Chapter 40 #4
I reached for his shirt, and my fingers found the buttons, and I unbuttoned them with the slow, deliberate care of a person who is not undressing a man but is instead unwrapping a thing that is precious and irreplaceable, and the unwrapping was, I acknowledged, the most intimate act I had ever performed, because the performing was not a performance, and the absence of performance meant that I was, for perhaps the first time in my conscious life, entirely present in a physical interaction with another human being, and the presence was overwhelming in its simplicity, because it required nothing of me but the thing that was happening, and the thing that was happening was two bodies in a dark room, moving toward each other with the slow, certain inevitability of a tide approaching the shore.
We were on the sofa, and then we were on the floor, because the sofa was too small for what was happening, and the floor was carpeted in the deep Turkish rug that I had selected for its colour and its texture and its capacity to absorb sound, and the absorbing of sound was, at this moment, irrelevant, because there was no one in the house to hear and no one in the world who cared, and the irrelevance of the sound-absorbing capacity of the rug was, I thought, a metaphor for the irrelevance of all the strategic architecture I had constructed, because the architecture had been designed to manage the perceptions of others, and there were no others, and the absence of others meant that the architecture was standing empty, a beautiful, useless structure with no one inside it.
He was above me, and his body was warm and solid and real, and the reality of his body was a thing that I could not strategise around or calculate my way out of, because the reality of another person's body pressed against your own is a thing that bypasses the intellectual machinery and speaks directly to the physical machinery, and the physical machinery, in my case, was functioning with a precision that was almost alarming, because the physical responses that his touch was producing were not being filtered through the usual strategic assessment, and the absence of the filter meant that I was feeling the touch in a way that I had never felt any touch before, and the feeling was not pleasure, exactly, because pleasure requires an emotional component that I lacked, but it was the physical sensation that pleasure produces without the emotional narrative that usually accompanies it, and the sensation was, in its own way, more intense than the sensation of pleasure, because the intensity was undiluted by meaning.
His mouth moved along my throat, and the movement was slow and deliberate and utterly without urgency, and the absence of urgency was the thing that made it different from every previous encounter, because the previous encounters had been conducted at a pace dictated by strategy, and the strategy had required either the simulation of passion or the performance of control, and the pace had been the pace of those simulations and performances, and this pace was the pace of a man who is not simulating or performing but is simply doing, and the doing was the thing that made it real, and the reality was the thing that made it terrifying.
I pulled him toward me. The pulling was not a gesture of control or a move in a game or a calculated response designed to direct the encounter toward a predetermined conclusion.
The pulling was the pulling of a body that wanted to be closer to another body, and the wanting was not strategic but physical, and the physicality of it was so unfamiliar that I did not recognise it at first, did not understand that the sensation of wanting to be closer to another person was a sensation that was available to me, and the availability was a thing that I would need to think about later, when the thinking was possible and the machinery was re-engaged and the experience could be categorised and filed and understood within the framework that I used to understand everything.
He entered me. The entering was slow, so slow that the boundary between the before and the during was almost imperceptible, and the imperceptibility was the thing that distinguished this from every previous sexual encounter of my life, because the previous encounters had been characterised by clearly defined boundaries — the boundary between the performance and the reality, the boundary between the strategy and the sensation, the boundary between the self that was performing and the self that was experiencing — and those boundaries had been the structure upon which I had built my capacity for sexual manipulation, and the absence of the boundaries meant that the structure had collapsed, and the collapse was, in the space where other people feel vulnerability, a sensation of such profound disorientation that I closed my eyes and held onto him and breathed, and the breathing was the only honest thing I knew how to do.
We moved together. The movement was slow and rhythmless and entirely without the calculated choreography that I had brought to every previous sexual encounter, because the choreography required a director, and the director was the strategic self, and the strategic self was, for the first time in my adult life, not present.
The absence of the strategic self was not a choice.
I had not decided to stop performing. I had not calculated that the absence of performance would produce a more powerful effect than the presence of it.
The absence was simply the absence, a gap in the machinery where the machinery should have been, and the gap was the most terrifying thing about this encounter, because the gap meant that I was experiencing something without the protection of analysis, and the unprotected experience was a thing that I had spent my entire life avoiding, because unprotected experience was the thing that Vivienne had trained me to fear, and the fear, in Vivienne's formulation, was the fear of being seen, and the being seen was the thing that could not be survived, because the seeing would reveal the emptiness behind the performance, and the revelation would destroy the performance, and the destruction of the performance was the destruction of the self.
But the seeing had happened. Sebastian had seen me, long ago, in the first weeks of our acquaintance, and the seeing had not destroyed me, and the survival of the seeing had been, I acknowledged in the slow, rhythmless darkness of this encounter, the thing that had made him different from every other person in my experience, and the difference was the thing that had drawn me to him and held me and prevented me from destroying him when destroying him would have been the rational thing to do, and the irrationality of not destroying him was the single largest strategic error of my life, and the error was also, I thought, the only genuinely human thing I had ever done.
His forehead touched mine. The touch was light and warm and damp with perspiration, and the closeness of his face to mine meant that I could see his eyes, even in the darkness, because the darkness was not total and his eyes were bright and focused and entirely open, and the openness was the thing that undid me, because the openness was not a performance, and I had never seen Sebastian perform openness, and the absence of performance in a man who was always performing, always maintaining the careful, controlled facade of a detective doing his duty, was the most intimate thing I had ever witnessed, because it meant that he, too, was without armour, and the mutual absence of armour was the thing that this moment was made of, and the moment was a thing that had never existed before between us and would never exist again.
I came. The coming was not the calculated, timed climax that I had produced in previous encounters, a performance of pleasure designed to bring the encounter to its strategic conclusion.
The coming was a thing that happened to me, a physical event that was not initiated by my will but that arose from the accumulation of sensation and the rhythm of our movement and the terrifying, unprecedented intimacy of two people who were, for the first and only time, entirely present with each other.
The physical sensation was intense, more intense than any I had experienced in the context of sexual activity, and the intensity was overwhelming in a way that I could not manage, because the management of sensation was the province of the strategic self, and the strategic self was absent, and the absence meant that the sensation moved through me without moderation, a wave that broke over the empty space where my defences should have been and that left, in its wake, a stillness that was deeper and more profound than any stillness I had ever known.
He came. I felt it, the pulse and the shudder and the warmth, and the feeling of it was the feeling of a thing ending, and the ending was not the ending of an encounter but the ending of an era, and the era was the era of Cecilia Blackwood, Countess Dowager of Ashworth, the woman who had built an empire on the bodies of three men and who was now, in this dark room on a Turkish rug on the floor of a house she was about to lose, experiencing the first genuinely unperformed moment of her adult life, and the experiencing was the most terrifying and the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to her, and the beauty and the terror were indistinguishable, and the indistinguishability was the thing that she would carry with her for the rest of her life, a memory without precedent and without category and without the emotional framework to contain it.