Boundaries Tested Pt. 02

All characters in this story are adults

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He was there first.

In four summers that had never happened. He came up rue Mouffetard into the square at five to two with his heart going like he'd run there, and through the window of the café he saw her at their table along the wall, kir already in front of her, a Marlboro lit, sunglasses on indoors, looking at the door. When she saw him she took the sunglasses off, which was worse, because then he could see her face, and her face was doing the thing his was doing.

"You're late," she said.

"It's five to."

"You're always early. So you're late." She pushed the ashtray an inch to the side, for no reason. "Sit down, Checco. You're making the waiter nervous."

He sat. The waiter in the long apron brought his demi without being asked and set it down and went away again with the particular discretion of a man who has seen everything twice. The room was empty apart from the two of them and the long bar and the clock over the door and the white heat of the square outside. It was exactly as it had been on a hundred afternoons. Nothing was as it had been.

They did the acting. It was the strangest half hour of either of their lives and they got through it on pure training. She asked if he'd got home all right. He said yes. He asked if she'd slept. She said like a baby, which was a lie, and he knew it was, and she saw him know. They talked about her course. They talked about his train back to London in September. She smoked. He turned his glass. Every ordinary sentence had another one sitting underneath it, and the one underneath was the same sentence every time, and it was: *you stood in my bathroom door and watched me come.* Neither of them said it. The waiter polished a glass. The clock went round.

Then she put the cigarette out, slowly, and looked at the ashtray, and said, in the careful voice, "Checco. Serious question."

He felt it in the backs of his knees. "They're all serious questions."

"Not like this one." She didn't look up yet. "After a guy sees a girl naked for the first time. What does he do? When he gets home. Honestly."

So that was how it was going to be. Not nothing happened. Something happened, and we're going to talk about it the only way we know how.

"Honestly," he said, "he lies on his bed in the dark with his clothes on and doesn't move."

"That's all?"

"That's all he can do. It's too big. He can't even." He stopped. "He can't do anything with it. He just lies there and it goes round and round."

"And in the morning?"

"In the morning he does."

She looked up then. Her colour had started.

"Thinking about what?"

"You know what."

"Say it." Quietly. Her chin had come up, the way it did when she had decided to ask the thing. "You always say it. That's the rule. Say it properly."

He looked at the waiter, who was at the far end of the bar with his back to them, and then he looked at her, and he said it properly, with his voice low and his hands flat on the table.

"You, with your foot on the edge of the bath. Opening yourself with your fingers so I could see. Asking me if that was what I wanted. That's what. Three times, that's what. I couldn't get it out of my head, I didn't want it out of my head, I just kept seeing you look at me and ask."

Her breath went out of her. She picked up the kir and put it down again without drinking, and under the table he heard her cross her legs.

"Okay," she said, and it came out not quite as a word. Then, after a moment, in a smaller voice than he'd ever heard from her: "Was I what you expected?"

And there it was. The thing under the thing. The question she had actually come to ask.

"No," he said.

Her face started to close, and he put his hand across the table, not touching hers, just near it, and said, "Sophie. Listen. I've thought about it since I was fifteen. I've been careful not to think about it properly, but I've thought about it, in the dark, for six years, and I'd made a picture, and you were not what I expected because you were better than the picture. All of you. Your back. The way you go in at the waist. Your breasts, which, God. The hair." He said it. "Exactly what you told me. Thick and dark and soft and tidy at the sides, and when you were wet it went flat and I could see you through it, and I have never in my life seen anything so beautiful, and I'm not being kind, and you know when I'm being kind, so look at me and tell me if I'm being kind."

She looked at him. She was very red. Her eyes were bright in a way that wasn't the kir.

"You're not being kind," she said.

"No."

She picked up the cigarettes and took one out and did not light it. She held it, and turned it, and said, looking at it, "Next question. Does he get bored? A guy. Once he's seen it. Is it done, is it, like, okay, seen that, what's next."

"No. The opposite. It's worse."

"Worse how?"

