Evening Storm

by Anne Calhoun

  He seized the opening like he used to storm a margin call. “Tell me why you left France. Why the Fashion District? Who are you?” he asked.

  “You tell me about me,” she said.

  He liked the way she nudged him with her knee, like they were friends, flirting friends, touching friends. “What makes you think I know anything about you?”

  “A big component of investment banking is research. You are a successful investment banker. Therefore you are a competent researcher, or you employ them.”

  Jealousy burned as badly as his irritated stomach lining. “Did you learn that from Stéphane?” he asked, because she had him dead to rights. He’d researched her, and knew all about Stéphane Roussel, the French finance genius who helped her start up Irresistible.

  She lifted one eyebrow, calling him on his bullshit, and the confidence radiating from her nearly blew all his circuits. He had a sudden image of her taking her life by the hand and giving it a sharp spin, like a weighted globe, just to see what shook out.

  “You are Simone Demarchelier, part of the fifth generation of Demarchelier House, designing clothes for over a hundred and fifty years. You took a degree at the Sorbonne, then joined your family’s house, starting in the ready-to-wear collection and moving on to couture design. You stayed for almost a decade until you suddenly split from the family business, moved to New York, and opened Irresistible. You’ve not gone out of your way to hide your connections, nor have you played them up. You bought this building with a down payment from your own money, and Stéphane arranged the financing for the rest of it. How did I do?”

  “Very well,” she said. “But it’s all public knowledge.”

  “The next step is the insider information we’re not supposed to use.”

  “Ah. And to whom did you speak for the juicy gossip?”

  “No one.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want to learn you for myself.” He hoped, somewhere inside, that she’d extend the same courtesy when the shit hit the fan. “Why did you leave your family’s house? Most designers would sell their mothers to work for Demarchelier.”

  “They were increasingly focused on the brand. I know that’s part of the business now, but I’m a bit of a purist. I wanted to control the process from beginning to end, every element from fabric to design to showroom space, and I wanted to do it on my own.”

  “Some people call this your vanity project.”

  She shrugged, clearly unconcerned with what people thought. “I answer to myself, which is easy enough to say when I have Demarchelier as a fallback option. Perhaps that is a vanity project.”

  “But you don’t give a damn what people think.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I stopped asking for permission. Life got shockingly simple when I did.”

  He shifted so he faced her, leaning back against the wrought iron railing. “Stéphane helped you get there?”

  “He did,” she said as she turned her head to gaze at him. The setting sun burnished her hair and brought out the copper highlights, reminding him of a Caribbean sunset full of reds and oranges and golds. Her eyes were the blue of a morning sky, her freckles smudges of color down her cheeks and throat, disappearing into the open collar of her shirt, reappearing at her forearms. Ryan suddenly, and rather irrationally, hated knowing that Stéphane was intimately acquainted with the patterns of her freckles.

  “You really shouldn’t look at me like that.”

  He didn’t say like what? He knew how he was looking at her, knew it was totally and completely obvious that he wanted to know each curve and swell of her body, that simply thinking about it sent blood thumping to his cock. Instead he tipped back the bottle of beer and finished it. Without saying a word she twisted the top off a second bottle and handed it to him.

  “Are you going to tell me a story?” she said.

  From the tone of her voice he couldn’t tell if she wanted him to say yes or no. What popped out of his mouth was a question he wasn’t even aware he was thinking. “Do you want to hear one?”

  “No, but I think you want to tell me one.”

  She was too perceptive by half. He waited. She’d said she didn’t want to hear it. He would respect that.

  “Perhaps the lingerie didn’t facilitate your mood. She chose the full coverage panties, not bikinis or a thong. You probably prefer thongs,” she said knowingly.

  He actually didn’t have a preference one way or the other. The thought cheered him, as if there was still a little bit of ground left between him and rock bottom. At least he wasn’t the kind of man who felt insulted when a woman let him touch her and he discovered plain cotton briefs rather than cheeky lace panties, a garter belt, or a barely there thong. “It’s actually about the body inside the underwear. No, that’s wrong. It’s actually about the woman inside the body inside the underwear inside the clothes.”

