Читать книгу The Dare Collection October 2018 - Nicola Marsh - Страница 19

EVERYTHING WAS FINE.

More than fine, as a matter of fact. Thor was not in the habit of having emotional responses to his sexual exploits, because there was no place for such absurdities in the face of a mere physical release, and he was determined that this should be no different.

Because it was no different, he told himself sternly.

The only thing that made his night with Margot unlike other nights he’d had was that she’d gotten a rare glimpse into the personal life Thor preferred to keep as private as possible—despite what everyone thought they knew about him, thanks to his successes and that damned will. It was an error he would have prevented if he’d thought it through that morning. And one he’d compounded by talking to her about things he never, ever discussed.

Never.

Thor had no idea why he’d done any of that—and he had no intention of ever repeating his mistakes.

There were some rules even he never broke.

The professor had left in a taxi Thor had ordered himself. And once she had gone, Thor took great pleasure in telling himself that he could breathe again. That the world made sense again. That the strange urges and feelings that he’d experienced during that storm were more about the storm than anything else. They weren’t about Margot, because they couldn’t have been.

Because that didn’t make any sense.

That wasn’t who Thor was.

Thor had spent the whole of his childhood watching the people in his life claim that love was the reason for all of their bad behavior. All of their weaknesses and vices. All of the cruelties they’d visited upon one another, whether by design or indifference.

Thor had no intention of falling into that trap himself. And he’d spent decades more or less immune to emotion, which was a terrific way to make certain he steered clear of it all.

This was no different, he assured himself. He was no different now than he’d ever been. It had been a long night, that was all.

He spent the next week congratulating himself on his wisdom in sending his purple-haired American on her way before he could confuse the issue further with more private thoughts he should never have shared with her.

And not only because he could see that sympathetic look on her face every time he closed his eyes.

Thor couldn’t say he particularly cared for the revelations he’d had about how his behavior matched Daniel St. George’s famously debauched approach to life in general and women in particular, but he could handle that. After all, there was an easy solution if a man no longer wished to be the kind of man-whore Daniel St. George had always been.

And Thor quickly discovered that abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh was far easier than he ever would have imagined.

He removed himself from the hotel a few days after Margot left, telling his staff that a change of scene was in order.

It was good to get back to his house in Reykjavík. To remind himself that his real life wasn’t that brooding hotel, but one stuffed full of his art, his books and all the things he’d collected over the years to show he was not and never would be his father. He had no interest in spending his life in an antiseptic warehouse the way Daniel St. George had.

Thor spent his nights in his clubs in the city, doing his usual rounds to make sure they were all running as smoothly as he liked. He made note of every detail about each place, then sent his thoughts and suggestions to his managers ahead of the monthly managers’ meetings he insisted upon.

It wasn’t until he found himself standing out on Laugavegur an hour or so before dawn one night, the bitter wind licking at him straight off the harbor, that he understood what he was doing.

He’d been so busy congratulating himself on taking a break from the hotel and his reputation that he’d somehow failed to notice that what he was really doing out here every night was looking for Margot.

And it was one thing to tell himself lies while he was tucked up in warmth and luxury. It was something else again when he was out in the thick, heavy dark of the approaching winter, just Thor and the night sky.

He found he didn’t really try.

And the not trying felt a good deal like surrender.

Worse still, it appeared that his stubborn professor was full up on her research, because she was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t in the bars or the clubs or any other of Reykjavík’s hot spots—and this was Reykjavík. There were only so many places.

If she’d been out at night, conducting her interviews, he’d have run into her already.

Thor was standing out in the cold, pretending he was clearing his head after the loud live music he’d been listening to at the last bar.

He’d been pretending a lot of things lately, it seemed.

The truth was, Thor had been alone all his life, in one way or another. He had been alone in his parents’ painful loop of unrequited love. He had been alone when he’d made his way in the world. He’d been alone when he’d built himself a tidy little empire and he’d certainly been alone throughout his adult life.

It had never occurred to him that there was another way.

And yet despite all of that, Thor had never been lonely.

Until now.

And he didn’t know what the hell to do about it.

Margot locked herself in her bright and cozy little sublet, flatly refusing to entertain the dark emotions that traipsed around inside her. Instead, she threw herself into her work.

Because everything was different now. She could feel her shift in perspective like a kind of bone-deep tremor all throughout her body. It was a physical manifestation of what she’d done and said and felt that night at Thor’s hotel and it made her hands ache. It made her legs feel weak even when she was lying down, scowling at her sloped ceiling, wishing herself asleep.

