Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [141]
Lucky bastard.
‘After here, I’ve got a quietish time until the shows.’ He nodded at Lisa’s tailored two-piece. ‘I haven’t seen that suit before.’
She inspected herself. ‘Nicole Farhi.’ Lifted from a shoot the previous January, she’d attempted to hang the blame on Kate Moss.
‘I don’t like it.’ Oliver said.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ She’d always valued his opinion on her clothes and hair.
‘Nothing. I mean I don’t like that I’ve not seen it before.’
She knew what he meant. She felt an aching affront that his hair was longer, that his watch was new, that since she’d last seen him he’d travelled halfway around the world and she’d known absolutely nothing about it.
‘You look different,’ he said.
‘Do I?’
‘No.’ He shook his head and laughed with an odd breath-lessness. ‘I don’t fucking know.’
She knew exactly what he meant. Extreme familiarity and empty distance hung together in strange coexistence. Both were present equally, so it felt that two different realities had been sliced and put back together incorrectly.
‘Excuse me!’ He interrupted himself to pick up her wrist and, with his other hand, turn her fingers to him. There was something he wanted to see. He was rough and the angle was painful. ‘You don’t wear your wedding ring any more?’ he accused, his brown eyes contemptuous.
She tugged her hand away and glared. Rubbing her sore wrist she accused, ‘You hurt me!’
‘You hurt me’
‘What’s the big deal with the ring?’ Her face was flushed and angry. ‘You’re the one talking divorce.’
‘You were the one who brought it up in the first place!’
‘Only because you were leaving me.’
‘Only because you gave me no choice.’
They glared at each other, breathing hard as emotion over-spilled.
‘Do you want,’ he demanded, his expression like thunder, his eyes never leaving her face, ‘to come up to my room?’
‘Come on.’ Already she was on her feet.
The first kiss was a frantic, teeth-clashing grind. Trying to do too much at once he pulled at her hair, tugged at her jacket, kissed her too hard, then tore off his shirt.
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Looking exhausted, he laid his naked back against the door.
‘What?’ she mumbled, numbed by the sight of his hard polished chest.
‘Let’s start this again.’ He reached and pulled her to him with delicate tenderness. She buried her face in his chest. The special Oliver smell. Forgotten, but remembered with such stupefying, sense-filling impact. Peppery, sweet-spicy, and something unique and indescribable that didn’t come from soap or a bottle or from his clothes. A smell that was just him.
His familiarity brought tears to her eyes.
With unbearable fragility he placed a fluttery kiss on the corner of her mouth. As if it was the first time. Then another butterfly kiss. And another. Moving inwards slowly, creating pleasure that was almost indistinguishable from pain.
Not moving, barely breathing, she let him administer kisses.
Sex with Oliver was the one time in her life when Lisa played passive. When she wasn’t controlling or rapacious or proactive or voracious. She always let him be in charge and he loved it.
‘I look into your eyes and you’re not even there,’ he often used to remark. ‘You’re just this whimpery, helpless little girl.’
She knew he was turned on by the contrast between her usual bolshiness and such bedroom passivity, but that wasn’t why she did it. With Oliver there was no need to be in charge. He knew exactly what to do. Nobody did it better.
The kisses moved from her mouth to her neck, her hairline. Her eyes closed, she groaned with pleasure. She could die now, she really could. She heard him whisper, his breath hot on her ear, ‘You’re gone, babes.’
Like a sleepwalker, she was led to the bed. Obediently she stretched out her arms for her jacket to be removed, lifted her hips for her skirt to come off. The smooth, cool sheets poured across the bare skin of her back. Her whole body was quivering, but she lay without moving. When he grazed her nipple with his mouth, she jerked as if she’d had an electric shock. How could she have forgotten how