Whispers of the Flesh (21 page)

Five

S
HOWTIME,
ISABEL THOUGHT as she approached the darkened hunting lodge on slippered feet around eleven that night. She was shivering like crazy, not only because she’d just followed an interminable dirt road through the woods on a cool night wearing nothing but her thin cotton travel robe and flip-flops, but because she was
out of her freakin’ mind
to be doing this.

It was dark as hell, there being just a sliver of moon hidden behind a suffocating layer of clouds that had been hovering up there waiting to burst into rain since around dinnertime. The illumination from her flashlight jittered as it played over the statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, that was the centerpiece of the lodge’s front garden, before-and-after watercolors of which were included in David Beckett Roussel’s extraordinary book of plans. Diana smiled down on Isabel from her pedestal as if to say “Turn back now, honey, before you make a complete ass of yourself.”

The lodge itself had been built in the sixteenth century of the same dusky volcanic rock from which the castle and most of the outbuildings were constructed. It was a beautiful edifice, stately but welcoming both inside and out, the most perfect house she’d ever seen.

No guts, no glory,
Isabel thought as she turned the knob of the front door.

The door was unlocked, of course. This wasn’t New York. She eased it open and stepped into the entrance hall, only to find that the house wasn’t completely dark after all, nor completely silent. There was light coming from the rear, where she knew the so-called hunting hall to be because of all the hours she and Adrien had spent there that long-ago Christmas vacation, as well as barely audible music.

Damn.
She had hoped to find him asleep upstairs, so that when she stole into his bed and woke him with soft kisses, he would be groggy and malleable.

Fighting the urge to turn back, she switched off her flashlight and padded silently toward the back of the house, the music growing louder as she approached the hunting hall. It was a nimble-fingered piano piece called “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”—
how perfect is that
—from an Oscar Peterson album she and Adrien used to play a lot that Christmas.
Night Train
was one of the hundreds of jazz LPs, some of them dating back to the 1920s, that his late father had spent his life collecting. While Julien Morel was alive, Adrien had been big on rockers like Springsteen and Bob Seger; he didn’t get jazz, didn’t care to. After the plane crash that claimed the lives of his parents and Isabel’s grandfather, thrusting Adrien into the role of
gardien,
he bought a state-of-the-art turntable with a record changer and set about playing every single album, one after the other. He developed a love of cool jazz that rubbed off on Isabel that Christmas and never left her. Her own CD collection covered most of the living room wall in her apartment.

Whether from the damp chill in the air or her nerves, or both, Isabel trembled like a rabbit as she stood in the wide, arched entrance to the hunting hall. It was a cavernous, high-ceilinged, dark-timbered room with plastered walls and a massive stone fireplace, in which low flames twitched and sputtered. Against the back wall, lined with leaded glass windows, was a long, slablike table that had come from the refectory of some medieval monastery. A scanner, laptop, printer, and three desk lamps stood on the table amid a sea of books, papers, and parchment scrolls. There was also a record player, the old kind; he was playing the same vinyl album they used to listen to together.

Adrien, standing with his back to her in a dressing gown and pajama bottoms, lifted a bottle of wine from the table and took a swallow right out of it, which surprised and amused Isabel. He’d always seemed like the type who would not only use a wineglass when he was drinking alone, he would use exactly the
right
glass.

From the defined musculature of his shoulders and back through the thin fabric of his robe, she could tell that he wasn’t wearing anything else on top. She loved the shape of his shoulders; she always had, even when he was a lanky adolescent. The low drone of arousal she had felt all evening at the prospect of making love to Adrien again morphed into liquid-hot lust within seconds; God bless hormones.

He set the bottle down and lifted a scroll, pulling it open so he could read it.

“Adrien,” she said.

He turned and stared at her, the scroll popping shut.

She swallowed hard, thinking back to that night in the bathhouse last August, when their long-sublimated feelings had erupted in frenzied lovemaking—which he’d immediately regretted. It had been an excruciating reminder of the way he’d suddenly distanced himself from her after their first chaste kiss as teenagers, initiated by her. She knew now that he had put her aside at the encouragement of Darius for the good of the Follets, whom he was duty bound to spend his life protecting—just as he was duty bound to produce gifted offspring with a gifted wife. He was being responsible and dedicated, sacrificing his personal happiness for the greater good. Still, rejection was rejection; it hurt regardless of the reason.

