Casanova LLC

Episode 4

“T he happiness I gave her increased mine twofold, for it has always been my weakness to compose the four-fifths of my enjoyment from the sum total of the happiness which I gave the charming being from whom I derived it.”

― Giacomo Casanova

Claire

Back at the palazzo, we hung our wet outer layers in the androne, then went upstairs and straight into the bedroom on the piano nobile. Alessandro grabbed a water bottle out of the mini-fridge and handed it to me before taking one for himself. I leaned against the counter and rolled my ankle.

“Are you tired? Do you want to take a quick nap?”

“No, just body-tired. I have Museum Feet.” I mimicked looking side-to-side, leaning in to read placards. “Art Neck.”

He cracked open his water bottle. “Why don’t you have a quick shower and I’ll get the table ready.”

“Great idea.” I turned to go up to my suite.

“Shower here.” He nodded toward the bathroom.

I happily kicked off my sneakers and shrugged out of my cardigan, throwing it on the bed.

Inside the bathroom, I closed the door, quickly stripped, and turned on the shower. Just as I was about to step in, I realized I didn’t want to get my hair wet, to have to dry it again before the costume fitting. Before I could start poking around for—maybe?—a forgotten hair band, Alessandro gave a knock and opened the door just enough to reach his hand through.

It was holding a shower cap.

I could also see, through the building steam, his lowered head reflected in one of the mirrored walls. I stayed behind the door and took the cap. “Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome.”

He closed the door.

I was about to tuck my hair into the cap when the door opened again. Slightly, but enough. “By the way, there are other sundry items in the drawer.”

I could have said thank you again. But I wanted him to linger.

They say if you can see a person’s reflection in a mirror, they can see you. It was thrilling, being naked, standing essentially shoulder-to-shoulder with him, separated by a cracked-open door. Knowing that if he dared to look up, into the mirror, he could see the foggy outline of that nakedness. So I kept him there. “Like?”

“Razors. Lotion. Combs. Mouthwash. Not that you need any of it.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome.”

But he didn’t leave this time. And he still didn’t look up.

“Which drawer?”

“Top one.” In the mirror, he lifted his arm; next to me, the real article appeared, visible up to the elbow before the door blocked the rest from view. “To the left of the sink.”

I gathered my hair at the crown of my head.

I mentally implored him to look up, to see my reflected breasts on proud display, with my hands on top of my head. The steam was building, in the room, on the mirrors; soon I’d be completely invisible. “Alessandro?”

He looked up.

I took my sweet time settling the shower cap on my head; he took his sweet time watching me. My reflection was as impressionistic as the paintings from earlier. I wondered what his artist’s eye thought of what he saw. “Yes?”

I looked straight at his hazy face in the mirror and grinned. “Huh. I forget.”

In the mirror, I saw a wisp of a grin. “Well, I won’t.”

He closed the door once more.

Oddly giddy, I stepped into the shower. I could have stayed in there for an hour, it felt so good, but having something even better to look forward to, I made it quick. There was a fluffy towel hanging on the warmer and I dried myself off.

I took off the cap and wrapped the towel around my chest when there was a light rap on the door.

It opened just enough. Again.

There was too much steam to see anything now. “Would you like a robe?”

I opened the door the whole way. “The towel is fine,” and relished the look on his face: a schoolboy caught peeking into the hot neighbor’s window. Or the girls’ locker room.

I stepped around him.

He’d turned down the lights. Lit candles. The white top sheet on the massage table was peeled back, inviting me in.

Maybe it was the lovely day we’d spent together. Maybe it was our conversations throughout it. Maybe it was the allusions to our first encounter at the rehearsal dinner. When he was just a painter who had flirted with me.

Had I liked him then? Yes, very much. Too much. Had I been attracted to him? Again, too much. But I was getting married. So lines had been drawn.

But now? What did I have to lose? There were no stakes because there could be no consequences. This was not the man I’d met. And I was not the woman who’d rebuffed him.

I was here with a man who wanted nothing more than to do what I wanted. I could flirt back. I could tease. I could be playful. I had three days to turn into a lifetime and I had this…this Casanova to do it with.

And that was incredibly, astonishingly…freeing.

So I walked to the table, my back to him, and dropped the towel.

Alessandro

I stood there as she took the last few steps to the table, transfixed by that inverted heart of an ass. I could not not stare at it. In fact, by the time the sight had fully registered, she was already settling herself under the sheet. I wanted a replay. I wanted her to climb onto the table again. I wanted to see whatever else I could have seen that I now realized I’d missed while my brain was busy being fried.

I unglued my feet and stepped over to the towel. “Drop something?”

She lifted her head out of the cradle. Rested her cheek on the rim and smiled, the candlelight glinting off her bare shoulders and the peak of her cheekbone.

She watched as I rolled up my sleeves. Then she turned her face back toward the cradle. “Where did we land on spanking?” I asked.

Even in the low lighting I was sure she blushed as she hid her smiling face.

I took a full breath, as discreetly as possible, and stepped around to the head of the table. I gathered her hair and draped it off to one side, then pinched the edge of the sheet between both thumbs and forefingers, billowed it up slightly, and settled it back down at the dimpled base of her lower back.

