Bound in Moonlight (8 page)

The next day, Saturday, I awoke as the sun was rising and lay there in bed for a while just looking at Inigo sleeping and marveling at how all of this had come about. He was lying on his stomach with his face turned toward me, and I was struck by how terribly young he looked in the pinkish dawn light. It had been a warm night, prompting him to kick the covers off, so I sat up to admire his body, taking a mental photograph of it to savor after I left. It had never occurred to me before that a man might be said to have a beautiful rear end, but Inigo's was positively stunning—small, muscular, and with a graceful shape that put me in mind, once again, of those statues in the bathhouse. Just above the crease, in the area of the tailbone, I saw what looked to be a vertical scar about two inches long, very thin and neat, and so faint that I never would have noticed it had I not been inspecting his body so thoroughly. I leaned in closer to get a better view.

“It's from an operation.”

I jumped, pressing a hand over my kicking heart. “What . . . um, what kind of operation?”

“I don't remember,” he said groggily as he rolled over. “I was asleep at the time. God bless chloroform.” He drew me into his arms, nudging me with his morning hard-on, and that was the end of that conversation.

After breakfast, Inigo took me on a walking tour of the grounds. We strolled along footpaths in the thick, sprawling woods, explored the cave (during which I became so light-headed that we had to turn back), and spent most of the afternoon in the bathhouse. He laid me on the edge of the pool so as to pleasure me with his mouth, then sat me on the bench and took me between my breasts.

Afterward, I burst into tears. He scooped me up and held me for a long time, stroking my hair, kissing my forehead, and murmuring comforting things. He asked if I was upset because we would have to part the next day. I told him no, that I adored him, but that I'd never viewed our liaison as the beginning of something, but rather as an enchanted interlude. What saddened me was that I would have to leave there without ever having truly made love to him. He tried to convince me that it was actually a blessing, because it was something I could save for when I eventually fell in love, but I was having none of that. I told him I was ready for it now, more than ready, that it was the natural culmination of everything we'd shared for the past three days, that it felt as if there was a void inside me that needed to be filled.

A little while later, Elic and Lili entered the bathhouse holding hands. I'd gotten to know them both over the past couple of days, but every time I saw them, I was struck anew by their remarkable beauty. I've already described Elic. Lili had heavy-lidded eyes, high cheekbones, and hair like a sheaf of black silk. That afternoon she wore, as usual, an elegantly simple garment of gold-embroidered silk that tied at one shoulder like a sarong. She called it a
lubushu,
and said it was what women wore in her homeland. I asked where that was, and she said, “The Fertile Crescent”; I couldn't get any more out of her. The
lubushu
fell to just above her feet, revealing a hammered gold anklet adorned with a disc of blue stone that looked like lapis lazuli.

As they greeted us, I sat in the water with my arms wrapped around myself to cover my nudity. But then they both nonchalantly disrobed and joined us in the pool, and before long my pointless modesty was a thing of the past.

Noticing my puffy eyes, Lili asked me what was wrong. I gave some mealymouthed response I can't remember now, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn't buying it. Later, as we were all walking back to the château together, the men a few yards behind Lili and me on the path, I heard their conversation drop to a near whisper. I suspected they were talking about me, and as it turned out, they were.

Inigo read to me as we lay curled up in bed that evening—not a bawdy novel, as usual, but the erotic poetry of Catullus, which had been sadly excluded from the classics curriculum at Miss Cox's. He closed the book, kissed me, and said quietly, “Elic wants to make love to you.”

I was speechless, and you know, dear Rèmy, how rare an affliction that is for me.

He said, “I mean, really make love—you know.”

“But Lili . . .” I shook my head, dumbfounded that we were even having this conversation.

“You know she and Elic sleep with other people.”

“Yes, but seeing them together . . . it's so obvious how much they love each other. They're always touching, embracing, sharing little looks. And I like Lili. She's been so friendly to me, so warm. I feel as if I were betraying—”

“She suggested it.”

I sat up. “How . . . how did she know . . . ?”

Rising onto an elbow, he said, “I might have said something, when she asked why you were so—”

“This is mad,” I said.

