The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [88]
I keep hold of her hand. She tries to pull away. “I don’t believe you,” I say. My heart is beating very hard. “You do, don’t you?”
She looks me in the eye. “Yes,” she admits. Her eyes are glistening, and in this light I can’t tell whether it’s cosmetics or tears. “But we mustn’t.”
I manage to nod. “You’re right.” The words feel very heavy to me, to both of us. I can feel her need, a physical hunger for an intimacy she hasn’t allowed herself to indulge in years. It’s not sex, it’s something more. Oh what a lovely mess! She’s been a solitary predator for so long that she doesn’t know what to do with somebody she doesn’t want to kill and eat. I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don’t think I’ve ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom—off-limits if I value my life.
She closes the gap between us, wraps her arms around me, and pulls me against her. She kisses me on the mouth so hard that it makes my hair stand on end. Then she lets go of me, steps back, and smoothes her dress down. “I’d better not do that ever again,” she says thoughtfully. “For both our sakes: it’s too risky.” Then she takes a deep breath and offers me her arm. “Shall we go to the casino?”
THE NIGHT IS YOUNG. IT’S JUST BEGINNING TO get dark, and sometime while I was sleeping there was a brief deluge of rain. It’s cut the baking daytime heat down a few notches, but steam is rising from the sidewalk in thin wisps and the humidity setting is somewhere between “Amazonian” and “crash dive with the torpedo tubes open.” We stroll past a few street vendors and a bunch of good-time folks, under awnings with bright lights and loud noises. The brightly painted gazebos in front of the restaurants are all full, drowning out the creaking insect life with loud chatter.
We arrive at the casino entrance and I nod at the unfamiliar doorman. “Private party,” I say.
“Ah. If monsieur et madame would come this way . . . ?” He backs into the foyer and directs us towards a nondescript staircase. “Your card, sir?”
Ramona nudges me discreetly and I feel her slide something into my hand. I flip it round and pass it to the doorman. “Here.” He scrutinizes it briefly, then nods and waves us upstairs.
“What was that?” I ask Ramona as we climb.
“Invitation to Eileen’s little recreation.” It’s all polished brass and rich, dark mahogany here. Deeply tedious landscape paintings in antique frames dot the walls, and the lights are dim. Ramona frowns minutely as we reach the landing: “Under our own names, of course.”
“Right. Do the names signify?”
She shrugs. “Probably, on some database somewhere. They’re not stupid, Bob.”
I offer her my arm and we walk down the wide hallway towards the open double doors. Beyond them I can hear the clink of glassware and voices raised in conversation, layered above a hotel jazz quartet mangling something famous.
The crowd here feels very different to the gamblers in the public areas of the casino downstairs, and I instantly feel slightly out of place. There are dozens of women in their thirties and forties, turned out in an overly formal parody of office wear. They have a curious uniformity of expression, as if the skin of their faces has been replaced with blemish-resistant polymer coating, and they’re pecking at finger food and networking with the perky ferocity of a piranha school on Prozac; it’s like the Stepford Business School opening day, and Ramona and I have wandered in by mistake from the International Capitalist Conspiracy meeting next door. I briefly wonder if anyone’s going to ask us to announce the winners of the prize for most cutthroat business development plan of the year. But past the buffet I spot another set of open double doors; at a guess the ICC meeting’s going to be through there, along with the roulette wheels and the free bar.
★★I’m going to go say hi to our hostess,★★ Ramona tells