I squirted warm oil into my hands and silently admired the hills and valleys and slopes of her. A bas-relief I couldn’t wait to explore.

Later , I told myself.

I stepped forward, rubbed my hands together, and placed my palms on her shoulders. Pressed and, slowly, slid them down her spine. Was rewarded with a long sigh from her. And the goose bumps I’d imagined in the speakeasy. “You’re so goddamn beautiful.” I said it before I’d decided to say it. “I could spend the weekend kissing your back. These shoulders. Those little?—”

“You don’t have to…”

I paused my hands. They had reached those dimples. “Do you want me to stop?”

“Oh, no. No. Keep going. Please . Never mind.”

“What were you going to say?”

She sighed. “It’s just—you don’t have to do…the whole Casanova thing. You know, the script or whatever. I already feel good, really good.”

I squatted down in front of her. She raised her head and we were eye to eye. “Everything I say to you, I mean.”

“Everything?”

In answer, I gently kissed her forehead, smiled, and stood. “Now, where was I?”

We were silent for a while as I reentered the landscape of her body. Eventually, her breathing evened and deepened. She’d needed a quick nap after all.

When I moved to her feet, she moaned. I grinned; she was awake. She breathed out a long “Oh, God,” as I dug into both hamstrings, arriving, finally, at the crease of her ass.

“Over or under?”

She knew I meant the sheet. She answered without pause, “Under.”

I didn’t wander, my fingers didn’t drift inward and lower. I wanted to take my time. I wanted the luxury of exploring her before anything became overly sexual. I knew the sheet was unnecessary at this point. I knew she wouldn’t object if I slid it off entirely. But the flimsy barrier was sexy. I was sure this was Claire’s idea of sexy: pretend barriers. High necklines, unacknowledged absent panties, fogged mirrors. I found myself captivated by it as well.

I leaned forward, over her back, whispering, “Want to turn over now?”

“Sure,” she answered, throatily. Then she flipped over before I had a chance to lift the sheet. “Ready.”

She had this way of subtly surprising me.

I resituated the sheet over her as she ran her fingers through her hair. She exhaled long and hard and rested her arms above her head, half hanging off the top of the table. A small stretch that arched her back.

It was wanton.

It was inviting.

I wanted to climb up onto the table.

But instead, my professional self continued the massage. I drew away, lifted her leg, and wrapped the sheet around her hip. Then I took her free leg and pressed her foot against my shoulder. Pushed my weight forward to stretch her hamstring. Her eyes remained closed as I skated my hands along her calf, up her thigh. At her hip, I began to—“I enjoyed watching you talk to your nephew today.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m wedged between your legs, and you’re thinking about the dead bee box?”

She giggled. “I told you, things just come into my head, I can’t help it.”

“Okay, well, I’m not going to take it personally.”

“Don’t! Please, just continue.”

“With pleasure.” I lowered her leg, repositioned the sheet, and moved up the right side of her body, keeping contact with my hand the whole way. She was free to be thinking about me and Lucca, but I was fully engaged elsewhere.

My eyes drifted over the covered hollow of her stomach, the swell of her breasts, her flushed neck, to her face, and found her eyes…open. Watching me. I slipped my fingers through hers and began working on one of her hands. Maybe I’d recaptured her desire. Maybe it was time for more. Maybe she was going to ask me to?—

“Alessandro?”

“Yes?” I purred.

“What’s your mother like?”

I calculated how to make a significant course correction.

She took my silence for censure. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

“No, it’s okay. It was just your use of the present tense that…” I cracked the knuckle of her ring finger. “She’s no longer with us.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry?—”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” I lied. No one had ever asked me about her. Ever. And during a massage? Never ever. “My mother was…” I continued to work her fingers with mine as I considered every terse, dismissive adjective I could say. Depressed. Frivolous. Vain. Erratic. But they all painted an incomplete picture. “You know how there are some people who peak at twenty-two and are shocked when they discover the world doesn’t actually revolve around them? And they spend the rest of their life trying to reclaim something they never had in the first place?”

“The high school quarterback type.”

“Precisely. My mother was practically royalty here in Venice, even if she didn’t have the money to back it up. But outside, to the rest of the world, she was just a pretty girl. Who attracted the wrong men.”

“Your father?”

“Among others.” I left her hands and worked my way up her arms, determined not to let the current conversation disintegrate the mood. “He lasted long enough to take her back to America and foist two kids on her. Then gone.”

“He was American?”

“First-generation. From a Lombardy family. Anyway, ancient hist?—”

“Is that why you wanted to do this? Take over after Jacopo? To be a better man for women than the ones your mother had?”

She was too perceptive. So I prevaricated. “I wanted to do it because it’s what we do.”

“Do you miss her?”

I stopped stroking entirely now. I stared at Claire’s hand. “I miss who she could have been.”

“I can understand that.”

I risked a glance at her face. Her eyes had closed again. A tear, two, slipped over her temples. I left her hand, squeezed her bicep. “I think we might want to change the subject.”

“Just one more question.” Her voice betrayed neither of those tears. It was low, calm, composed. That all-too familiar place of hers.

