by Anne Calhoun
“Thinking about a business proposal, and working on a letter to Nan. You?”
“I ran in the rain.”
“Do you run in all weather?”
“Anything short of a blizzard or a thunderstorm,” he said. “I’ve slipped a couple of times on the ice, but never broken anything. Marathon training won’t happen if you don’t run.”
Her feet were still blocks of ice against his, the cold seeping through his socks to his skin. They’d been lovers for a couple of months now, the newness of it still shocking and visceral. He thought of himself as the man who kept her warm, who brought the blood to the surface of her skin, turning it pale pink, a darker red at her lips, cheeks, nipples, throat, sex. The image bloomed in his mind and sent blood pumping south, hardening his cock. He did nothing as gauche as grind it against her bottom, but it was impossible to miss. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile, and she said, “I’ve a million things to do.”
“A million,” Daniel said, and cupped her throat with his hand, thumb by the bolt of her jaw, tips of his fingers brushing her ear on the other side of her head.
“Perhaps half a million.”
“Slacker.”
She smiled and made a soft sound, low and deep in her throat, somewhere between a purr and a laugh. He couldn’t name it, but with his hand against her throat, he could feel it under his palm. A few months into their relationship, he was learning that the best way to explore her was through touch, as if he could draw the answers to who she was out through her skin. And it blew his mind that she’d let him palm her throat when the only difference between caressing her and choking her was pressure.
No self-protective instincts at all. “What’s left on the list?”
She shifted a little, tucking her feet into the throw’s lower edge. “Work. Call a few people. Make a connection. I may need to go to London in a few weeks.”
“See your family?”
“Talk to people at Quality Group about a potential business deal. I’ll take the train to Cornwall to see Nan while I’m there, yes.”
He made his own soft noise, indicating he’d heard her. Family wasn’t her favorite subject, and he wasn’t clear on the details of her childhood, except that for a woman who collected friends and acquaintances and people to connect, she could count her living relatives on one hand and rarely brought up friends from home.
Or former lovers.
“You have any ex-boyfriends in the UK?”
“No,” she said.
“No,” he repeated, a little surprised. “How old were you when you left?”
“Eighteen. I skipped my gap year to start at NYU. You sound surprised.”
“I am surprised.”
“You asked about boyfriends. I had one lover before I came to America.”
He mulled this over. In high school he’d had girlfriends, not lovers. It was an oddly mature word to use to describe what he thought of as a typical teenage experience.
“How many since?”
“Do you keep score, Daniel?”
“I’ve lost count,” he admitted.
“As have I.”
The colorful leaves of the oak tree dipped to the glass, smearing the water streaming off the glass ceiling before springing up. She wasn’t relaxed in his arms, but she wasn’t getting up, either. “Fine,” he said. “Your first kiss.”
“Rory Freeman, in his father’s shed.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. He lived on the next farm over from Nan’s. I was with her on and off that summer, based on Mum’s schedule. You?”
“Tiffany Lubbock, thirteen, both of us, on the way home from junior high school. I’d had a crush on her since the fourth grade. She had braces, and it was very awkward. Neither of us knew what we were doing.”
She peered over her shoulder at him. “You’re quite good at it now.”
He kissed her. “Thanks. Lots of practice. How was it?”
“I also made up for inexperience with enthusiasm,” she said. Her eyes went out of focus. “It was a toolshed. Rory and his dad fixed motorbikes for extra dosh, so it smelled of dirt and oil and petrol. His hands were rough. I remember that. He liked to hold my face while we kissed,” she said.
He drew his finger along her jaw. Tilda’s jaw was so strong, not square but distinct, with a stubborn chin, and somehow knowing a boy of twelve had been the first to feel the clean bones of her face under his hands sent a swift pang of jealousy through Daniel’s gut. “He had calluses. The contrast of rough skin and soft lips fixated me. I wanted to learn everything he could teach me.”
“At twelve he couldn’t teach you much.”
Her eyes remained unfocused. She was lost in memory, and somehow Daniel doubted he’d be thanking Rory for anything. To cover the flood of emotion inside him, he kept going. “When did you lose your virginity?”
“Virginity is a cultural construct,” she pointed out. “Given the many, many ways two people can have sex, limiting the question to the penetration of penis into vagina is a rather narrow approach. Anyway, why is it a loss? I gained knowledge, experience.”
The thought of wild, barely restrained Tilda growing in experience sent a bolt of desire tinged with a now gut-deep jealousy through him. “It’s just a figure of speech,” he said mildly.
“An interesting one. I didn’t lose anything.”
“Fine. When was the first time you had sex?”
“Proper sex? It was a step up from a toolshed. A very posh hotel room, actually. Smelled of expensive linen detergent and a stupidly big floral arrangement.”
“Rory sprang for a hotel room?”
