A Ladder to the Sky(54)
I shook my head as I brushed myself down. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What were you doing in there, anyway?’
‘In where?’
‘In my study?’
‘Your study?’ you asked, raising an eyebrow. I could hear the petulance in my voice and tried to control it as I didn’t want to ruin the evening ahead. But it was my study and we’d always referred to it as such. On the rare occasions when you used your laptop you always did so at the kitchen table.
‘The study, then,’ I said.
‘Nothing,’ you told me, stepping past me into the kitchen and turning on the kettle. ‘I was looking for a pen, that’s all. Anyway, I thought the plan was to meet on campus later?’
‘I needed a shower,’ I said. ‘I’ve been running around like a lunatic all day. I won’t be long and we can walk in together.’
Before going towards the bedroom to undress, however, something made me go into the other room to look around. Glancing towards my desk, I could see a few pens lying there, and when I placed my hand on top of the desktop computer, ignoring the part of my brain that told me to leave well alone, it was warm. My first thought was that you had been using it to access pornography. Had I disturbed you in the act? I moved the mouse to wake it from sleep and checked the search history but there was nothing incriminating there, only searches that I’d made myself over the previous few days. Perhaps it had simply been the sun, I thought. After all, due to the positioning of the house, the study could become oppressively warm during the afternoon.
The reading and interview went very well. Leona Alwin combined erudition with a wonderful sense of humour, talking about her work and the work of others with real insight. You seemed dazzled by her and, as the lights came up, you turned to me with the sort of enthusiasm that I hadn’t seen on your face in a long time.
‘Isn’t she terrific?’ you said, and I nodded in agreement as you took my hand. We walked across the courtyard towards the reception being held in the registry building. Once inside, we sipped champagne, waiting for an opportunity to introduce ourselves to the guest of honour. Out of the blue you reached forward to kiss me and it wasn’t just a peck, it was a real kiss, our lips parted and as your tongue entered my mouth I felt a warmth spreading through my body that reminded me how I had never wanted a man as much as I continued to want you. When you pulled away, you had a mischievous expression on your face. You leaned in and I thought you were going to kiss me again but no, you simply whispered in my ear:
‘Let’s go somewhere and fuck.’
My eyes opened wide in surprise and I put a hand to my mouth to stop myself from laughing aloud, but the idea, the spontaneity of it, aroused me instantly. I looked around at the increasingly busy room. ‘We can’t,’ I said. ‘We’d be caught.’
‘So what?’ you said, taking me by the hand and leading me down a corridor, where we tried a few doors, all of which were locked. I glanced back in case we were being followed but no one was going to leave the main party while Leona was still holding court. We turned the corner into a dead end with just two office doors, one on either side. I tried one and you tried the other but neither would open.
‘Out of luck,’ you said.
I looked at you, grabbed your arm, and smiled.
‘What?’ you asked.
I stepped back into the corner and you raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know what I was doing, it was terribly risky because there were about a hundred people gathered at the end of the hallway, but I knew that I had to have you right then or I would go mad.
‘Here?’ you asked.
‘Here,’ I said, and you came towards me and pressed me against the wall, reaching under my dress to pull my underwear down as you unzipped your trousers. It was only a matter of seconds before you were inside me and, as we fucked, we looked into each other’s eyes and your hand wrapped itself lightly around my throat, your thumb pressing hard against my carotid artery. When we came, we came together. It was intense and sexy and when we were done we stared at each other, our lust somehow amplified now rather than quenched. A few moments later, we tidied our clothing and returned to the party, giggling like teenagers.
The first person we met as we walked through the doors was Leona Alwin herself and, although I would have liked to go to the bathroom to clean up before talking to her, there was no way we could just ignore her. I introduced myself, embarrassed by what I was sure was the smell of sex that enveloped us, but she didn’t appear to notice it. Instead she seemed overjoyed to meet me.
‘Oh, of course,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘You wrote that wonderful novel!’
‘You’re very kind,’ I said. ‘And very generous. Your endorsement was really helpful.’
‘I’m sure it did very little,’ she said, waving my gratitude away. ‘Good work will always out, that’s what I believe. It was one of the finest debuts I’d read in years.’
‘It’s really admirable that someone of your stature is so interested in the work of new writers,’ I said.
‘Well, I try to keep up,’ she replied. ‘I can’t bear ageing novelists who refuse to bother with the young. Most of them seem to think that they’re the only ones worth reading, you see, and that literature as we know it will come to an end when they publish their final book. Well, the men do, certainly. Can you imagine a seventy-five-year-old white Englishman with twenty novels under his belt reading a debut by a twenty-eight-year-old black girl of Caribbean descent? It would never happen. They’d much rather tell the world that they’re re-reading all of Henry James in chronological order and finding him a little smug.’ She turned to you then, Maurice, and I knew by the way you were standing that you were waiting for her to recognize you.