“And you’re going to fuck me?” she demanded, her voice low like she was exacting a promise from him.
Odd, he’d always thought of Americans as rather Puritanical when talking about sex.
Your job, they’d natter on about for hours. They were obsessed with work, again, due to their Puritan founders.
But sex? He’d seen grown women sputter and refuse to discuss what they wanted.
Not that he was any better about his darkest desires that he never admitted.
Yet, the woman seemed to want an assurance, so he leaned over and whispered near her ear, his breath puffing her gossamer hair, “Yes, I’m going to fuck you until you scream and can’t move with exhaustion.”
She paused, but then turned away. “No, you won’t.”
He tugged her hand back and caught her in his arms. “I will fuck you in ways you haven’t dreamed of. I’ll be your sure thing for the night if you will just get in the damn car.”
She drew back and examined his face, seeming to look for signs that he was serious, and then took his hand and marched toward the cab.
Odd, she wasn’t weaving when she walked, like she would have if she were that drunk.
He dropped his jacket around her shoulders again and hustled her into the back seat of the cab, handing the driver the little paper on which she’d written her address.
The guy looked at the paper. “You’re sure this is right?”
“Yes, she’s rented an apartment there.”
“If you say so.”
The taxi drove through the Parisian night, speeding on expressways and making quick turns on city streets.
The woman snuggled against his side, and her alcoholic breath warmed his neck. He’d kept one arm around her in case she passed out and flopped over, but her fingers roamed over his tee shirt, tracing his hard-won musculature. None of that had been built in a gym. There had been no gyms for miles where he’d been living for the past several years.
The driver turned the steering wheel, and the car coasted to a stop at a dingy building emblazoned with neon-colored graffiti in at least three alphabets.
The part of town didn’t alarm Maxence any more than it had her. Though some people might have hesitated to venture into “District 93,” as the French social services ministry euphemistically called it, Max had lived in much more impoverished and violent areas of the world for most of the last few years.
The driver asked, “You sure this is it?”
Maxence jiggled the little blonde with his arm. “This is it, ma chérie?”
She turned and blinked at the building. “Yeah, this is it. I’m on the third floor. There’s no elevator. You okay with three flights of stairs?”
He almost retorted something, but she was obviously an American. Most Europeans and Parisians didn’t balk at climbing a few flights of stairs. “Yes, that’s fine. Let’s go, then.”
Max added a tip on his phone for the cab and thanked the driver, who sped away as soon as Max slammed the car door.
It was very late at night, past midnight, and several of the streetlamps farther down were broken. The cement-block buildings faded away into the darkness, and few trees had found root in the paved-over landscape.
Window boxes shadowed the barred windows. In the daytime, those might have some greenery.
The woman was fumbling with keys for the iron-barred security door to the building. Her aim for the lock left much to be desired.
When she dropped the keys for the second time, Maxence scooped them up, picked out the key, and twisted it in the lock.
The whole door clicked as bolts retracted, and Max breathed a sigh of relief that this was indeed her address. He did not particularly like standing on this road in the dead of night, illuminated by one streetlamp, when other people were moving in the shadowed parts of the rutted street.
He opened the steel door inside the security gate, and they were inside a hallway illuminated by a bare bulb in the ceiling. The woman leaned against a wall and stared up at him. “You haven’t run away yet.”
“Why are you so worried about that?”
“Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life,” she said with a heartbreaking choke in her voice. “I don’t want to fuck it up.”
He reached for her again and pulled her into his arms, feeling the delicate narrowness of her waist and the softness of her flesh. He shoved her up against the wall and kissed her hard. Her mouth opened under his, and she ensnared him again with her arms and one leg. This time, she had a wall behind her, and he ground upward with his thigh, rubbing her.
The blonde moaned, and it was a soft and sexy sound that tightened his groin. He growled, “Where are the stairs?”
She flopped her hand toward the hallway, and he reluctantly lifted himself off her far enough that she could slip out and lead him to yet another locked stairway door that he navigated the keys for.
Max held her tiny hand while they climbed the three flights of stairs, just in case. She had seemed so intoxicated, but she’d had no trouble walking from the nightclub to the cab, and now she managed the three flights of stairs all right.
That was odd. Someone who was as drunk as she’d seemed shouldn’t skip up three floors of stairs without a bobble.
Though he liked her bobbles. He knew she was going to be on him like a vine as soon as her door closed.
His dick felt heavy and pulling in his tuxedo pants.
He did not have sex with women who were too drunk. He didn’t like a dead lay in the slightest, anyway. There was nothing exciting about a woman who didn’t scream his name and flay the skin off his back with her fingernails.
An image of her scarlet-painted fingernails drifted through his mind again, and he needed to adjust