That pain had been echoed, on a smaller scale, this afternoon in the Sub Rosa garden, after she’d impulsively invited him for a dip in the koi pool. His hesitation had spooked her into bolting instead of staying and giving it the old college try. Upon reflection this afternoon, she realized she’d squandered a golden opportunity.

Adrien’s gaze shifted from her eyes to a point just slightly above her head, and back again. Her aura would be like a banner to him, broadcasting blatantly sexual vibes. He looked as if he were about to say something, then thought better of it.

She said, “Please don’t tell me it was a mistake for me to come here.”

Adrien looked down at the scroll in his hand, a palpable reminder of his sacred obligation to devote his life
dibu e debu
—to the gods and goddesses. He raised his gaze to her, his grim expression saying it all.

Isabel stood there for another few seconds, trying to think of something to say that didn’t sound totally lame, or desperate, or sappy, heat sizzling up her throat and face. “Shit,” she whispered.

She turned and made her way to the front door as quickly as she could without actually running, her throat clutching.
Asshole. You fucking asshole.

She opened the door. It slammed shut with concussive force.

Adrien spun her around by her shoulders, crushed her to the door, and kissed her, hard.

The flashlight dropped from her hand, clattering onto the tiled floor. He yanked at the sash of her robe, whipping it open. His hands were everywhere on her, hot and reckless.

She felt him tugging at his own clothes, and then he lifted her against the door and wrapped her legs around him. His initial thrust was shallow, an exploratory probe. On finding her already wet, he lunged into her. She clutched him to her, meeting his grinding thrusts as the pleasure shuddered through her, stealing her breath, squeezing her heart . . .

She came hard, bucking against him. He rammed into her as if he were trying to batter down the door, and suddenly he stilled, groaning low in his throat, his fingers digging painfully into her hips, his cock jerking inside her. She felt the semen shooting against the mouth of her womb in gradually diminishing jets, and smiled.

Adrien’s knees seemed to give out as his orgasm waned. He slumped to the floor still connected to Isabel, both of them with their arms still tight around each other.

“Mon dieu,”
he whispered. He kissed her through a breathless chuckle, his mouth tasting like wine.

They uncoupled awkwardly and straightened their clothes. He stood, raised Isabel to her feet, and kissed her again.

“You’re shaking,” he said, chafing her arms. “Come into the hunting hall. I’ll stoke the fire. I’ll pour us some cognac, and we can talk. It’s been a long time since we just talked together, comfortably. Our thoughts used to be so in sync, remember? That Christmas?”

She nodded.

He stroked a tendril of hair off her face. “And then you can come upstairs and sleep with me.”

She looked up into those big, molten chocolate eyes and felt her stomach twist with guilt. He wasn’t fretting, as he had that other time in the bathhouse, about not using protection. She had told him then that she was on the pill. He undoubtedly assumed she still was.

“Men feel threatened by the idea of fathering a child on a woman they’re not involved with. They just won’t go for it.”

“I don’t know, Adrien. Maybe . . . maybe we shouldn’t, you know. Encourage something between us that—”

“There already is something between us,” he said gently. “I’ve spent the past ten months trying to deny it, trying to put you out of my mind. It’s pointless. It will always be there.”

She looked down and closed her eyes, stinging with tears.

“Isabel.” He stroked her face, lifted her chin. “We don’t have a future, but we can have tonight. We can sleep together and make love again—properly this time, in my bed, taking our time about it. And in the morning, I’ll make you breakfast.”

“You cook?”

“I cook very well. I’ll brew us a big pot of strong coffee, and I’ll squeeze you some orange juice and make you some crêpes with berries. Or if you prefer cheeses, we can have that, and I’ll get a fresh baguette and some croissants.”

