take some informal classes, but she was rethinking her ideas about what sculpture could be.