Chapter 13 #2
I entered her in one motion, pressing her against the wall, and she cried out, and the sound echoed in the small room, muffled by the curtains and the carpet but still audible, still real, and I did not care, I did not care about anything except the feeling of being inside her, the heat and the tightness and the way her internal muscles gripped me as though she were trying to pull me deeper.
She was wet, impossibly wet, and the slickness of her was a reminder that what was happening was not happening to her but was happening with her consent, and the consent was given, and the giving was controlled, and the control was hers.
I fucked her against the wall. I do not use that word lightly, and I do not use it decorously.
What I did was not making love. It was not tenderness.
It was an act of possession, driven by three weeks of humiliation and three weeks of wanting and three weeks of knowing that every lead I followed was a leash she held, and the fucking was my way of seizing the leash back, or believing I was seizing it, or needing to believe I was seizing it.
I braced one hand against the wall beside her head and gripped her hip with the other, and I drove into her with a rhythm that was not measured or controlled but urgent and demanding, and she matched me, her hips rolling to meet each thrust, her internal muscles clenching around me in a way that was not passive but responsive, the way a musician responds to a melody, and the response was so precisely calibrated that it should have warned me and did not.
I was rough. I drove into her hard, each thrust pinning her tighter against the wall, and she took it, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth open, and her sounds were not the sounds of a woman being overwhelmed but the sounds of a woman choosing to be overwhelmed, and the distinction was everything, and it was nothing.
"Say my name," I said.
"Sebastian." She said it clearly, precisely, the way she said everything, and the clarity of it made me harder.
"Again."
"Sebastian." And then, softer, against my ear: "You are not in control. You have never been in control. The harder you fuck me, the more you prove it."
I stopped. I held her against the wall, buried inside her, and I looked at her face, and her eyes were open, and the expression in them was not triumph and not pity but something I could not name, something that looked almost like curiosity, as though she were observing me the way a naturalist observes an animal, with interest but without investment, and the observation cut deeper than any physical act could have.
"Let me go," she said.
I let her down. She stood on unsteady legs and straightened her chemise, which had somehow survived the encounter mostly intact, and she looked at me with the composed expression of a woman who has just finished a business meeting rather than been taken against a wall, and the composure was the most disorienting thing about her, because it told me that nothing I had done had touched her, nothing I had done had shaken her, nothing I had done had altered the fundamental architecture of her control.
I leaned against the wall. I was breathing hard.
My hands were trembling, and I pressed them flat against the panelled wood to still them.
The room smelled of sweat and sex and tobacco smoke from below, and the lamp had burned lower, and the shadows were deeper, and I understood, with the terrible clarity that comes after the fact, that I had not reclaimed anything.
I had surrendered again. I had initiated, I had grabbed, I had pushed, I had fucked, and at every stage she had allowed, and allowing is not surrendering, and the difference between them is the width of a hair and the depth of an ocean.
"Feel better?" she said.
"No."
"Good. Because you accomplished nothing.
You asked me about the false leads, and I admitted to them.
You demanded the truth, and I gave you a version of it.
You initiated this," she gestured at the rumpled room, at our half-dressed bodies, at the wetness on my stomach where she had been, "and I allowed it, and the allowing was as controlled as anything else I have done.
" She paused. "You cannot reclaim your investigation by fucking me, Sebastian.
You cannot reclaim your professional credibility by asserting physical dominance.
You cannot undo December by being rougher in January.
The only thing you can do is decide whether you are a detective or a man who wants me, because you cannot be both. "
I could not answer. She was right about all of it, and the rightness was a blade, and I stood against the wall in my shirtsleeves with my trousers around my ankles, and I could not answer because there was no answer that did not confirm everything she had just said.
I dressed in silence. She watched me, sitting in the chair, her chemise straightened, her hair hastily repinned, looking as composed as though she had spent the evening at cards and nothing more.
I could not meet her eyes. Not because I was ashamed.
Because looking at her was looking at the evidence of my own weakness, and the evidence was too detailed, too precise, too damning.
"The leads were designed to waste your time," she said, as I was buttoning my shirt.
"I will not insult you by pretending otherwise.
But I want you to understand something. I did not plant them to protect evidence of murder.
I planted them because you were getting too close, and I needed you farther away, and the most effective way to move a man farther away is to send him in the wrong direction. "
"Too close to what?"
She did not answer. She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw the same thing I had seen in the bedroom at Blackwood House, and in the drawing room before that, and at the musical evening before that: recognition.
She saw me. She saw me more clearly than anyone had ever seen me, and she saw me knowing that I could see her, and the mutual seeing was the most dangerous thing in the room.
"Goodnight, Inspector," she said.