"Before, he could imagine. Now he knows. He knows exactly what's under the dress. He's sitting in a bar with her and he knows what her nipples look like when they're hard and he knows what sound she makes, and she's talking about her Sciences Po course, and he's supposed to drink his demi." He heard himself and didn't stop. "It's not done. It's never going to be done. That's what I'd tell you if you were asking about some guy."

"I'm asking about some guy."

"Then that's the answer."

She lit the cigarette. Her hand wasn't steady on the lighter and she saw him see it and laughed, a short breath, at herself.

"Okay. Practical question." The old register, the lecture-hall one, except that under it something was shaking. "Last night. At the door. When you." A tiny pause. "You said eight seconds. At this table you said eight, maybe ten. That wasn't eight seconds, Checco. I was watching. I was counting, actually, which is a terrible thing to admit." Another pause. "Was that because of me?"

"Yes."

"Because of what I was doing?"

"Because you were looking at me. The whole time. You didn't look away once. Nobody has ever." He didn't finish that one. He didn't have to.

She smoked. The waiter, at the far end of the bar, found something to do in the back. The clock over the door said twenty to three and the light in the square had not moved.

"Okay," she said, for the fourth time, and he understood that *okay* was the sound of a thing being filed, and that she had been filing all afternoon, and that she was nearly done.

She put the cigarette in the ashtray and left it burning and put both hands flat on the table, mirroring his, and looked at him straight.

"Hypothetically," she said. "If a girl who had done that. Last night. Wanted to do something again. Not the same thing. Something else." Her voice was very level and her colour was all the way down her throat into the neck of the dress. "What would a guy want? Next. If he could choose. If he answered honestly, which he always does."

He had known, since she'd put the sunglasses down, that this was where the afternoon was going, and he had thought he would be able to answer it the way he answered everything, as a friend, carefully, with his hands on the table. He found he couldn't. He found he was sitting in the Contrescarpe at twenty to three with the one true thing in his mouth and the waiter in the back, and the drawer was open, and there was nothing in him left to keep it shut.

"He'd want to be closer," he said.

"Closer."

"Not to touch. You said. I know. But closer. Not a doorway. A foot away. Close enough to." He breathed. "At this table, a month ago, you asked me if the hair would get in the way. If a boy went down on you. And I said it wouldn't, and then I said 'if anything', and I stopped, because the end of that sentence wasn't one I could say in a bar. So here's the end of it. If anything it's the reason. I want to put my mouth on you, Sophie. I want your hair on my face and my tongue inside you and I want to know what you taste like, I've wanted to know what you taste like since you sat there and told me you dreamt about it. That's what he'd want next. That's what I'd want. You asked."

For a long moment she did not move at all.

He waited for the ten days. He waited for *Oh*, and the arms folding, and *Bonne nuit Checco* with no bisous. He had said the second unsayable thing a month after the first and he knew exactly how that went, and he sat there and let it come.

It didn't come.

She went red, a deep slow red that started at the neck of the dress and went up over her throat and her face to her hairline, and she held his eyes the whole way, and her lips parted, and she reached out and picked up the burning cigarette and took a long drag and let it out, and said, with the smoke, in a voice that had gone low and rough and not at all well brought up:

"Okay."

Then she smiled. The slow one.

"One more question," she said. "And then I think we should go, because I've had two kirs and the waiter is going to have a heart attack." She leaned in. Her voice dropped to the level that could still be heard at the bar, which was the point, it had always been the point. "If a girl told a guy. In a bar like this. In the middle of the afternoon. That when she got dressed to come and meet him, she had put on the dress and she had, on purpose, left off what goes under it." A beat. "What would he do?"

Every drop of blood in his body went to one place.

"Nothing," he said. It came out as a croak. "He'd sit there. And die."

"Good answer."

And under the table, where the waiter couldn't see and he could, she uncrossed her legs, slowly, and crossed them the other way, and the pale blue dress rode up her thighs as she did it, and for one second between her legs he saw the thick dark hair, plain, unhidden, exactly as he'd seen it in the mirror, and then the dress settled and her legs were crossed and she was reaching for her bag like a girl in a bar on a Tuesday.