And she told herself she didn’t mind if she carried the remnants of that night—and that napkin, and everything that had come after—with her forever. She knew she would. It was as if that night was a tattoo she wore on her skin, much brighter and more vibrant than the text she’d already put there.

Margot could choose to ignore the tattooed sensation and that trembling thing that lived in her now, every time she thought about Thor. Or she could try. But she was determined that her research reflect the change she’d lived through that night.

She flipped through all the notes she’d made on all those nights out in the city’s bars and clubs. She listened to the voice recordings she’d made, imagining the faces of the people she’d met, and if she pretended that there wasn’t one particular face that she saw above all, well...that was no one’s business but hers.

She begged off from coffee dates and dinners her friendly colleagues invited her to and threw herself into her work with the kind of passion she remembered from way back in the last of her doctoral dissertation days.

That was the last time she had given herself permission to immerse herself in her research completely. She’d thrown herself into her dissertation and hunkered down with it until it was done at last. Until she couldn’t quite tell the difference between the writing, the thinking and her. Until she wasn’t sure where the words ended and she began, as a separate being.

Margot told herself it was a kind of freedom. Even a sort of bliss.

And she ignored the part of her that whispered that really what she was doing was hiding.

She restructured her arguments. She developed new theories.

“I still don’t understand why you picked such a dramatically remote place to spend your sabbatical,” her father told her with his usual condescension when she took a break from it all on Sunday evening to call her parents like the dutiful daughter she’d always been. “But I suppose Iceland is all the rage these days. As are treatises on sexuality, one supposes.”

Margot burned with her usual shame and fury at that.

And normally she would have fallen all over herself to explain what she was doing. To try to make herself palatable to the one person alive who had never approved of a single thing she’d ever done—

But there was that tremor inside her. There was that ache in her fingers. There was the memory of the bluest eyes she’d ever seen and the approval in them that had made them seem lit on fire.

She wasn’t the same person she’d been before she’d gone to Thor’s hotel.

Maybe that was why she laughed instead of launching into the usual host of hurried explanations her father never paid much attention to anyway.

“I’m a tenured professor, not a teenager trying to be dramatic, Dad,” she said, the same way she’d have laughed at a pompous student in one of her classes. “If the research I wanted to do could have been done in Des Moines, I would have gone there. I’m not in Iceland because it’s trendy. I’m here because it’s critical to my work.”

Her father sputtered, and Margot braced herself for the flare of his temper—but instead, he handed the phone over to her mother quicker than he usually did.

Margot stood across the dark autumn arch of the planet, staring out her little window into the quickly coming night, and wondered why it had taken her so long to stand on her own two feet.

“What on earth did you say to your father?” her mother asked, muffling the receiver as if she was whispering. She likely was. Margot could see her as easily as if she was in the same house. Her mother was walking through the house from her father’s study, back to the kitchen table, where she liked to spend her time. She read the paper there, listened to the radio and watched the kind of television that made Margot’s father curl his lip in disgust.

Margot had always curled her lip in the exact same way at those shows, just to prove once again that she was nothing like her mother; that she was smart and intellectually curious and was worried about weighty matters, not the latest royal wedding or Hollywood scandal or silly movie-of-the-week.

“I think Dad forgets that he’s not the only academic in the family,” she told her mother, squeezing her eyes shut as if that could keep her from having to look at herself too closely.

Her mother let out a sound that could have been a sigh. Or a laugh.

“Your father forgets he’s not the only academic alive,” she replied after a moment. “It’s part of his charm, really. But, Margot, you should know that no matter how he gets—and you know how he can get sometimes—he’s so proud of all you’ve accomplished. We both are.”

There was no reason Margot should have found herself blinking back tears at that. At another example of kindness from a person who she hadn’t always treated well, so busy had she been trying to earn Ronald Cavendish’s next distracted smile.

“I couldn’t have done anything without you, Mom,” she heard herself say, and it actually hurt as it came out.

Because it was true, and she hadn’t understood that before. It was true, but Margot had been careening around all these years feeling superior to her own mother and the simple, steadfast love she’d always offered no matter the lip-curling or superiority complexes around her. Margot had always been so sure that kind of solidity and certainty was beneath her.

Maybe you’ve been emulating the wrong parent all this time, something inside her suggested. Harshly.

“I love you, too, honey,” her mother was replying, sounding surprised—which also hurt. “Are you all right?”

