La Ceinture Read online

  She had worn the softest underwear she owned today, but the memory of those words still made her body respond below the waist, warm on her backside and wet in the front.

  At least the belts she sold did nothing for her, evoked no special reaction.

  Still, her anger sustained her through the day, waning only as night came on and she sat alone in her apartment, something mindless on the television and something tasteless on her dinner plate. The emotional effort had exhausted her, so sleep came easily enough, numbing and welcome.

  Thursday was harder. Anger had given way to guilt, shame, and recrimination. She tortured herself with fears of pregnancy and disease. Who knew what strange or sick things he had done with whatever kind of cheap tarts and low sluts?

  Like girls who let him pull up their skirts and beat them, whispered her mind, compounding her guilt.

  She should have made him wear a condom. She shouldn’t have drunk so much. She should have worn her underwear. She shouldn’t have gone to his room. So many shoulds and shouldn’ts, an ocean of blame to wallow in. Eventually she exceeded even her own capacity for guilt, and had to refute a few fears.

  Like pregnancy. She was always on the pill anyway, because she liked the regularity it brought to her period. Also the dampening this brand happened to exert on her libido, whispered some distant voice in her mind, but she ignored it, like she always did. Her last boyfriend had complained loudly about her paranoid requirement that he use a condom even while she was on the pill, and his arguments came back to her now, comfortingly. She could accept them now that she was in the position of having had unprotected sex. The risk of pregnancy was really quite low.

  There was still disease, though, and she became angry again. What had he been thinking? She almost made an appointment with a doctor, but the idea of having to admit she’d had sex with a virtual stranger was daunting and she put the phonebook down. Instead, she decided to confront him about it.

  In bed, in her pajamas, she felt righteous and strong about her decision. She would face him down, make him take a test. Why should she have to? Why should she be ashamed of fulfilling her needs, even with a stranger? He was as much at fault as she—no, more so. Because… She didn’t really have a “because”, but she didn’t need one. What she needed was release. Thinking of seeing him again made her thighs twitch. Just from loneliness, of course. She wasn’t actually attracted to such a brute.

  Her nightstand drawer yielded up its secret treasure, and she was pleased to see the batteries were still willing to serve.

  But her body was not. It rejected her ministrations, refusing artificial food when it had so recently been fed with real meat. Frustrated, she turned the device off and banished it back into the drawer, as if it were somehow to blame.

  Friday, she was nervous and scared, the bravery of the previous night no stronger than the memory of dream. But she had to, really had to do this. Work crawled by, the thought of returning to the bar looming like an execution in the distance. All night she stalled, changing clothes, procrastinating, until almost 11:00, long after the hour they had quit the bar on Tuesday. Then she cursed herself for wasting time, and dashed out the door to her car, pretending to hope that she wouldn’t be too late.

  Jackie’s was even more crowded, of course, a fresh weekend just starting. She wore blue jeans for comfort and to dispel any foolish notions any parties might have about what would be occurring, and a silk top for power and confidence. Plenty of underwear, too. Pushing through the crowd, her angry demeanor like a shield, she went to the table where he had last held court.

  Much to her surprise and dismay, he was still there, with all his friends. He saw her coming, and met her halfway.

  “Hello,” he shouted over the din. His smile seemed genuine and open, and she had to clutch at her anger to keep it from deserting her.

  “We need to talk,” she yelled back. Unlike every man she’d ever known, he did not flinch or retreat at those terrible words. Instead he nodded agreement, took her arm, and plowed a path through the crowd to the door.

  Outside, they stood under a streetlamp, neutral ground between his bar, his house, and her car. This was not what she had imagined, not what she had prepared for, and she did not know where to start.

  He started. “I was hoping to see you again.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” A hint of frosty accusation. She was good at that.

  “I didn’t want to bother you at work. You know, after…that.” He delicately referred to the strangeness of that night, apologizing for it, without recrimination or lewdness.

  “You could have called.” But of course she had never given him her number.

  Instead of pointing out her illogic, he just smiled sheepishly as if he had been the guilty one, and shrugged his shoulders in appeasement. This unexpected generosity, an unrequited gift of responsibility, infuriated her.

  “Why didn’t you use a condom?” she snapped.

  Now he almost blushed in real embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I should have. But I don’t have anything to worry about, do I? You can tell me if I do. I won’t be mad, because it was my fault.”

  “You? What about me?”

  “Oh,” he said, surprised. “No, I’m clean. I know that. I wouldn’t have…done that otherwise.”

  “What about babies?” She spoke down to him like a schoolteacher rebuking a foolish child. “Did you think about that?”

  The shame became real, his face dark red in the pale light. “I pulled out.” His tone admitted it was inadequate. “At the last minute. I know that’s not really safe, but something came over me. I just couldn’t stop. I’m sorry.”

  And then he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “But if it comes to that, I’ll do what’s right.”

  She wanted to scream in frustration. Even when he was admitting his guilt, he was impervious to fear. Even faced with the direst consequences, he refused to run.

