Читать книгу A Stolen Summer - Allegra Huston, Allegra Huston - Страница 9

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The club has no sign. It’s on the Upper East Side, a quiet part of Manhattan. The streets feature well-groomed older women walking very well-groomed small dogs, and occasional uniformed nannies pushing strollers built like mountain bikes. It is the middle of the day, so there are no visible men.

Two chic, beautiful girls sit behind an ornate desk.

“I’m meeting Micajah Burnett.”

“Ms. Armanton?”

“Yes.” It feels transgressive, admitting to her maiden name.

“He’s waiting for you in the library.”

The second girl presses a button. Eve hears a discreet buzz. A doorman opens an inner door. Eve has never been in a place like this: oozing comfort, patinated with money, every surface polished or faux-painted or plushly cushioned.

She spots Micajah in a corner, beneath the oak paneling, the glow of a lamp reflecting off his dark hair. He’s sitting in an armchair. A backgammon board lies open on a low table. He rises when he sees her.

“You came.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I figured maybe you said yes just to get me off the phone. You’re too polite to hang up on me.”

“And too polite not to turn up when I said I would, I guess.”

Her smile moves quickly beyond politeness, as if Micajah has lassoed it and pulled it close to him.

“What is this place? It’s quite something.”

“A club. Favored by older British rock stars, South American drug lords with surgically altered faces, and Russian oligarchs.”

“And you?”

“On special occasions.”

His clothes are scruffy in the way of movie stars caught by paparazzi in the park: jeans, T-shirt, creased cotton jacket. Flip-flops, as on the day they first met. Smooth, square toenails.

“Two sisters,” he says, following her eyeline. “You get used to getting pedicures.”

She can’t tell if he’s joking or not. To cover, she focuses on the backgammon board, the pieces set up ready to play on their eight sharp points. It is made of chocolate-colored leather, with points of alternating cream and ocher outlined in gold tooling. The pieces are discs of agate and white marble. It is a board for emperors and plutocrats. She runs her finger along a seam where two colors of leather meet, inset-sewn rather than appliquéd so that there is no obstruction to the pieces sliding across them.

“Dad told me you’re pretty good.”

“I was,” she says. “I haven’t played since my brother died.”

“That must have been tough for you. My dad . . .” He shrugs. We’re different from him, the silence says. No need to say more.

“I ordered tea,” he says, sitting down.

“Tea’s perfect.” People who have assignations do not drink tea. It is possible, and acceptable, to drink tea with the offspring of one’s friends.

He gives her a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. “This is the luthier I know,” he says. “The man who’d be able to fix your instrument. His name is Yann Logue. He’s eccentric. Don’t be put off by his manner, he’s not trying to be rude. It’s not personal.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to call him,” Eve says.

“The best way would be if we just took it to him,” says Micajah. “But you’ve got his number, in case you never want to see me again.”

She stashes it in her handbag, after a glance to make sure she can read his writing. It’s almost calligraphic, each letter formed with care. She wonders if he always writes like that.

“Sorry if I offended you the other day,” he says as he pours from a teapot perched on a side table. “Maybe you love roses.”

“I like climbing roses. But lots of people want formal rose gardens.”

“Status symbol?”

“I suppose. Or just lack of imagination.” She takes a sip of tea. “Did you know there’s a rose called Richard M. Nixon?”

“With the M?”

“Yes.”

“That’s actually revolting.”

He reaches behind his chair and brings out a bunch of spectacular, full-blown peonies, a wet paper towel wrapped around their stems.

“I don’t know if they’ll last long enough for you to get them home.”

“They’re far more beautiful than roses.”

A young man— Waiter? Bellboy? Concierge-in-training?—materializes with a vase half full of water. He places it on the side table and departs.

“Did you arrange that?” she asks Micajah.

“They’re good here. They think of everything.”

“You did.” He escapes the accusation rather than denying it, by picking up his dice cup and raising it toward her as if he’s making a toast.

“Shall we play?”

“Sure.” She picks up her own cup. He tips one die into his palm and rolls the other. A six. She does the same. A six also. She feels a twinge of embarrassment, as if she’s done it intentionally to flirt with him.

“Game on,” he says, turning the doubling cube to two.

The game comes back to her. She finds herself able to move her pieces without counting, to know instinctively when to risk getting hit and when to close ranks and protect. It’s a relief not to have to talk. She lets the rhythm of the game take her, the ebb and flow of the energy across the board, his hand reaching toward her when he moves his pieces and withdrawing as he collects his dice, her hand reaching toward him when it’s her turn. She finds herself staring at his long fingers as they slide the marble discs into place.

