Marco stood facing Tinker from a distance of some eight inches and put her left hand on his right shoulder. “Look over my shoulder, not at me.” He grasped her other hand in dance position. “Now, flex your knees. More!”
Feeling utterly foolish, Tinker gazed into the corner of the room.
“When I say ‘slow’ walk back on your right foot and when I say ‘slow’ again, walk back on your left foot.”
They took two deliberate, backward steps in slow motion. “Keep your knees flexed! Now when I say ‘quick,’ another step back on your right foot. On the second ‘quick,’ a step sideways, to the left on your left foot. Then when I say ‘slow’ drag your right foot across to your left foot and stop.”
He led her powerfully through the last three steps, preventing her from wavering.
“That’s it,” Marco said. “You’ve just done the basic step.”
“You were holding me up.”
“Because we were doing it so slowly that you could have lost your balance. With music it goes so quickly that there’s no problem. Now, we’ll walk through it again without music. I want you to say the slows and the quicks with me out loud.”
“Oh, for goodness sake!”
“Stop being such a self-conscious child! Slow! Slow! Quick, quick, slow, damn it! That’s better. And again. And again.” He led her twenty times around the room until Tinker found herself matching the steps and the words automatically.
“Now, with music,” Marco said.
“Can’t I wait till the first real lesson?” Tinker pleaded, panicked again.
“No, you cannot.” Marco put the tape on and walked back to Tinker. “Doesn’t that music make you want to dance?”
“No!”
“You’re a liar. From now on, no more walking, no more talking. Now!”
They circled the big room, the only sound their feet and the music. After a shaky start, Tinker found the beat, and soon, sooner than she would ever have believed, she found herself dancing in a sense of heightened consciousness. She became a big, resplendent, masterful cat, a great, prowling, sure-footed, arrogant cat, full of indisputable pride, a cat whose territory no one would dare invade. The beat of the insistent music became her cavalier, the music infused her with its strength and grace, the music made her forget that she couldn’t dance, because while it lasted, she could. She could!
“Basta! Enough.” Marco danced her over to the sofa and released her so that they both fell backward, side by side. “You may rest a minute. So, now, what do you think? Unwilling to admit it, aren’t you? But you were doing the tango, no mistake about that.”
“I know.” Tinker blushed with deep pleasure. She was dripping wet, her sweater clung to her in patches, and sweat ran down her forehead into her eyes.
“Here,” Marco said, offering her a handkerchief. As she dabbed at her face he inhaled the pungency of her natural aroma with brutal pleasure, savoring the throb of his instant arousal. There would never be a better opportunity, he thought through a haze of lust. While she continued to dry her face he opened his trousers in a quick, stealthy gesture. With a deft, strong move and the advantage of surprise Marco grabbed Tinker’s wrists and flung her to the floor, locking his knees around her body.
“Take it in your mouth,” he ordered.
“No!” She screamed as loudly as she could, rearing backward.
“There’s no one left in the building. Do it!”
“The hell I will!”
Her resistance inflamed him. It was exactly what he wanted.
“Have you ever had a hard cock in your mouth?” he asked, savoring the words. “Have you ever sucked a man until he came? No, of course not. This will be your first time.”
“Let me go!” Tinker struggled as violently as possible but she was immobilized.
“Not until you’ve taken it between your lips. Not until you’ve tasted it. I won’t permit you to stop. Look at it. Look!” He pulled her by her wrists until she was forced to bend forward at the waist. “How can I let you go when it’s so hard? Don’t you know that when I’m in your mouth you’ll own me, you innocent child? Don’t you want that power?”
“Power?” Tinker asked in a muffled voice, ceasing to struggle.
“I’ll teach you something that will give you power over every man alive.”
“That?” Tinker said wonderingly. “Only that?”
“Yes. That.”
“You’re hurting my wrists,” she whimpered.
“Bend your head and take it in your mouth,” he said, his voice thick.
