Sleeping Beauty (15 page)

He pulled on her arm, saying, “The bottom of your skirts are getting wet. Come back here, where it’s drier.”

And darker. She went willingly.

Then suffered a small comeuppance. He drew her toward the back, but only to the better lit wall near the thick-planked door. There he rotated and settled beside her, his back against the stones, his feet stretched out in front of him. He leaned there at her elbow, six inches away, without so much as brushing her arm—leaving disappointment to settle on her as palpably as a rock lowered onto her chest.

She wanted him. Oh, the silliness of it. Wanting a young swain with gold eyes, gold-streaked hair, and a blessed twenty-four carat gold reputation. Her Majesty’s hero. Society’s darling. A young man born so late he probably couldn’t remember trouser
seams that weren’t stitched on a sewing machine or cloth woven of threads spun on wheels, not mules and jennies.

Coco remembered suddenly her own contempt for “old men” who, fancying her, had made her laugh in her youth. She’d had no pity for them but was all pity now. Poor fellows.

She and James leaned side by side against the wall, she huddled in on herself, wrapped into his coat, he with his straight back braced, his long legs forward. More silence. Seemingly more strain. Or the tension was all hers and her imagination. What was he thinking? Feeling? Her bad tooth gave her a sudden twinge, and—the last straw—her soul seemed to sink.

At which point, James Stoker looked over and down at her and said, “It’s not that I can’t imagine it or don’t know the logistics.”

“What?” She meant, What did you say? She couldn’t have heard correctly.

But she had, and he took her question as asking for more specifics. He nodded toward the deep shadows in the opposite corner. “There,” he said. “I would know how to pull you over there and begin at the buttons down the front of that wet dress. I could make love to you there—or against a tree or on the ground or in a hut, on rocks on the edge of a river or in the river up to our hips. I know the principles involved so long as you aren’t shoving me. But you would. You don’t want me to. Am I wrong?”

“What?” she repeated. Like a simpleton.

“Would you let me? I want to. God help me, I
want to so much I can’t stand up without the aid of a wall.”

She blinked, shook her head. She couldn’t even get the word
no
out.

Though he understood
no
to be the answer. He asked, “Would you lie?”

“P-pardon?” She laughed nervously.

“About whether you’d let me or not? Would you lie to me?”

She kept shaking her head. “No,” she said finally, firmly. “I wouldn’t lie.”

Though she’d done almost nothing else for the last ten minutes, one falsehood after another. And this was the biggest of all. For—when he crossed his arms and settled his head back against the stones with a clunk (as if he could brain himself and thus get the idea out of his head), her reversal of feelings took the breath out of her. As if a trap door had suddenly dropped out from under her feet. Her stomach lifted. Her head grew light.

Aloud, she said, “It—It would be a terrible idea—”

He looked at her.

She laughed again, such a jittery sound. Not the thing to do. He stepped around in front of her, his face puzzled—a man who meant to investigate her peculiarly inappropriate laughter. He braced his arms on the wall on either side of her.

“Don’t—” she said.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

Oh, yes, a promise sure to be of great help. She said, “We’re really wrong for each other, you know. It wouldn’t—”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Wrong. All wrong. This is going to feel terrible.” He leaned in.

“James—” The first she had ever naturally used his given name voluntarily aloud. Fine timing. She had to turn her face to avoid being kissed—though why she would choose to avoid it was a mystery to her. She wanted him to kiss her. Part of her wanted it horribly, while another part was so wary that her hair all but stood on end.

He backed off an inch, no more, lowering his arms to take hold of the lapels of his coat. He kept her pressed to the wall, his face immediately above her as he snugged his coat up around her, holding onto the lapels, then resting his fists, contracted around the fabric, onto her collar bone.

Coco wet her lips. Yes, very close up, he smelled faintly of citrus and cardamom and something else foreign, Eastern—tamarind, perhaps. The smell, his proximity made her faint; it thrilled her, excited her, and—how strange—made something inside quake with a kind of terror. A strange, sharp ambivalence held her, while her heart leaped in her chest in rhythm to the rain pounding hard on the stoop.