"L'addition, s'il vous plaît," she called to the waiter, sweetly, and he came, and she paid, and she did not look at Checco once while she did it, and her hand on the notes was shaking so badly she had to put her other hand on top of it.

Inside, Sophie had never been more frightened in her life, and the bathroom had been nothing to this.

The bathroom had been a door. A door she could have closed. She could have changed her mind with her hand on the zip and nobody would ever have known what she'd meant to do. But this was the Contrescarpe, in daylight, with Marcel behind the bar who had served her father, and she had got up that morning and stood in front of the long mirror and put on the dress over nothing, and looked at herself, and gone out, and sat at the table for an hour with it between her legs and the cotton against her bare skin, knowing what she was going to ask and what she was going to show him, and every minute of that hour had been a decision she could not pretend was an accident.

She had wanted to know. That was the honest version. She had wanted to know whether what she'd felt in the shower, with the water running and his face in the door, was the water and the dark and the not-knowing, or whether it was him. Whether she could sit across a table from him in a white room at two in the afternoon, sober, nearly, with Marcel polishing glasses, and still want to open her legs for him. And she had sat there, and she had wanted it so much that she'd had to put her hand on her own wrist to stop it shaking, and that had answered that.

And then he had said the thing. The end of the sentence from a month ago. *I want to know what you taste like.* He had said it in the Contrescarpe, in his low voice, with his hands flat on the table and his eyes not leaving her face, and she had felt it between her legs, physically, like a touch, and she had not folded her arms. She'd thought she might. She had been braced for the nun to come back. The nun had not come. Instead she had sat there going red to the roots of her hair and thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than anything: *yes. That. Tomorrow. His mouth. Yes.*

She did not want to be touched. She had told herself that in the dark for ten nights and it had been true. She turned it over now, walking out of the bar into the white heat with him a step behind her, and found that it was still true and also that it was not the whole truth. She did not want to be *taken*. That was the thing she'd meant. Hands that wanted something. But his mouth was not that. His mouth would be the other thing, the thing she'd told him she dreamt of, with her chin up, before any of this, and he had said *beautiful*, and now she wanted him to prove it.

---

On the Vespa she put her arms round his waist.

Both arms, properly, the way she had before the ten days, her chest against his back with no inch of air in it, her chin on his shoulder. He felt her breath on his neck. Halfway up rue de Tournon her right hand slid, slow and deliberate, from his waist down over his stomach to the waistband of his jeans, and rested there, flat, and stayed, and he nearly put them both into a parked Renault.

At the green door she got off and stood close to him and did not kiss him on either cheek.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Eight. Bring the pizza. Maman's back Sunday."

"Okay."

"And Checco." She looked up at him. The red had not left her face since the bar. "What you said. About wanting to." She did not say the word on the pavement. "I've never. You know that. I told you."

"I know."

"So you'd have to tell me afterwards. Honestly. Like always." Her chin came up. "Whether the hair got in the way."

"It won't."

"Then." She looked at him for another second, and something in her face that had been held very tight for a month let go. "Then I don't mind."

She went in through the green door. He stood on the pavement with the engine running and watched the heavy door swing shut behind her, and she did not look back, and that was its own kind of answer.

---

He didn't sleep. He hadn't expected to. He lay on his bed in the dark with his clothes on, which was, he reflected, exactly what he'd told her a guy did, and it went round and round, and at one in the morning the phone lit up green on the bedside table.

*Checco. Awake?*

*Yes.*

A minute.

*Don't come early tomorrow. I need the time. Bisous*

He looked at the bisous for a long while.

*Time for what?*

Two minutes. Three. He thought she'd gone to sleep.

*To get ready. And to stop being frightened. Bonne nuit Checco. Bisous bisous*

He put the phone face down on the bedside table and lay in the dark and did not move, and somewhere in the third row of his iron memory a girl was singing along, and he understood, for the first time in his life, that he had been wrong about everything, and that being wrong was the best thing that had ever happened to him.