  She tilted her head and gave him a little grin. “Really? I’ve had gentlemen in my dressing rooms who complain at length of the horror of getting a hand up a girl’s skirt and discovering a pair of saggy cotton panties.”

  “They weren’t gentlemen.” It was only after the words came out of his mouth that he realized the hypocrisy.

  “Point taken.”

  He tipped his bottle of beer back and thought about it for a moment. “I actually like the feel of skin through cotton,” he mused. “It’s very real. I guess at some level it reminds me of being young, when girls wore cotton blouses from discount stores, when you could feel the heat of their skin through the shirt they were wearing. Now it’s all really refined fabrics, the kind of thing that you know cost more than I used to make in a month in tips when I was waiting tables to put myself through college. I guess I miss that. I miss being the kid who was happy to feel cotton against the sweet curve of the hip or breast.”

  She grinned and looked at him through her eyelashes. “I’m having trouble deciding if I should mock you for your first-world problems, or validate your feelings as particular to your circumstances and very real.”

  “You should mock me,” he said. “Nostalgia is always for an imaginary past, and I’ve made my bed.”

  “So you’re imagining the sensation of cotton against skin?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, then glanced at her button-down. “May I?”

  She was sitting on the landing with her back to the railing, while he occupied the first step down to the street. She thought about it, and while she thought, his heart began to pound in his chest, his fingertips and palm tingled with that sense memory of warm, slightly rough cotton against his palm, the weights of the breast, the realization that a nipple was hardening because of his touch. It yanked him back in time to his teenage years, before he even had sex, when girls were mysteries and summer was a sheer delight and he had no understanding of greed or depravity or the heights he would attain and how far from himself he would drift.

  Simone set the bottle of beer on the landing beside her and hitched herself forward until she was in line with his bent knees, sitting crisscross applesauce, as his mother the teacher would say, leaning forward a little bit, bracing her forearms on her knees. She gave no direction and set no boundaries, just looked at him with a slight challenge in her eyes.

  She wore an old Oxford cloth shirt, tailored for a woman, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, the placket unbuttoned to just between her breasts. He thought about all the places he could put his hand. Her forearm, where he could stroke the sensitive patch of skin inside her elbow. Right at her breastbone, where he could stroke the thin skin covering the ribs that housed the heart he coveted. Or he could reach out his right hand to her left shoulder and stroke in the slow tender line from the tip of her chin down her throat to the notch between her collarbone. Over and over and over again.

  That’s what he did. He let his fingers curl around her shoulder, felt her bra strap bisecting th
e slope between shoulder and neck, felt the heat exchange between his palm and her skin. With each slow pass he learned something new, the way her pulse stuttered, the way her breathing hitched, that it took almost no friction at all to raise a streak of pink under the scattered freckles. If he kissed her, made love to her, the slightest hint of beard stubble would mark her.

  Her breathing was barely audible over the city’s summer hum: jackhammers and trucks, cars and the subway, the machinery of modern life banging away all around them, but in the pursuit of what? Money? Fame? Fortune? Or he could pursue this, the simplicity of his skin against hers, his thumb on the soft, slightly damp, tender flesh of her throat. The simplicity of cotton. This anchored him while his world was spinning out of control. He thought about what he didn’t get at that party, about what he had yet to do, because he was falling and it was a long goddamn way down.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  ***

  His hand rested purposefully on the ambiguous territory at the juncture of throat, collarbone, and chest, holding Simone as thoroughly as if he’d handcuffed her. Jealousy and desire blended together in her veins while he stared into space, remembering moments she wished he’d never experienced in the first place. But when Ryan started talking, he was in the present, looking at her, not in his memories with Daria.