She waited for him to step into his coat, to wrap it around both of them, put them belly to belly. She could imagine it, imagine being trapped further, tighter, closer to him. She could in fact imagine being under him, under his weight, entered…dear God. She blinked, lifting her eyes away.

Then he began down the worst path of all: “I am so fascinated by your moods and laughter,” he said, “a way you have about you. I know you worry about your age. But something in you, a strength and generosity—” He shook his head. This wasn’t
adequate. “Something timeless—” He let off again. Then finished, “You will be beautiful when you are ninety-seven, Mrs. Wild. You are incredible.”

What luck, she thought, that a novice should stumble into the exact right—wrong, wrong, wrong—words. Exactly right for his purposes; too soothing, too much a nostrum for all that ailed her. Like sweet cloves applied to her worst fears, fed to the bats that fluttered inside her. She let him fold the lapels of his coat up into one of his hands and pull her, nudge her around and into the deeper shadows.

He walked her backward into the most lightless corner, as if an alcove in the pouring rain weren’t privacy enough. He put her where the overhead arch came down into splay-wall, cornering into thick stone doorframe. His body became a backlit silhouette, moving in, cutting off all daylight except for a rainy halo of luminescence around him.

She put her hands up, expecting to fend off an onslaught. There in the dark, her hands found the warm tension of that possibility, a tension in his arms and chest, but it was harnessed. For the moment. And at some expense. The quick rhythm of his heart drummed into her palms. The muscles of wall of his chest were hard as if contracted from physical labor. As if his desire had weight and mass and holding it back were as arduous as holding back a boulder that threatened to roll down over both of them.

He did nothing for several measured seconds, while she felt a kind of horrible slide of her will, all defenses on steep, slippery ground. She held the distance—all of a few inches—then didn’t. He
slowly leaned his weight into her arms till her wrists gave. There were all kinds of opportunities to stop him.

She stopped nothing. Rather she braced herself for a deep, lascivious kiss.

Yet it didn’t arrive. She could feel him shaking slightly. He hovered, his face a close shadow, his breath warm and smelling faintly of coffee. She closed her eyes, aware of her own pleasure in him so close. Close without any real contact other than her hands on his chest and the heat of his body surrounding her, protecting her from the coolness of rain.

Then—much worse than a deep, lascivious kiss—he brushed his mouth lightly over hers. Dry, gentle lips. He dragged his mouth along the tender skin of her lips, pressing his nose to her cheek, drawing in deep breathfuls of her.

He murmured, “Tell me, say one word and I’ll stop. But surely—surely this much is all right.”

No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right at all. And the most amazing part was there was no premeditation to his actions. Nor any self-protection. He kissed her with open tenderness—a young man whose life had been so blessed he didn’t understand that some feelings were best kept to oneself.

And, idiot that she was, she didn’t say anything. Or certainly not the right anything. Instead, when he opened the coat, pushing it back, and ran both his hands down the front of her body, she called out softly, “Oh. Oh, yes.”

The heat in his palms penetrated her skin; it filled her breasts. His warm hands seemed to melt the muscles over her ribs; they warmed her to her
bones, turning her bones to liquid. Without the wall behind her, she could not have stood. He cupped her breasts and kissed her open-mouthed, groaning a release, a long, low, animal sound as he pressed his hips, at long last, against hers.

What a welcome feeling. Coco let her hands go up to James’s shoulders, wide and solid, up his neck into his hair. She pulled his head down to her, opened her mouth, and touched his tongue with hers, inviting him in. And in he went, his tongue firm, reaching, then softer, slathering her mouth.

His hands slid to her hips, around to her buttocks, pulling her into him. He was rigid against her belly. He pressed himself to her, sliding against her, a wonderful, primal grind that elicited small gutturals of pleasure from somewhere down inside her throat.

She muttered these into his mouth as his hands smoothed down her thighs and scooted fabric up. And up and up, loading heaps of skirt and petticoat onto his arms, till his fingers traced where, beneath the fabric of her drawers, her stockings ended yet her corset had not begun. Just the thinnest cambric separating his hand from her flesh. He smoothed his palm over her thigh, then found the place between her legs. With a long, satisfied groan that echoed lewdly—no other word—in their stony sanctuary, he cupped her there. A man who had found the place he wanted.

