Cleopatra and Frankenstein(69)

Cleo was standing in his apartment, looking at the large white walls of his living room. Below them the evening traffic provided its usual complaint of car horns and sirens.

“How can you live with nothing on your walls?” Cleo asked.

Anders shrugged. He spent all day being ambushed by images at the magazine; it was a relief to come home to sparsity.

“Can I get you something?” he asked. “A drink, maybe, or …”

He strode toward her and picked her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist and let him snake his tongue inside her mouth. They toppled onto the sofa, but Cleo shook her head and pulled him down onto the floor. Of course. Last time they had been on the sofa. She was encased in layers. He pulled off a sweater, a turtleneck, a T-shirt, then unbuttoned her jeans to reveal a pair of tights beneath. He laughed as he tugged the stockings off her feet.

“You’re like opening a Russian doll.”

She offered him her slow, catlike smile.

“Worth the effort,” she said.

She was spread naked on the carpet before him, her clothes scattered in a halo around her head. He ripped off his own shirt and pushed his trousers and underwear to his knees. He didn’t even wait to kick them off before he spread her legs and was thrusting inside her, dipping hard and fast. He was in another world, no thoughts but the sensation of her wrapped tight around him. God, she felt good, even better than he remembered.

Cleo brought her hands to his chest and pushed him away. She stared up at him seriously.

“Anders,” she said. “This isn’t sex.”

He looked down at her, panting.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what you’re doing—this jabbing thing—it’s not sex. It’s you masturbating with my body instead of your hand.”

“I—uh. God, Cleo … Well, what would you like me to do?”

Cleo put her hands on his lower back and pulled him deeper inside her.

“Do you feel that?” she said. “That ridge at the top in the back? That’s what you’re trying to hit. Well, not hit, exactly, just stroke with the tip of … Yes, yes, like that, but slower. Roll up against it. Good … Good … Nice and slow. Mm-hmm, keep rolling and stroking, stroking and rolling. Yes, yes, that’s it …”

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.”