“One more,” I agreed reluctantly, and used both hands to pull her arm, stroking downward.

“Do you like women?”

My hands stopped moving. “Is that a trick question?”

“I don’t mean sexually. Obviously, in that way, you must…well, obviously. I just mean…do you like women? Sorry, I’m not making sense?—”

“No, you are. And, yes, I do.”

“Why?”

Looking at her face, my thoughts drifted to last night. To seeing her sitting across the table. Her pianist fingers on her wineglass, laughing with my uncle, the candlelight in her hair, the flushed rise and fall of her chest. The see-through dress. But also: the heady combination of wit and sincerity, youth and age, softness and strength, innocence and intelligence in those eyes. The way the light shimmered on her inner thigh.

“I think women are the magic of the entire universe manifested.” Oh, come on, dude. Really? I set down her arm, walked back to her feet. “I genuinely enjoy being of service to women. Giving them pleasure, sure. But mostly just…caring.”

I slipped my hands under the sheet, under her ankles and up until I grabbed the back of her knees and gently dragged her down to the end of the table. Her calves dangled off on either side of my hips.

“They’re lucky to have you.”

I was fully connected to her body again.

I would have thought the conversation distracting, but it actually complemented the experience.

How interesting.

“Even if only for a weekend.” There was a smirk in her voice.

“Well. Yes. But?—”

“And only if they can afford you.” The smirk continued.

I smirked back, even though she couldn’t see it, and lifted her right leg, bending her knee. Bracing mine on the table for leverage, I leaned my weight against her shin, pushing her leg toward her chest. Now her eyes opened. I looked directly down into them. “Right.”

This got a soft laugh out of her. I readjusted myself between her legs, putting her feet on my shoulders. Under the sheet, I dug my thumbs into her hips. “A question for you now: What did you imagine sex would be like?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were young. Did you fantasize about your first time?”

“Oh, God,” she groan-chuckled. “Uhh…let’s see.” After a moment, she took a breath. “I used to spend a lot of time at the pool. I loved being in water. Still do. I was even on the swim team. So…” She laughed. “Wow, I haven’t thought of this, of him, in like—I can’t remember the last time I—okay.” She sounded less like herself now and more like how she must have sounded then. It was adorable. “I used to imagine that this one guy—this preppy-looking, sandy-haired, green-eyed kid on the boys’ team—would find me alone in the locker room. He’d hid himself, but I knew he was there, watching. My fantasy was that I’d change out of my swimsuit in a very sexy way—or what I imagined was sexy at the time, anyway—and then he would—” She giggled and covered her face with her hands.

As I’d said: adorable. I kissed one of her ankles, murmuring, “Hands down. Don’t hide from me.”

She brought her hands to her sides and fisted the sheet, pursing her lips to keep the smile from running off her face.

“What did he do? In this fantasy?”

“He, uh… I guess he finally couldn’t take the sexiness anymore, because he came out from behind the lockers. He started touching me, m-my breasts. Then he slid my bathing suit all the way down and just…stared at me. It felt good. His staring.”

This furthered my understanding. Why the orgy. Why in the bathroom, with the foggy mirror. Should I have gone to her, as her fantasy prep-boy had done?

“He’d say how pretty I was. How he could never stop looking at me. How just the thought of me consumed him. And what a—what a good—” She giggled again. “What a good swimmer I was.”She dissolved in laughter.

“Wow. Hot,” I deadpanned.

She cackled. Her hands went to her face again.

“Hands.” They came back down. I released her legs, letting her calves dangle off the table again. I adjusted the sheet over her, and ran my palms over it, up her thighs, right to the top, just shy of touching her where they met. “And then?”

“And then…you know.”

“It’s yours to tell.”

“And then…he’d take me to the…to this utility closet. Where he somehow would have already put a surprisingly nice mattress on the floor. And lit candles. And rose petals. And my favorite soda.” She rolled her eyes. “So romantic.”

“ Was it romantic? Was he? His lovemaking?”

She studied the ceiling. “It would vary, depending on my mood. Sometimes, yes, he was romantic. Sometimes gentle. Sometimes he couldn’t control himself.”

“Is this when you would use your pillow?”

She blushed and her hands covered her face yet again. “I can’t believe I told you that.”

“Hey. New rule: you can either touch me or touch yourself. Below the neck.”

She brought her hands down, to my wrists. Encircled them. She answered with a nod.

I wanted to ask if pool boy had ended up being her first. Or if Richie Rich had stolen that from her, too. But there was a reason I didn’t ask women about their first time, only how they’d imagined it. The fantasy was always better than the reality.

“Just one more question. So I can properly compete.”

“Yes?”

“What’s your favorite soda?”

“Dad’s Root Beer.”

I nodded and ran my thumbs over her hip bones. “Fancy.”

“I normally drank the grocery store brand. That’s all we could afford. Dad’s was for special occasions. Like losing your virginity.”

We grinned at each other. We had arrived somewhere. The combined massage-conversation had been a journey and now what? Where to next? Her eyes settled on my face, with a renewed energy. She answered the question for me. “Alessandro.” She squeezed my right wrist. “Move your hand a little inward, please.” All I had to do was fan out my fingers and they were directly over her pubic bone. She exhaled in pleasure.

