The Paris Apartment(60)

I came back to the apartment as dusk was falling, climbed the stairs, stood on this same spot and knocked on his door.

Benjamin answered it quickly, before I had a chance to change my mind.

“Sophie,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans; his feet were bare. There was music playing on the record player behind him, a record spinning round lazily. An open beer in his hand. It occurred to me that he might have someone there with him, which I hadn’t even considered.

“Come in,” he said. I followed him into the apartment. I suddenly felt as though I was trespassing, which was absurd. This was my home, he was the intruder.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked.

“No. Thank you.”

“Please—I have some wine open.” He gestured to his beer bottle. “It’s wrong—my drinking while you don’t.”

Somehow he had already managed to wrong-foot me, by being so gracious, so charming. I should have been prepared for it.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want any. This is not a social visit.” Besides, I could still feel my head swimming from the wine I had drunk in the restaurant.

He grimaced. “I apologize,” he said. “If this is about the restaurant—my questions—I know that was presumptuous of me. I realize I crossed a line.”

“It’s not that.” My heart was beating very fast. I had been carried here by my anger, but now I felt afraid. Voicing this thing would bring it into the light, would finally make it real. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

He frowned. “What?” He hadn’t expected this, I thought. Now it was his turn to be on the back foot. It gave me the confidence I needed to go on.

“The notes.”

He looked nonplussed. “Notes?”

“You know what I’m talking about. The notes—the demands for payment. I have come to tell you that you do not want to threaten me. There is little I will not do to protect myself. I will . . . I will stop at nothing.”

I can still hear his awkward, apologetic laugh. “Madame Meunier—Sophie—I’m so sorry but I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. What notes?”

“The ones you have been leaving for me,” I said. “In my letterbox. Under my door.”

I watched his face so carefully, but I saw only confusion. Either he was a consummate actor, which I wouldn’t have put past him, or what I was saying really didn’t mean anything to him. Could it be true? I looked at him, at his bemused expression, and I realized, in spite of myself, that I believed him. But it didn’t make sense. If not him, then who?

“I—” The room seemed to tilt a little: a combination of the wine I had drunk and this new realization.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked.

And I did sit, because suddenly I wasn’t sure that I could stand.

He poured me a glass of wine without asking, this time. I needed it. I took the offered glass and tried not to hold the stem so tightly that it snapped.

He sat down next to me. I looked at him—this man who had been a thorn in my side since he arrived, who had occupied so much space in my thoughts. Who had made me feel seen—with all the discomfort that came with that—just when I thought I had become invisible for good. Invisible had been safe, if occasionally lonely. But I had forgotten how exciting it could feel to be seen.

I was in a kind of trance, perhaps. All the wine I had drunk before coming here to face him. The pressure that had been building in me for weeks as my blackmailer taunted me. The loneliness that had been growing for years in secrecy and silence.

I leaned over and I kissed him.

Almost immediately I pulled away. I could not believe what I had done. I put a hand up to my face, touched my hot cheek.

He smiled at me. I hadn’t seen this smile before. This was something new. Something intimate and secret. Something just for me.

“I—I need to leave.” I put my wine glass down and as I did I knocked his beer bottle to the ground. “Oh, mon Dieu. I’m sorry—”

“I don’t care about the beer.” And then he cradled my head in his hands and pulled me toward him and kissed me back.

The scent of him, the foreignness of it, the alien feel of his lips on mine, the loss of my self-control: these were all a surprise. But not the kiss itself, not really. In some part of myself I had known I wanted him.

“Ever since that first day,” he said, as though he were echoing my own thoughts, “when I saw you in the courtyard, I’ve wanted to know more about you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, because it was. But what made it feel less so was the way he was looking at me.

“It’s not. I’ve been hoping to do that ever since that night at your drinks party. When it was just the two of us in your husband’s study—”

I thought of the outrage I had felt, finding him in there looking at that photograph. The fear. But fear and desire are so tangled up in one another, after all.

“That’s absurd,” I said. “What about Dominique?”

“Dominique?” He seemed genuinely confused.

“I saw you two together at the drinks.”

He laughed. “She could eye-fuck a statue. And it was convenient for me to be able to distract your husband from the fact that I was lusting after his wife.”