She turned her face away to stare out the window. The rain was too steady to be showers but too light to be a storm, and he once again pondered the possibility that Tilda made the weather. Today she was quiet, still, reflective, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that water would coalesce into clouds, then shed their excess weight to let the entire city know Tilda Davies’s frame of mind. The curve of her jaw needed to be kissed, so he kissed it, then slid his hand to span the soft space between her hipbones. “Not Rory. Another student,” she said lightly. “Very careful with me. He didn’t rush, didn’t push. I set the pace.”
“Not a typical teenage boy,” he said.
The corner of her mouth he could see lifted. “No,” she said.
“Are you still in touch with him?”
“No. Are you still in touch with your first lover?”
That word again. Lover. Maybe everything was more sophisticated in Tilda’s world, public schools and high-class stationery. Her eyes were the color of the sky beyond the trees, dark, cloudy, opaque.
“Most people as intently curious as you can’t keep their mouths shut. But you never tell anyone’s stories.”
“I respect that people have desires, and that they want to keep some of them private.”
“Which would you miss more? Making connections or collecting stories?”
“They’re the same,” she said. “Stop changing the subject. Are you still in touch with your first lover?”
“No. Mindy Carlyle,” he said. “Prom night. I was a sophomore, she was a senior. She knew exactly how she wanted it to happen, so there was a mix CD for background music and a bottle of champagne I had to bribe my cousin to buy for me.”
“And how was it for you?” she said, clearly amused.
He shrugged. “She knew what she wanted. I respect that.”
“Sounds a bit artificial.”
He stroked her hair back from her temple, watched the play of black silk stream through his fingers. “Self-conscious,” he said. “Wasn’t it for you?”
“I had my first orgasm when I was eight,” she said. “Sex didn’t seem mysterious to me.”
He felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Eight?”
“Horseback riding,” she said in explanation.
“You were eight.”
She hummed, her gaze avid, bright, probing, testing. “When did you first experience orgasm?”
“I was probably ten or eleven when I had my first wet dream. A little older when I managed it myself.”
“As was I. Are you judging me, Daniel?”
“Just surprised,” he said. “I haven’t had this conversation with a lot of women, but none of them were sexually aware that early.”
“It’s entirely possible they were lying to you,” she said. “Americans are barely comfortable with a grown woman owning her sexuality, let alone the thought of her being aware of it as a child. First love. Mindy Carlyle?”
She was relentless. Suddenly shy, he ducked his head and kissed her shoulder. “No. Not Mindy.”
“You knew you didn’t love her then, or you know now that you didn’t?”
“I knew then,” he said.
“How?” she repeated.
“You just know,” he said. “What about you? First love? Rory with the motorcycle? The guy with the dish for the hotel room?”
“Dosh,” she corrected. “No. Neither.”
“Someone else, then.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love,” she said, looking right at him. “Something to look forward to. God knows I don’t have many firsts left.”
His heart began to pound against his sternum. To hide his expression he nuzzled against her ear, breathing heat and humidity into the soft fall of hair. She made a soft sound, then turned her face away from the rain and kissed him, an openmouthed brush of lips interspersed with flicks of tongue. She turned onto her side on the narrow chaise, the cashmere throw crumpled between their bodies as she tucked her leg over his. He worked his lower arm under her shoulder and draped his upper arm over her hip and pulled her as close as he could get her. The throw tangled between their legs until Daniel impatiently tugged it from between their bodies.
Tilda gasped when he rolled her to her back, and he had to put out a hand to stop them from tumbling to the floor. Her hands fumbled with his belt and zipper. When he regained his balance he took off her sweater. Her hair sparked and crackled in the gray light, and stayed in an eerie halo around her head even as he tried to work her jeans lower on her hips.
“Not here,” she said. “It’s silk. I’ll never get the stain out.”
He slid to his knees on the floor in front of her, gripped her jeans, and pulled them off. “Fuck,” he said. “My wallet’s in my jacket pocket.”
Naked except for her bra, she crawled to her desk and pulled open the top drawer, tore a packet off a strip, and handed it to him, then wrapped the throw around her shoulders as he sheathed himself. “Off,” she demanded, pulling at his shirt hem.
Sweat made the cotton cling to his back as he yanked it off, but the moment he did Tilda straddled his thighs and gripped his cock. He steadied her with both hands on her hips, looking down between their bodies for that indescribable moment of lush, hot pressure, groaning as what he saw and felt blended in his mind.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, enfolding them both in the throw, and started to roll her hips into his. Even with miles of leg, she couldn’t get her knees on the floor for the leverage she needed so she clamped them to his hips. He thought of horseback riding and orgasms and groaned again. She gave a little laugh, as if she knew what he was thinking, and he opened his eyes, because he had to kiss her and the last thing he wanted to do was head butt her while blindly trying to find her mouth.