“My wrists … I can’t bend.…” She was on the verge of tears.
He let go of one of her wrists and put his free hand behind her head, pushing it toward his cock. Tinker stiffened her neck until his attention was focused on pushing her head down. Then, with a lightning movement, she grabbed his balls with her free hand and squeezed them as tightly as she could.
“Aah!” he screeched, gasping in pain.
“You sick, evil bastard! If you ever touch me again I’ll kill you.” With both hands free now she squeezed even harder. “I’ll never be in a room alone with you again. Do you want to work without me?—I’ll go or stay—your choice.”
“Stay,” he grunted.
“I thought you’d say that. I believe we understand each other now, innocent though I am.”
“Let go!”
Tinker held his balls in one final wrenching squeeze. “Know what I was famous for in high school, Marco?”
“Damn you!”
“The best blow job in town. See you tomorrow.”
Tinker was out of the door, shaking but still grinning at her lie, a long time before Marco was even able to move.
16
If I had to bet on it, I’d say that Tinker had unquestionably won the jackpot.
There had been a couple of free days during which Lombardi sent word that he didn’t need any of the girls and didn’t have time for Tinker. I was deeply concerned that he didn’t mean to keep his promise to her, but at least the time was used by Mike, who had the three girls at his disposal—by now he must have exposed enough film to fill ten issues of Zing. Then yesterday, Tinker had been selected for special treatment by Lombardi.
I didn’t know about it until he called me a half hour ago, while I was eating breakfast, to inform me of her new schedule: tango lessons in the mornings, afternoons working for him in his atelier. I asked him what I could do to help and he said that since he had arranged for one of the limos to be permanently assigned to Tinker there was nothing else she needed. No, the photographer was most definitely not welcome to pollute the concentration of the tango lessons nor, most particularly, was Mike to interrupt his work with Tinker. We were to leave her to him and his staff and to Señora Varga, and not bother him with questions: his time was at a premium.
Naturally I immediately checked this all out with Tinker, the anointed, who, for a change, I managed to find in her suite taking a bath. She promised me that she could handle the pressure.
“It’s an overly heavy schedule,” I warned her. “You’re spending almost every night on the Left Bank with some guy. Now you’ll be dancing all morning and standing on your feet being fitted all afternoon—that’s just crazy pressure, Tinker. You’d be giving yourself much better odds if you moved back to the hotel … at least you’d have your evenings free to soak your feet, get a good night’s sleep alone in your own bed … I don’t have to remind you how much there’s at stake. I have a responsibility to you, Tinker, and you have a responsibility to yourself. You know what Justine would say.”
“Oh, Frankie, I don’t give a damn! I don’t care what you say, I can’t not be with Tom. He’s what keeps me going. Oh, if you only knew him you’d understand.”
“So introduce me.”
“I will, I promise, but not yet. It’s too soon … I want him all to myself.”
“Tinker, I hope to God that you’re as strong as you think you are,” I said with real worry. Tinker was so aflam
e with a combination of love and ambition that she was beyond reasoning with. If she insisted on burning the candle in the middle as well as at both ends, there literally wasn’t anything I could do, short of physical restraint, to stop her. Justine and I both knew that she had magic and now Lombardi did too. Maybe, after all, it was this Tom who had given her the special visibility, the new glow of self-assurance that Lombardi responded to?
While I was mulling over how delicately I could break this significant, unwelcome, and sure-to-be-upsetting development to April and Jordan, Mike Aaron called on the house phone.
“Frankie, it’s another magnificent day.”
“Oh, be my guest, just take the girls again,” I sputtered. “I don’t care if it’s good weather or bad, they’re yours, all except Tinker, she has to work.” Did it matter how many unnecessary pictures he took?
“No, that’s not why I called. I’ve been feeling terrible about that lie I told the other night.”
“Huh?”
