13. Carrington
CARRINGTON
Somebody knocked on the courtyard door.
Carrington's hand opened and three pins dropped into the carpet. She had been at the dresser a while by then, half her hair down and the rest still up, and she didn't move for a second and a half. Then she dropped the rest of the pins into the dish by the mirror and went out onto the landing.
Eleven at night, and the call box at the gate hadn't rung. Nobody had been buzzed through. Whoever was at that door was already on the property, and that could only be one person.
Grace's door was second on the left, standing ajar, a strip of amber light laid across the boards. Carrington waited at the gap for the sound of Grace's breathing, heard it, and went on to the stairs.
She came down with one hand on the rail. Lucy had come up to the house after dark twice since February, and both times something was wrong with Grace. But this time, Grace was asleep two doors behind her.
The study door stood open on her left and the desk lamp was still on in there. She went past it. The courtyard door had a bolt at the top that nobody had ever used and an outside light on the same switch as the path. Carrington switched the light on and opened the door.
Lucy stood on the step with her hands in her coat pockets. She had brought the cold up the path with her and it was still coming off her.
"Ms. Harper," Carrington said, and then, "Has something happened?"
"No," Lucy said. "Grace is fine."
Carrington kept her hand on the edge of the door.
"You let me write your name on the school picnic sheet," Lucy said.
"Yes," Carrington said.
"You stood right there and watched me do it and you didn't say a word." Lucy took her hands out of her pockets. "I've been down at the cottage since nine trying to figure out what that was."
"And?" Carrington said.
"I couldn't," Lucy said. "So what was it?"
Carrington didn't have an answer.
"You'll freeze out there. I'll have Nadia—" Carrington said and stopped.
Nadia was asleep in her own bed nine miles away and could not do one thing about any of this.
"Come inside," Carrington said.
Lucy came in as far as the mat and no further. Carrington shut the door behind her and turned off the outside light.
"We can talk in the study," Carrington said.
Six steps down the hall, she turned around. Lucy hadn't followed her and hadn't taken her coat off.
"I'm not going to sit at your desk," Lucy said.
"It isn't a negotiation," Carrington said.
"Everything in that room is," Lucy said.
Carrington came back down the hall. She stopped a few feet short of her. "The woman needed two names on the sheet," she said. "You drop her off every morning and pick her up every afternoon. It was the accurate thing to write down."
She heard herself while it was happening. It was true, but it wasn’t really an answer.
"That isn't what I asked you," Lucy said.
"No," Carrington said.
She put a hand up to her own hair, still half down, and took it away again.
She wanted her hands on Lucy. She had wanted it on the gravel in the rain and she had wanted it that morning in a plastic chair with two hundred people in the room, and she had never once in her life known what to do about wanting something.
"Lucy," Carrington said. "I don't know how."
Lucy took her coat off and laid it over the arm of the chair by the door.
"Then don't do anything," Lucy said. "I'll do it."
She crossed the mat and put one hand flat on Carrington's sternum, above the top button, and held it there long enough for Carrington to step back. Carrington's own hands hung at her sides and stayed there. Lucy's palm was cold from the path. Then Lucy took a fistful of her shirt and kissed her.
Carrington got a hand into Lucy's hair and one arm around her and pulled her in because she wanted her there, and Lucy came against her all at once, and Carrington's shoulder came up against the wall. Lucy made a low sound into her mouth, the one from the hallway at the lodge.
Then Lucy took her mouth away and put her forehead against Carrington's jaw and just breathed there, and Carrington stood in her own hallway with her hand shaking against the back of her neck.
"Upstairs," Carrington said.
The stairs were the worst part.
Carrington had lived here since the year Grace was born and had never once climbed her own staircase with a thought in her head about the noise it made.
Carrington took them at the outside edge where the wood was newest, and behind her Lucy did the same without being told to.
On the fourth step from the top, something settled deep in the house and both of them froze.
Ten seconds. Carrington counted them out with her hand on the rail and her heart pounding in her carotid, standing in her own hallway, waiting to be caught.
Grace's door was still ajar with the light coming out of it in its strip.
