Stardust(65)
“You think that’s true? You sleep with someone and you know her? All those girls before—you knew them? Every one?”
“I didn’t want to know them.”
“Just go to bed. Very nice. And now that you’ve seduced me—”
“Me?”
She smiled, moving her hand down his chest. “You’re sweaty.”
He moved his hand up to her breast, running the back along it.
“Come on,” she said, getting off the bed.
“How can you move? Where?”
“Just come.”
She pulled his hand and he followed, his eyes trailing her white skin, feeling illicit walking naked through the dark house. He put his hand on the smooth flesh of her behind, cupping it, and she laughed, then sprang away, opening the patio door and running across the tiles to the pool, looking over her shoulder once at him before she plunged in. He ran after her, the front of him flapping in the warm night air, then jumped in, too, and swam after her underwater, his testicles floating beneath him, everything free. When he caught up to her, they both rose to the surface.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, shaking her hair. “I never want to wear clothes again.”
“All right,” he said, kissing her.
She laughed. “And you’d like that?”
She swam a little toward the shallow end so they could hold each other without having to keep afloat in deep water.
“You know, my father says you can only seduce someone who wants to be seduced. Otherwise it can’t work.”
“When did he say that?” Ben said, kissing her again.
“In a story. Die Verführung.”
“The Seduction. He wrote a love story?”
She giggled. “Well, it was about Germany. How the country wanted to be seduced by Hitler. But I think it’s the same with people. Like you,” she said, touching his face.
“What about you?”
He drew her against him as they kissed, not playing anymore, aroused again, drawing one leg up around her.
“Everyone thinks it should be easy in the water,” she said, “but it’s hard. Maybe Esther Williams can.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know her? Bathing Beauty? With Cugat? Daniel did some Second Unit work on it.” She stopped, looking away.
“We didn’t get everything overseas,” he said, trying to glide over it.
“Maybe it was like this for him,” she said, distracted. “With the others. All like me. So now I’m one of them.”
He let his leg drop, freeing her below, then turned her head with his fingers. “I’m not him.”
She glanced up and moved her shoulder. “And you don’t love me, either. So that’s the same anyway. But I know it. So nobody gets hurt.”
“Nobody gets hurt.” Not wanting to go further, coaxing her back.
“Someone you meet at a party. Why not her?”
“Is that what it feels like to you?”
She looked at him for a second, her eyes opening wider, then pulled him closer, leaning her head into his.
“Make love to me,” she said, her voice quick and raspy.
He glanced over the side of the pool. “The chaise,” he said, kissing her.
“Yes, on the chaise,” she said, amused. “Like an odalisque.” She took his hand, urgent again, leading him up the shallow steps, shivering a little as the breeze touched them.
He held her to him, his body a blanket, then lay down next to her.
“Now you seduce me,” she said.
“You have to want me to,” he said, stroking her. “That’s how it works.”
She pulled herself up, her wet hair falling on him, then took his penis into her, straddling him. She closed her eyes, just feeling him there for a second, then slowly sat up, moving just a little, looking down on him. “This time we don’t have to hurry.”
This time it was slow enough to feel everything, every part, until they came again, gasping, and then fell back together, not talking, just breathing. Ben could see the city lights in the distance, hear the palm fronds overhead clicking in the soft air, the sound of paradise.
After a while it turned cooler, and he went over to the changing cabana and brought back two robes. She wrapped herself in one and reached for a cigarette pack on the table, then crunched it up.
“There are more in the house,” she said. “Can I get you anything? A drink?”
He shook his head, then raised the back of the chaise to sit upright. He watched her go in, a blur of white through half-closed eyes, and leaned back, smelling the night flowers. A light went on in the house. In a minute, he knew, his body would start to go limp and he’d drift, the animal languor that came after sex. Everything else could wait until tomorrow—what had happened, what it would mean. Now there was just this.