“Telling everybody that we’d been at the Louvre. It eats away at me. And then you rubbed it in that none of them had gone. Don’t you see that we’ve put ourselves into a position of cultural superiority that we don’t deserve, and I feel that’s distinctly immoral.”
“I’m sure nobody remembers or gives a damn.” What was wrong with him?
“No, they remember—I can see them thinking that Mike and Frankie went to the Louvre and we didn’t, we missed out on it—it’s something you’d have to be a photographer to notice, but it’s there in their eyes all right. A sort of sadness, a kind of deprivation.”
“That could become a real problem,” I said seriously, feeling my heart beginning to wake up and take notice.
“So what I thought is, you and I could sneak off to the Louvre today but we won’t tell anybody, never mention it. That way we’ll make reparations, even if we’re the only ones who know it.”
“Hmmm.”
“Don’t you agree that it’s the only right thing to do?”
“I’m really not sure, morally speaking,” I said thoughtfully. “You still told a lie, and this could be considered just another lie, coming on top of the first, a cover-up, compounding the first one. Maybe you should check with your rabbi.” No way you get away with this so easily, Aaron, I thought.
“Jesus!”
“Why not? If you can reach Him.”
“Frankie, will you please go to the Louvre with me today?”
“I’d enjoy that,” I made myself say sedately. “But why didn’t you just ask in the first place?”
“It made it seem like a date thing.”
“Well, is it or isn’t it?” I wanted to get this absolutely straight before I let myself get too excited.
“Well … yeah, it is. But date things—I haven’t done them in years. That’s kid stuff.”
“Not where I come from. Your problem is you moved to the city. You’re too far from your roots. Manhattan has crazy rules … in Brooklyn we still do date things, all the time.”
“Could we possibly discuss this in person? I like hearing you tell me what’s wrong with me, but it’s more fun to watch you while you do it. This conversation is degenerating into what my mother calls ‘hanging on the phone.’ ”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour.”
“Can’t you make it sooner? Your phone’s been busy or I’d have asked earlier.”
“Date things never take less than an hour prep time,” I said severely, dancing wildly around the phone cord.
“I guess, if you say so.”
“See you later.”
I hung up and rushed into the dressing room. I’d already had my bath and I’d been brushing out and admiring my new hair when Lombardi called. After several cautious attempts I’d finally dared to use enough henna to turn into a dark redhead. It was, I had to admit, rather becoming. Hell, it was magnificent.
Donna, I implored silently, help me out here, I’ve never been a redhead before. I need your great brain, Donna, my own has turned to electrified marshmallow. I made my way through the row of hangers, trying to think redhead thoughts.
Green … obviously there were a variety of greens, the natural choice, but was I going to make my debut as a redhead wearing green like the majority of other redheads on earth? No, for my coming out I intended to make a major redhead statement, and not in any of the subtle browns, blacks or ivories, some of which I’d already worn. Justine had been wildly generous but when I’d eliminated all the obvious colors, all that was left was a tunic with matching trousers. The tunic had a generously cut turtleneck and a wide belt, and both pieces were made in a stretch wool in a fascinating color that wasn’t quite plum or precisely grape—more like an eggplant, a rich, luscious eggplant, a moody purple with a lot of black in it.
I held the tunic up to my face and even on the hanger I could tell that I’d found my answer. The eggplant made my hair come more burningly alive, in some way only an artist could understand. I was fast approaching a potential Paul Mitchell approval rating, I thought as I did my makeup with hands that stayed blessedly steady even though my mind was zigzagging with a thousand considerations. A date! And he’d figured out an absurd excuse to set it up, which made it so much more meaningful than if he’d just said, “Come on, we might as well go to the Louvre, I’ve got nothing better to do,” which would have been perfectly natural and in his style.
Fact. Mike Aaron, after almost a week of seeing me daily, wanted to get me off alone, without the others knowing. Was there any other way to view this development except as a sign of some degree, however small, of … interest, no matter how mild?
