Lovers (23 page)

After they’d left the pitch, she and David had decided that it would be unthinkably anticlimactic to return to the office, particularly since one of the senior partners would not be anxious to have them hanging around gloating.

“You did it,” he grinned, watching her tumbling around on the couch, unable to sit still in her excitement.

“We did it, and don’t start throwing me all the credit again or I’ll hit you, Davy Melville. Cheers!” She raised her glass to him. “Down with the ruling classes, knees up, Mother Brown, chin-chin, and anything else you want to toast to. Did you hear Victoria say, ‘We’ll all get to work on the details on Monday,’ did you think she was going to strangle on her words?”

“I thought she was going to faint, not strangle.”

David had trouble responding in kind to Gigi’s abandon. He was at least half as happy as she was about getting the account, but in advertising as in every other field, no triumph thrills as much as the first one. David still remembered when he’d made his first winning pitch, some five years before, for a half-million-dollar account. He hadn’t touched the ground again for three days and nights.

This winter afternoon his pleasure was considerably tempered. He knew it was essentially and fundamentally all Gigi’s achievement, but a team lost and won as a unit, so he had won too, and it couldn’t have been done with words alone; his inspired photos had been important. But David discovered that he was constricted in any free expression of joy by a stronger emotion, his realization that as Gigi kicked off her boots, threw off her vest, unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse, and snuggled, with an irrepressible series of bounces, into the pillows of her wide chintz couch, he was growing more and more alarmingly disturbed by her proximity.

This was the first time David had ever been really alone with Gigi. He had had no way to anticipate how different Gigi now seemed to him in her own place, how confiding, how casual, how heartlessly free and easy. If she had designed every move she made to force him to imagine her naked, she couldn’t have succeeded as well as her unself-conscious familiarity did. When she bent over to pour them drinks, he thought he saw her breasts fall forward under her blouse. When she brought him the drink, he could have sworn that he could hear her thighs brush together under her skirt. When she raised her glass with a flourish, he clearly envisioned her arms lifting to clasp him around the neck and draw his head down to her throat.

He was going fucking nuts.

“How come you’ve got such a big place?” David asked. Since Gigi had rushed in and taken only enough time to turn on the two lamps by the couch, the room seemed enormous as the winter twilight fell quickly.

“just luck. It’s a rental … one of those things. Oh, Davy, isn’t Signora Eleonora Colonna heaven?”

“Heaven. So you rattle around in here all alone?”

“It’s amazing how you can get used to more space than you need. Giorgio … Gianni … Enrico … I love them! Are they a world-class act of what?”

“Top-notch. Listen, Gigi, are you seeing anyone? I mean, is somebody going to walk in here and say, ‘Who’s this strange guy sitting on my couch and drinking with my lady?’ ”

“I’m not ‘seeing anyone,’ as you quaintly put it,” Gigi yawned, beginning to feel the fatigue of an adrenalin letdown. “I’m nobody’s ‘lady,’ thank you very much. My own woman, Davy my lad, and don’t call me a lady ever again. I hate that expression. Woman, female, girl, gal, even chick, but not lady.”

“I didn’t. I was imagining someone else saying it.”

“No one would dare,” she said, and with those words she realized that her liberty was real, as real as the empty house she inhabited, as real as the empty bed she slept in,
as real as the solitary dinners she ate, as real as the lack of a man’s touch on her skin. Only the excitement and pace of preparing for the Indigo Seas pitch had enabled her to thrust aside thoughts of Zach, only brutally hard work had allowed the fact that she was no longer waiting for him to come back home to sink deeply and meaningfully into her mind.

Gigi stretched hugely, her arms high over her head, clasping her right wrist in her left hand and pulling as high as she could, then repeating the stretch with the other hand, trying to ease away some of the tension of the day. She groaned with the relief of it. What she really needed was to have her back rubbed, she thought lazily. “Davy,” she commanded, “come over here—you’re too far away. Now, take off your glasses.”

“If I take off my glasses, I won’t be able to see.”

“I don’t care, I want to look into your eyes,” Gigi insisted, determined to have her own way, for, as she quieted down and lost the energy that had been entirely concentrated in Indigo Seas, she found her attention eager to turn to David Melville, who had lived through every minute of the process with her. There was something mysteriously and pleasantly comfortable about sitting here with him. Cozy, chummy, warming.

