Читать книгу The Wicked City - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 21

I MENTION ALL this because I don’t want you to misunderstand when I describe how, upon waking later that morning, I find myself enjoined in a lovers’ knot of baroque configuration: pinned to the sheets by Billy Marshall’s heavy right thigh across the two of mine, my mouth encompassed by his shoulder, our limbs snarled together. His damp lips dangle along my ear, and his hair shadows my eyes in a kind of brilliantine curtain. The tempo of his respiration suggests utmost satisfaction. (As well it should.) The tempo of mine suggests—well, otherwise.

I heave Billy’s body aside and sit straight up, gasping for air, gasping for freedom. The air’s dark but not black, and the illumination behind the thin calico curtain warns of a snow-streaked dawn. Next to my hip, Billy continues in exquisite slumber, embracing my shingle of a pillow. The familiar dimensions settle around me: walls, window, chair, washstand, bureau. Not much space between them. I reach for my kimono from the hook on the wall and slither over Billy’s corpse to stand on the cold floor. It’s bare. I have a horror of dirt.

We did not take long to express our physical longing, Billy and I, in the pit of a New York winter’s night. Short and brisk and effective. My nerves still course from the aftermath, and when I peer at my watch, laid out on the bureau in a perfect vertical line next to Billy’s silk top hat, I discover there’s a good reason for that: I have slept only two hours. Dear Miss Atkins at Sterling Bates will expect me at my typewriter at nine o’clock, mind sharp and fingers swift. I cast another gaze at Billy. White skin glowing in the gray sunrise. Mouth parted and smiling at the corner.

I wrap myself in the kimono and lift the extra blanket from the foot of the bed. If I’m lucky, I’ll wake again before Billy does, so he doesn’t catch me in the old paisley armchair, all by myself.