by Laura London
Christine’s pint-sized students had begun to notice him leaning against the door frame, and they stopped dancing one by one to look knowingly at one another, and at him. They started to giggle but hid the noise behind their small square hands when he placed a finger on his lips.
Lost in the music and her pleasant thoughts, Christine heard the soft stifled laughter but assumed that someone had improvised an exuberant pratfall. Then she heard a light quick step. Warm arms encircled her waist. Warm lips softly touched her mouth. The elfin giggling grew loud and irrepressible as she opened her eyes on her husband. She pulled back, still in the circle of his arms, and when he opened his eyes also, she crossed hers and made what her sister in Boston called a caterpillar face.
“This is all very well, Mr. Ludan,” she said, “but if you stay you’re going to have to put on a tutu.”
“Do they come in my size?”
Tingling energy from his pressureless touch on her waist was radiating all the way to her tiptoes. “That depends on what it is.”
Bending closer, he breathed the answer in her ear and pulled back, grinning to watch her blush and clear her throat and make a caterpillar face again.
“That will do, Mr. Ludan.” She pushed him off and he went into her office to work on her accounts for her like a good Brownie while she finished class. The crunch of gravel and purr of motors outside let him know when parents began to arrive for their little ones. When he returned to the classroom, Christine was alone, securing a CD in its case. Lifting it from her hands, he read, “ ‘Twinkle Toes: Beautiful Ballet Music for the Little Ballerina.’ Hmm… ‘Lady Bug Waltz, Dancing Raindrops, Dance of the Bee’… now I see what’s been missing from my day. No ‘Dance of the Bee.’ ” He dropped a kiss on her shoulder and walked through the open door to her back room to shelve the CD. “I did last month’s books for you.”
She put her head around the door, working the rubber band out of her ponytail. “How’d I come out? Am I rolling in it or broke?”
“Let’s put it this way—you put to death the old myths about rich girls being good with money.” He dodged the rubber band she shot at him. “You know, Chris, you wouldn’t do half-bad if you’d collect on some of those overdue accounts.”
“Watch it, kid. I might tell your pinko friends what a closet capitalist you are.” She made a bristling mustache under her uptilted nose with one burnished red curl and advanced on him, wringing her hands and cackling villainously. “And now, my pretty, either pay your ballet bill or I’ll repossess your hovel. Or—” Freckled fingers grabbed his lapels and jerked him full into her body. Her voice lowered a sultry octave. “Or you will submit yourself to me.”
Her fingers spread flat on his chest, moved slowly downward over his cotton shirt, and got fresh with the zipper on his jeans. His body was gullible enough to heat and ache under the welcome invasion. Grinning weakly, he said, “Promise you’ll be gentle.”
The hand left his body, made another mustache, and twirled it before she seized him in a firm grip and dragged his lips toward hers.
“Your pleas avail you nothing!” she hissed, covering his mouth with her soft, soft lips after gently wetting their cool dry surface with her tongue. Yet she took a swift step backward out of his tightening embrace. “I think maybe I’ll take your hovel instead. It might be safer. Want to go out for beer and pizza?”
“Not tonight. Tonight we picnic. I’m going to surprise you in a minute. Just wait in here.”
“In here! A dank closet!”
With her glowing moistness stinging on his lips, he pulled on the light cord and shut the door on her. “In a minute.”
She was a good sport and crouched by the mop and bucket listening to muffled sounds from the other side of the door, and tucked her hand on a stomach that had begun to quiver at the delightful luxury of having someone to pamper her once more. To distract herself from the sudden unwanted tears that rose under her lashes, she rapped on the door and called out, “I don’t think you could have done much thinking about how this is going to look in my memoirs. Locking your wife in a closet…” She could hear his soft answering laughter through the door. “Anyway, you’re supposed to lock Grandmother in the closet and let Red Riding Hood provide the goodies.”
“Tonight,” came his voice, “the wolf brings the goodies.”