  “Why?” she said, meaning why are you so unlike me, but he could not know that.

  “I don’t know. Something came over me… I wanted that moment, that real thing, no matter what the cost. I felt alive, for the first…” He trailed off. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again,” he promised her, a penitent little boy.

  “Do you have a condom now?” The question startled even her. But it was the only way to get control again, to make him into just another man.

  “Yes.” He recovered his balance quickly and easily, riding out the sudden change in pitch. “I’m prepared for whatever may happen, this time.”

  He was still leaving her an out, still not cocksure of his conquest. Struggling to retain command, she forged ahead.

  “Then let’s try to get it right this time.” Breathless at her audacity, she turned to the street and tried to pick out his townhouse.

  “Yes, my lady,” he said with a grin, because really, what else could he say at that moment? Gently taking her arm, he escorted her across the street and up the stairs. At each door, at each landing, she felt her heart pound and wondered at herself.

  But all of her self-discipline and will were bound up in not looking at the belt he wore, not acknowledging its existence, not giving the slightest hint of a clue that the strip of leather could possibly matter to anyone or anything except his trousers and gravity.

  In his bedroom again, he kissed her gently, petting an unpredictable but beautiful wildcat. She responded with the practiced arts of seduction, melting into him, reaching to put her arms around his neck, while her brain issued careful instructions. A gentle tug at his shirt collar, and he took it off. A subtle nod, and he continued disrobing, dropping his pants on the floor and standing naked before her.

  The belt was safely out of sight, still trapped within his jeans, and her sense of control was not challenged.

  He reached for her waist, but she shook her head and took off her own clothes. Not like a cheap stripper, enticing him with each move, but merely the business of undressing, laying her garments n
eatly across the back of a chair. Then she lay down on the bed and opened her arms in invitation.

  With gentle courtesy, he joined her. Holding their naked bodies together, feeling the heat and pressure of his bare skin, she began to become aroused. His hands were rough and strong, but the grave and delicate way he touched her made her feel safe. Not inflamed with passion, but safe.

  There was a moment of good humor while he fumbled with the condom, and then he was inside her and everything was all right. Moving on top of her, his large body above, her legs apart and open, his steady breathing like a steam engine climbing a hill, she felt happy. This was what she knew, this was what she had always thought of as good sex. The time passed pleasantly, and she was comforted.

  But she had to fake her climax, when it became clear he could not last much longer. With careful practice she made her body lie to him, hide her own disappointment and unfulfilled longings. Clasped to him while he swam in the afterglow of orgasm, dazed and idle, she fought back tears.

  Afterwards, kissing and small talk, she said all the right things.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, as he pulled off the used condom and dropped it into a wastebasket. And then, while he was coming back into bed, “You’re so handsome.”

  But he said all the right things, too. “You’re fucking gorgeous.” He ran a finger down her chest, circling her breast with a delicate touch and raw admiration. “I’m so glad you came back. Tell me what to do to get your number.”

  His frankness stung her dishonesty. She could never reveal that she had faked her ecstasy, so she offered him more of his own.

  “You don’t have to use a condom next time. I’m on the pill. And clean, as you put it.” You had to actually have sex with people to be dirty, and she had let her last boyfriend drift away unclaimed and uncontested years ago.

  To his credit, he did no more than raise an eyebrow. He understood and accepted her testing without complaint. She could not understand that, unless he was so certain of success that he never feared trial.

  “So there will be a next time?”

  “If you play your cards right,” she answered automatically, sticking to the script, the one that made everything safe and predictable. The politics of power, withholding and rewarding, controlling and manipulating.

  But he was terrible at the game. “Awesome.” He grinned, and kissed her again.

  To change the subject, she went to the window, a sheet wrapped around her nakedness, and stared out over the bay.

  “Why did you say you should move, before?”

  He came to join her, standing behind her.

  “I’ve had enough of the sea.”

  Because she could not speak her own heart, she asked for his. “Tell me.”

  He put his arms around her, and told his story, his voice a little sad, his eyes always on the lights on the ocean.

  “When I left home, a young and foolish boy, my best friend and I wanted to see the world. In time-honored tradition, we became sailors, because, we joked, we had no talents that would admit us to the circus life.

  “We worked too hard, and never got paid enough, but the life was all we wanted. Hopping ships wherever we found them, picking ones that were going places we had not been yet. So we wound up on a tramp freighter out of Brazil with a less than sterling reputation. Well deserved, too—the captain had been remiss in his paperwork—so rather than go north and through the canal, he decided to go south and around the cape.

  “The cape is a fearsome place, where storms appear from nowhere with a savage fury that awes you before it terrifies you. It seems a place put there by God, to remind man that no matter what he builds, the wild world is still a dangerous place, and all our plans and devices like candles in the dark, waiting for a puff of wind.