But what was it about him
exactly
, she wondered with an unexpected rising of a tide of acute curiosity. Suddenly it seemed to her that although she thought she knew Davy, she didn’t
know
him, not really. And such ignorance, such almost-taking-for-granted, surely wasn’t proper between creative teammates, was it? Maybe, if she knew him better, she would ask him to rub her back, Gigi told herself.

It was getting so dark in the room that she had to lean forward to inspect him closely. “Hmmm—as I thought, the irises of your eyes are the most unusual kind of speckled brown, just like those brown eggs that are so hard to get, your hair is precisely the deep, dark brown of Godiva chocolates, there’s not a single light streak in it, and your skin could easily pass for heavy whipping cream. Why, Davy,”
she said, her eyes wide and deliriously mocking as she stared intently at him, “I could make a chocolate soufflé out of you!”

“And I could make an entire meal out of you,” he answered, grabbing her with his long arms, goaded beyond endurance. “I am going to eat you up, Gigi Orsini, until there is nothing left but some bits of red hair and an empty tube of mascara!”

“Davy!”

“It’s your own damn fault,” he moaned, and kissed her with all the growing passion and love he’d been suppressing since the day they’d met.

“Davy, what the hell are you doing?” Gigi asked, trying to sound astonished. Was a mere backrub all she had in mind, she asked herself with what remained of her honesty. My, what very tasty strong lips he had. Nothing like a soufflé at all.

“Just shut up and pay attention.” He kept right on kissing her, and Gigi felt herself growing interestingly languid. Davy was such an absolute darling, but who would have dreamed that he’d be such a good kisser? Who would have expected that he would know exactly how closely she liked to be hugged and held? Who would have realized that lying down next to her—how had that happened?—this lanky Davy creature would feel as reassuringly solid and lovely as a rock that had baked in the sun? Who would have believed that you could work in the same room with a man for weeks and not understand that the beautiful shape of his mouth made it impossible not to kiss him back with the same intensity with which he kissed you? Who would have anticipated that if this man swept your hair up from your neck and kissed you very slowly and deliberately right up and down your bare nape, taking little nibbles as he progressed, you would become violently excited?

As those questions drifted through her mind like a fresh breeze, Gigi knew she was the biggest humbug alive. She wasn’t surprised, not at all at all at all.

“Oh, Davy …” She stirred in his arms, pressing closer to this heavenly, hesitant man.

“Please, darling Gigi, please give me a chance. I’m so much in love with you that I’m nearly insane …”

“Prego
 …” she whispered.

“You mean …” David hadn’t been totally sure what
prego
meant, and he didn’t want to make a false move now that he finally held his treasure in his arms and had told her his love.

“Prego
means do … by all means … whatever …”

“Would that include this?” he asked, trying to unbutton her blouse with his clever artist’s fingers, which had started to tremble so much that they were clumsy.

“Whatever …” she murmured, closing her eyes so that she could better fell the first touch of his lips on her breasts. When it finally came, she stirred under it as a glade of trees stirs under the first raindrops. “Oh, yes, definitely
that …”

Davy rolled off the couch so that he could kneel on the floor and take both of her breasts in his crafty, sensitive fingertips. He caressed them with wonder, by lamplight, marveling at the vivid pinkness of her fragile nipples, which rose and became plumply erect as he looked at them, marveling at the flushing of her white skin, which created a color so rare that it became an ornament, transfixed by the firmness, the unexpected resilience of her young flesh, each of her breasts a promise that could break his heart. In reverent silence he traced her skin toward the edge of each nipple, until he saw her lift herself upward toward him and her lips shape unuttered assent. Thirty, trembling, awestruck, he drew close to the tenderly swollen buds made of hot honey and tight silk and gently took each of them, one by one, deeply into his mouth.

Kneeling there, drunk on the taste of Gigi’s flesh, David hardly breathed, held in the sweet surge of a thousand daydreams come true. As she grew dense with longing, Gigi gave great ragged sighs and gradually worked her
way out of her clothes while he barely lifted his mouth from its deliberate work. Now he was wily, now demanding, now artful, now avid, always cosseting her, always regaling himself.