The studio lights were out when she emerged, but a chimneyed candle lit a pretty quilt and floor cushions that were laid with two china place settings: shrimp on crushed ice, fresh salad, chicken with paprika, and crystal wineglasses. She reclined on the pillows with a sigh, smiling at the unearthly haremlike image. Gliding down beside her, Jesse caught the direction of her glance.
His light gesture indicated their reflections in the mirrored wall. “I hope that other couple will leave us alone.”
Leaning forward to brush her forefinger lovingly over his chin, she said, “I’m not worried. They’ll probably be too preoccupied to glance our way. Jesse, thank you for thinking of this.”
A slight movement of his head brought his lips to the tip of her finger, pushing lightly against the pad. “I like to cater to your every whimsy.”
She was leaning toward him, the low bodice of the leotard outlining her breasts, exposing the gingery warmth of the skin above. The straps of the garment were fragile, curving over her straight shoulders, and he found himself half-feeling the light tug that it would take to draw the strap down over her arm. The sheer practice clothes gave her body drama. She was a fantasy image, a tiny dancer in pointe shoes, the eloquent wish fulfillment of every man who loved the sensuality of ballet and dreamed of carrying one of the lovely, ethereal creatures to a couch and slowly undressing her. She had been perspiring slightly; a few fleecy wisps around her face were still darkened from it, and it fascinated him that she could lend glamour even to sweat.
The lovely, ethereal creature put a shrimp in her mouth, made a blissful face, and was still munching when she said, “When did you get time to do all this?”
“On and off during the day. I worked at home today—I couldn’t get anything done downtown. Come here, Chrissie.” He pulled her toward him, turning her around, and settled her against his body between his thighs. His lips were in her hair. “I want to feed you.”
The soft note in his voice had left her a little breathless, and the pressure of his hand sliding around her, coming to rest under her breasts, brought a throbbing pulse to her throat. Opening her lips to receive a bit of chicken from his fingers, she leaned back into his chest, savoring their closeness.
“Did you have a nice visit with your family last night?”
“My family…” he repeated absently, as though he’d forgotten who that was. “Sure. They don’t change.” He fed her again, and then showed her the label on the wine bottle. “Do you know what this is?”
“Yes! Because the words look like proper names in a Russian novel. Is it a Hungarian wine?”
“Uh-huh.” He rested the bottle on the floor between her legs and began to perforate the cork. “It’s Tokaji Aszú. Uncle Vilmos sent my father a case.”
“Are you serious? You mean the wine of the kings?” Her voice became dreamily ecstatic. “The favorite vintage of Louis the Fourteenth and Frederick the Great… grown in the rich volcanic mountainous soil in your family’s vineyards for seven centuries…”
His laughter produced warm exhalations that penetrated to her scalp. “Oh, we had a scraggly vine or two.”
“And a title,” she took delight in reminding him, aglow with the romanticism of his family history. She heard him mutter something about the meaninglessness of hereditary nobility, especially in families like his who hadn’t had two forints to rub together since the sixteenth century, as he always did whenever she brought it up. His legs were a warm saddle around her hips. She could feel the seams of his jeans through her thin tights, and behind her, his chest and stomach were a hard cloak of warming flesh. His hand brushed her thigh as he withdrew the bottle. She shivered.
In the mirror she watched the play of his fingers as he fed her, the way his long hand curved around the bowl of the goblet as he touched it to her lips. Their images in the mirror were light, angular, and graceful, picked out of the black mirror by the brightly burning candle flame.
Presently he murmured, “You know, don’t you, child, that you’re in trouble.” His fingertips were lightly rubbing, touching along the soft swell of the underside of her breast. “I’ve put something in the sauce that makes me irresistible.”
“Really?” She tipped her head to look at him. “I’ll have to keep the leftovers under lock and key.”