“Double you.”

He pushes the cube toward her. She looks into his eyes, green flecked with gold. She does not need to look at the board to know that she will say yes. After all, there’s nothing at stake.

She takes the cube with her left hand, and notices the glint of her wedding ring.

They play for nearly two hours. The board belongs to the hotel, he tells her; it’s why he invited her here. She asks about his band, and he tells her that their name is Blisskrieg, though they may change it to Metropolis because the label thinks Blisskrieg looks weird in print. They’ve been together for nine years, he says. It’s been a long road to what’s shaping up to be their overnight success. She’s pleased she can see, even in this softly lit room, the beginnings of lines around his eyes.

“What instrument do you play?” she asks.

“Lots of them. Fiddle mostly, and cello. Whatever gives the track an edge. Accordion sometimes. I just started learning theremin.”

“What’s a theremin? I’ve never heard of it.”

“A man named Léon Theremin invented it. It sounds like a zombie opera singer and it looks like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. You play it without touching it. It picks up the electrical energy from your hands.”

“So it’s like you’re playing the air?”

“Exactly!” He’s excited that she’s understood so quickly. She is too.

“I’d love to see that,” she says.

“I’ll show you,” he says. “Next time.”

So there will be a next time. It’s agreed.

She wins an eight-point game and he gives her a high-five. It feels like a stopping place. By tacit agreement, they don’t reset the pieces. He checks the time on his phone.

“Teatime’s over,” he says. “It’s cocktail hour.”

“I should be getting home,” she says. Though Larry is not due back from his business trip until tomorrow, and the cat can look after itself.

“Just one?”

He stands, and holds out his hand to her.

“Not here?”

“Kind of,” he says. “And kind of not.”

Again, that feeling of the horse under her—not bucking, but picking up speed. Yes, she should be going home, back to the safety of her home and the sanctity of her marriage vows. But there are reins this time; she can control it.

“All right,” she says. “One.”

He grabs a backpack from the floor and, after checking that nobody is watching, leads her to an unobtrusive door for staff only, ushering her through into a tiny space with another door blocking the way. He digs in a pocket, fishes out an ID card on a lanyard, and slides it through the reader.

“You work here?” Eve asks, happy that this extravagant venue now makes some kind of sense.

“Art deliveries,” he explains in a low voice, almost a whisper. “People actually live here. The kind of people who don’t want visitors to come inside their apartment, and don’t want to go outside. Too famous. Too wanted, in every sense of the word. They buy art, of course. Very expensive, large art, which somebody has to deliver. Which would be me.”

“So we’re sneaking in?”

Eve is the kind of person whose heart races when she sees a cop car, even if she isn’t speeding.

“Does it bother you?”

The thought of getting caught does, but she left caution behind when she left her house hours ago, and adrenaline is fueling her now. She feels like a kid sneaking into her parents’ bedroom when they’re out for the evening. She will discover something forbidden. She will learn secrets.

Micajah conducts her quickly through the service passageways to an elevator, and presses the button for the highest floor. Once the doors close, he speaks in a normal voice. “This”— he gestures with the ID card, —“is because I got a temp pass one time. Complicated installation piece, lots of in and out. The night shift was on duty when I left and they forgot to ask for it back. So later, I took it to this guy I know.”

“What kind of guy?”

“The kind of guy who can turn a day card into an all-access platinum wonderpass.” He grins at her. “The advantages of the frontier lifestyle. Brooklyn. Not the fancy part.”

When they emerge, he leads her down a scruffy corridor to a door marked Fire Exit. He pushes a horizontal bar to open it. Concrete stairs lead up to another door at the top.

“Close your eyes.”

Eve hears the click of the bar being pressed, and the squeak of hinges. She feels a faint breeze on her face. Micajah takes her hand lightly.

“Watch the step.”

Eve feels with her foot: it’s just a high lintel. She steps across it.

“Keep them closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

Micajah lets go of her hand. Behind her the door creaks closed. She hears the long rasp of a zipper, things being pulled from the backpack.

“You can open them now.”

They are on a wide expanse of roof, punctuated by little towers that enclose the various vents and chimneys of the building. The rooftop itself is paved with terracotta tiles. It’s the tallest building in the vicinity; all around them, the sky is a haze of pink.

