Chapter 22 Last Waters
The season wound down as seasons do up there, in departures staggered across a week, cars descending the switchbacks one by one, the building slowly emptying of its wealthy ghosts.
There’s a particular feeling to a spa at the end of a season, a thing nobody warns you about.
The wing goes quiet a room at a time. The milk-bath system gets its final run before the off-season drain.
Bianca started leaving doors open that stayed closed all winter, airing rooms that wouldn’t be used again until autumn.
Poppy ran her end-of-season audit, which involved spreading the entire guest book across the desk and reconciling it against the takings and humming, the contented hum of a woman whose numbers reconcile.
And the snow on the south face had gone from a wall to a memory of a wall, the first black rock coming through, meltwater running in the gutters day and night, the mountain remembering it had a shape under all that white.
I spent the week doing the things a building needs before it half-sleeps: draining the lines that would freeze, servicing the generator I’d nursed through the storm, planing the front door that still stuck in the damp no matter how many times I planed it, because some doors are like some people and the swelling is just who they are.
Ute caught me at it and said the door had stuck for thirty years and three handymen and I should make my peace with it, and I said I’d make my peace with it the day it stopped sticking, and she looked at me a long moment and said, “You’ll be here a while, then,” which was about the closest Ute came to saying she was glad.
Simone was the exception. She extended her booking through test day, and she made the announcement at breakfast in a tone that brooked no discussion.
“I’m staying for the result,” she said, buttering toast with executive precision.
“I have thought about it carefully. I can wait two weeks for the most important number of my life in a glass office in the city, vomiting from nerves into a wastebasket between meetings, or I can wait for it here. With cake.” She bit the toast. “There’s no analysis.
The cake wins. I’ve cancelled three things.
” She bit the toast again. “Don’t look at me like that, all of you. I can feel it from here.”
Eva, by contrast, had gone quiet. The wrong turns had stopped. The bright wrong questions had stopped. She drifted the lounge and the pool being charming and patient and giving away nothing, and Poppy trusted the quiet less than she’d trusted anything all season.
“A snoop who stops snooping isn’t a snoop who’s given up,” Poppy said darkly, sharpening a pencil she didn’t need sharpened.
“It’s a snoop who’s changed her angle. I’d rather she was rooting through the laundry.
When Eva, whatever her name really is, goes still, that’s when I get scared.
” She tapped the pencil against the ledger, hard.
“Maier. When Eva Maier goes still. If that’s even what we call her. ”
The kitchen, that week, delivered its verdict.
I was eating late, as I usually did, Ute’s plate appearing without my asking, and she sat down across from me with her own cup, which she almost never did, and watched me eat for a while in her square-armed silence.
“Henrik ate at this table twenty-two years,” she said, finally.
“Every night. Good man. Kind man.” She turned her cup.
“Ate like a guest. The whole twenty-two years. Took the plate, said thank you, sat a little apart, never once reached for the bread without being offered it. Never put his elbows down. A guest.” She looked at me, eating with my elbows on her table and my second helping already taken without asking.
“You eat like family. From the first week. Reached for the bread your second night here like you’d lived here ten years. ”
“Is that a complaint,” I said.
“It is the opposite of a complaint.” She got up, gathered my empty plate, and delivered the rest of it on her way back to the stove, the theme of the season in one verdict from the one person allowed to state it.
“That is the entire difference between the two of you. Henrik and you. He was the cure and never let himself be fed. You let yourself be fed.” She set a slice of cake down in front of me I hadn’t asked for.
“Don’t ever learn his manners. They killed him slow. ”
The milk chamber’s last service of the season belonged, by tradition, to the staff.
It’s an old rule, older than anyone working, that on the final night before the chamber’s drained and scrubbed for the off-season, the people who clean it all year get to use it.
And Bianca commandeered it the way Bianca commandeered things, loudly, joyfully, drafting me into it as if there’d ever been a question, and Poppy, with enormous relish, paged Marlene for the formal permission the rule technically required.