If that wasn’t an indictment, Margot didn’t know what was.

“I’m perfectly fine,” she told her mother.

And God, how she wanted that to be true, even if she wasn’t sure she knew herself any longer. Maybe the truth was that she was finally figuring out the truth of who she should have been all this time.

No matter how much it hurt.

All in all, it was a full ten days later when she emerged, feeling shaky and strange, blinking her way into the bright, white light of a shockingly clear Reykjavík morning.

It was cold, the way it was always cold. She could feel the wind slice into her despite the fact she was wearing her heavy parka and good, warm boots. The air slapped at her face, making her eyes tear up and her skin feel chapped on contact.

Margot arranged her scarf to cover her mouth, then shoved her gloved hands into her pockets as she headed down her little street toward the busier, more central part of Reykjavík. She took deep breaths of the thin, frigid air and told herself it was time to accept the fact that there was no more avoiding the one subject she hadn’t wanted to address at all.

Not directly.

If she pressed her lips together, she could still feel that napkin there, teaching her a thousand things about herself she hadn’t wanted to know.

And what a funny thing it was that she could be brought so low by a simple bit of fabric and the man who’d offered it to her. She felt humbled, altered, and she couldn’t tell if that was a positive or negative—not even all these days and a new interaction with her parents later. Margot thought that really she should have objected. Surely every feminist bone in her body should have risen up in protest—

But that was the curious thing. She couldn’t think of anything more feminist than locating her own voice, by any means possible. Did it matter how she’d gotten to that point? Or was she trying to complicate her own responses because she thought she should have reached it on her own?

Was what had happened to her problematic—or did she want it to be, so she could dismiss it? Or shame herself into denying the experience had changed her?

If another woman had told her that she’d had this same experience, Margot would have found it hugely concerning that a man had been the impetus for such growth. She knew she would have.

But that was minimizing the experience. And Margot didn’t want to do that any longer. No more airs of intellectual superiority to conceal all her worst insecurities. And all the Bechdel tests and feminist manifestos in the world couldn’t change the fact that it was the sex that had changed her.

And she was unaware of any way that a heterosexual woman could have life-altering sex without a man.

Which meant, of course, that there was no way not to put a man in the center of her own narrative. It was a notion that should have appalled her and yet...didn’t.

Does it matter if we were both there at the center? she found herself asking as she walked down the cold streets. Is sex only problematic when it’s not intimate, or is it intimacy that’s the real problem—because it knocks down all these barriers and leaves everyone both more and less than they were before?

She could almost hear Thor’s voice in her head as she turned that over and over inside her.

But then, the truth of the matter was that she could hear Thor’s voice in her head all the time, and she wasn’t sure she cared how problematic that was.

She hadn’t believed in the kind of casual sex Icelanders engaged in before she’d experienced it herself. She still didn’t. It was just that now Margot knew that it wasn’t just hookup cultures or her generation’s approach to dating that she found curious and flat. She had to look back at her entire sexual history and ask herself why she’d never understood that all the sex she’d ever had before Thor had...not been good.

Of course, she knew the answer.

She’d thought that the idea that sex could be fireworks and earthquakes, natural disasters and the northern lights all in one, were lies told in romance novels for the benefit of the feebleminded.

Margot had never imagined for a second that sex like that was—or could be, or maybe even should be—real.

“You got exactly what you asked for,” she told herself resolutely. “A bit more than that, maybe, but no less.”

Her lack of imagination was her own damned fault.

She made herself walk past the coffee shop nearest to her flat where she knew a number of her university colleagues spent their time, because she didn’t want to talk about any of this.

That concerned her, too, if she was honest. She felt as if Thor had freed her. He’d allowed her to find her voice in ways she never would have imagined possible, but it had left her loath to engage in the kind of conversations she’d used to find so entertaining. She didn’t want to take a tiny point and dig at it, poke at it, tear it apart.

Her life before that night in Thor’s hotel felt so small now, as if it had shrunk in the wash while she hadn’t been paying attention.

Was it academics that had gotten narrow over the course of these tenured years? Or was it Margot’s approach to scholarship?

When had she turned away from big questions and lost herself in the minutia instead?

It was that old saying that everyone liked to trot out in weary tones, usually after contentious meetings, that academic politics were so vicious because the stakes were so small.

And Margot couldn’t seem to remember why she’d decided that what she needed from her life was a steady diet of small stakes and meaningless arguments. Especially not now she felt turned inside out and made anew.