  “Daria’s not like Jade. When she’s not onstage or in front of the camera, she wants to disappear,” he said, an assessment that matched Simone’s experience in Irresistible’s showroom. “Success turned her into public property, so she values every second of privacy she can get. Private pleasures are even that much more valuable, like owning a Van Gogh.

  “We’re at a party where everyone wants to talk to her, shake her hand, congratulate her, but what they really want is to be seen with her. Does she remember what it’s like to not be a commodity? In an hour or so, the press of bodies in the living room will overwhelm the air conditioner, and the room already stinks of a clash of perfumes and sprays and desperation. The average net worth in the living room is well into eight figures, so you’d think we’d reek of satisfaction, but instead there’s the sense of never enough.

  “I’m standing in a library of a man who hasn’t read a book since he left business school. It’s dark, lit only by the desk lamp, and cool. She seems relieved to have found a hidey-hole, so I watch her stroll along the perimeter of shelves, looking at the pristine spines. I can’t tell if she’s acting the part of a person who loves books, but if she is, she’s earning another Oscar. I let her get lost in a rare quiet moment, watching the way the light catches the gold thread in her cream gown. Whoever designed that gown knew what he was doing. It’s the exact color of her skin, so she looks like she was made from the same rich cloth. I wonder what color she chose at your shop. I saw silk, satin, and lace in green, gold, red, blue, and white.”

  The question had a probing quality, as if he wanted her to confirm a detail he should know. For a split second Simone wondered if he really didn’t know, if he really hadn’t seen Daria’s gold silk set.

  “It’s the curiosity that propels me from behind the desk, across the Turkish rug, to stand behind her. I’m not so close she can’t easily move, but close enough to let her choose. Move away, and it’s over. Stay where she is, and it’s my move again.

  “She doesn’t move. Instead she crooks her index finger into a book’s spine and tips it forward into her palm. I can’t see the title, but I can see her nape. Her hair is caught up in a heavy offset French twist, leaving her bare from her hairline to her shoulder blades, shifting under her skin as she palms the book, opens it. She looks otherworldly, like she’s on a pedestal. Unreal.

  “I step closer. Now I can smell her perfume, too faint and subtle to be noticed under the heavy smell of luxury in the living room, but in the cool, dim air of the library, it drifts into my nostrils and goes straight to my back brain. I don’t presume to touch her, but I do let my head drop forward until we’re sharing heat, my breath flowing against the skin of her shoulder.

  “She turns a page.

  “I kiss her shoulder. Just lips. No tongue, no teeth. Just my lips against the rounded joint, for just a moment. I don’t want something from her. I want to give her something she won’t even have to ask for.”

  Emotion twisted in Simone’s stomach. This was different from Jade. Intimate. Real. With Jade, Ryan was playing a role, pleasing her in a way that was almost mocking her. In this one, he was active, interested, engaged. Trying . . . not harder, but from his heart, and once again, Simone was torn between unmistakable arousal and an unjustifiable envy.

  “She turns another page, lets her finger follow the words to the middle of the text. Disinterest wafts from her posture, the angle of her neck, every part of her except her skin, which is heating from cream to pink as the seconds pass. I press another kiss into her shoulder, this time in the dip where the collarbone attaches to the joint, and wait for approval.

  “Her finger pauses, so I part my lips and brush them lightly along the slope where her neck meets her shoulder. It’s a caress and a kiss all at once, and it ends at the hollow behind her ear. Goose bumps raise and disappear, and the tops of her breasts quiver as she exhales.

  ‘Yes or no,’ I say.

  ‘My last chance?’

  ‘Never,’ I say. ‘You can say no any time.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  “Some men love the thrill of the chase. They want a woman who makes them work for it, the dance of yes-no-maybe-no-yes. Get together, fight, make up, break up, fight, get back together. I prefer no drama, a woman who’s wide awake, aware, clear-eyed. Bring your best, because I want nothing less. There’s something so hot about a woman who knows she can take what I want to give her.

