Chapter 32
Oxblood
IVY
The leather under my thighs is cool through my creased and damp sundress. I am sun-cream-sticky and slightly out of breath from being carried out of a hotel by my husband in front of strangers.
Alistair is beside me on the seat. The afternoon light catches the side of his face. His tie is the color of bitter chocolate. His hand is on my thigh, just above the knee, and it is not in any hurry. When we don’t turn in the direction of his family home, I frown at him.
“Where are we going?”
“A party.”
“Whose?”
He turns his head to look at me. “Sarah and Matt's.”
The Aperol moves around in my body. The pool. Sarah's pretty mouth. Matt's thick cock. I feel a current in my clit. “What kind of party is it?”
“The kind we went to in Spain, with Madison.”
“They’re in London?”
“Apparently so.”
Sarah's small, feminine hands. Matt watching me from across the jet pool. Alistair watching me throughout. The pleasure of it, the strangeness.
“Are you in the mood for that?” he asks.
I’m drunk and reckless. I’m wet, and I feel like licking him all over. “I think I'm in the mood for everything tonight.”
“Isn’t that funny,” replies Alistair, a slow smile spreading. “So am I.”
“We're making a stop. I'm putting you in something new.”
“Alistair Ravenscroft. Are you taking me shopping after I have had a bottle and a half of champagne and way too much Aperol spritz?”
“I am.”
“Is this wise?”
“Probably not.”
I laugh and look down at myself, dress wrinkled, swimsuit damp, sun cream on my collarbone, the cut on my forehead, my hair messy and half-down.
The shop is small and pale and smells of roses. There are no rails. There is a long bench in cream velvet, two chairs, a table with a vase, and a door at the back. Whatever is for sale is not in the room.
A woman in sand-colored satin comes through from the back. Fifties, dark hair pinned up, the kind of expensive that is quiet about itself.
“Mr Ravenscroft.”
“Diana.”
“And this must be Mrs Ravenscroft. Welcome. I have a few things ready. Champagne while we work?”
“Yes,” says Alistair.
I grin, feeling like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
Diana disappears through the back door. A girl I had not noticed in the corner appears with a tray, two glasses, a bottle that is already open. She pours and withdraws.
The velvet bench is impossibly soft, and the champagne is icy.
Diana comes back with three dresses on hangers.
The first is black, with a high neck and a slit.
The second is silver, sequinned, narrow.
The third is oxblood. Heavy silk. Bias-cut.
Thin straps. The neckline is low and the back, when she turns the hanger to show me, is not there.
The dress is open all the way down. The hem will sit mid-thigh.
“That one,” says Alistair, before I have spoken.
“Try them all if you like,” he adds. “We can buy them all. But I want that one.”
The fitting room is at the back, behind a curtain of the same cream velvet. I peel the swimsuit off. I rinse my hands in the small basin with the lemongrass and ginger soap that probably costs more than my old monthly rent. I stand naked for a moment and look at myself.
The bruise on my ribs has gone yellow at the edges. The cut on my forehead is healing. My shoulders are pink from the rooftop. My nipples are still cold from the damp bikini.
I put the oxblood dress on. The fabric falls over me like water.
The straps are thin enough that I can feel the silk move.
The back is open from my shoulder blades to the small of my spine and I can feel the cool air conditioner on my bare skin.
When I walk out, Alistair sets his champagne flute down. His eyes say everything.
Diana, somewhere behind him, makes a small pleased sound.
Our car eases back into the traffic.
The light has gone the kind of blue that London goes when the day has been clear. The street lamps flicker on in twos and threes. A cyclist crosses in front of the car with a baguette in her basket.
Alistair's hand goes to my thigh again. This time it is on the silk, not the cotton, and the silk slides under his palm. When I look at him, he’s staring at me. “You are a hazard.”
“You picked the dress.”
“I’m already regretting it,” he jokes, but there is some truth in it, too.
I lean against him. The seam of his suit jacket is against my bare shoulder. He smells of his signature cologne, my favorite smell on earth, apart from his just-showered skin. And his post-workout skin. And his post-fuck skin.
“I meant it when I said I’m in the mood for everything tonight,” I say. “All of it. Every part of it. Nothing is off the table.”
His eyes have gone dark again, hungry. “So am I.”