“I’m sorry . . .” he said, “.., I’m sorry. . ..”
“There’s no need,” she said, standing up and putting her lips to his. He continued to murmur his apologies, however.
“I haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “So adolescent.”
She kept her silence, knowing anything she said would only begin a further round of self-reproach. He slipped away into the bathroom to find a towel. When he returned she was picking up her clothes.
“Are you going?” he said.
“Only to my room.”
“Do you have to?” he said. “I know that wasn’t much of a performance, but . . . the bed’s big enough for us both. And I don’t snore.”
“The bed’s enormous.”
“So . . . would you stay?” he said.
“I’d like to.”
He made a charming smile. “I’m honored,” he said. “Will you excuse me a moment?”
He switched the bathroom light back on and disappeared inside, closing the door, leaving her to lie back on the bed and wonder at this whole turn of events. Its very oddness seemed appropriate. After all, this whole journey had begun with an act of misplaced love: love become murder. Now a new dislocation. Here she was, lying in the bed of a man with a body far from beautiful, whose bulk she longed to have upon her; whose hands were capable of fratricide but aroused her like none she’d ever known; who’d walked more worlds than an opium poet, but couldn’t speak love without stumbling; who was a titan, and yet. afraid. She made a nest among his duck-down pillows and waited there for him to come back and tell her a story of love.
He reappeared after a long while and slipped beneath the sheets beside her. True to her imaginings, he said he loved her at last, but only once he’d turned the light out, and his eyes were not available for study.
When she slept, it was deeply, and when she woke again, it was like sleeping, dark and pleasurable, the former because the drapes were still drawn, and between their cracks she could see that the sky was still benighted, the latter because Oscar was behind her, and inside. One of his hands was upon her breast, the other lifting her leg so that he could ease his upward stroke. He’d entered her with skill and discretion, she realized. Not only had he not stirred her until he was embedded, but he’d chosen the virgin passage, which—had he suggested it while she was awake—she’d have attempted to coax him from, fearing the discomfort. In truth, there was none, though the sensation was quite unlike anything she’d felt before. He kissed her neck and shoulder blade, light kisses, as though he was unaware of her wakefulness. She made it known with a sigh. His stroke slowed and stopped, but she pressed her buttocks back to meet his thrust, satisfying his curiosity as to the limit of its access, which was to say none. She was happy to accept him entirely, trapping his hand against her breast to press it to rougher service, while putting her own at the connecting place. He’d dutifully slipped on a condom before entering her, which, together with the fact that he’d already poured forth once tonight, made him a near perfect lover: slow and certain.
She didn’t use the dark to reconfigure him. The man pressing his face into her hair, and biting at her shoulder, wasn’t—like the mystif he’d described—a reflection of imagined ideals. It was Oscar Godolphin, paunch, curiosity, and all. What she did reconfigure was herself, so that she became in her mind’s eye a glyph of sensation: a line dividing from the coil of her pierced core, up through her belly to the points of her breasts, then intersecting again at her nape, crossing and becoming woven spirals beneath the hood of her skull. Her imagination added a further refinement, inscribing a circle around this figure, which burned in the darkness behind her lips like a vision. Her rapture was perfected then: being an abstraction in his arms, yet pleasured like flesh. There was no greater luxury.
He asked if they might move, saying only, “The wound. . .” by way of explanation.