“Just means that my publicity people are earning their keep. What are you doing these days?”
She was running the press office of an independent television network. She wished, she said, that she had stuck with acting, certain that she would, by now, have been on the West End stage. She ran her hand through her long, dark hair and smiled like Emma Peel, and I would have followed her anywhere. I closed my book and put it into the pocket of my jacket.
We walked through the park, hand in hand. The spring flowers nodded their heads at us, yellow and orange and white, as we passed.
“Like Wordsworth,” I told her. “Daffodils.”
“Those are narcissi,” she said. “Daffodils are a kind of narcissus.”
It was spring in Hyde Park, and we were almost able to forget the city surrounding us. We stopped at an ice cream stand and bought two violently colored frozen ice cream confections.
“Was there someone else?” I asked her, eventually, as casually as I could, licking my ice cream. “Someone you left me for?”
She shook her head. “You were getting too serious,” she said. “That was all. And I wasn’t a homewrecker.”
Later that night, much later, she repeated it. “I wasn’t a homewrecker,” she said, and she stretched, languorously, and added, “—then. Now, I don’t care.”
I had not actually told her that I was divorced. We had eaten sushi and sashimi in a restaurant in Greek Street, drunk enough sake to warm us and to cast a rice-wine glow over the evening. We took a golden-painted taxi back to my flat in Chelsea.
The wine was warm in my chest. In my bedroom we kissed and hugged and giggled. Becky examined my CD collection carefully, and then she put on the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Sessions, singing along in a quiet voice. This was only a few hours ago, but I cannot remember the point at which she removed her clothes. I remember her breasts, however, still beautiful, although they had lost the firmness and shape they had when she was little more than a girl: her nipples were deep red and pronounced.
I had put on some weight. She had not.
“Will you go down on me?” she whispered, when we reached my bed, and I did. Her labia were engorged, purple, full and long, and they opened like a flower to my mouth when I began to lick her. Her clitoris swelled beneath my tongue and the salty taste of her filled my world, and I licked and teased and sucked and nibbled at her sex for what felt like hours.
She came, once, spasmodically, under my tongue, and then she pulled my head up to hers, and we kissed some more, and then, finally, she guided me inside her.
“Was your cock that big fifteen years ago?” she asked.
“I think so,” I told her.
“Mmm.”
After a while she said, “I want you to come in my mouth.” And, soon after, I did.
We lay in silence, side by side, and she said, “Do you hate me?”
“No,” I said, sleepily. “I used to. I hated you for years. And I loved you, too.”
“And now?”
“No, I don’t hate you anymore. It’s gone away. Floated off into the night, like a balloon.” I realized as I said it that I was speaking the truth.
She snuggled closer to me, pressed her warm skin against my skin. “I can’t believe I ever let you go. I won’t make that mistake twice. I do love you.”
“Thank you.”
“Not, thank you, idiot. Try I love you too.”
“I love you too,” I echoed, and, sleepily, I kissed her still sticky lips.
And then I slept.
In my dream, I felt something uncurling inside me, something moving and changing. The cold of stone, a lifetime of darkness. A rending, and a ripping, as if my heart were breaking; a moment of utter pain. Blackness and strangeness and blood.
I must have dreamed the gray dawn as well. I opened my eyes, moving away from one dream but not entirely coming awake. My chest was open, a dark split that ran from my navel to my neck, and a huge, misshapen hand, Plasticine-gray, was pulling back into my chest. There was long dark hair caught between the stone fingers. The hand retreated into my chest as I watched, as an insect will vanish into a crack when the lights are turned on. And, as I squinted sleepily down at it, my acceptance of the strangeness of it all my only clue that this was truly another dream, the crack in my chest healed, knit and mended, and the cold hand vanished for good. I felt my eyes closing once more. I was tired, and I swam back into the comforting, sake-flavored dark.
I slept once more, but the rest of the dreams are now lost to me.