But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking over his shoulder. He turned to see a pale reflection of them in the glass. His back, bared to his backside, the throw’s fringe clinging to his skin, Tilda straddling him. She looked like a fierce anime character, big eyes, pointy chin, jagged edges of hair, a red mouth that pressed to his as he watched. She was staring at him, unblinking, unflinching, eyes as dark as they were that night on the ledge. His head dropped back and he groaned, felt the sound start between his hipbones and rumble through his chest, into the air. She laughed like a witch or a wild woman and kept up her pace. He had to be hurting her, as tightly as he gripped her, thrusting up into her body in short, sharp jerks, thinking of nothing, nothing at all in a desperate effort to stave off the inevitable, until her head dropped back and she cried out. The pulsing contractions around his cock set him off. He held her hard against him and ground up into her body, tremors ripping through him.
The aftershocks left him light-headed and curled around her. “You’re going to kill me one of these days,” he said.
Her smile curved against the spot where his neck and shoulder met. “I hope not,” she said.
She didn’t so much get up as tumble backward onto the Turkish rug. He got to his feet and hitched his jeans up enough to let him walk to the bathroom, where he flushed the condom. When he got back to her office, she was dressed and running her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame the curls. He braced his shoulder against the doorframe and folded his arms. “I expected you to be back on the chaise.”
“I thought we might see a film.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “Really,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. “I thought you didn’t want to go out in the rain.”
“I’m energized now,” she said, focused on her phone. “The theater in Union Square is showing a Clint Eastwood retrospective. Hereafter starts in twenty minutes. If we dash we can get there in time.”
She’d never suggested a date. She texted him to let him know she would welcome a late-night visitor, and he did the same, keeping things far more casual than he would prefer. “Sure,” he said.
“Do you have plans?”
“No,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
She darted into her bedroom to snatch a pair of Wellingtons from her closet, then hurried down the stairs. He followed, shrugging into his blazer while she stomped into the boots, belted her trench coat around her waist, and plucked an umbrella from the stand. He took her hand at the top of the stairs to the sidewalk and they jog-walked through the rain to the theater.
“Popcorn? Junior Mints?” he asked. She shook her head, and they walked into the nearly empty theater as the lights dimmed. She kept her jacket on, and hooked the umbrella over the seat in front of her, and watched the movie, a tale of the ultimate severed connection, with a near-feral intensity.
When it was over, he took a chance. “Dinner?”
“Sure,” she said.
He took her to his favorite Ethiopian place, and since she was feeling chatty, probed a little while she studied the menu. “You have art on the walls, but no pictures. None of you, your friends, vacation snapshots, selfies in unusual places, your family, nothing,” he said. Earlier in the afternoon he’d taken the time to look at the art on his way up the stairs. Normally he was too focused on getting Tilda naked and in bed to do anything as contemplative as look at pictures.
“They got lost in one of my moves,” she said, flipping from the appetizers to the vegetarian dishes. “The originals are in Cornwall with my grandmother, and between school and work, I never got around to replacing them. Fancy a starter?”
“Depends on what a starter is.”
“An appetizer.”
“The sambossas are good here,” he said.
“That and doro wat sounds delicious,” she said, and closed the menu. The waiter took their orders and left a bottle of wine.
“You mentioned a business proposal,” he said, his voice lifting just a little to indicate that it was a question.
“Yes, I met someone at the same party where I saw you for the second time. He’s in charge of North American acquisitions for a luxury goods global conglomerate. I haven’t called him yet, but if things go well, there’s a good possibility that I would take West Village Stationery to the next l
evel.”
“I still don’t fully understand why stationery,” he said as he poured her a glass.
With one elbow resting on the table, she played with the stem of her wineglass and smiled rather wryly at him. “Two reasons, I suppose. Do you know how really good paper is made?”
“No,” he said, and prepared to sit back and enjoy every second of learning.
“It’s a rather vigorous process by which the fibers are separated from the junk, beaten into pulp—that’s where the expression came from, by the way—screened through mesh to eliminate still more unwanted materials that affect the paper’s quality, then pressed and dried. Making one sheet of paper requires three gallons of water, more as the quality increases. The finest paper in the world has been through a purifying crucible. I admire that, and respect the result.”
He blinked. Her face, her tone, were far too intense to reflect casual interest, but then again, in his experience people with obsessions were intense about them. “And the second reason?”
This time the smile softened. A better memory. “It began in childhood, as these things so often do. I went to boarding school when I was eight, and was terribly homesick for the first year. The housemistress suggested I write a little bit of a letter each day, to Nan, my grandmother. I did, and it helped. Eventually.” She smiled at him. “Now it’s a habit I can’t break. Cheers,” she said, and tapped her glass to his.
“You don’t email her?”
“Nan never made the leap into the digital generation, and I like writing. It feels more real to me,” she said, then glanced at him. Like she’d admitted something she shouldn’t have. “I suppose that’s why I make the connections. I know chemistry when I see it. Computers can match people based on interests or activities or hobbies, but I match people based on something far harder to quantify. It’s the human elements, like stationery. You just can’t replace the human touch.”
“So if I want to make something real to you, I should write it down?”