He wasn’t used to being told what to do. It irked him. He thought about pulling out, but it was Cleo, after all. The one he wanted most. The one he wanted to please most. She slid two long fingers into his mouth, swirling them around his tongue. They tasted ashy from her cigarettes, but he didn’t care. Her eyes were looking up into his with that funny, furious intensity she had. They were an unusual dappled green, incredibly light. How had he never noticed before? She pulled her hand away and pushed it into the space between his stomach and hers. He could feel the curve of her knuckle moving against him as she touched herself. Her eyelids were fluttering open and closed like wings beating. She slipped her hand down to where he entered her, squeezing him between her fingers as he rolled in and out, in and out. He lasted another ten seconds, allowed himself a few quick pumps to finish off, then released inside her.
She laughed as he collapsed the weight of his body onto her with a groan.
“All right,” she said, giving his back a pat. “We’ll work on it.”
He was getting too old to have sex on the floor like this. His lower back gave a twinge of complaint as he hauled himself off her and hastily tucked his shriveling penis back into his underwear. Cleo’s pale body lay still on the rug next to him like a vase of lilies tipped over. She was staring up at the ceiling with a blank, inscrutable expression. What was she thinking? Did she regret it? She seemed suddenly to have receded from him. Her body was there, but he could feel her presence withdraw. It felt like stepping from the sunlight into shadows.
“Got a cigarette?” he asked, straining to sound casual.
She wordlessly rolled onto her stomach to reach for her bag and remove her pack, placing one in her mouth and lighting it with a grace born of practice. Exhaling, she passed it to him.
“You’re not in South Africa,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Did you have to work or something?”
Another head shake.
“Why then?”
She sat up and took the cigarette out of his mouth, bringing it back to her own. He could see a damp patch on the rug from where his semen had leaked out of her.
“You don’t speak anymore?” he asked.
Cleo rested her light eyes on him. The softness he had witnessed in her just moments before was gone, replaced by a severity that unsettled him. Her voice, when she did speak, was low.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Why didn’t you go to South Africa?”
She looked around for somewhere to ash the cigarette, then tapped the embers into her palm.
“Jesus. Here—”
He leaped up and grabbed a cup from the kitchen counter. That was the problem with Cleo, he thought, she never asked for help with anything. Kneeling back down in front of her, he took her hand in his and gently wiped the gray ash from her palm into the cup.
“I didn’t want to go anymore,” she said quietly.
“You two have a fight or something?”
Her pale shoulders were hunched close to her ears. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sure it matters to Frank.”
“Frank’s a drunk,” she said quietly.
Anders thought about this for a moment. Frank did drink a lot, he had to admit, though so did he. Of course, Anders being Scandinavian, it was just a cultural thing. And it wasn’t like Frank was some homeless guy drinking himself to death under a bridge. If he was a drunk, he was a high-functioning one at least.
“Is that why you’re here, then?” he said. “To get back at him for drinking?”
She shook her head again and looked down at her hand, which he was still holding in his.
“So what?” he asked. “You just wanted the company?”
She grabbed his fingers with surprising firmness.
“I wanted you,” she said.
What astonished him most was how easy it was to be with her, how little guilt he felt. He had thought of her often since that drunken night they spent together, of course, but he had known to push any feelings toward her down to a deep, untouched part of himself. The day Frank told him they were getting married, he had felt a strange kind of betrayal—by Frank or Cleo, he couldn’t tell—and had vowed to keep his distance from her. And he had managed for almost a year. Until now.
Every evening after work he raced home to see her, anxious to fold her back into his arms. They barely left his apartment. They ordered platters of sashimi and ate them with their fingers. They smoked weed out of an apple and had slow, trancelike sex. They watched movies, enfolded in each other. They ignored the snow softly falling through the window. They took baths. They drank tea. They squeezed each other’s feet. They played each other music. They built a snowman on the balcony. They made soup from scratch. They snorted coke and stayed up talking until the morning chased them back to bed. They slept next to each other, sometimes fitfully, sometimes peacefully, every night for two weeks.