Magdalene (20 page)

“I hate it when people say that,” he
groused.

“So...long weekend. Does that mean you’re
playing hooky from church on Sunday?”

“Well, that’s why I have counselors, right?
But I don’t want to wear out my welcome.”

“You can’t wear out your welcome until
you’ve worn out my sheets.”

He chuckled.

“Swishy skirt, then?”

“Eight o’clock,” he said instead, and hung
up on me.

I would’ve dumped any other man who was
arrogant enough to tell me what to wear—and in such
specificity!—but if I were going to comply, I’d damn well do it
right.

I stared at myself in the mirror that
evening, wondering if it were too blatant and thus would derail my
full-court press.

Red.

The color of a whore.

Only...

Mitch didn’t make me feel like one. He sent
me gifts, but not expensive ones. Sentimental ones, ones that meant
something to him—layers of meaning I couldn’t hope to peel away
without getting to know him better.

I doffed the dress that said
Fuck
me!

I put on a bra and found a different
dress—still red—that said
I know you want to. What are you going
to do about it?

With a swishy skirt.

And wickedly high red Louboutins.

My doorbell rang and I headed up the stairs
from The Bordello, where I’d done business for so many years. I
stopped on the stairs and looked over my shoulder. It was as
exquisitely decorated as it had ever been, though completely
different from when it had been my workplace.

It was not a place I’d ever bring Mitch.

“Where are we going tonight?” I asked as we
descended the front stairs, feeling my tone coming from somewhere
down deep, husky, willing. I did not do this on purpose; it seemed
I couldn’t keep my arousal out of my voice and, worse, he probably
knew that.

He opened the back door of the taxi that
awaited us and said, “Dancing,” low, slow, and held my attention
with those unimaginably ordinary blue eyes that did unimaginably
extraordinary things to me.

“I thought dancing was verboten in most
Protestant religions.”

“Dancing is one of my culture’s favorite
pastimes and as a collective, we’re
very
good at it.”

I wondered how he defined “very good at it.”
In my experience, heterosexual white males aren’t particularly
interested in dancing, much less taking time to learn how to do it
halfway decently. Appreciating good dance is one thing, but doing
it— Dancing well takes time and effort, concentration and practice,
interest and talent.

Like making love.

“We aren’t going anywhere if you don’t get
in the cab,” he said finally, amused.

He handed me in, but I left him little room
to sit beside me. If I calculated correctly, I could end up in his
lap by the time we got wherever we were going.

As he squeezed in next to me, he looked at
me sideways with that knowing expression he had; I had indeed
miscalculated. He was much bigger than he looked under his
expensively tailored suit and I had to scoot away from him—an
entire inch—so he could close the door. He gave the cabbie an
address I didn’t recognize and then looked at me, inscrutable, and
laid his arm across the back of the seat behind me.

I leaned into him and touched him, dared him
to say a word as I rested on my hip and pressed closer to slide my
left leg over his, then draw it up his until my knee nudged his
cock. I placed my hand on his shirt front, and slid it slowly
across his chest and under the lapel of his jacket.

He dipped his head a bit. Finally!

But his lips only barely brushed mine when
he whispered, “Were you hoping I’d kiss you?”

I sighed and began to close my eyes and tilt
my head just a tad.

He chuckled—
chuckled!
—pulling a mere
inch away from me, a satisfied smirk on his face. In retaliation, I
found the little nub of nipple through his shirt and flicked it
with my thumb. His only response was the slight flare of his
nostrils and bob of his Adam’s apple. He said nothing, but
continued to watch me as speculatively as I watched him.

Daring more, I caressed downward, intending
to make a point of the fact that he was as aroused as I—if the tent
in his trousers was anything to go by—but he caught my hand just as
I touched his belt buckle and slid his fingers through mine, at
once rebuffing me and drawing me closer.

“Abstinence,” he murmured, “is an effective
aphrodisiac, don’t you think?”

Unbelievably
erotic.