This time when she sipped, the wine was nearly gone and the backs of his fingers were tracing slowly, slowly across her lower lip. In slow motion his hand, holding the wineglass, drifted down to rest on his raised knee. She was concentrating on the hypnotic flow of his arm until, through the unguarded part of her mind, a sudden flow of image and sensation came together as she saw in the mirror his hand flat against her side, then moving up to very gently cup underneath her breast with a warm, lifting feel. His hair falling over his forehead, he bent to nuzzle in her curls and down the crescent of her throat in a movement so soft it might have been only his breath. His tongue, in passing, played over her earlobe and the outer terrace of her ear within its graceful curves. A hot liquid heaviness filled her breast where he held it, and she began to breathe in long slow deep inhalations. He smoothed over nipples that had become tight and tender against his fingers.
“Chrissie, will you tell me something?” His finger traced down her cheek. His voice was soft. “Did I hurt you last night?”
It was difficult to collect herself enough to imagine what he meant. And then she remembered her arm this morning, with its livid print of his hand. Jesse’s nightmare. The nightmare that had become hers. Her chest tightened and, close as he was, he felt her tension and said gently, “It’s all right; you can tell me. Talk to me. Last night when we were making love it seemed… difficult for you, physically.”
Her tension collapsed into a smile that measured her relief. Not the nightmare. She would not have to lie to him. She lifted her chin, straining to look upside down into his green eyes.
“You mean last night when I was—” Her hesitation stretched, becoming patently obvious.
With amused comprehension, he finished for her. “A little dry, sweetheart.”
Four years of marital intimacy with an uninhibited lover had taken her beyond the point where that much frankness would produce a blush, but that didn’t spare her the attendant emotions. Dry. Really. You’d think he could have found another way to put it, being a writer. But her look of reproach began to defrost under the steady stroke of his hand.
“I don’t know…” She had to swallow. “Maybe it was hormones, or—Jess, you’re making it kind of hard to speak.” His husky laughter tickled the back of her neck. “Or it might have been the excitement.”
“I was afraid it might have been the lack of it.”
“Oh, no, I was really flying. It was nothing mental, only physical, and it got better soon. It felt a little bit like I was losing my virginity again.”
“I felt a little bit like I was taking it, but none too kindly.” He pulled her very close, nourishing her in his arms, and touched his lips to hers lightly, once, twice, in movements of tantalizing sweetness. Then, cradling her head in his palm, he lowered her to the floor. “I was worried that it might make you afraid the next time we made love.”
“Whenever that’s going to be…” The gentle thrust of his knee inside her thighs made a gush of desire fill all of her, drowning thought. Her practice leotard had an oily slipperiness that eased the path of his hands, helping her savor the size and texture of his palm as it came to rest over her breast, outlined so perfectly as she lay on the quilt beneath him. And he felt the soft, giving flesh push upward against his palm as her breathing quickened and deepened, and the firmer feel of her nipple lifting with desire. He bent to kiss it.
“It wasn’t your hormones,” he murmured, his tongue making unhurried circles over the liquidy fabric.
“Wh-what?”
“Ladies who go without stimulation for a while can sometimes—sometimes—God, Chrissie…” His words dissolved into a thick inhalation as her hand slipped under his belt and into his jeans.
“You were saying,” she breathed, “about ladies who go without stimulation?”
“They—they—oh, my God.” Gasping and laughing, he caught her wrists and pressed them into the quilt. “Do you want this to take a while or do you want it to be over in about twenty seconds?”
And when she widened her eyes and said, “Hell, no. I want a man with a slow hand,” they collapsed together giggling idiotically and shivering, their hands coursing over each other until he pulled her on his lap and undressed her, telling her the Hungarian words for each part of her body as he kissed it, laughing at her accent when she repeated the words.
He gave her more wine, and when it spilled on his unsteady fingers, he put them to her mouth, watching her lick them, and then dipped up a tiny crystal of melting ice and cradled her against his body while he spread the dripping bead all over her lips. She tangled her hands in his hair, moaning as his mouth descended to the cold, distended polish of hers, heating it again with his kiss.
