The Seduction of Suzanne (17 page)

“I’m just going to relocate you a bit,” she said to Justin, who stirred a little and murmured an unintelligible inquiry.

“Stay still.”

He subsided. With a determined effort she pulled him bodily across the floor, blanket and all, only the polish on the wooden floorboards and the full application of all her own bodyweight making the endeavour possible. She rearranged his limbs slightly, strictly forbidding her hands to linger on his sun-warmed skin. Then, satisfied at least aesthetically, she went back to her work.

It seemed only a short while before the moving sun again interrupted her. Yet by the ache in her feet, she knew it had been much longer. With some surprise she realised that the painting was nearly complete. Usually it would take upwards of a week to finish a project to a stage where she was satisfied with it, and that was after she had made several sketches and preliminary paintings. However on this occasion, she hadn’t had the patience to prepare more thoroughly, and for once her lack of discipline had paid off. Apparently nearly three days of observing her subject minutely beforehand had helped matters. She was pleased with it. A piece of his beauty captured for the years.

With a competent ease she cleaned her palette and brushes, and set the easel to one side of the room where it would be out of the way. It would be worked over later when she could view it more dispassionately, after the first rosy flush of creation had worn off.

Yet she had a feeling that very few changes would be made.

Everything put tidily away, she went and stood over Justin. Tempted as she was to let him lie (God knew he’d been getting little enough sleep lately) if he slept on he was going to wake up very stiff from being too long on the unyielding floor. She squatted at his side and shook his shoulder gently. He awoke with a start.

“You can get up now. I’ve finished for the day.” He grunted sleepily in acknowledgment, and then winced as he began to move.

“I thought you might be a bit sore. I’ll be happy to give you a rub-down,” she said generously, knowing that she would enjoy it as much as he.

“Is that a service you offer to all your nude models?” he inquired, coming slowly to his feet.

“Oh yes,” she said enthusiastically, her eyes wide and her gaze innocently sincere. “Especially the good-looking ones.”

That
got his attention.

“Say what?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her forbiddingly.

With interest Suzanne surveyed the promising beginnings of what looked like jealousy. It was not in her nature to deliberately provoke anyone, but the idea of Justin being jealous over her was too tempting to resist.

“It’s one of the perks of the job. All that naked male flesh . . .” she trailed off as she saw muscles all over his body clench in rejection of her words.

“Oh yes, all one of my nude male models arouse this incredible depth of passionate lust in me. I really just can’t help myself,” she went on blandly.

She saw the moment that the meaning of her words penetrated, his face abruptly wiping clean of all expression, as if he had flicked a switch inside his head. She marvelled at his control. The slightest of urbane little smiles emerged.

“Glad to be so appreciated,” he said. Was his tone a little stiff? She couldn’t be sure.

He abruptly turned, appeared to see her newly created painting, and started towards it.

She bit her lip, already regretting her words, and followed. Coming to stand behind him, she placed at tentative hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry. I only meant to tease,” she said.

“Don’t worry, it’s fine,” he replied dismissively. Then he changed the subject. “I like this. It’s simple and powerful.” He didn’t seem at all self-conscious about examining an image of his own naked form. But then he’d never shown any signs of shyness, so Suzanne realised that she shouldn’t feel surprised. She knew she wouldn’t be able to be so dispassionate in similar circumstances. She’d be bashful at the least, probably embarrassed.

“I haven’t tried to paint people in a long time,” she said, subdued. “I can remember my mother saying something about it being better if I stuck to scenery, because at least I didn’t make such a mess of that.”

It was only when he didn’t react, that she realised she’d been expecting his sympathy. Instead he said, as if thinking aloud: “I suppose that if you’d been to art school, you would have spent a lot more time studying things like that. People.”

“Yes. I’d have been better at it then. This
,” she indicated the painting, “would have been better.”

“Maybe it would have been. This is pretty damn good, but maybe it would have been better.”

As she thought about it, she liked it that he didn’t flatter her. It was something special to know someone who was so truthful she could really rely on what he said. It felt solid. Real. Bit by bit she was really coming to trust him. And it was a good feeling.

Chapter Ten

The first quiet click woke her. There was a long pause as she muzzily sorted through her memory to identify the sound. A minute later there was a second click. This time she jack-knifed in the bed, pulling naked limbs together then leaping to her feet in the middle of the mattress.

She stood over a surprised Justin, and a red haze of fury descended over her vision as she caught sight of the slick little black rectangle in his hand. The sound of a camera shutter. The thin, tinny sound that emanated from a mobile phone as it took a picture.

The lens still pointed at the spot where she had lain sprawled over the top of rumpled sheets, completely nude and asleep.

“You bastard!” she shrieked. “You utter, unprincipled bastard!” She bent down and snatched the phone from his unresisting hand, and in a single motion swept it high then dashed it with all her strength on the hard wood floor. There was a splintering sound on impact, and little black pieces scattered around the room.

“Get out of my house, you slime, you piece of filth.” She swooped to pick up a pillow by its corner and swung it at his head without letting go. The force of her blow rocked his head sideways. He scooted backwards across the bed, coming to his feet with his hands held out in front of her in the same gesture a man might use when trying to calm a savage dog. His expression was confusion, but she barely saw it. Superimposed over him was an image of teenage boys laughing coarsely as she fought not to retch.

“
Suzanne? I don’t-“

“I said get out! Get out get out GET OUT!” She leapt from the bed, lithe as a panther. He wasn’t braced for her shove and he stumbled as she cannoned into him from a height, recovered, turned to her again hunched over, broad shoulders pulled in as he tried to minimize his threatening size, defuse her aggression.