I swallowed, my mouth dry, unable to stop
staring at him. I knew I should feel ridiculous, but I didn’t. He
wouldn’t allow it. He seemed to know every move I’d make, be
prepared to stop me and at the same time, keep me near.

He dropped his arm from the back of the seat
over my shoulders and pulled me tight against him; my breath caught
when I felt his lips against my temple. “Patience.”

Patience.

All signs pointed toward the inevitable, but
something was off, some disconnect about the basics of the game. We
seemed to be playing with the same end in mind, but the rules
conflicted in some way I couldn’t sort out.

“You want me,” I whispered. “You want to
make love with me.”

“Yes, I do.”

I blinked and drew away from him to stare. I
already knew that; I’d known it from the moment he’d asked me to
dinner, but his candor shocked and diverted me.

“That surprises you?”

“It surprises me how quickly you admitted
it.”

He shrugged. “I have no reason to lie. It’s
not a sin to want.”

“Just a sin to do.”

He inclined his head.

“I
am
going to seduce you.”

“You can try. You won’t succeed.”

“I already have because you’re here.”

“Maybe I like playing this game with
you.”

“Why would you think it’s a game for
me?”

“
You
made it one. So since I still
haven’t given you what you want, you decided to throw down the
gauntlet.”

“I don’t play games I can’t win.”

“Neither do I,” he whispered, this time in
my ear. I shivered. “Puts us at cross purposes, doesn’t it?”

“You want to. I want to. What’s the
problem?”

“You know the answer to that.”

And the cab came to a halt. Mitch got out,
but not in an attempt to escape from me; he’d had plenty of chances
to put me off and, well, he had but...he hadn’t. He turned and held
his hand out to me, to help me out of the cab.

I looked up at the building in front of us
and gasped, even knowing he watched me, gauging my reaction to the
place he had brought me. I glanced at him, amazed. “You—?” It came
out as a squeak.

He flashed me a wicked grin. “Shall we
dance?” I stared at him, aghast, but apparently he misunderstood as
he wrapped his arm around my waist and propelled me toward the
door. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll teach you.”

But he didn’t have to.

I’d spent my childhood and adolescence as a
good debutante from the Upper East Side learning how to dance
properly in a ballroom, and I’d made sure to dirty up all those
sanitized Latin dances as soon as I was old enough to sneak out of
the house with my sisters and into a nightclub.

It was my sole rebellion, one my parents
would never have believed me capable of, even if they’d caught
me.

“Where—? How—?”

“Long story,” he said, concentrating on
navigating the path from the cab to the door, guarded by a large
bouncer. He held my left hand in his, his right arm curved around
my waist to guide me past the hundreds of people on line all the
way down the block and around the corner.

“Hey, yo, Bishop!”

“Luis,” Mitch called back as he climbed the
stairs. “How’s Maria?”

“Good, good, and— Rowr,” said the bouncer as
he looked me up and down appreciatively. For once, I didn’t feel
objectified so much as appreciated. I found myself preening; it was
an odd feeling and I liked it, particularly when Mitch smiled at
me, pleased.

Proud.

“Missed you the last few weeks.”

“Had better things to do than hang out with
a big bouncer checking IDs.”

Luis roared and after another couple
pleasantries, Mitch guided me into the darkened club, buzzing with
the energy of humans engaging in the ages-old sex ritual of drums
and dance. The music assaulted my ears and entered my body easily,
like an old lover I had neglected too long and was now welcoming
back to my bed. Lights flashed. The dance floor writhed with the
serpentine grace of a hundred bodies moving to the same beat.

The bartenders all greeted Mitch, and he
yelled back to them and others as we navigated a path through the
clusters of people toward the dance floor. At the edge of the
parquet, I saw that a table was waiting for us. In the middle of it
sat a platter filled with a large selection of tapas and two
pitchers of water with glasses. He took my coat and handed it to a
server who’d appeared out of nowhere. “Thank you, Margarita.” He
took off his jacket and I watched, hungry to see more of what those
expensive clothes covered.

“You come here a lot?” I yelled over the
music once Margarita had left.

