Chapter 7 #2
A girl with two thick puffs of natural Black hair, eight or nine years old, sitting on the back of a pale paper crane, sailing across a sky the color of grape soda.
Aurora's entire body went cold.
It was hers.
It was one of her senior thesis pieces from her degree show eleven years ago.
It had sold at the small Houston gallery for eight hundred dollars, anonymous buyer, the morning the show opened. She had used the money to pay for her textbooks her last semester.
She had never seen the piece again.
She had never known where it went.
She turned her head in what felt like slow motion and looked at him.
He was standing five feet behind her, hands in the pockets of his tuxedo trousers, his bow tie pulled fully off and hanging from his collar. He was looking at the wall.
“Halston,” Aurora said. Her voice was not steady.
“I know.”
“You bought it?”
“I bought it.”
“Eleven years ago.”
“Eleven years ago.”
“Anonymously.”
“Anonymously.”
“You have kept it in this room since.”
“I have.”
She turned back to the wall.
She was quiet. The grape-soda sky was the same sky she had been painting again three weeks ago when the phone had rung in her studio.
She had not realized she had been drawing variations of this one image her entire adult life.
She had not realized that somewhere across town, in a soft white library on a Gilded-Age estate on Galveston Bay, the original of this image had been hanging on a wall for eleven years.
She turned around.
Halston did not move toward her. He waited with his hands in his pockets.
“Halston,” she said, “why?”
“Aurora. You know why.”
She did. She had known since the moment she saw the watercolor — since the gold ring came out of his pocket at the courthouse.
And if she was being entirely honest with herself, she had known since the morning at the breakfast table, when he poured her coffee without asking, slid it across to her, and she drank it.
She did not say I know.
She crossed the library in her gold halter gown and her bare feet — she had stepped out of her shoes in the foyer — and stopped one foot from her husband.
“Don't,” he said, hoarsely. “Aurora. Don't, unless you mean it.”
“I haven't meant anything more in fifteen years.”
He cupped her face in both his hands. The slim white scar across his right palm was rough against her cheek. He looked at her, hard, like he was trying to find the lie.
He could not find one.
He kissed her.
Not the way he had kissed her in the courtroom.
This was a man kissing his wife, finally, with no one else in the room.
His mouth was hot and certain, and he tasted faintly of champagne and the very small bourbon he had let himself have in the limo, and Aurora's hands went up into his black hair without her telling them to.
He made a small low sound against her mouth.
She kissed him back like she had been kissing him for years in her sleep, which she had.
They did not stop in the library, in the corridor or on the stairs.
They got to the door of his bedroom and he opened it with one hand without taking his other hand off the back of her neck, and the door clicked shut behind them, and Halston, who had not allowed himself a single uncontrolled second, finally let himself go.
He drew back from her mouth and looked at her.
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure.”
“Aurora. If you are not sure.”
“Halston. I am sure.”
He reached behind her neck. He undid the halter tie of the gold gown in one slow pull. The silk fell, caught for half a second on her nipples, gave up the catch, and pooled around her bare feet on the rug. Halston exhaled like he had been holding the breath for hours.
“Christ,” he said, low. “Aurora.”
She did not let him admire her for long.
She had not come up to his bedroom to be looked at.
She set both her hands on the front of his white tuxedo shirt and she yanked, and the small buttons popped one after the next, two of them flying off into the dim and clicking on the hardwood somewhere behind him.
He laughed once against her mouth.
“That was a Charvet shirt, Mrs. Iverson.”
“Buy another one.”
She got the shirt off his shoulders and ran her palms flat down the lean tight line of his chest, the small dark hair under her hands, the warm muscle of his abdomen, the faint thin pale break of a scar she did not know about under his right collarbone.
“What is this.”
“A break. Argentina. I was twenty-four, I came off a horse.”
“You used to hate horses.”
“I still do.”
She bent her head. She put her mouth on the scar.
