‘I can’t take it anymore,’ she pleads.
And this time he relents. He lets her come. It shocks her by its intensity. She screams his name, but strangely, he refuses take his mouth away from the painfully sensitive blood-engorged sex. She tries to wriggle away but his grip is steel. Then, suddenly she is no longer pushing his head away and begging him to stop, but pulling him back in; the waves of ecstasy are coming back. And again. Three times in total she jerks, shakes, trembles and soars before she falls from her great height. Her hands flop to her sides, spent.
She feels him take his watching eyes away from her and lay his cheek for a moment on her stomach and listen to her ragged breathing.
Then he bounds up, full of coiled energy and picking her up lays her on the pillow. She is so spent she looks at him with hazy, passion-filled eyes. She wants to tell him that she has never experienced such a thing before. She wants to tell him how beautiful and awesome it has been, how complete he has made her feel; perhaps she might even have blurted out that she is in love with him and has been for some time now.
There is no one but him for her—she would take the bad, the good, even the indifferent—but he places a silencing finger on her lips. He does not want words from her. He wants only claim of her body and only when he wants it. All he was doing was defining her as his. As her eyes flutter shut she hears him step out of his trousers and feels the mattress give under his knee.
‘Ah,’ she says.
Twenty two
t is late, nearly twelve, when Blake slots his key in the Idoor and enters the apartment. The sliding doors to the balcony are open. A gentle breeze lifts the curtain. He sees her asleep on the sofa and feels a frisson of some strange emotion. He stands over her and watches her. In the soft light, the pattern on the lavender wallpaper looks like thorn vines that the prince has to hack through and she is the princess from Sleeping Beauty. He can still remember reading it for his sister. So many times. Her favorite. He hated it. Corny nonsense. He sits next to her and her sleeping body tilts twenty degrees towards him.#p#分页标题#e#
He runs a finger along her cheek. She opens her eyes.
‘You smell of whiskey. Where have you been?’
He chuckles. ‘Doing my rounds.’
She puts a hand to his cheek. It is cold. She puts her hand on his chest. Through the shirt material, her fingertips register the beat of his strong heart.
‘You reminded me of Sleeping Beauty.’
‘That must make you Prince Charming then.’
A look of sadness crosses his face. His hand gently traces the line of her cheek. ‘Don’t deceive yourself, Lana.
Our liaison can only ever be temporary. I am spoken for.’
His words stab her like a knife. The wounds are whispers. ‘Who is she? Where is she now?’
‘She’s from an old family like me. She has to finish her education. She is only twenty-two. Next year I will be thirty-one and she will be twenty-three. Then we will marry.’
‘Are you in love with her?’
He looks amused. ‘No.’
‘Is it like an arranged marriage?’
‘Something like that. There is some leeway, there has to be some attraction, but marriage for us has always been a merger of two great families. The Lazards marry their sons to Rockefellers and the Rockefellers marry their daughters to Hapsgoods. It works well.’
‘Is love ever a part of the equation?’
‘Love is vastly overrated. We consolidate our wealth and position and make arrangements to cater to our specific tastes.’
‘Specific tastes?’
‘Some of us are gay; others are pedophiles.’
She looks at him in shock. ‘Are you condoning pedophilia?’
‘I’m not condoning anything. I’m stating a fact.’
‘So you wouldn’t report a pedophile who was abusing a child?’
He shakes his head. ‘That is a matter between the pedophile and God as God made him that way.’
‘What about the child?’
‘Time’s march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy, however tiny it might be, is to ask that a link be broken in that web of iron. No one deserves such a miracle—Jorge Luis Borges.’
‘What an unkind world you live in.’
‘Your tragedy is that you live in the same world as me only you do not perceive it, and that makes you careless.’
‘And your tragedy is your fatalism.’
‘On the contrary. It means I recognize the threat.
Cause and effect. Unlike you, my wife and I will guard our children in such a way that they will never be exposed to dangerous situations.’
She looks at him, calmly, shamelessly discussing his bride to be with her. ‘If you are already engaged to be married why are you never seen together and why are you being touted as the most eligible bachelor alive?’