“Adrien . . .” Isabel hadn’t planned on this, on him trying to hang on to her for a while longer. If anything, she’d assumed he would exhibit the same postcoital misgivings as last time. That would have made this easier—much easier.

“Twelve hours, Isabel. At”—he squinted at his watch in the semidarkness—“eleven forty-five tomorrow morning, we’ll go back to how it’s been. And that will be the end of it. We’ll lift our chins and carry on, as your father would say. In the meantime, we can have our twelve hours, twelve hours where it will be just us, and we won’t talk about . . . afterward. We won’t think about it. We’ll just be together and be happy.”

She sighed.

“Come on, it’s raining,” he said, and she could hear that it was. “Stay. Just till noon tomorrow.”

“You’re stealing an extra fifteen minutes,” she said.

He smiled. “Can you blame me?”

She stayed.

He lowered the needle on another LP, of Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, and they sat curled up together under a cashmere blanket on an old velvet sofa in front of the fire, sipping cognac and talking about things Isabel hadn’t ever talked about to anyone, because no one else would understand them, no one else would really care, no one else was the other half of her.

They shared lazy kisses in the glow of the fire to one of their favorite songs, “I’m Glad There Is You” . . . Two lovers caught in amber for one isolated moment in time, a moment they would have to keep and hold, preserving it in their hearts for an eternity, because it was all they would ever have of each other.

She undressed him under the blanket, touching and exploring, memorizing the topography of muscle and bone, the smell of his scalp, the way his hips tightened when she stroked his erection, pressing, pleading . . .

He pulled off her robe and made slow, dreamy love to her with his hands and his mouth, until by the time he entered her, she felt as if her entire body were one quivering, breathless nerve. He took his time, stoking her pleasure as he’d stoked the fire, bringing her right to the point of combustion, then backing off, again and again and again, the muscles of his chest and shoulders and arms flexing as he reared over her, his gaze growing more and more unfocused . . .

It’s perfect.
That was her only coherent thought as she basked in sensual delirium, her heart thudding so hard in her ears that she could barely hear their pants and moans.
It’s perfect because it’s Adrien. He’s the man I was meant to make love to, the only one.

She came first, he close on her heels, his groans sounding almost anguished as he clung to her, his back hunched, his body hard. They held each other, gasping for breath, as the record ended, the needle scritch-scritch-scritching around the played-out album.

“I thought we were supposed to make love properly this time,” she said, “in your bed.”

He chuckled; she felt it deep in her womb. “I’m getting around to it.”

They took a warm bath together, then went to bed and held each other and whispered and kissed and made sweet, drowsy love, and sailed off to sleep in each other’s arms.

He
sailed off to sleep. Isabel lay awake until his breathing was deep and heavy and regular. At two o’clock, she carefully extracted herself from his embrace, got out of bed, put her robe and slippers back on, found her flashlight, and stole out into the night.

While Isabel was walking back to the château in the rain, sobbing, Elle and Lili were standing over Jason MacKenna’s empty and tidily made up bed.

“I was afraid of this,” Elle said. “Didn’t his mother say he’s a night owl? I’ve gone through The Change for nothing.”

It was never easy. The softening of her muscles and the compression of her bones was always accompanied by pain, and there was the temporary but harrowing sense of having the breath squeezed out of her as her rib cage tightened around her lungs. Worst of all was the awful nausea—what she called the Change Sickness—as her physiology morphed from male to female. Her thought processes remained much the same—she was still Elic, after all—but those feelings that were governed by body chemistry, such as sexual arousal, were now those of a female.

“Just because he’s not in his bed doesn’t mean we can’t find him and tap his seed,” Lili said.

“Are you sure Isabel would want this?” Elle asked.

“She said, ‘I’ve decided to try and scare me up some high-quality spermatozoa.’ I should think Jason’s would fit the . . . Hmm . . .” Lili was staring through the window behind Elle. “Those lights aren’t usually kept on at night, are they?”

“What lights?” Tracking Lili’s gaze across the courtyard, Elle saw that the gymnasium windows were brightly lit. “No, they aren’t, but somehow Jason doesn’t quite strike me as the workout type. It’s probably Karen or Hitch.”