Chapter XXVII. The Beautiful and Damned. #2
“Just everything.” She holds my gaze for a second. Her eyes flit up toward the house and then back. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Now? Already? Aren’t you enjoying it?”
“I’m enjoying it immensely.”
“But?”
“But…” She smiles at me, and I feel it in my toes. Her want. “I can think of something I’d enjoy more.”
Her intention is clear.
“Oh.”
I watch as she sets aside her champagne and checks her phone. An array of expressions washing over her face—curious, worried, frustrated, resigned—in that particular order.
“What’s wrong? Anouk?”
She shakes her head, looks back toward the house, and then, “We should probably thank our hosts, yes?”
I follow her over to where Hayden and a small group have clustered near the pool. Hayden looks fetching in a draped russet dress. Her raven hair gathered in a low ponytail.
“I’m afraid we have to rush off, ma chérie,” Anouk says, interlocking arms with her and easing her away from her guests.
“Already?”
“Yes, Frederick just sent a text that Sacha is very ill and vomiting, and he’s not certain if it’s food poisoning or a virus, but on the off chance it’s a virus, he doesn’t want to get close to him and risk getting sick and missing his race next week. So I have to run home, I’m afraid.”
I am aghast at this fabricated story, and the ease with which she has relayed it. Did it come to her spontaneously? Or was it her go-to when needing to escape for an impromptu tryst with her obsessive friend of the moment?
“Oh no, I’m so sorry. No, go, go.”
“It was really lovely, Hayden,” I say, still flummoxed. “I enjoyed it very much. Thank you for having us. You have a beautiful home.”
“Yes. Extraordinary. Enchanting. Thank you.”
Anouk moves so quickly across the patio and through the house that her dress billows behind her, and I am forced to scramble just to keep up.
There is something about the moment that strikes me as familiar.
I am about to place it when a figure catches my eye as we pass through the foyer.
At the far end of the hallway, just inside the living room, near the entrance to the salon, the back of a blond head.
It’s quick, a flash of recognition, she laughs, running her fingers through her hair, and something catches the light.
A canary-yellow diamond. I am about to say something, but Anouk is already out the front door and dashing toward the valet stand.
“Hurry!” she calls back. “Sacha is waiting.”
She does not waste time. Her hand sliding between my knees as I navigate the curves of Bellagio. Iron gates, hidden driveways, tall hedges, a millionaires’ labyrinth.
“What are you doing, Anouk?”
“I like you in a dress. Turn up here,” she directs.
We were not yet at Sunset. The road dark and cunning. My focus faltering.
“Where are we going? This is a dead end.”
“Go to the top and turn around.” She says it low, her voice throaty. One eye on the road, the other gauging my expression as her hand climbs my thigh. I can feel myself opening to her, even as my grip tightens on the steering wheel.
This reckless spontaneity, this intense need, this wanton lust. The things I no longer regularly get from my husband.
“Here,” she says, at a particularly dark stretch, under an awning of twenty-foot ficuses. “Pull over here.”
I do as I’m told. Put the car in park, kill the engine, release my seat belt as I reach for her over the console. She grabs my wrist, stopping me. “Don’t. Not yet. I want to watch you come.”
I let her have her way. Her fingertips tracing the surface of my underwear, soft, teasing, barely making contact.
And then she stops. Waits, listening to me breathe.
She leans in, nuzzling my neck, allowing me to smell her.
Cinnamon and sandalwood. Anouk. Anouk. Anouk.
Through the material, she finds my clit.
Her touch deliberate, measured. My heart races.
I am reminded of my youth. Summers with Lorry, and cruising through backcountry Greenwich, searching for places to fuck in the back of his Corolla hatchback.
The time I doubled my body over the stick shift and sucked his dick while he sped down 684.
Jodeci crooning on the sound system. Us steaming up the car windows in his dad’s green Audi Cabriolet. How reckless I was then. How free.
I come quickly. And hard. Her fingers sliding inside of me at the last moment, her breath in my ear. My body quaking against her.
“?a va?” she asks, when my breathing subsides.
I laugh, a little loopy. “You threw your husband under the bus just so we could come here and do this?”
“I wouldn’t say it was under the bus.”
“I think you might be just a little bit crazy.”
“I think that’s why you like me.”
I reach for her then, angling over the console, untying the knot in her wrap dress, forcing her back into her seat. My hand moving over the curve of her breasts, the coolness of her necklace, the flatness of her belly. Her skin is like silk. “Really?”
“Mmm,” she says, purring.
“How do you know it’s not just your face?”
She laughs at that. And then stills, as my fingers slip into the top of her panties. She is wet and warm and—for the moment—mine. Her head back on the headrest, her seat reclined. Her lids at half-mast. Anouk, glassy-eyed, disheveled hair. The wild one.
“How do you know it’s not just your face?” I repeat.
“Because I think you want all of me. And…” She trails off. My hand moving against her, my mouth on her nipple through her sheer bra. The feel of her entirety tensing beneath me. This power, divine.
This thing we have, whatever it is, unlike anything I’ve experienced. And for all my confusion about labeling it, I could not deny what she said that time in the studio. We were having fun, were we not?
“And?” I push when I know she is ready to climax.
She shudders. Her thighs clenching, her nails raking my scalp, her body lifting off the seat.
And in the moment after, her voice low and soft, she says to me in French, “And I think you’re bored with your cliché of a husband.”