  “Just after sundown on a peaceful, easy day, our first taste of the storm was a wall of water twenty-feet high that swept over us like wind. For the next three hours we fought for our lives and our ship, in waves that crested thirty feet or more, in a howling gale that tore away everything not nailed to the deck.

  “And then it was gone as quickly as it had come. But it had taken two of us with it, and left one man crushed and dying under cargo that had not been properly stowed.

  “I searched for hours, unable to believe that my friend was gone with the storm. A lifetime of adventures together, from the kindergarten playground to high school hijinks, washed away in an instant. And with it, my youth.

  “I sailed another voyage after that, but it was all work and misery. The joy had gone out of it. So I came home and found a landlubber’s job, pouring solid concrete into piles that will never move.

  “And here I sat, without lust for anything, until I saw you in Jackie’s, your nipples poking out under your shirt, and hunger in your eyes. Now there is something I want, again. Now there is something to gain.”

  He hugged her, kissed the side of her face. A beautiful story, some cold part of her mind whispered, I’m sure he tells it to all the girls. The sheet between them seemed like a wall of stone, but she could not let it fall. It held her heart apart even while her body melded to fit his.

  Chapter Four

  There wasn’t a next time for weeks. Although she came to see him at Jackie’s every weekend night, although she came to know his friends and laughed and joked with them, although she went back to his flat every time, she always found some excuse to leave before sex. She managed to stretch her period over two weekends, but he was never suspicious or even cranky.

  She learned why they called him chief. He was the crew leader for their team. His authority was never questioned, but she never saw him exert it. He never had to. When he made a suggestion, it was always a good one, and people just followed through on it.

  “Ya,” one of the men told her, “he’s like that at work, too. They keep trying to promote him, but he can’t go any higher without getting stuck behind a desk. He says there’s time enough for that when he can’t do the field work anymore. And thank God,” the man added. “He’s the best chief I’ve ever had.”

  She learned that the girlfriends of the group were envious, but not jealous. All of them had tried, in one way or another, but none had ever gotten past his politeness. None had been able to compete with the mistress who had used and abandoned him. They did not have the mystery of the sea, its dark and murky depths hidden under a smooth and cool surface.

  Or perhaps he had just not been ready yet, to forgive and forget, to move on.

  What she did not learn was why she ran away each time they returned to his bed. It was not that she was playing hard to get, trying to string out the lure of her mystery to keep him interested. She could see him getting frustrated, though he did not let it affect his behavior. He was not a kitten practicing the hunt, but a man pursuing the leviathan, to capture and render it into the belly of his ship, to make it a part of himself forever.

  And she was frustrated, crying herself to sleep half the time. But only in the dark, where no one could see her tears, not even her. She wanted to be caught, but she didn’t know how to surrender.

  “Not again,” he finally said, as she made another excuse to leave his room. “Why do you even come here, if only to walk away?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she lied. “I just have to get up early tomorrow. We’re doing inventory, so we all have to work the weekend.”

  “It’s just coincidence that keeps us apart? Three weeks in a row?”

  “I wasn’t counting. Is the number important?”

  But he brushed off her guilt-ploy, immune as always. Under narrowed eyes, he studied her carefully until she blushed from the scrutiny.

  “I’ll think on it.” It sounded like a promise.

  The next week was much the same, except that even she was bored with herself now. A few more weeks like this and she would drift away, if he did not. Tonight, he laughed and drank with his friends as always, but when they went up to his room, the air changed.

  “You’re st
ill here.”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Why would you be?” But he wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  Just as well, because she had none to give.

  “I’ve been around the world. I’ve seen a lot of things. I learned to keep my eyes open and ask questions.”

  When he did not continue, she had to speak, to break the tension. “What are you talking about?” She was unwarrantedly petulant.

  “I asked about you, Well, not you specifically, of course, but about girls like you.”

  “And what kind of girl is that?” Her shoulders tensed in anger, expecting a kind of lecture on the theory and nature of cock-teases or frigidity.

  “One who needs a different approach. A good sailor trims his sails to the wind he gets.”

  “You’re not making sense,” she snapped. “I should go.”

  But when she started for the door, he blocked her way, although he didn’t actually move more than an inch.

  “Not just yet.” Slowly, deliberately, he began to remove his belt, pinning her with his eyes.

  Conflicting emotions surged inside her. Fear at his menace, shame at the sound of the belt sliding free, and impossible and irrational desire, her body responding instantly even though it had ignored four weeks of her best efforts to please herself.

  “Lie down on the bed,” he said softly.

  “No. You’re scaring me.”

  “We can’t chart our own course through the shoals,” he muttered cryptically, and she had no idea what he was talking about. “We take the one we’re given.”

  Then, drawing back a fraction of an inch, giving her room and permission to escape, he said something anyone could understand. “Walk out that door… Don’t bother coming back.”

  The threat of separation struck at her like a fist, more terrifying than his bulk and stature. The emotional strength that he could cut her free in an instant and not look back was more frightening than the muscles in his body.

  “Take off your shirt. And lie down on the bed. I won’t ask again.”