“Yes,” he yelled back.

“With whom?” I asked before I thought and
instantly regretted it. The corner of his mouth quirked as he
jerked off his tie and threw it carelessly onto the table. He
unbuttoned the top two buttons of his fine white shirt to his
rather low-scooped undershirt, then rolled his sleeves up to his
elbows. He dropped his cufflinks in his pocket with one hand and
offered me his other.

I put my hand in his.

He led me to the edge of the floor, and I
was not surprised when he first pulled me to him, then pushed me
away. I had to grin at the look of pleased shock on his face when I
completed the simple figure I knew he would choose to begin my
lessons.

Swishy skirt. High heels.

I threw back my head and laughed.

The dancers on the floor seemed to notice us
as we stepped out onto the parquet.

Mitch could dance as well as the best club
dancers I’d ever met or danced with. He had a more pronounced Cuban
styling than mine and I was terribly rusty, so it took us the whole
of half an hour to get me up to speed and negotiate adjustments. It
took us another hour to learn to dance together, but then we did so
as if we had been doing it our entire lives, equally matched in
skill and stamina.

If I actually believed in a deity that
cared, I might have been tempted to think it had had a hand in
this.

Everyone here knew him, from bouncers,
bartenders, and random denizens, some of whom—the female variety,
anyway—stared at me with some amount of consternation. I laughed in
the middle of a turn, Mitch’s arm sliding around me and turning me
under, swift and sure, then his turn under my arm. I didn’t have to
look around to know that only Manhattan’s best club dancers were
here tonight and it seemed that the CEO of Hollander Steelworks and
bishop of a Mormon congregation was one of them.

The air was heavy with sex: impending,
frustrated, yearned for.

Incomplete.

I was no different and neither was he. I
knew it the minute the music slowed and he pulled me back against
his chest for a slow rumba. His arms slid around me, his body close
against my back, his mouth near my ear, his arousal against the
small of my back. In business, he didn’t hesitate to practice a
little sleight of hand. Here, though... I wasn’t sure it would
occur to him to press his cock into me to make a point.

“I come alone,” he whispered. I closed my
eyes and melted into him, my hands wrapped around his hair-dusted
arms. “Eight months or so, I guess. Cutting loose from my life. I
don’t dance with any woman more than once and I don’t stay past
midnight. Mina, she— She was never strong enough to dance like
this. I’ve missed it.”

I gulped.

He turned me out then and I looked at him:
Fine white dress shirt all sweaty and wrinkled, the tails out now,
his face open and happy, without that sly humor he used as a
shield.

The music exploded then and I turned,
stepped away from him, ecstatic that I had a skirt I could flip
back at him as my hips hit every beat, swiveled and otherwise
taunted him, but then he caught me, twirled me around to follow
him.

Mitch was not shy about his footwork nor the
hip technique he needed to do it and even in those generously cut
trousers, I could tell he had a fine ass. His figure eights were a
work of art—and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. I caught him and
he turned, so that he held me firm in frame as we maintained eye
contact and did crossover steps.

The night wore on, neither of us flagging,
our steps faster, our turns and footwork more complicated, as if
this were the game itself, to compete on a dance floor.

No, not competing.

Making love.

We left the club at three a.m., breathless,
sweaty, laughing, hanging onto each other. We had cleared the floor
a couple of times, finished off kids half our age, decimated two
platters of tapas, amused the bartenders and waitstaff.

I had never felt such joy in my life.

“So do all Mormons dance as well as you?” I
teased when he handed me into a cab.

He laughed. “If they don’t, it’s not for
lack of opportunity or encouragement. You surprised me. It was
nice.”

I smiled and bit my lip, somewhat shy to be
so happy right in front of the man who made me feel that way.
“
Where
did you learn to dance like that?”

“Ah...” He laughed wryly and looked down at
the knot our entwined hands made. “The first woman I ever asked to
marry me.”

“What? And she
refused
? Crazy.”

“No. Backed into a corner. Like you. Like
Mina.”