I left the private room. I walked through the faro room, past the card tables and the men who bent over them, past the bar where my untouched glass still stood, past Griffiths the waiter, who gave no sign of having noticed anything unusual in my arrival or departure.
The staircase descended to the entrance hall, and the entrance hall led to the front door, and the front door led to St. James's Place, and the night air was cold and clean and tasted of fog and coal smoke.
I stood on the pavement for a long time.
A hansom cab passed, its horse's hooves clattering on the cobbles.
I did not hail it. I did not move. I stood in the cold and stared at the black door with its brass serpent, and I thought about what had just happened and what it meant and what I was going to do about it.
I had tried to take control. I had failed.
She had allowed me to believe I was dominant while directing every movement, every gesture, every breath, and the directing had been so subtle that I had not recognised it until it was over.
The roughness, the wall, the possessiveness, all of it had been my assertion, and all of it had been her accommodation, and the accommodation was more powerful than the assertion because it required no effort.
She had simply stood there and let me perform, and the performance had been exactly what she had predicted it would be, and the prediction was the proof of her control.
I walked home. It was a long walk, through St. James's and Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square and the Strand and Fleet Street, and the streets were wet and the fog was thick and the gaslights made halos in the damp air, and I walked through all of it without seeing any of it, because my mind was in a private room in a gambling club, pressed against a wall, inside a woman who was allowing me to believe I was conquering her while she conquered me.
The walk took nearly an hour, and the cold seeped through my coat and into my bones, and I welcomed the cold because it was a sensation that had nothing to do with her, and for a few minutes, shivering on the Strand, I was able to think about something other than the feeling of her body against mine and the sound of her voice and the terrifying composure in her eyes when it was over.
The night was cold. My coat was insufficient against it, and my shirt was still untucked where I had thrust it back into my trousers without the patience to do it properly, and my collar was askew, and I must have looked like what I was: a man who had just been thoroughly undone and was walking home in the aftermath.
A constable passed me on the Strand and gave me a second glance, and I straightened my collar and lifted my chin and quickened my pace, and by the time I reached Fleet Street the constable was forgotten, replaced by the memory of her hands on my shoulders, her legs around my waist, the sound she had made when I entered her, a sound that was not pain and not pleasure but something between them, something that I had taken for surrender and was now beginning to understand was something else entirely.
What she had said afterward echoed in my mind with the persistence of a church bell.
"The harder you fuck me, the more you prove it.
" Prove what? That I wanted her. That wanting her had overwhelmed my reason, my training, my sense of self-preservation.
That every principle I had built my career upon had crumbled the moment she said "No, I did not stop," and I had heard, in those four words, not permission but calculation, and I had taken the permission anyway because the calculation was invisible and the permission was real and my body did not care about the difference.
I turned into Great Scotland Yard and saw the lights of my rooms glowing in the upper windows.
Mrs. Parfitt had not yet retired. The warmth that leaked through the cracks of the front door was a temporary comfort, a small mercy that would evaporate the moment I was alone with my thoughts.
I climbed the stairs and unlocked my door and stepped into the room where the case files were pinned to the wall in their neat grid, and the grid stared at me, and I stared back, and the silence between us was the silence of a man confronting the evidence of his own failure.
I did not light a fire. I sat in the dark and thought about Cecilia, and about the false leads, and about the private room, and about the way she had looked at me when it was over, composed and faintly amused, as though I were a card she had already seen and already folded.
The image of her at that moment, half-dressed and perfectly calm, was the most disturbing image in my memory, because it contained no vulnerability, no shame, no remorse, nothing I could use.
It contained only control, and control was the thing I could not break, and the not-breaking was the most devastating thing about her.
The case was not closed. But I was more compromised tonight than I had been in December.
Then, at least, I could tell myself that she had seduced me, that the initiative was hers, that I had been overwhelmed by a superior force.
Tonight I had taken the initiative. Tonight I had believed I was in control.
Tonight I had learned that control was an illusion she had constructed for my benefit, and the learning of it was the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to me, and I could not stop thinking about her hands in my hair, and her voice saying my name, and the heat of her against the wall, and I knew, with the certainty of a man who has lost something he can never recover, that I would go back.
I would go back because I could not help myself, and she knew it, and the knowing was the final proof that the game was hers and had always been hers, and I was not a player in it.
I was a piece on the board, and she moved me with a precision that was almost beautiful, and the beauty of it was the most terrible thing of all.
I sat in the dark until dawn, and when the grey light of morning crept through the window and touched the case files on the wall, I looked at them, and I looked at my hands, and I understood that I had become the thing I had spent my career hunting: a man who could no longer distinguish between justice and desire, and who had begun to suspect that the distinction, in the end, might not matter.