Micajah squats next to a spread-out blanket. On it are a couple of miniature alcohol bottles, two conical glasses, and a rather battered cocktail shaker.

“I hope you like martinis.”

“I haven’t had a martini in years.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Eve regrets them. The decade since she’s drunk a martini makes her feel old. Even worse is the thought that martinis are what older people drink, and that must be why he is making her one.

“Retro chic,” he says. “Actually, it’s just because I’m showing off. I won an award for my martini when I was bartending in Berlin a while back. I brought a bottle of white wine too, if you’d like that better.”

“I’ll stick with the martini,” she says. “It goes with the sunset.”

“Lemon or olive?” he asks, holding up two Ziplock bags.

“Both.”

“Live wild,” he says, bending over the drinks. His shirt has come untucked and Eve longs to tuck it back in, to feel the knobs of his spine, the vertical ridges of muscle flanking it.

He hands her a glass. She takes a small sip. Alcohol will only dull her senses, which are on fire.

He leads her to the crenellated parapet that rings the roof. She knows the architectural style: Strawberry Hill Gothic, which was used in New York only occasionally, about a century after it was popular in England. She’s been studying classic English gardens for a project at the Trenton Country Club. Her mind races to those houses: Strawberry Hill, Cholmondeley Castle. Small square windowpanes. Banks of lavender. Ranunculus. Agapanthus. She distracts herself with the complicated words, steady things to hold on to.

“Blows your mind, if you let it.”

His voice brings her back. She’s never considered wonder to be her choice before. Okay, she thinks: I’ll let it. Right here, right now, I am on a rooftop with a crazily handsome young man who is holding my hand and showing me the view of Central Park as if he is Arthur and this is his kingdom.

Eve stares out at the expanse, a thousand colors of saturated green after a rainy spring. The sprawl of the Metropolitan Museum. The vast amounts of time and effort and imagination and ingenuity that created this city. The largesse that placed an enormous public park at its heart.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.

He sets his glass down on the parapet. It is a sign which, despite the decades since a man has flirted with her, she can read perfectly.

This is the time to run away, she thinks, to call it a mistake, to race back to home and safety. If I don’t, home will never feel safe again.

Then that’s the way it will be, she decides. Recklessness is giving her a rush more thrilling than anything she’s ever felt. And there’s a certainty about it, a total lack of fear. The horse is galloping, and she cannot fall off.

She sets her own glass down on the next crenellation over. Those glasses had better not fall, she thinks. They could kill someone.

Micajah’s mouth meets hers. His lips are soft and strong, pressing hers open then pulling away, an invitation to her mouth to push back against his. Instead, she draws back.

“You’re young enough to be my son,” she says.

“So?”

He covers her mouth again, his tongue reaching just the tip of hers, caressing her and then withdrawing, seeming to pull her tongue back along with his. She thinks: I am inside him. She has never thought that before, kissing a man. It feels delicious to follow him so closely. Her instincts flow with an ease she never knew was in her. The lead and the follow of their kissing is seamless. She feels their breath merge, the air flowing between them warmed by their bodies. He is breathing me in, she thinks. I am breathing him in. His DNA is in my veins.

His thumbs stroke her wide cheekbones, his fingers tangle in her hair, finding the edges of her ears, the tender spot where jaw meets neck, the soft indentation underneath her chin. Suddenly his lips leave hers and she feels them on the plate of bone in the center of her forehead, pressing it smooth, then tracing down the ridge of her nose, her upper lip, and dropping a chain of kisses around her mouth. She imagines a circlet of pearls that his kisses have left on her face.

She has never felt anything like this before. His lips, his tongue, his fingers, are caressing the fibers of her mind.

The stone is warm against her back, through the thin cotton of her shirt. She leans against it, freeing more of her energy to kiss him, to concentrate on the sensations of him kissing her.

What am I doing? she thinks. I am kissing this boy, this man, and soon I will be . . . fucking him? She’s only ever used that word to swear with—and even then, not very often. She and Larry didn’t fuck: nothing so gleeful and direct. They “had sex”—though not recently, not for years. When they were first married, less impersonally, they “made love”—though Eve had always felt rather uncomfortable with that phrase too. Did they really make anything together? They made a child, of course, but it was a long time between the making and the evidence of it. On that night, and every other night, Larry would climax and roll away, averting his eyes. Nothing remained that was made.

So, then, she thinks, slashing thoughts of Larry adrift, we will fuck. Maybe. It sounds good. She thinks, This should not be happening. This is not my world. But it is: his tongue is running down the cords of her neck, digging into the hollows of her collarbones. His hands are moving up under her shirt, searching for bare skin.