I pressed ever so gently down and felt her heartbeat come alive at her center. I dropped soft kisses to each cloaked hip.

“You need to…step away,” she breathed. “Or there will be nothing left for the orgy.”

I hoped she was kidding.

I didn’t want to share her. I didn’t want to take her to this ball, to be petted and licked and squeezed by others. I hadn’t wanted to last night, when she’d suggested it, but now, after the day we’d had, after the last hour we’d shared…

I removed my hand, for the moment, and moved to the top of the table. Slid my palms under her shoulder blades. Her lips separated and her eyes closed. My thumbs worked the column of her neck. I stared at her mouth.

“And later on?” I asked it against my better judgment.

“Later on?”

“What did you fantasize about later on? After you were married?” I could sense, could feel, the moment the wheels in her mind started to spin. The question seemed to propel her backward, not forward. But I wanted her answer. “The truth, Claire. No one’s here to judge you.”

She stared up at the ceiling. Again. “You.”

My thumbs found the back of her skull and I pressed. “Me? I would never judge you?—”

“No: you. I fantasized about you.”

I hadn’t expected that answer. I hadn’t, for all my expertise, control, jadedness, been prepared for that answer. “What about me?”

“That I…went with you that night. That you did things to me.”

I placed my hands around her neck. That swan neck. Traced my fingers along her collarbone. “Things?”

She shivered an exhale and I watched her nipples pebble under the sheet. “I imagined what you wanted to do to me.”

I kept one hand on her throat, but brushed the other above the sheet, across her perked tips. I dropped my mouth to her ear. “Like?”

“Like…”

“What did you imagine I imagined?”

“I don’t—I can’t imagine anything other than what you’re doing right now, God , this feels?—”

“We’re in that tucked away gallery room, the light’s just clicked off.” A sound from the back of her throat. “Imagine if we had given ourselves over to that night. What then?”

Her eyes fell closed. “Tell me.”

I made the decision, at that moment, to ruin the ball for her. I wanted her thinking of me, only me.

My lips brushed against her ear. “Maybe I started like this?” With thumb and forefinger, I found one nipple through the sheet. Held it. Tugged ever so slightly upwards. “Through that little white blouse you were wearing?”

She gasped and her breath held for a moment as she raced to catch up to it. By the time she caught it, I was already headed for the other one.

The doorbell was so shrill we both jumped. I strode to the wall-panel, quickly, before it could screech again. I really should fix that , I thought abstractly. Breathing hard, I buzzed the gate open without bothering to answer the intercom. “The costumer.” It had the tone of an expletive. I had forgotten about her. I had forgotten about the ball. About the very thing I’d been trying to make Claire forget about.

I turned around.

She’d come up on her elbows, sheet tucked between her arms and her torso, tight across her primed breasts, looking like a work of art.

“Do you want that robe?”

She nodded and I brought it to her. I took her discarded towel, wiped the oil off my hands, and gave her my gentlemanly back. I heard her sit up, shuffle the sheets to the side, and plant her bare feet on the floor.

“I want to say something.”

I turned around again. “Please.”

“I had forgotten what it felt like.”

“What?”

“That pounding ache. Of arousal.”

An intrusive knock-knock-knock at the door.

We looked at each other.

“Thank you.” So simple. So honest.

“You’re welcome.” I moved for the door. There was nothing else to do.

For now.

“You can have your fitting in here. I’ll go change upstairs.”

After one final lingering moment of eye contact, I went to retrieve the costumer.

Claire

The costumer, Paola, had put a Marie Antoinette wig on me and a black lace-and-diamond mask that covered the upper half of my face. The dress was red, with gauzy off-the-shoulder, slitted sleeves, a corset, and a flouncy high-low skirt. White stockings and ruby-colored shoes. I looked like a cross between a louche courtesan, a pirate wench from some nineteenth-century opera, and a Spirit Halloween Sexy Anne-Boleyn-In-A-Bag, but—I had to admit—it was exquisitely crafted. Paola was an artist.

All of this had occurred to me on a delay. I’d spent the first fifteen minutes of the fitting giving her one-word answers, turning when she told me to turn, lifting my arms up and down as commanded, all the while trying to calm my heart, which felt as though it was about to leap out of the corset. Could she tell? Did she know where I’d just been? The effect he had on me? How close I’d been to losing all composure? Apparently not. Though if she could, she was probably used to it. She probably saw it all the time in the women who came through this palazzo. She just benignly grinned, chattered in half-understandable English and, finally, presented me to the mirror.

I initially felt a tad-bit—or more accurately a tit -bit—over-exposed in the dress, but then Alessandro reentered the room and the way he slowed at what he saw, the look on his face, gave me the confidence I needed to pull it off.

He hadn’t put on a mask yet, so I was able to see everything that crossed his face as his eyes raked over me.

Conversely, I hoped mine hid my reaction to him. Watching him move toward us, I found it hard to breathe, which I mostly attributed to the corset. But it could have also had something to do with the tight-fitting breeches, the matching waistcoat of black brocade with intricate silver threading, the white silk bastion shirt untied at the neck. The black velvet cape draped over his shoulders topped the whole look off like a dark cherry on a Dread Pirate Roberts sundae.