As I zipped up my wonderful eggplant pieces, I thought that if there was ever a day to begin to lead a redhead’s life, it was today. Big silver hoops for my ears, to match my belt buckle, and wide silver bracelets. The black coat over my arm, my black boots—I looked at myself in the mirror and shook my head in amazement. Why had I spent so many years dressing for a dance student role that was no longer mine, when I could have looked like a woman out to do damage of a very mature nature?
“Frankie, this is just a date,” I said to the mirror, sternly. “Only a date. Nothing to get in a tizzy about. People have dates all the time. They don’t mean anything special. Just a way to get through the day.” The sound of my voice only made me feel more nervous. I don’t normally talk to myself out loud.
I walked into the lobby feeling so self-conscious that I had to fight the need to put on my sunglasses, but I felt dramatic enough without going over the top. Mike was standing there with his back to the elevators, looking massively impatient. I stopped for a minute before he saw me, just taking him in from head to toe. It wasn’t just his height or the field of energy he walked around in that made him stand out in that lobby. It was also the details; the fine, unkempt shape of his head, the arrogance of his big, handsome nose, the confident line of his lips, the muscles in his strong neck. And there was not one single camera hung around his neck! Oh, help me, Lord!
“Am I late?” I asked, slipping around into his field of vision.
“No, half an hour early.”
“Then why are you looking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Impatient.”
“I didn’t know I was. Oh, shit! Hi, Jordan. Hi, April.”
“Frankie! What did you do to your hair?” April asked, gasping.
“My God, it’s—too beautiful! And where’d you find that marvelous thing you have on?” Jordan demanded.
“Sorry, girls, Frankie doesn’t have time to gab. Hurry up, Frankie, the guys in the darkroom won’t wait forever.”
“What darkroom?” April demanded curiously.
“The Zing darkroom. Maxi Amberville sent me a fax—she wants Frankie to look at the contacts and let her know what she thinks.” He grabbed me by the arm.
“Can we come too?” Jordan suggested with lively interest.
“Maxi’d eat me alive if I let models see contacts. You ought t
o know that. See you later, girls.”
“Why don’t we all meet for lunch somewhere fun?” April said. “I’ll let Maude know, she can join us.”
“Impossible,” Mike said firmly. “Frankie and I have to go scout locations in the Paris sewers. No lunch for us today. Go shopping, you two, take the day off. I’ve worked you hard enough.”
“Sewers?” I heard April wondering, as we escaped toward the lobby door and into a taxi.
“What lies you’ll tell not to tell a lie about a lie you’ve told,” I marveled.
“I can’t believe my imaginative capacities. Do you think they guessed?”
“They’ll never find out,” I said, comfortingly. “I almost believed you myself.”
“But there is a famous sewer system and people really visit it.”
“We should swing by the sewers after the Louvre,” I suggested, “if that’s going to trouble you.”
“Maybe another time. It’s dark down there, alligators all over the place most likely, like in New York. And sewers don’t count, they don’t give you the aesthetic stature of going to the Louvre.”
“But they do show that you have a genuine interest in history, Mike. And archaeology And sanitation. What is civilization without sanitation? That makes three more areas of superiority we’ll appear to have. The girls will develop heavy-duty inferiority complexes—you should never have mentioned sewers. Did you see the look on Jordan’s face? She was really impressed.”
“I’m going to have to teach you not to laugh at me.”
“You and who else?”
I guess I must have given him a smile loaded with redhead power because the next thing I knew Mike was kissing me in a way that shut me up as effectively as if I’d fainted. I may have actually fainted, because the next thing I clearly remember was the cab stopping. Could we have been kissing all the way to the Louvre? Considering my condition, the fact that I was more or less paralyzed, gasping for breath, yet more alive than I’d ever been in my life, there was every reason to believe that was what might have happened. One thing was certain, I hadn’t played hard to get.
Spring Collection Page 24