  “I bring my hands up to her collarbone and trail my fingers along the prominent slopes and angles to her shoulders, then back down to the neckline of her dress. With my index fingers I trace the seam along the curve, barely grazing the skin as I follow around to the soft, warm spot where her arm meets the bodice. In response she lifts her arms and braces them on the shelf in front of us. The move is as satisfied and confident as a cat perching on a windowsill, and I continue around, under her shoulder blades, to the zipper.

  “It’s loud in the quiet library, the rasp of metal tabs separating. I don’t open it all the way to her tailbone, but the fabric still gaps away from her spine.”

  Simone went on high alert. If he’d been telling a story, not relating his experience, this is where he would slip.

  “Gold. She chose a shimmery gold fabric for her underclothes, and for a moment I’m transfixed by the sheer quality of the garment. All bras are the same, hooks and eyes, underwire, cups, a band, but in this light, this has the aged sheen of buried treasure. Every stitch is the same size, the same tension, with no rough spots at the seams to mar skin, and there’s a glimmer to the fabric that makes me think of fairies, or think places where this world shimmers against another.

  “I’m suddenly, achingly hard. My fingers are trembling a little when I repeat my move, this time following the racier, deeper curves of the strapless bra. But I don’t unhook it. We’re at a party. Anyone could knock on the door. Daria locked it, but still. She doesn’t want to be seen. It’s no hardship to leave her covered in satin made of pirate’s gold.

  “I curl my fingers into the heavy fabric at her hip, slowly edging it up, baring ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Keeping her hands on the shelves, she shimmies a little to free the cream cloth from her hips. Gold panties, full coverage. It shouldn’t be hot.”

  Simone’s clit fluttered as he spoke. His voice was lower, rougher; none of the amused playboy and all Wall Street raider. “But it is hot,” she said, the words drawn from her without her knowledge or consent. He was right, and she both hated it and loved it. “Layer upon layer to peel away, uncover. Daria doesn’t need overtly sexualized lingerie to feel powerful. She know
s she’s wanted, so she doesn’t need to please anyone but herself.”

  “Exactly,” Ryan said. His dark eyes held hers intently. “It’s very hot. Her heels and curves give her a Marilyn look, and it’s so fucking sexy, because I can tell she thinks it’s so fucking sexy. She’s not posing like a pinup girl would pose: heels together, knees straight, bottom tipped back, Betty Boop in a couture gown. Instead there’s a slight curve to her hip, as if a bit of her weight is on her left foot, and a smile on her face that says she feels so goddamn good.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I say.

  “She looks over her shoulder. ‘I hear that all the time, but you sound like you mean it.’

  “I know how she feels. After a while, compliments lose their meaning, words like beautiful, smart, talented, master of the universe running together with every other word like coffee or bus, app or text. Overuse strips them of their power, renders them not a gift but more noise. Perhaps she wants the noise to disappear as much as I do.

  “I can’t resist. The fabric gleams in the light, and I run my palm over it from waistband to the curve of her buttock. It’s sleek and warm. I slip my index finger under the elastic, slide it back and forth. She purrs like a cat and turns to face me. My fingers trail over her hip as she moves, and once again I’m stunned by how sexy it is when a woman’s half dressed. The top of her gown droops away from her breasts, and from the front, the fabric of her bra cups is sheer, not hiding her nipples. The expensive gown is bunched inelegantly at her waist but there’s a method to my madness. The party is big, raucous, and spilling over into the rest of the apartment. Eventually someone will knock on the door.

  “She sets the book on the shelf by her shoulder, then uses that hand to grip my neck and draw my mouth to hers. I brace myself against the bookshelves so I don’t crush her against the unforgiving wood, but when her other hand slips between my jacket and my cummerbund to pull me closer, I give in and press myself against her. When my erection presses into the thick folds of fabric at her midsection, I growl. Too soft. Not enough friction or pressure. Without releasing my nape she reaches forward to grip my cock.