How were we ever going to make it through the ball?

At my feet, Paola finished taping the dress’s hem and Alessandro offered her a hand up, which she repaid with a hug.

The older costumer had obviously done this for him before. Many times before. I would bet she’d done it for Jacopo, too. She rapid-fired some Italian at Alessandro and then said to me, “It’s good, no? Just some few, eh, piccolo alterazione. He knows your curves to the centimetro.” Then she gave Alessandro a wicked smile.

He pursed his lips, jaw clenching slightly. But a second later the embarrassment was gone. “My one party trick.”

He pointed at Paola’s chest and said, in Italian, a number. Then pointed at her waist; another number. Her hips; another number. Then he brought his fingers to his lips and made a chef’s kiss. “They haven’t changed since the day I met her.” Paola swatted his arm and he pulled her into a side-hug, kissed the top of her brassy-bronze head. She tsked and scolded, tying the neck of his shirt closed.

He walked her out and I heard her say to send her love to Jacopo and Alessandro’s sì, sì, sì , and then he came back and asked if I was ready to go. He helped me into a jacket and we walked out the door and started down the stairs. I let him get a step or two below me before I said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He turned around and looked up at me. “It’s only the most important part.” I tapped the material over my cheekbone.

“Whoops.”

He pulled the mask out of his coat pocket and lifted his hands behind his head. “No, let me.” He turned around, settled the mask over his eyes, and handed me the velvet ties. I secured them across his midnight hair. “Too tight?”

“Tighter.” I obliged.

When I was done, though, I gave into an impulse. I dropped my lips to his neck, right above the cape’s collar. He jolted like he’d been tased. He spun around, hissing out a laugh. “Jesus, warn a guy first.”

In retribution, he yanked me against his body and brought his lips to that spot on my jaw. That same spot that his fingers had feathered in Raines Law Room. The spot that made me shudder…just as he had a moment ago. He flicked his tongue against it and I full-on spasmed, and then he pulled back and looked up at me. “We’re even.” His fingers trailed down my arm, touching my skin through the slits in the blousy sleeve, took my hand, and started back down the stairs.

“For now,” I whispered back, and realized we’d reached a point of connection where I could feel his grin, even if I couldn’t see it.

We left the palazzo and walked a short distance to another grand house, Alessandro explaining the tradition of Carnival and the purpose of the masks on the walk. They were equalizers. With masks, no one knew which class you belonged to. It was an opportunity for the upper classes to slum it for a night; and the lower classes to interact with their “betters” without anyone being the wiser.

But for many, in today’s world, it was simply permission to be someone else for a night. Something I understood.

We stopped at an iron gate and Alessandro pressed an intercom button. From other buildings on nearby streets, I could hear the muted bass of party music. But from this house, nothing. No lights, either. When the intercom connected, Alessandro said a single word in Italian, and we were silently admitted to the courtyard. When we reached the front door, I still couldn’t hear any noise from within.

We didn’t knock or ring a doorbell. The door just opened. Whoever had opened it was standing behind the door, out of view. We may as well have been welcomed by a ghost.

We stepped into a soaring foyer, greeted by the smell of incense. The space was bisected: a reception-like desk on the right and a grand marble staircase on the left. A woman appeared, wearing a mask— only a mask—and took our outer coats, while a man—in the same “uniform”—handed us two champagne flutes.

I did not stare.

I did not gasp.

I did take a large gulp of champagne.

Alessandro took my hand again and led me up the staircase. As we switch-backed on the landing, he glanced at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah! Fine!” He peered at me. “I just wasn’t expecting, you know—” I gestured more sharply than intended down the stairs. “—right out of the gate. But it’s fine. Really.” As he led me up the next set of stairs, I couldn’t help but mumble, “Not sure why there’s a period costume dress code if everyone’s going to be naked, but—ooh, that’s lovely.” I pointed at the ceiling, to a chandelier that had just come into view. “Swarovski?”

“In Venice? Murano.”

“Of course. Do you think it’s original? To the house, I mean? The reproductions are exquisite, but the wiring on this one doesn’t look as integrated as those?—”

“Claire.” He stopped and turned to me. “This isn’t a house tour. We’re not in a museum. This is—” He gave me a very sweet, patient smile, and stepped closer. Brought his palm to the side of my head as he had in the traghetto and rubbed his thumb over my temple. “Try turning this off for the night.” His hand dropped to my stomach. “Try turning this on. Does it feel good? Does it feel bad? That’s it. That’s the brief tonight.”

I took a breath, appreciating his reminder, and nodded.

We ascended the rest of the staircase and stepped into a large open room, different from the hallway of Ca’ Casanova’s piano nobile. This was called a portego, I believed, and nearly asked, but: not a house tour. There was a large, circular bar in the middle. Spaced around the outer edges of the room, stone pillars stood as sentries to four open doorways. Now, there was sound: very low lounge music accompanied by some distant moans of pleasure.

I downed the rest of my champagne.