Marlene’s answer came back, and it was the first joke-shaped order I’d ever heard her give, and the staff understood it for exactly what it was.
“Approved,” Marlene said, dry as bone, over the intercom, to a front desk full of people pretending not to listen. “The directress declines to chaperone what she cannot afterward unsee. Enjoy the waters.” Click.
The chamber was lamp-low when I came in, the white water steaming gold under the recessed lights, the column of the high window dark now with night instead of bright with day, and Bianca was already in it.
She was in the white water to the waist, her dark waves piled high on her head, her strong arms stretched along the marble lip on either side like a queen receiving an audience, and she’d very obviously, very shamelessly, started without me, her color high and her grin wicked and her breath already not quite even.
“Ten years,” she said, by way of greeting, watching me undress, “I have scrubbed this tub on my knees for duchesses and czarinas and a contessa who cried in it for a week. Ten years of cleaning other women’s milk baths.
” She tipped her head back against the marble, the long brown column of her throat sheened with steam.
“And tonight the help takes the waters. Get in here, lindo. I may have begun without you. I make no apology.”
I got in. The water closed warm and silky around me, milk-white and almond-scented, and she came to me through it, slick and laughing, half-wrestling, all that strong joyful weight in my arms, and I caught her and her legs came around me and we played in the white water like the warm thing it was meant to be, her mouth finding mine, the two of us sliding and laughing in the holy water she’d scrubbed a thousand times for women who never asked her name.
My mouth found her throat, the sheen of the milk-water on her skin, the salt of her under the almond, and then her breasts, high and full enough, the ones she joked about first so nobody else could, the dark nipples drawn tight in the warm air, and I gave them the attention she pretended not to want, drew one stiff peak into my mouth and sucked hard, rolling it with my tongue, and got a husky Portuguese curse for it and a hand fisting in my wet hair to hold me there.
“You always do that,” she gasped, half a laugh. “Nobody bothers with those, they all go straight for the…” She broke off as I bit gently. “Sim. That. Okay. You’ve made your point.”
And then she pushed off me and stood, in the waist-deep shallows, and turned, and gave me the thing.
The defining body part of the season, given its altar.
She bent and braced her hands on the marble lip and presented herself, arching her back to lift it clear of the water, the round heavy high curve of her, the white milk-water streaming off it in the lamplight, running off the deep-tan skin in pale ribbons and dripping back into the bath.
I came up behind her in the shallows and just looked for a moment, both hands settling on the full warm weight of it, and she looked back over her shoulder, grinning, proud of it, wanting it admired.
“Go on,” she said, softer than her grin. “Nobody’s watching tonight. Nobody’s waiting on the room, nobody’s listening at the wall. Just you. Worship it properly or get out.”
So I worshipped it the way the season had been building to, hands and mouth and teeth, gripping the full heavy weight of it, spreading her cheeks apart with my thumbs, my mouth tracking the wet pale ribbons of milk-water down the deep-tan skin and then dragging my tongue through the slick split of her, the lamplight catching every wet line of her and gilding it, turning all of her to molten brass and shadow, and Bianca dropped her head down between her braced arms and groaned long and low and lost, somewhere in the rising steam, any ability to narrate at all.
I worked her with my mouth and then with two fingers from behind, found her cunt dripping and swollen and gone, and she pushed back onto my hand and swore into the steam.
Then I stood and pushed into her slick open cunt and took her there, bent over the marble lip, sliding into her deep and slow and reverent, all the way in until my hips met her ass, the lips of her stretched tight around me, my hands full of the heavy sway of her ass.
And here was the place where, any other night all season, she’d have aimed it at a thin wall and given the corridor the performance.
But the room was stone, and the road was empty, and the season was done, and there was nobody for a kilometer in any direction, not one ear to play to, and Bianca Moraes, the loudest joy in any room she had ever walked into, went quiet.