She found herself a seat near the window in a quaint coffeehouse, packed with cozy couches and overstuffed bookcases, and shrugged out of her parka. It was still bright outside and the light streamed in, piercing and blue and maybe a little too intense, but Margot liked the feel of it on her face.

She’d spent so long in the dark—all those nights out on the Reykjavík streets, or holed up in her flat. Or that long, stormy night in Thor’s hotel, for that matter.

Or her entire life and field of study.

Margot had almost forgotten the simple pleasure of sunlight. The warmth of it and the way it washed over her like a caress. The way the light poured in through windows and made it hard to see anything but all that bright, hot sun.

And maybe that was why it took her longer than it should have to notice the person who came to her side and stood there, backlit by the precious northern sunlight.

Margot shifted. Frowning by rote, she tried to make her eyes focus on the figure before her. She opened her mouth to comment on the numerous empty seats sprinkled throughout the coffeehouse at this hour on an indifferent Tuesday morning, but stopped herself.

Because her eyes might have been watering as she gazed into all that miraculous light, but her body knew exactly who she was looking at.

She felt herself shiver into instant awareness. She felt her pussy clench, then melt.

She knew.

Even before she lifted her hand to shade her eyes and really look at him, she knew.

“Hello, Professor,” Thor said.

He sounded...not quite angry. Nothing quite so sharp. But he didn’t sound his lazy, disengaged self, either.

Margot told herself there was no reason for her heart to flip around inside her chest at that notion.

“Thor,” she said evenly, by way of greeting. “What are you doing here?”

He moved to the side so she could turn in her seat and look at him without having to stare directly into the sun. Not that it was any better. Thor was brighter by day. His eyes were too blue and the light picked up those impossible cheekbones and the mouthwatering line of his jaw. He wasn’t dressed in that armored suit of his today, preferring boots and more casual trousers under the typical parka. He unzipped it against the heat in the coffeehouse, but he didn’t sit down.

It took Margot a shockingly long moment to realize he was...whatever awkward looked like on a man like him.

Her stomach twisted into a knot, then flipped around deep inside her.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, no.” Thor stood there over her and she saw to her amazement that his big hands were in fists at his sides. She could hardly make sense of that, but there was no denying the way his eyes blazed when she lifted her gaze to his again. “I’m not all right, Margot. Where have you been?”

He did nothing to modify his volume or his tone, and Margot felt herself redden at the knowledge that the locals behind the counter might recognize him. Or even Margot, since she hadn’t exactly been hiding her identity during all those late-night interviews.

She made herself smile. Politely. “I assume you mean that in a philosophical sense. Because I wasn’t aware that I had to report my whereabouts to you. Or anyone else.”

“You haven’t been on Laugavegur, Margot. You haven’t been accosting my customers. What am I supposed to make of that?”

“I don’t know why you would care where I am.” It cost her to keep her feelings off her face, but she thought she managed it. “You do remember that you told me to get out of your hotel, right?”

“We agreed that you would be there only as long as the storm continued. The storm had ended, so it was time for you to get back to your life. It didn’t mean you needed to drop off the face of the planet.”

“I didn’t drop off the face of the planet.”

“It’s been ten days.”

He said that as if he was outraged that she might not know how long it had been, and that made the knot inside her catch fire.

“Thor.” Margot indicated the seat across from her, nodding toward it, afraid that if she let herself she would...explode. Or something equally terrifying. “Would you like to sit down?”

“I would not like to sit down, Margot. What I would like is an explanation. Any explanation will do. Where have you been? Have you been hiding? Licking your wounds?”

That knotted thing pulsed, electric and so intense it bordered on pain.

“What wounds do you imagine I should be licking?” she asked, and she wasn’t managing to keep herself calm and expressionless any longer. She could hear it in her voice and had no idea what was on her face. What felt revolutionary was that she didn’t care. “You’re the one who threw me out. Because I had the temerity to worry about your emotions, if I recall correctly. Not a mistake I plan to make again.”

“That’s the trouble,” Thor threw at her. “I don’t make mistakes and I don’t have feelings.”

“People don’t generally track other people down in coffeehouses to shout at them about things they don’t feel.”

He looked as if she’d hit him. And she watched as he took one of those big fists and tapped it against the center of his chest.

“I don’t want to feel this, Margot,” he thundered at her. “I don’t want to feel any of this. I don’t want you inside me, so deep I don’t remember my own damned name.”