A naked male server appeared as I lowered my glass. He offered me another, which I happily took. No sooner had he left then another server appeared with a tray. I grabbed two caviar-covered blinis and Alessandro picked up two oysters. We wandered over to the bar, perched there, and I looked out into the room. At the meandering naked servers and a few costumed guests in various states of undress. One, outfitted like a jester, had his dick fully out of his harlequin britches.

“You’re thinking,” Alessandro said, in a warning lilt.

“Sorry, but is this even legal?”

“It’s Italy. It’s sex. I think that’s still legal.”

“But…” I wanted to say something else, but I had no idea what it was. Nudity near food? The problematic class structure on display? That I’d already seen more penises tonight than I’d seen in my entire life?

He set his glass down on the bar and cupped my face, trying, I could tell, one more time, to get through to me. “Everyone here wants to be here, whatever their reasons. You and me included. If you want to go, we go. If you are curious, we stay. If you want to participate, you will, if you don’t, you won’t. I must keep reiterating: we only do what you want.”

His supportive, emphatic clarity made me need to swallow a lump in my throat. “I know. But that tangled chain…it doesn’t just magically untangle. It’s not so easy to know what I want.”

He shook his head. “It’s the easiest. It’s just tangled up in some other wants that don’t belong to you.” He pointed a finger at his chest. “What do I want? What would Richard have wanted? Hell, the lawyers, the victims, the judgmental tabloid readers. You ”—he rested one hand right over my heart, the other cradled the back of my neck—“are not being you. You are trying to be everyone else’s you.”

The arrow found its target. I suddenly, irrevocably, wanted nothing more than to be me.

“How do I do that?”

“Stop listening to the other voices and you will hear yours.”

“ How ?”

“Tell yourself that what you want is all that matters.”

“Say that again.”

“The only thing that matters…is what you want.”

It was so simple. Why did it feel so revelatory?

He dropped his hands. “Your voice. Yours. It will tell you what you want.” He glanced out into the room. “It will also tell you what you don’t want, and that’s just as valuable.”

For one crystalline moment, his knowing superiority irked me. It wasn’t in his tone, which hadn’t sounded remotely arrogant. It was just the inarguable fact that he knew truths about people and feelings and sex that we mortals didn’t. Everyone else here was forced to wander around with their parts out, bumping into each other, trying to find the answers he carried effortlessly inside him. “Spoken like an artist?—”

“Why, thank you.”

“You didn’t let me finish. Spoken like an artist who hasn’t painted in five years.”

Instead of being wounded, he simply shrugged again. “We all have untangling to do.”

There was something so sincere in his words. So real. The real him.

I was taken aback by how much I wanted to kiss him, then. For real. I wanted to have him. For real. To love him. For real.

What happens , I wanted to ask him, when you know what you want, but you can’t have it?

For a minute, we both sipped our champagne, looking out into the vast room, as sounds of pleasure built in the air and body parts crossed back and forth between the columned doorways to the left and right.

“Okay,” I exhaled, and picked my glass up off the bar. “I just got a message from myself, and what I want is to know what’s going on in each of these rooms.”

“And I want you to.”

“And I don’t care what you want, so there!” I stuck my tongue out at him.

He made me wait like that for a few seconds before saying, in that particular part of his voice, “Tell me. If I pushed you to your knees right now, with that pretty tongue out like that, what would you do?”

I didn’t overthink, I didn’t get embarrassed, I didn’t hesitate. “Give you the best head of your life.”

His eyes flashed behind the mask. “Is that a fact?” For a suspenseful beat, I wondered if he was going to take me up on that. Right here, in front of everyone. Grab the back of my wig and push me down and?—

But he did the opposite. He swooped his glass out to the side, inviting me away from him. “You lead. Tonight, I follow.”

I clinked his outstretched glass and walked over to the first room on the right.

It looked like a stage set of a cozy café. There were intimate bistro tables, where two straight couples were kissing and touching, their empty glasses and plates between them. In another corner, one club chair hosted a couple cuddling—enthusiastically—while, from the chair opposite it, another couple watched. A candlelit banquette on the opposite side had two very stimulated men and one nothing-but-a-mask-clad woman. One man was stroking the other while the other man rolled the woman’s left nipple in his mouth.

I felt Alessandro’s presence behind me. Hovering, but not touching. Waiting for my next move. Did I want to sit down at the table just now being vacated? To watch more? To join?

I couldn’t answer the questions. I wanted more time.

I wanted to see what else there was first.

The next room was an entirely different décor. It was lavishly filled with harem-esque pillows, mats, billowing silks. Every cushion was in use. Much use. There was entirely too much going on. I doubted anyone knew who was touching them. I couldn’t even determine which parts belonged to whom. The room was alive with writhing bodies.

“Snakes, I hate snakes.”

Alessandro’s lips found my ear. “What?”

“Oh,” I whispered, “just, for some reason, this reminds me of the snake pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark .”

His laugh was so loud it made me jump. It also made several people whip their heads in our direction. Alessandro waved a charmingly apologetic hand and then pulled me back against him. Nuzzled my neck. Let his hand skate down my hip, my thigh, begin gathering the material of my skirt. Fisting it incrementally upward. It was a show, being done to make the other people feel comfortable. See? We’re just like you .