And she wanted him there. Pleasure, such pleasure. Yet as strong as it was, it existed with a perfectly matched counterpoint of anxiety. A real escalating fear. She could feel James letting loose, his mind letting go of all else so as to enjoy sexual sensation. She could feel something reciprocal in
herself. A lover, a lover like this one, one who was kind and admiring, who listened to her and wanted an intimacy from her, expected it guilelessly.

Her worry seemed connected to this: opening her eyes onto the sight of James Stoker in silhouette bent toward her was like staring into the dark substance of every romantic notion she’d ever mocked—and secretly wished existed all the same—these fused, alloyed, and made steely, with every disappointment she’d ever known. There were good reasons to like the human being, James Stoker. And profound reasons to fear the icon he’d become.

Yes, yes, in a minute she should really do something about letting an icon put his hands where James’s were, about her own less-than-innocent hands gathering way too much information—beneath his shirt, across his pectorals to his breastbone, she could feel a cushion of chest hair, unexpectedly thick, a very unboyish abundance. It narrowed into a line she followed under his shirt’s placket, down into his vest. She was distracted again.

He had began to pull at her drawers, trying to free them from where they were tucked under her corset. She knew the light touch of his fingers as he partially succeeded. Her body shuddered seemingly everywhere.

What finally coalesced her thinking was the combination: his naked touch, precise, pinging along her senses in the pitch black dark of a rainy stoop, and her own fingers coming in contact with his gold watch chain where it drooped over the points of his vest, over the top of the fly of his trousers. She knew a quick, vivid memory of him standing in
Tolly’s, chatting up the help as he waited for her tea, looking for all the world like the heroic young knight Victoria thought he was. Prince Charming. A walking fairy tale.

Yet here was no prince. Here, if anything, to put it in terms of the drawings she was doing, was a full-fledged spinning wheel—fascinating, the likes of which she had never encountered before—and she was about to be pricked, so to speak.

“Stop,” she murmured. Coco pushed on his chest.

Then another amazing, heretofore-never-seen thing: he didn’t pretend he hadn’t heard or protest or try to talk her out of the word
stop
. He just stopped. Just like that. He froze.

It was she who found herself talking, trying to explain. She stammered—she actually stammered out, “Y—you—”

“I’ve offended you,” he said quickly, backing his head away. “I’m sorry. I’ve never—never been quite like this with a European woman, I mean—I—”

“No, no.” She laughed, surprised. “You did nothing offensive. It’s just you—you’re—”

“Me?” His silence became mildly insulted.

“Yes. The Queen’s man. The Vice-Chancellor’s man. Society’s favorite. I can’t. You’re far too dangerous for me.” She pushed him to arm’s length, her skirt falling to where their knees met. She tried to explain. “I did all right years ago. The emperor never invited me to the palace, but I did all right. Paris was different then. Even in Paris now it’s not the same. And in England, well…let’s just say I want calm. I’m old. I don’t relish turmoil.”

“You’re only thirty-six.”

“Thirty-seven. My birthday was last week.”

“Well, happy birthday,” he said.

He stood there nonplused, panting. He knew what was happening. She could feel how much he resented it, but he didn’t complain further. Coco wasn’t very happy about it herself. But at least she was thinking again.

What to say? She would have told him
I shall not see you again, if you insist on touching me
, except even to think the words
I shall not see you again
put a great lump in her throat.

She said instead to the dark, hulking shadow above her, “All right, we like each other. But you want to belong. You do belong. And I don’t.” Then the most difficult truth to utter: “James, with you I run the risk of believing all the romantic nonsense you represent. I like you too well. But you are somehow too earnest, too unprotected. I don’t dare peel myself down to the same level you do. I’m not as innocent—”

“I’m hardly innocent—”

“Then not as brave. I won’t let myself fall in love with you.”

The words reverberated in their dim, stony shelter for a moment. The rain eventually beat them out. More gently, she said, “If it were just an affair, James, oh—” She finished, “Let us just say that I am no longer silly enough—young enough or inexperienced enough—to allow myself to get involved with you as a woman.”