6. Konstantine
CHAPTER SIX
KONSTANTINE
She comes to my study the next night at midnight.
I spent today the way I spend all my days, cargo, calls, the south office, and I retained none of it.
At dinner she sat across from me at the long table and ate slowly, with her chin level.
I watched her hands instead of listening to Adrian, who noticed, because Adrian notices everything he is not supposed to.
Since eleven I have been sitting at the desk with my hand on the closed leather notebook, waiting.
She comes in without knocking, in the black dress she arrived in, barefoot on the stone.
I stand. She crosses the room and stops at the corner of the desk. I look at her in the lamplight of my study.
“I will not put you on the bed tonight, Isadora.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a thing I have to tell you before I do that, and I have not told you it yet.”
“Tell me tonight.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to give you one night, mikrí mou, in which there is nothing between us but the want. After I tell you the thing, you will know what we are, and I will never be able to give you a night like this again. I want to have given it to you once. Tomorrow I will tell you. But tonight, I would like to put my mouth on you with nothing between us.”
She looks at me. Then, in her formal mode: “And the line you will not cross tonight?”
“I will not take your virginity tonight. That is the line. Everything else is the want.”
“I want this too.”
I close the distance.
I lift my hand and rest it at the side of her throat, where it was last night in the library. She turns her face into my palm, and something old in me turns over at the weight of it.
I bend and kiss her. She opens her mouth under mine.
She lifts her hands and lays them flat on the front of my shirt, resting there over my heart.
I make a sound against her mouth that I did not authorize, low, in a register I have not used in years.
She answers it with a sound of her own, smaller, and the two sounds settle the matter between them.
I lift her, carry her three steps, and lower her to the rug in front of the desk.
I kneel and lift the hem of her dress slowly past her thighs. I leave it gathered at her hips, because the line I gave her is what I will not do, but I have said nothing about what I will.
I bend and put my mouth at the inside of her knee and work upward.
I am relearning the gesture one motion at a time, my mouth moving up the long pale line of her thigh while her breath goes ragged above me.
I learn the small mole on her left hip. I learn the soft place where her thigh ends.
When I hook my fingers in the cotton at her hips she lifts to let me draw it down her legs, and then she is bare under the gathered black dress, in the lamplight, in my study, the daughter of my enemy with her hand already finding my hair.
I look up the length of her once.
“Do not stop,” she says, before I can ask.
I put my mouth on her.
She is soft, already wet, and the taste of her goes through me.
I go slowly. Long, flat strokes of my tongue first, learning her, listening.
She was taught somewhere, by nuns, that a woman does not cry out, so she makes instead the smallest sounds I have ever heard a woman make, tiny bitten notes at the top of her breath.
Every one of them lands in me like a nail driven clean.
I part her with my thumbs. I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue until her hips rise, then seal my mouth over her, steady, patient, a man with nothing else to do for the rest of his life.
Her hand tightens in my hair. Her heel slides on the rug.
The sounds climb, still small, still bitten.
I slide one finger into her, slowly, careful of what she is.
She is tight, hot, and her whole body pulls taut as rigging.
“Konstantine.” My name, in her formal Greek, wrecked at the edges.
I work her with mouth and hand until the trembling starts in her thighs. Then I hold her hip flat and take her over the edge. She breaks with one long shaking breath that she keeps almost silent to the very end, which undoes me worse than screaming would have.
I keep my mouth on her past the height of it. When the aftershocks slow, I begin again, softer. She says something that is not a word. I let her come a second time against my tongue, my hand holding her steady, and I keep on until she is shaking too hard to stay on the rug.
I lift my head and rest my cheek against the inside of her thigh, her pulse going hard against my jaw, and I stay there while she comes back into her body.
“Konstantine,” she says at last, above me, in a voice I have never heard from her.
“Mikrí mou.”
“Come up here. Lie with me.”
I rise and lie on the rug beside her. I draw the hem of her dress down her legs, setting her back in order with the careful efficiency this house has taught me, then pull her against my chest, my arm beneath her shoulders.
She fits herself to me and presses her face into the open collar of my shirt, her breath going slowly back to level against my skin.
I lie on the floor and wait for the guilt to come.
It does not come. I file that away with the other things I cannot explain this week.
“Konstantine.”
“Yes.”
“The thing you will tell me tomorrow. It is about my father?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me one sentence tonight. So I can sleep.”
“One sentence?”
“Yes.”
“Mikrí mou. Your father ordered the death of my wife. We do not have to speak of it tonight. We will speak of it in the morning.”
She is still against my chest. She does not move for a long moment. Then she says, in the smallest voice I have heard: “I will speak of it in the morning, Konstantine.”
She closes her eyes, and she does not move, and neither do I, the two of us on the rug while the sea works at the cliff below the shutters.
She is asleep against my chest at the end of it.
I carry her up to her room, lay her in her bed, draw the cover to her shoulder. I close her door behind me.
Then I go back to the study. I sit at the desk, take the photograph of my wife off the wall, turn it face-up in front of me.
She is laughing. She is still laughing.
“Marta,” I say. “I am sorry. Forgive me.”