“This is Grotte Cachée.” He took my hand, kissed my fingers. “Elic says you're exquisite, that you ‘resonate with sublimated passion.' He's very good at initiating virgins, and he loves doing it.”

“But I've only ever . . . done anything like that with you. I've only just met him. I've never even been alone with him, never even touched him.” Ah, but I had watched him in
le Boudoir
that night with Helen. Every time I recalled what I'd seen, I grew wet and breathless.

“I would be with you,” Inigo said.

“You . . . you would?”

“Of course,” he said, sitting up. “I'm not trying to hand you off, Em, I'm just trying to make you happy. I would love to share your first time with you—unless you'd rather I weren't there. It's up to—”

“Of course I want you there.”

He smiled. “Shall I invite him over?”

“Now?”

He stroked my face, saying softly, “This is your last night here, sweetheart.”

I hugged him tight while I thought about it. Finally I nodded against his shoulder. He kissed my head and got up to call Elic, who lived in another tower, from the telephone in his front hall.

When Inigo came back into the bedroom and saw that I'd put on my nightgown, I said, “Don't laugh.”

“I'm not laughing.” He wasn't. He wasn't even smiling.

Plucking at the skirt of the nightgown, I said, “I know there's no point to this, because he's already seen me naked, but it just . . . it makes me feel a little more . . .”

“Of course it does. Here,” he said, pulling on a pair of drawers, “so you're not the only one.”

He blew out all but one candle and mounted the pillows against the headboard. We got under the sheet (it was too warm a night for blankets) and reclined against the pillows with our arms around each other, kissing, until a knock came at the door of the apartment.

“Entrée,”
Inigo called.

When Elic walked into the bedroom, I couldn't even look directly at him at first. “Is that a new Renoir hanging over the mantel?” he asked as he sat on the edge of the bed. He was wearing an untucked shirt with dark trousers, and his feet were bare.

Inigo nodded. “I picked it up in Paris last month. Isn't it beautiful?”

Elic said, “It is, actually, and I've never been too keen on still lifes. What do you think of it, Emily?”

“I love it,” I said. “It's exquisite, so lush and colorful.” I started jabbering the way I do when I'm nervous. “I can't stop gazing at it, but then, parrot tulips have been my favorite flower ever since I was a little girl. I love those twisted, feathery petals.” (Yes, Rèmy, my much-loved Renoir came from Inigo.) I told them how Nana used to have vases of them in her house every spring, but my mother thought they were “too showy and ostentatious.”

The conversation turned from bourgeois sensibilities to education to women's suffrage. Their effort to relax me with small talk was touching, and as I played along, it actually seemed to be working. By the time Elic reached out to stroke my hair, saying it reminded him of Fortuny's paintings of odalisques, I had all but forgotten the benign ruse.

“Your hair is Fortuny,” he said softly, “but your skin is Ingres.” He stroked my face and throat until my eyes drifted closed. I felt the back of his hand trail lightly down my chest and over a linen-clad breast as Inigo caressed the other one. Lips touched mine. I opened my eyes to find that it was Elic, not Inigo, who was kissing me.

“Is this all right?” Elic asked softly, earnestly.

I nodded.

He took off his trousers, but not his drawers or his shirt, probably because he sensed, from my nightgown, that I needed that thin layer of linen between us. He got under the covers and kissed one cheek while Inigo kissed the other. I smiled at the prospect of being made love to by two beautiful, sexy men who also happened to be all-around swell guys, almost too swell to be true. They both stroked and fondled me, both kissed me and rubbed against me and whispered the things every woman wants to hear. At length, someone slid a finger in me and found me slick and ready.

As Elic reached under his shirt to unbutton his drawers, I said, “I, um, wouldn't want to end up in trouble.”

“You have nothing to fear in that regard,” Elic said. “I'm sterile. But if it will ease your mind, I'll wear a condom.”

I turned the condom down, not even thinking about syphilis or gonorrhea, that's how naïve I was. Luckily, I didn't catch anything from him, which is actually a wonder, given how many women he must have been with.

