The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [96]
He spun away from the group and threaded a path through backless dresses and thickened necks, faintly aware of his name being called, ignoring the summons, walking past an Asian woman wrapped in silken saris and a slender Frenchman (he could only be French with that mouth), hearing as he walked — or did he only imagine it? — a voice raised in argument, a snarl from somewhere deep inside the crowd. It was the weather, he knew — parched and gritty and oppressive — that chafed skin and tightened jaws and loosed snarls where before snarls had been unthinkable. He reached a table and stood against it, not knowing where else to go, and smoked a cigarette, his back to the crowd, not wanting to see them.
He heard his name and turned.
—Keep moving, Linda said, putting a hand out to touch him.
He walked, not blindly, for he was aware of searching for an empty corner, of moving at the edges of the party, of not being able to find the exit and so wandering into a hallway, into an anteroom and through a door into a darkened office. She was behind him, in full sight, he supposed, of anyone wishing to notice, but he was so glad she was there he thought his lungs would burst.
She slid inside the door and turned the lock.
He understood that she was drunk, but he couldn’t help himself. This might be the last time — would be the last time — they’d ever be together. The moment doubly stolen, like borrowing from an overdraft, the original capital depleted. And far from thinking it dishonest, he considered it a mercy she herself didn’t know. His own grief enough for both of them.
In the darkness, he found her mouth and her hair, kissed the one, held the other, then kissed them both. He could barely see her face, the only light a streetlamp outside the window. She was wiry against him, more passionate than he had known her before — more expert — and it was her lust as much as his own that made them impatient to be undressed. They strained at fabric, stepped on it, had no time for buttons. She took her shoes off and suddenly was smaller, more fluid against him, and for a time they were up against a wall, then leaning on a leather chair. They slid or knelt to the carpet between the chair and a table, a corner of the table catching him in a kidney, and he thought there must be some anger of her own fueling her, for she was unlike herself — more abandoned in the way that anger can produce abandon, as, indeed, it had just done in him when he’d spun away from the grouping. He didn’t stop to ask himself longer than a second what Regina and Peter and Roland might be thinking, because they were not important now. Not right now. This would be all that mattered if it had to last a lifetime. And, fuck it, it would have to last a lifetime. And he said, or she said, I love you, as lovers will, though he knew the words — devalued (had he not said them to Regina? she to Peter?) — didn’t explain what it was they had, for which he knew only one word, a word both blank and precise, now repeating itself endlessly in his head: This, he thought. This.
And then again, This.
______
They lay in the squalid dark of the office. He was aware of bunched clothing at his head, the heel of a shoe poking into his thigh. Their naked hips wedged between a table leg and a chair. Maybe they would not be able to get out, would have to stay until they were found. She felt for his hand and laced her fingers through his, and there was something