She trails her hand down his ribcage and back behind her, to push away from the wall and press up into him. She feels an edge, a corner—above it, empty space. The gap between the crenellations. A three-foot-wide shelf of stone.

She edges to the left, settles herself against the edge of the parapet, half sitting, and raises one knee, resting her foot against the wall. Her bent leg presses on the outside of his thigh. She puts her hands on his hips, feels the bones beneath the denim, and pulls him toward her. He stops.

Her heart flips. I don’t know what I’m doing, she thinks. I’ve gone too far.

He draws back just far enough that she can focus on his face, see its oval shape, the tousled dark hair, those beautiful lips, dark brows shadowing green eyes like mossy pools lit by rays of sun. His eyes search hers. Here I go, she thinks, and feels herself slipping in.

He picks her up and sets her on the wall. “Eve,” he says.

Her name sounds different in his voice, firm and definite. That is who I am, she thinks. Eve. The Eve who is here, hearing her name. From the mouth of this man who is about to fuck me. Under the sun and the wide sky, on a roof overlooking New York City.

She lets her sandals drop and curls the arches of her feet over the muscles of his calves.

His hands are under her skirt now, fingers tracing the lace edges of her underwear across the ridges of the tendons, then further down, further in. His thumbs press on her: a question. The energy inside her body jumps toward him.

“Yes,” she says.

The lowering sun is warm on her face, glinting on the top of his dark head. She presses her hands against the parapet to lift her weight as he draws her underwear down, and gives quick silent thanks to Macy’s for putting such high-end underwear on sale. She buries her gaze in the dark forest of his hair as she feels the fabric brush over her knees, across the bony points of her ankles, along the tops of her feet. Gone.

As he straightens up, he grins mischievously. The feeling of her own smile makes her think of running on the beach with Allan when he was four, chasing the waves.

“You are beautiful,” he says.

“So are you.”

“I’m young,” he says, dismissing it. “That’s all.”

His hands are under her shirt again. He presses on the lowest rib, then the one above it, moving from the outside to the center, then away, up and out to the far edge of the next rib. She longs to lean back and lie open to his hands, to let him play music on her, but there is nothing behind her: only the gap between the crenellations, thin air, thirty stories above the ground. She hooks her hands tight on his shoulders.

“You’re safe,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

He wraps one long arm around her back, cradling her, and with the other hand strokes her inner thigh, caressing it open. She closes her eyes and feels him touching her, finding how they fit together.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let go.”

Her head is full of sparks, all conscious thought disjointed. The vertigo of the empty air behind her, though she can’t see it; the blaze of him etching a path of fire inside her, the granite hard against her tailbone, the lean muscles of his shoulders moving under her grip, his hand cupping her breast, thumb on her nipple. I’m holding on for dear life, she thinks. If I let go, he will fuck me so hard I will fall and die.

He stops moving, buried deep inside her. “Look, Eve,” he says, “look where we are.”

She knows it’s there, the sheer drop behind her, but seeing it—the treetops, the cars, the horse-drawn carriages—and feeling Micajah’s arms holding her above the precipice sends a rush of blood to her head so fierce it makes her vision swim. She looks up, to the distant skyscrapers of Midtown gleaming pink against the indigo sky. She wonders if there’s anyone behind those windows watching them—admiring them, envying them.

He starts moving again, faster, branding the blaze of pleasure deeper into her. Her whole body is concentrated in that furrow, the intensity unbearable, until she cries out and it dissolves into a new delicious heat flooding through her, out to her hips, her legs, up to her heart, her breasts, her throat, the cavities of her face. She shudders in his arms. He runs his finger up her spine.

Eventually, she opens her eyes, finds his. “What about you?”

“What about me?” he says lightly.

“But . . . are you sure?”

“But what?” he says. He smooths her eyes closed and kisses her eyelids. “Fun, right?”

What can she say? Yes, it’s fun, it’s beyond fun, it’s not fun at all. It’s crazy serious. Her body tenses up, even while the honey of orgasm flows through her.

She drops down from the parapet and slips on her sandals. He sees her eyes go to her underwear, lying on the gritty surface of the roof. He shakes it clean and holds it for her.

“I can’t do this,” she says, stepping into her underwear, allowing him to pull it up into place.

“I know,” he says.

And again she sees that look in his eyes that dissolves the space between them.