But it was making me feel comfortable, too. Almost too comfortable. I felt like a stranger to myself. Which was how everyone here saw me, too. Which was exactly what I’d come for. An anonymous freedom. With the mask, I was just a woman. A woman in a beautiful dress with a beautiful man behind her rucking it up. I didn’t have to be me…but then who was I?

I wanted him so badly right now, everyone in this place could watch and so what? But would I want them to watch? It seemed to me that to belong in this room you not only had to not care if people watched, you had to actively desire it.

I reached down and took his hand off me, spinning myself out of his grip and leading him around, over, and to the side of the menagerie of bodies, out the open doors, across the mezzanine, and back to the bar. It was like reaching an outcropping of rock after swimming across a lake. I belted back the final swallow of champagne in my glass and found that I needed to catch my breath. This damn corset.

I could feel Alessandro peering at me. I tried to keep my breathing steady. I didn’t want him to think I was uncomfortable, because I wasn’t. I was surprisingly not uncomfortable. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it all, or what I wanted to do here. But I was fully imbedded. Embodied.

A server approached with a tray of lamb lollipops. Perfectly situated above the tray, were the most beautifully abundant natural breasts I’d ever seen. Just lushly decadent. If I were Alessandro, I would have felt compelled to do something with them. Touch them? Paint them? But he wasn’t looking. He was focused on the tray, collecting two for each of us, and plucking napkins from her outstretched hand like cards from a deck. As she walked away, and he handed me a lamb chop, I looked down at my own chest, two petite, red-flushed apples about to bob above the surface of the corset. I glanced at him and saw his eyes were where mine had just been. I took a breath, which moved them dramatically, because there was literally nowhere else for oxygen to go in this thing, and I was about to open my mouth to somehow explain I wasn’t trying to draw his eye, I wasn’t trying to compete with the feminine ideal of our server, when his gaze came to mine and he said, “They’re perfect. You’re perfect.”

I had to remind myself of what he’d told me at the beginning of the massage: he meant everything he said to me.

And I felt myself start to love him a little more.

The sound of champagne being poured behind us distracted me. I turned around and a beefy bartender was wordlessly filling our empty glasses. When he was done, he simply turned away.

“Grazie,” I called.

Surprised, he glanced over his shoulder, looking at me for the first time. Had no one said thank you to him tonight? After an assessing moment, he nodded. And then he grinned. And then he turned his body the whole way around, opening it up to me as he watched my masked face. He was…astonishingly well-endowed. When my eyes finally flicked back to his, he simply winked, and walked to the other side of the bar. Alessandro put his elbows down next to me and inclined his head toward mine, stage-whispering, “Remind me to order my martini shaken, not stirred.”

I swallowed a laugh and whispered back, “Where do you think he keeps the olives?”

His head dropped and his shoulders shook. We were being quiet, but I knew if I allowed myself to, I would lose it. This whole thing was so surreal, so absolutely, utterly bizarre that if I stopped to acknowledge what was happening, I would make a fool of myself.

Without looking at me, Alessandro held up a lamb lollypop and I took it. We nibbled and gnawed, watching the room.

Eventually, he murmured, “Thoughts?”

“Many.”

“Care to share?”

“Not yet.”

We finished our chops and I pushed off the bar. We made our way over to the third doorway. We went in and were immediately part of an audience, surrounded by couches, all occupied, and all pointing toward a small stage. Upon which was a lot of leather. Whips, horse crops, chaps. Some items I had never seen in real life before. As if they didn’t actually exist outside of this house. In the center was a middle-aged woman wearing a full bridle, and nothing else, who seemed a bit (God, no pun intended) uncomfortable in the paraphernalia as she was whipped around the stage by different people jockeying (pun very much intended) for position, vying to take up her reins.

While all this was happening on stage, the couches had their own activities.

I watched.

I watched it all.

At some point, Alessandro leaned over. “Well?”

“See, this is where I thought spanking might lead. A gateway drug.”

He grinned at me. Nodded at the couch, where three people had their mouths filled with each other. “Care to join?”

For some reason, my instinct was to glance down at his crotch. I wanted to know if this excited him. If he cared to join. But it was dark and his pants were dark and the cape was in the way and, besides, I reminded myself: it was about what I wanted.

I assessed how I felt. I didn’t feel embarrassment. I didn’t feel judgmental. I liked how much everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was a roomful of unencumbered pleasure. A raw kind of joy.

But it also seemed…sad. Not that they were sad, but the motivation was. It felt a bit desperate. As though they wanted to escape something. Themselves?

Believe me, I understood. That’s why I’d agreed to come here—to Venice, to be with Alessandro—after all. It’s why I’d thought I wanted to come here, to this ball. As if escaping myself was the same as freeing myself.

I looked to my left. Another couch. A woman sitting, slumped, slouched. Pleasure had rendered her liquid and she was spilling off the cushion. Her legs were wide and there was another woman between them, one hand playing with the breasts above her head.

The woman’s wig was askew, her mask uneven, her eyes closed and mouth open.

Had she escaped herself? Did she feel free?

I couldn’t answer for her.