Inigo held me tucked into his embrace as Elic knelt between my legs, tilting my hips up onto his thighs. What with my voluminous nightgown and his shirt, I couldn't see what he was doing, but I could feel his fingers gently parting me, and then the head of his cock pressing in.

“Take care, brother,” Inigo told Elic. “She's small.”

Elic flexed and stretched me open. I flinched.

“Easy,” Inigo murmured. I didn't know whether he was talking to Elic or to me.

Elic entered me by degrees, easing his cock back and forth little by little as my body conformed to it. At one point, he gripped my hips and gave a short, hard thrust, and I felt something give inside—my hymen, of course.

Stilling for a moment, Elic asked if I was all right. I told him I was wonderful, and both men chuckled. Elic continued pushing into me. There was a sort of burning ache, but it was overwhelmed by the novel sense of being penetrated by something that felt, at that moment, like a column of marble.

When he was buried completely inside me, he kissed me and told me how tight I was, and how incredible it felt. “It feels
too
good,” he said. “If I get carried away and start hurting you, you've got to let me know.”

I told him I would, and then I pulled up my nightgown and lifted his shirt a little so that I could see him inside me. It was a fascinating sight, and deeply arousing. Obviously sensing my curiosity, Inigo took my hand and placed it where my body and Elic's were connected. He really did feel hard as marble, and it amazed me that my body could accommodate him.

Elic made a deep purring sound as my fingertips brushed his cock. He started thrusting again, slowly but purposefully, his languorous gaze on my breasts as Inigo gently kneaded them, squeezing and rubbing my nipples through my gown. When he lowered his hand to stroke my clit, I moaned and grabbed Elic's shoulders, arching my hips. I met Elic's thrusts, which grew swifter and deeper as his pleasure mounted.

“Does this hurt?” he asked in a husky, breathless voice.

“No.”

I could feel Inigo's erection through his drawers, so I reached beneath the sheet to unbutton them. He kissed me gratefully and rubbed against my sweat-slicked thigh while continuing his intimate caress. The three of us moved together in the same rhythm, panting and shuddering. A drop of sweat fell onto my forehead from Elic's face.

Inigo came first, pressing hard against me as a growl of satisfaction rumbled from his throat. Every hot jet of come against my thigh drove me closer to the edge, so that as his climax was waning, mine was peaking. Elic reared over me with a groan, his face darkly flushed, a vein bulging on his forehead, hips jerking. I felt a pumping sensation inside me that set off a second orgasm on the heels of the first.

We lay there for a minute in a sweaty, sticky, breathless heap, and then both men whispered, simultaneously, “Wow.”

The final shoot-'em-out with Hickley took place the next morning, when he returned to the château only to find me in Inigo's apartment in my dressing gown, packing my things. He really cast a kitten, called me about fifty different synonyms for slut. “You are an engaged woman, for pity's sake!”

I told him that I was, in fact, a free woman, having had the good sense not to take back his ring, and that I furthermore intended to remain a free woman for the rest of my days on earth.

He screamed (spittle flying, very attractive) that he'd ruin me, that he'd make sure everyone in New York found out about my little romp with Inigo. “You'll never receive another marriage proposal, not from anyone who matters.”

I told him I'd learned some very useful and interesting things recently, the most important of which was that life was too short to end up a bird in a golden cage. “I can enjoy life very well on my own, thank you, certainly better than I could enjoy it as your wife—or as anyone's wife, for that matter.”

I told him to go ahead and spew his venom in New York, that I was thinking about settling down in Paris, and that Parisians wouldn't shun me for one little affair. “In a choice between being bound in matrimony or being ruined and therefore free to do as I wish, I happily choose ruination.”

And that, dear Rèmy, is the story of how yours truly came to bid
adieu
to her innocence and her tiresome fiancé, and good riddance to both. (I'll bet there aren't many women who've come not once, but twice while losing their virginity.)

By the way, Nils lost his two days ago, courtesy of my determined tart of a niece, who finally wore him down. She told me it was worth the wait, that he was a “roaring, rutting beast,” and that it was “the bounce to end all bounces.”