It was a corner apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a stone and glass building on Second Avenue. The hall was white and carpeted in beige. At the end of the hall was a tall, narrow window, but most of the illumination was provided by brass sconces set high on the walls to reflect light off the white ceiling. The apartment doors looked like darkly grained wood but David suspected they were steel.
Deirdre handed him the key. The small cardboard tag attached to it by a string read 34F. After making sure they were at the right door, he fit the key into the deadbolt lock above the doorknob, turned it, then pushed the door open. Stale air wafted toward the hall, as if the apartment had been unoccupied for a while.
“You’d better go first, David,” Deirdre said behind him.
He stepped into the apartment. The living room was bright, small, and uncluttered, with abstract prints on the walls, a low-slung modern sofa and angular slate-topped tables. A black, lacquered wall unit held a large-screen TV, a stereo, and some crystal animal figures. Half a dozen books that appeared never to have been read were propped between large onyx bookends in the shape of charging bulls that seemed to be squeezing the books together.
A loud metallic click made him turn.
Deirdre had locked the door behind them.
David looked back to the apartment’s interior. “Hello!”
No answer.
“I don’t guess the rental agent’s here yet,” Deirdre said. She began to walk around slowly and hesitantly, like a wary trespasser, touching objects randomly and gently as if to reassure herself that they really did exist. “Look at all the light streaming through that window!” She exclaimed. “It’s beautiful! I love this room!”
“It’s well furnished if you like modern,” David said. He didn’t like modern and thought the apartment looked like a futuristic art gallery.
“Darlene said the man who lives here sells and demonstrates electronics. He needs to sublease because he travels all over the world and he’s going to make his home base in London for a while. He’s smart like you are, David.”
“If I were smart, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t you believe it,” she said.
He trailed behind her as she walked to a short hall and glanced into the kitchen gleaming with white cabinets and appliances. She gave the black and white tiled bathroom the same cursory examination. The open door at the end of the hall led to the bedroom. She entered and he paused in the doorway, then followed.
The bedroom contianed only a king-sized bed, a dresser, a chair, and a small triangular table with a lamp and heavy glass ashtray on it. Beyond the foot of the bed was a wide window whose light was barely muted by gauzy white ceiling-to-floor curtains.
“You did say a rental agent was supposed to meet you here, didn’t you?” David asked.
“That’s what I thought someone said to me, but they might have been mistaken.”
He knew that the odds on a rental agent showing up were slim.
Deirdre walked to the wide window and located the pull cord. Rollers rasped in their traverse-rod track as she parted the curtains.
“Just look at this view, David!”
He dutifully walked across the bedroom’s plush rose carpet and stood at the window.
The view was toward the river and Queens. Afternoon sun highlighted the tall buildings so they were deceptively beautiful. The ornate steel suspension of the Queensboro Bridge was visible. Far below in the shadowed and sun-hazed canyons, tiny cars and foreshortened pedestrians crawled along in symmetrical puzzle-patterns of activity.
He heard, then felt, Deirdre move close behind him.
“What do you see, David?” Her voice was soft.
“New York. Too many people hurrying and not knowing where they’re going.”
He felt her fingertips on his shoulder and he turned.
“Now what do you see?”
She was standing even closer than he’d thought and had unbuttoned her blouse almost all the way down. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her large, firm breasts parted the fabric. One erect nipple was visible.
David opened his mouth, about to say her name, then her lips were closed over his, warm and writhing, soft and insistent. He felt the velvet wedge of her tongue.
With an effort of will and physical strength, he broke away from the kiss.
“Not a good idea, Deirdre.” He was breathing hard.
Desire glowed like fever in her eyes. “It was once. It can be again. Besides, you want to.”
“That doesn’t make it a good idea.”
He started to walk away from her but she blocked him with the length of her body smiling up at him. She kissed him again. He resisted again, but not as determinedly.
“Listen, Deirdre…” He hated the wavering note in his voice.
He felt her hand work between their bodies, find its way inside the front of his pants. She began to manipulate him, gently, so that it seemed such a natural thing to do. They had been intimate in a way never forgotten.
“At least once, anyway,” she breathed. “Don’t make me beg, David.”
Under the warm pressure of her fingers he felt himself go from tumescent to rigid. He threw back his head and stared straight up at the ceiling. His body cried to do what his mind was rejecting. “Jesus!”
“That sounds like a prayer, David. It can be answered.” Her hand continued its clever, expert work. She knew him; their bodies knew one another. Forever familiar. “We both want the same thing, the very same thing…”
The tightness in his body grew taut, and something in him gave.
He lifted her and carried her to the bed. Laid her down and bent over her, kissing her breasts as she pulled at his shirt. He raised his head then, and they virtually tore each other’s clothes off.
Pale and nude, beautiful as memory, she lay before him, gazing up at him with amusement and lust. “Want to hurt me, David? Want to whip me with your belt?”
He felt the mood shift.
“I’m not into that anymore, Deirdre.”
She gave him the most lascivious grin he’d ever seen. “Honestly?”
“Yeah, honestly. Straight sex is gonna have to be good enough.” He bent lower, kissed her.
When their lips parted, she gripped his earlobe and twisted it playfully. “Want me to hurt you? You been a bad boy?” She gave his ear an extra twist.
He gripped her hand and lowered it. “Straight sex, Deirdre.”
She pulled him down to her, on her. He kissed her lips again, her breasts, her stomach, the dark, wet center of her. She spread her legs wide, guided him up to kiss him again, then wrapped her legs around his waist as he entered her.
She made a deep, throaty sound and he began thrusting, slowly at first, spanning warm interior spaces, then faster and more violently as his passion took him. Her long, powerful legs clamped tightly around his waist like a trap. “Hurt me!” she moaned in his ear. “Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me, David! Please!”
He gripped her wrists and bent her arms back behind her head, watching her grimace and narrow her eyes. Her lips tightened, baring her teeth. He felt the core of her throbbing, then her fingernails clawing, digging painfully into his back. Her body arched with a power that surprised him. He knew she was climaxing as she whispered hoarsely in his ear. “Mine, mine, mine, MINE!”
She went limp beneath him and her legs fell to the sides as he thrust into her violently and emptied himself.
She kissed his ear, the one she’d twisted, as he slowly disengaged himself from her and rolled gasping onto his back.
Neither of them spoke.
He tried to analyze what he felt but couldn’t; his mind was still floating somewhere above body and desire, connected by only tenuous neural threads.
Finally, after he’d caught his breath, he stood up and went to the window, where he stood staring again at the teeming riddle of Manhattan. The scratches on his back felt like wounds from a lioness.
From behind him on the bed, he heard Deirdre say, “That was lovely, David. Aren’t you going to thank me?”
Twenty minutes later, as they were leaving the apartment, David knew how he felt: guilty and ashamed. Deirdre, he noticed with dread, looked smug. He couldn’t deny that he’d wanted her desperately, uncontrollably. Couldn’t deny it to her or to himself.
He held the door open for her and she edged past him into the hall, brushing him with her hip, glancing briefly up at him with a sated kind of lust that slumbered.
Behind them, and behind the louvered doors of the bedroom closet, a videocassette ran out of tape.
There was a soft click, a whir, and in the dark closet a pinpoint of red light winked out.