A moan came from his throat. His hand came up into her chignon. He pulled, just hard enough to tip her face up to his, and the careful pinning of her hair gave way. The spirals dropped to her shoulders. He looked at her like he had been starved.
He walked her backward to the bed. The backs of her thighs hit the mattress. He laid her down on the cream linen with one hand at the small of her back so her landing was soft, and then he was over her with his weight on his forearms, and his mouth went to her throat.
He did not hurry there. He kissed the long brown line of her throat from her chin to her collarbone. He bit, just once, where her shoulder met her neck, and Aurora let out a sound she had never made in front of another person before.
His hand closed warm and full around her breast. His thumb found her nipple and circled it. He bent his head and his mouth replaced his thumb; his tongue did something slow that made her arch up off the linen and grab two fistfuls of his black hair.
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“Halston. Get out of those pants.”
He laughed against her breast.
“Yes, ma'am.”
He shed the trousers and came back to her naked stretching himself out along her side. He set his hand flat on her stomach, then drifted it down between her thighs.
She was wet for him. She had been wet for him since the dance floor at The Wortham. His fingers found her clit and stroked once, slowly. Her hips came up off the bed without her permission.
“Halston.”
“I know, baby.”
“Halston. Now. Please.”
He rolled over her, braced himself on one forearm, took himself in his other hand and lined himself up against her and pushed, slowly, all the way in.
He was thick and hot and not, she realized with a small dim laugh, the boy she had been with in the boathouse at nineteen.
He was a man. He filled her up like a man.
Aurora's whole body locked around him for a long beat.
He held steady inside her, his forehead pressed to hers. He was breathing hard. He had not, she thought, expected to come this close to losing it this fast.
“Aurora.”
“I'm okay. I'm okay, baby. Move.”
He moved.
He started slow because he had to start slow.
Long full strokes, his weight on his arms, his forehead against hers.
Then a little faster. Then the dam went.
He drove into her harder, his free hand sliding under the small of her back to angle her up to him, his mouth at her ear saying things she did not entirely register, yes, her name and Christ.
She wrapped both her legs around his hips and pulled. The headboard knocked the wall once, twice.
The pleasure came up in her in a long hot unspooling. She made a sound that was not a word. He felt her go.
“That's it. That's it, baby. Stay with me.”
She did not stay with him. She broke first. She broke with her teeth in the muscle of his shoulder, his name in her throat and her thighs clenched tight around his hips.
The moment she did, he buried his face in her hair and let himself follow her over, one ragged thrust and a long low groan against her temple, his arm tight around her ribs.
They lay tangled in the cream linen afterward, both of them quiet, the moon doing slow work through the open bay window, the live oaks rustling, the cicadas pressed up against the screens.
Aurora's cheek was on the bare warm slope of his chest. Halston's hand was slowly stroking up and down her bare back.
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“What happened that morning?”
His hand on her back stopped moving.
He did not answer for a long time. The estate was very quiet. The bay outside was very dark. Aurora could hear, faintly, the rope of the boathouse moorings tapping against a wooden post.
“Aurora,” he said finally. His voice was low. “There was a contract.”
She lifted her head off his chest.
“A what?”
“There was a contract. My father. Your mother.”
Aurora's whole body went still.
“What?”
“I will tell you the rest. Not tonight. Aurora. Not tonight. Please.”
He looked at her with fear in his face, and Aurora, who had been about to climb out of the bed and demand the rest of it standing up in a sheet, stopped. Because her husband, the billionaire, who was typically never afraid of anything, was looking at her like he was afraid of her right now.
She swallowed.
“All right,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”
She slid out from under his arm, picked the gold dress off the floor and slipped it on over her head without bothering with the halter tie. She walked, barefoot, across the floor, through the inner door of the master suite, and back to her own bed.
She did not sleep.
The word contract did laps in her head until the sun came up over Galveston Bay.
Her father had been right about one thing. She had walked back into it. She had walked all the way back into it. And there was a piece of the story she had not yet been told.
She was going to find out what it was tomorrow.