Sliding beneath his body was a gradual movement threaded with dizzying pleasure. He lifted his mouth to hers, teasing open her lips slowly with small strokes of his own. His husky whisper came. “Open your mouth, Chris. More… I love you. I love—being with you. Don’t ever let me go away again, Chrissie—stay close… close…” Her returning kisses were vibrant with love, full and deep, touching into the pain within them both, healing, searing at the crisp hurt. He felt so warm lying on top of her, his long legs stretched across her as they kissed. She let her own legs fall open so that the warmth of his hard-muscled thigh was between them, and she was rocking imperceptibly against it, losing herself in the tightening pressure. Desire seemed to be wedging itself into her, making her body feel open and empty.
“Jesse…”
His hand moved over her lower belly, lying between her open thighs where his leg had been, and the urgency she felt there spread throughout her. She reached her hands up to his back, slipping them under the light sweater, moving them slowly up. With a humorous look, he straightened away from her and held his arms over his head so she could pull it the rest of the way off. And then he folded it into a neat soft square and tucked it under her head like a pillow, looking down at her. The candlelight flickered over his skin lovingly, leaving it golden, dappled with darkness in the lean hollows and curves of his chest, his ribs. She ran her palms over his flat stomach, over his hard chest. His vitality seemed to be burning so close to the surface, like heated blood leaping to warm her hands.
“Don’t stop touching me.” His voice was no more than a ragged whisper, a strand of breath. “Your hands feel so good to me—so good. Kérem, Christine… kérem.”
Please, he had whispered to her, and the desperate plea stayed with her as though it were the fragrance of some sweet fading flower as they became one in the candlelight in a golden cloud of rippling movement, tawny skin and dusky hollows changing in the light like the sun’s play on a brook through the leaves of a maple.
They lay together afterward with her head against his heartbeat, his hands idling over her moist, kiss-stung flesh, his lips touching her brow. Her arms and legs felt solid to her, pressing downward in deep relaxation, but inside she was quivery, a water droplet trembling on a blade of grass.
“Jess, what were you trying to tell me a while back?”
After a dreamy pause, “Hmmm?”
She pulled herself up on one elbow. “About women. When they haven’t made love recently.”
“Oh. That. Just that sometimes it creates a temporary problem with lubrication when they resume relations. If I had been more patient last night…”
She stopped him with a kiss. “Why i
s it that you always know everything about everything? Where was that from—Masters and Johnson?”
He stroked her chin with a lazy finger. “I don’t remember.” He gave her a sudden half smile. “More likely ’The Playboy Advisor.’ ”
Lovingly she stretched out her arm to caress his chest, and he turned his head to brush his mouth over the inside of her wrist. But something arrested the motion. Jesse sat up with a questioning look, taking her arm in a gentle grip.
Chris felt the warmth within her begin to chill. He was looking at the marks his fingers had left in her flesh. She watched in mute panic as he released her, pulled on his jeans, snapped on the overhead light, and then returned to sit opposite her and pick up her wrist again.
Silvery fluorescence brightened the marred fabric of her skin. The bruises were dark among the innocent freckles, broken like wine stains into discolored pools of red and purple, evoking their creation in pain and violence. For a moment he hallucinated his nightmare. Nausea cramped him. His lungs contracted in a dry spasm. What inner blindness had led him to believe that he could never harm her, even in sleep? His heart began to hammer as he studied the marks, trying to assess the force it would have taken to leave that much damage. Oh, God. He would have had to twist her arm half off. Finally he looked up into her face. Her expression was frozen, vulnerable, and she withdrew her arm from his hands and began to gather the quilt around her naked body.
“I could have broken your arm. And you only told me you were startled.”
Her fingers moved nervously on the quilt, tightening it over her breasts. “I knew you’d be upset. You’ve already been upset enough lately. It looks much worse than it is. Hey, Jess, c’mon, it’s no big deal.” There was a tremor in her voice. “It was an accident.”