right now?”
I reached out and pinched one of her nipples and then the other.
She liked that but only showed it by inhaling deeply.
And to show me that it wasn’t too overwhelming she began to speak again.
“It’s like when Axel’s older cousin Nina got jealous of me bein’
in his bed. She loved him in another way; like Bonnie loves you.
You shouldn’t be jealous of her. You should be happy that she can give your little girl life.”
Those were the words I had wanted to hear, needed to hear for days. I opened my mouth but she spoke first.
“No,” she said, pinching my nipples hard and then pounding down, her sex against mine. “No. No more. Come to me.”
I came all at once, before I was ready. She smiled but didn’t slow the hammerlike rhythm against my erection. It hurt but I didn’t throw her off or complain. And after a few seconds I had another orgasm. I guess that’s what it was. It happened somewhere inside my body. All of a sudden there was a dam I didn’t know about and it broke open and everyone in its path was drowned.
w h e n i a w o k e ,
the woman who might have been a murderer was lying along my side with her head nestled against my shoulder. I knew almost nothing about Philomena Cargill and yet she had touched me in a place I couldn’t even have imagined 2 7 3
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on my own. Was she like this for all men? A fertility goddess come from Africa somewhere to bedevil mortal men with something they could never know without her? Her hand was on my limp sex. But as soon as I saw it I began to get hard again.
“We should get cleaned up,” she said, awakening to my arousal.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
There was a jury-rigged shower nozzle attached to the wall above the small bathtub in the restroom. We washed each other.
Physically I was as excited as I had been on the couch but my mind was free.
“Where does Axel’s cousin live?” I asked.
“Down in L.A. somewhere.” In her mind she was still in Berkeley.
“And is she related to the family business somehow?”
“Nina’s father was the man who started the company. He’s Tourneau, Rega Tourneau.”
“Was he part of the company before the war?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Is he still alive?”
She began to lather my pubic hair, working deftly around the erection. “He’s very old. Ninety I think. Nobody in the family likes him.”
After the shower I was still straining with excitement. Cinnamon stood in front of me, smiling, and asked, “Are you going to leave now?”
I wanted to leave because I knew somehow that I’d lose something of my soul if I let her make love to me again.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
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Ididn’t leave Philomena’s until early the next morning. It had been a long time since I’d spent a night like that. Georgette was wonderful and passionate but Cinnamon Cargill was the spice of sex with no impediments of love at all. Where Georgette kissed me and told me that she wanted to take me home forever, Cinnamon just sneered and used sex like a surgeon’s knife. She never said one nice or kind thing, though physically she loved me like I was her only man.
When she’d leave the room to go to the toilet she seemed surprised, and not necessarily happy, to see me when she returned.
She told me all about old Rega Tourneau. He was the family patriarch, born in the last century. He had married Axel’s father’s aunt and so there was some family connection there — though not by blood.
“The old man had a sour temperament,” Philomena said.
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“When he was a boy he was caught in a boiler explosion that scarred his face and blinded his eye.”
When he retired he became reclusive and removed.
He had a disagreement with Nina about the man she married.
Rega didn’t like him and so he disowned his daughter. As far as Philomena knew, Nina was still out of the will.
Nina Tourneau eventually separated from her husband and tried to become an artist down in Southern California somewhere. When that failed she became an art dealer.