They went past it, and at the far end of the landing Carrington reached her hand back without turning around, and Lucy took it, and they walked the last of it joined up like that.
Her own door shut with the handle turned.
She let the latch down by degrees and lifted her fingers off it.
She had never once thought about this room. Gray walls, a gray bed, one dish of hairpins on the dresser and nothing else on any surface in it. Clara had had a cardigan over the back of a desk chair and a bird feeder somebody forgot to fill and eight hundred books stacked two deep.
Lucy looked around it exactly once from the middle of the floor and didn't say a word about any of it. Carrington stayed by the door and looked at her own room for the first time.
"Come here," Carrington said.
Lucy came, and put both hands up into Carrington's hair, and started taking the rest of it down.
"I can do that," Carrington said.
"I know," Lucy said.
Lucy worked slowly. She found a pin and eased it out and held it in her teeth and went after the next one, and it took a long time because she was doing all of it by feel.
Twice she pulled too hard and Carrington's eyes watered, and both times she said sorry into her cheek and kept going.
When it was all down, it was heavier than Carrington remembered and it came forward over one shoulder.
Lucy took the pins out of her teeth and put them on the nightstand in a small heap.
"There," Lucy said.
Carrington got her hands on the buttons of Lucy's shirt and could not undo the first one. She tried again and the button went through, then the next two, and then she gave up on it. Her whole hand was going, and Lucy was watching it.
Lucy flattened her own hand over Carrington's and held it there against her stomach until Carrington quit trying.
"There's no part of this you have to be good at," Lucy said.
Carrington didn't answer that.
"Did you hear me?" Lucy asked.
"Yes," Carrington said.
Lucy finished the buttons herself. Carrington took the shirt off her shoulders and set her mouth against the base of Lucy's throat, and Lucy's head leaned back.
The sound Lucy made was small—barely a breath, more vibration than voice—and Carrington felt it against her lips before she heard it. Lucy’s skin was warm and thin over the pulse. Carrington didn’t kiss so much as press against it, open-mouthed, letting Lucy feel her heat.
Lucy's fingers came up and found the back of Carrington's neck, just below the hairline, and rested there. Carrington could smell coconut now, faint and warm, mixed with whatever soap Lucy used. The lamp threw the long line of her neck into the soft light and shadows.
Carrington moved down an inch, then another.
She slowly traced Lucy’s collarbone with her lips, and Lucy's hand tightened on the back of her neck.
Carrington opened her mouth against the hollow above the sternum and let her tongue move once, flat and deliberate, and Lucy's breathing deepened, as if she were making a deliberate effort to pull the air all the way down and let it out without sound.
Carrington pulled back enough to look at her.
Lucy's eyes were half-closed, that particular expression she had when she was paying attention to an internal sensation. Lucy’s brown hair was down, and a few strands caught the lamplight and reflected copper.
Her lips were parted. She looked, as she always looked, like she had nowhere else to be and no interest in hurrying toward anything.
Carrington gently pushed Lucy back until she was sitting on the edge of the bed and stepped in closer.
She knelt on the floor beside the bed, between Lucy's legs. The rug was soft under her and the position felt natural in a way that surprised her. She hadn’t planned or rehearsed this, but now that she was here, her body knew exactly what to do.
She put her hands on Lucy's thighs, palms flat, and pushed her skirt up.
Lucy lifted her hips, and Carrington pulled it to her waist, exposing her panties—plain, black, no decoration.
She hooked her fingers in the waistband and drew it down while Lucy lifted again.
Carrington dropped the panties beside the bed.
She looked at Lucy’s body. The lamp caught her pale inner thighs and the dark hair between them.
Carrington could feel the warmth of Lucy's eyes on her and didn’t look up.
She leaned in and put her mouth on the inside of Lucy's thigh, high, where the skin was softest, and Lucy's leg shifted, a small involuntary movement, and Carrington smiled against Lucy’s skin.
She worked her way up slowly, using her mouth and the edge of her teeth on the tender skin of the inner thigh.
She could feel her heat before she got there.
When she finally put her mouth on Lucy, the sound Lucy made was swallowed immediately, bitten back and pressed into silence from her hand coming up to cover her own mouth.