I had to answer for myself. To hear my voice above the others in my head.

And it was saying that I didn’t want to escape myself; I wanted to be myself.

A man stepped up to fill the woman’s open mouth and she greedily took him. He threw back his head and his eye caught mine.

He extended an inviting hand.

Did I imagine Alessandro tensing beside me?

He needn’t have.

I reached out and took the man’s hand. I held it for a moment. Squeezed it once. I shook my head softly, and then let it go. He smiled at me and closed his eyes as the woman took him deeper into her mouth.

There.

I’d been to an orgy.

I led Alessandro into the final room. The ballroom, as it turned out.

This was where the soft lounge music was coming from. Two nude acrobats twirled from silks suspended from the ceiling, human chandeliers. People danced beneath them.

I finished my champagne and wordlessly Alessandro did the same. We set the glasses on a tray and I walked to the dance floor. The song playing was slow and sultry. He effortlessly put us into a loose waltz position. But we didn’t waltz. We just sort of hovered, moving only slightly back and forth. If everyone else in the room looked like extras from Dirty Dancing , we were parochial middle schoolers saving room for Jesus.

He broke the silence first. “You walked through those rooms like you walked through the museum earlier.”

“Wrong. I was much more engaged at the museum.” We peered at each other through the dim lighting, through the haze of drifting incense, through our masks. “Do you do this often?”

“Only with guests, never on my own. If that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not sure what I’m asking, exactly.”

He stepped closer. We were moving now, having found some kind of rhythm. “If you’re asking if I’d rather be walking through a museum with you, the answer is yes.”

What happens when you know what you want but can’t have it?

I had to look away. My eyes went to two gorgeous women on the periphery, heads bent together, staring at him, whispering. Desire clear on their colluding faces. “Seems you could have your pick of the litter. If you wanted.”

“That’s not what I do.”

“But what if she wanted you to? Your client?”

He studied me, seeming to gauge if that’s what I wanted. “Guest.”

“Guest. Sorry.”

He pulled me a bit closer. “Consent goes both ways. I consent only to be with my guest.”

The more cryptic he was, the more curious I became. “But do you like all this?”

“I understand it,” he non-answered.

I nodded toward two people who’d left the dance floor and were screwing against the wall, her breasts bouncing to the tempo of his thrusts. He obliged me and looked at them. Impassively. “Do you find that sexy, or arousing, or…what, exactly?”

“It’s sex. Just sex.”

“So, you’re too jaded to find anything stimulating?”

He smirked down at me. “I’d like to think not.”

“No, seriously. Do you even get turned on anymore?” His smile grew tight, but he didn’t seem angry, just impatient. “What do you, Alessandro, like? What do you fantasize about?”

“Not that.” He jerked his head to the wall couple.

My frustration built, though I knew I didn’t have the right to be frustrated. “What do you want, Alessandro?”

He stopped dancing. He took a long moment looking at me before saying, “I want whatever you want, Claire.”

He was ending the conversation. He was begging me to end it.

Then, as if to contradict what I saw in his eyes, he laced his fingers into mine.

We stood there, facing each other, and the room disappeared. All the sex, the naked bodies, the wild abandonment…gone.

I’d pushed us here. I’d pushed for the real him. I’d gotten it.

And there was nowhere to go with it.

I pulled him back into a dance position, to stop looking at his face. His arms came around my lower back and I wrapped mine around his neck and I stared at the now-finished couple over his shoulder. She was reapplying her lipstick and he was looking at his phone. They weren’t touching.

“Intimacy,” I realized aloud. “That’s what’s missing. It’s the most intimate act, but the intimacy… Everyone here just left it at the door, like a checked coat.”

He brought our bodies closer. The dance changed. We weren’t just feeling each other move, we were inside a shared movement. I felt the pads of his fingers land on my bare back, between my shoulder blades. Softly, they began to skate upward. They found the spot on my neck. The one he already knew so well.

Intimacy.

“I want to go home now.”

Alessandro

Walking back to the palazzo, arm in arm, all I could think about were those cornflower eyes, framed by black velvet, looking at me while we danced. And those charred blush lips of hers. And that creamy heaving chest, barely contained in that corset. All of that beauty coming home with me.

I hoped she’d gotten what she’d wanted. To feel desired. I had a feeling she’d been so busy looking at other people that she hadn’t noticed how other people were looking at her. But I had. I’d noticed all night long and it made me edgy. Like walking around with the crown jewels on a pillow, waiting to be robbed.

She wanted to be wanted. I understood that. That’s what her line of questioning was about: what do you like, what do you want? You, I was supposed to have said. But I couldn’t. My wants were off-limits. They were mine alone. They were not relevant to us, to our time together, to her experience.

But I needed to give her something. So I thought about the truest thing I could say that still kept us both safe and I said, into the quiet of the night, “I want to change your voice.”

“Huh?”

“You want to know what I want, I’m telling you. I want to change your voice.”

That vertical line above her pert little nose appeared. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve perfected that low, calm, cool thing. That I’m-totally-composed, everything-is-fine thing. That’s a composite of all the other voices in your head. I want yours alone. Your real voice.”

“How are you going to change my voice?”

I just smiled.