He remained on his knees, intoxicated and rapt, until he felt her hands plunge deeply into his hair, communicating an unmistakable change of pace that was half question, half invitation. At that he took off all his clothes, each movement punctuated by a kiss as his tongue penetrated her open, fragrant mouth. Gigi dexterously discovered his naked flesh limb by limb. At the hollow at the base of his throat, where the collarbones met, she found skin as tender as the softest glove leather, a pulse beating like the surf of a warm sea. In the glow of lamplight she saw that the joints of his shoulders and elbows and wrists were as beautifully shaped as his mouth, that the fine hair on his chest and arms was as dark as a fall of feathers against the luxurious smoothness of his skin, his muscles well defined, long and solid. As he stood up, she said, imperiously and unexpectedly, “Stop …”

“Stop?” he cried incredulously.

“Yes … I want to see you.” Gigi gave a low, playful laugh, allowing full rein to her saucy, erotic spirit. Glorying in her nakedness, she sat up tall on the couch, kneeling on her heels, and took his rearing penis in her hands. He saw the smile fade abruptly from her face as she bit down on her lower lip and drew in her breath with astonishment as she measured his length and bulk with airy, eager fingers, her touch flickering, clasping, unclasping, deliberately maddening. He stood his ground, unmoving, tensing his thighs, thrusting his pelvis forward, his hands forming fists, and willing himself to let her play with him until she had her fill. He adored the teasing punishment she meted out, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before the devilish inquisitiveness that had started by making him take off his glasses would get the better of her.

Gigi was torn between the gourmandise of drawing out this moment of fascinated discovery, of prolonging this glorious,
sweet frolic of inquisition, and by a growing urgency that could only be relieved by feeling him invade her, fill her, possess her. Her mouth grew dry and her heart pounded impatiently until, unable to make herself hold back a moment longer, she surrendered to the drug of long-deferred desire, fell back on the couch, and offered herself to him as eagerly as the dry land offers itself to the storm.

Now David grew serious, measuring his entrance with the concentrated precision of an Olympic diver, pleasuring her with knowing measures, meting out, with the hard-won patience of experience, his slowly sliding, deep, full thrusts that went in as far as he could go, and his short, hard, rapid strokes that penetrated only a few inches, holding back his own need in favor of hers, listening to her skin, gauging her sighs, judging her breathing and her sweat, until he wove a veil of pure passion around them, creating a zone of timelessness in which Gigi lost her singleminded rage to reach fulfillment, and let herself exist, aching still but rocked in the moment, exist in his arms and his breath and his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his body above her.

Only after he was certain that they had used that timelessness to begin to learn the uses of their flesh did he permit himself to attend directly to her excitement, to concentrate severely, sternly, on the burning pearl that lay deeply hidden between her legs. Soon she sighed and gasped, her breath finally rising into a series of shameless, uncontrollable shuddering sounds. David smiled for the first time and now plunged freely, over and over, the diver liberated from judgment, immersed himself in the living depths of her until he quickly pounded to his own superb release.

Soon after Victoria Frost moved to California, she rented an apartment in one of a group of gated town houses, vaguely Regency in style, that had recently been built on land once owned by Twentieth Century Fox. The well-guarded complex offered her the advantages of high security
and underground parking along with a striking degree of anonymity. She could go straight from her car to an elevator that rose to the fourth and top floor of the building where her apartment was located, one of a group of three other apartments, without seeing anybody or being seen, except by a stray unspeaking neighbor, all of whom were far older than she. Victoria had had all her furniture and books sent out from New York and she had reproduced, in the exceptionally high-ceilinged and well-proportioned rooms, an apartment that was almost identical to the one she had lived in before.

After the Indigo Seas pitch, she spent the rest of the day back at the office, conferring busily with several of the other creative terms, making sure that she didn’t get trapped by Archie and Byron into the usual lovingly detailed and endlessly repetitive recapitulation of strategy and triumph that followed a win. She knew she’d made a face-losing tactical mistake, and she didn’t want to listen to them try to get her off the hook with all the considerable tact at their command.