She shoved him once more, scooped his clothes off the floor where he had casually shucked them the night before and hurled them at him.

“Wait just a sec-“

“If I had a gun I’d SHOOT you, you miserable excuse for a sick pervert!” He was giving ground, a spark of indignation starting to burn in his own eyes, his ever-smiling mouth drawn tight and grim.

She pushed him again, rage lending her strength. They were in the hallway now, only feet from the open front door, and she hooked a foot around his ankle, crouched to engage her powerful quadriceps, set the heel of both hands on his sternum and tripped him so he fell out onto the verandah.

He rolled as he fell, coming to his feet in a swift motion, but she had already slammed and locked the door. With angry strides he headed for the French doors off the kitchen, but she ran and got there first, throwing the deadbolt in his furious face. Then she locked all the windows, leaving the highest one – the bay window off her bedroom – till last and dropping out his clothes and gym bag.

He had circled the house with her and was there to catch his gear as it fell.

“Suzanne,” he said in stormy-eyed reproach, “This is hardly rational. Let’s just talk-“

She interrupted him with a lurid string of words she had never used before in her life, heaping scorn on his head, his naked body a cipher to her. “Get out now or I’m calling the police,” she finished, with no trace of hesitation in her tone. Only a fool would believe she didn’t mean it, and Justin was no fool.

“Consider me gone,” he said through gritted teeth, turning on his heel to stalk away without bothering to clothe himself, possessions clutched forlornly under one arm.

He opened the car’s unlocked door, threw his gear into the passenger seat and got in with sharp, jerky movements, finding the keys and revving the engine before pulling out and peeling away with a puff of dust left hanging in the air behind him.

Suzanne took one deep breath, and then another. The third caught on a sob, coming from deep in her gut. It emerged like the moan of some wounded animal, full of raw pain.

Goddamn it, she had been right to start with. She’d known she shouldn’t touch him or let him close. She had known he would hurt her, but she’d ignored her instincts for the chance to scratch an itch.

And scratch it she had, over and over.

But more than that, more foolish and incredibly stupid, in her mind she’d been building it into something precious and special. Only now, in this second when the tawdriness of their connection lay revealed, her godlike lover a man with feet of rotten clay, she realized just how very wrong she had let herself become.

Because this pain radiating out from her core was not the hurt of a woman turned into a sex object without her knowledge or consent. Nor yet just a hearkening back to teenage wounds, no matter how devastating.

This was the anguish of a woman in love, having all illusion torn from her in the space of a single minute. Seeing her shallow lover in his crass truth, treating her like dirt, using her for a thrill, both the lover and the love itself worth no more than garbage.

She turned from the window to the bed, saw the hedonistic tangle of sheets and duvet, the scattered pillows. She ripped them from the mattress, gathering an armful and shoving it out the window. The pile slumped on the lawn, white and red like a gash against the faded green of the summer grass. If she could push the mattress out the window she would have. Instead she beat it with her fists, screamed at it, then folded, broken, and cried a puddle of tears into it.

Slowly the white heat and pain of her anger subsided, was replaced by a distant, numbed throb. The sun blazed brightly outside and as she rolled limply onto her back she saw the sky was a pure unclouded blue.

She had no will to move any further. She lay and stared as the plaster molding on the ceiling as the sunlight hitting the floorboards crept across the floor, then up the bed and over her. Tears still ran slowly down her face to soak the hair at her temple.

Weak tears. Weak, stupid tears from a stupid heart that should have known better this time. How could she have done it to herself again? She had known. She had warned herself away, time and again. But she’d just circled back, the moth to the flame. The beautiful, cruel, exploitative flame.

But that was enough. That was quite enough self pity. So he turned out to be worthless. She wasn’t the first woman to discover that about a man, and best to know it now before she was in even deeper.

With fingers that trembled just a little, she gathered the pieces of the smashed phone into a tiny pile. Then she stamped on it once more for good measure, before fetching a broom and dustpan, sweeping it up and throwing it into the rubbish. She contemplated the naked bed, then decided she could make up a fresh one in her
father’s room for the night.

She hadn’t been into that room for a long time – other than to dust occasionally – but it didn’t matter when she was feeling this numb. So she
spread sheets and a cover on the double bed in there, then went to the fridge and pulled out the half-full bottle of wine left over from their crayfish dinner.

She drank it all down, wondering if it would improve anything. She wasn’t one to drown her sorrows, so she had no idea. It made her feel strangely floaty after a day with no food, but she couldn’t exactly call that ‘better’.

She was sitting on the corner of the veranda watching the sunset fade from the sky when he came back. She hear the car before she saw it, recognized the thrum of the engine. He pulled up in his accustomed place and got out. She saw him check as he caught sight of something at the opposite corner of the house. He took a step or two towards it, and she realized he was probably looking at the pile of red and white linen on the grass.

After a moment he must have calculated the heap of summer-weight bedding was too small to be her, for he scanned sideways along the length of the house. She supposed she was an identifiable silhouette because he recognized her form huddled against the support post even in the dimness of the swiftly gathering shadows, and started in her direction. 

As he walked towards her she wondered at herself. She felt so blank inside, and cold. He looked like a stranger, an unknown assembly of features that made up a man, but one without any meaning to her.

He stopped a few feet away. She said nothing.

“I thought I’d give you some time to cool down.” Still she said nothing. Oh, she was cool alright. Icy. She looked at him with a flat, blank stare, giving him nothing.