The Exile by Patrick Worrall

Author:Patrick Worrall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529190830
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2024-05-22T13:00:13+00:00

15

When Greta returns to the restaurant, the light is on in Robert’s room. Every time they drink they end up locked together, mouth on mouth, but they have not taken it further yet. They tremble on the edge of it. It is torture. It is heaven.

She patrols her cold room for several minutes, feeling the champagne. When she steps out on to the landing he is opening his door at the same time. Kissing, standing up against the wall, is uncomfortable.

‘Giraffe,’ Greta scolds. She walks him back across the threshold and pushes him on to the bed.

There are no more jokes. His hand slides down the front of her skirt and finds the right place, instantly. He settles himself in the space next to her on the mattress. There is no clumsiness when they are lying down. Their bodies dovetail. He kisses her face from the side, lightly, devoutly, as his hand works at her.

There is a sensation in her, mobile like a living thing. It grows and recedes and shifts around, and nothing exists but the need to chase that feeling down and kill it. She squirms against his hand to direct him to the centre of it.

‘Deeper,’ she tells him. ‘You’re not going to hurt me.’

Time passes. Everything is pure instinct now. He reacts to the subtle prompts in her breath, her voice, the motion of her hips. When the final movement swells, she knows she is no longer in control of her body. There is a look of outrage on her face as it builds. Every nerve is stretched as taut as piano wire for three racking seconds. Then she swears in Lithuanian and her head bobs, over and over. Warmth floods through her. She is under morphine again.

They fuck clumsily, the first time. In the morning, with the early light coming round the curtains, it is less urgent. Robert wears the sober expression of a man performing important work with great care. She senses his concentration as he addresses himself to technical questions of rhythm and variation. Angles of incidence.

He restrains himself until the momentum they have built together cannot be stopped. Curses and blasphemies erupt from them, almost simultaneously.

She does not realize she has fallen asleep again until she hears Robert jumping out of bed. Someone is banging on the bolted and shuttered door of the restaurant. It is ten in the morning and Marcel, Robert’s young assistant in the kitchen, has arrived for his shift.

The two chefs are busy with their preparations for the lunchtime service when she comes down to make coffee. Marcel hands her the envelope that was lying on the doormat when he arrived.

It was delivered by hand. There is a single word on the outside: Greta, with double quotation marks inked round the name. It’s so knowing, so heavy with meaning, that she thinks immediately of the people in Paris who are aware of her past.

Did you see anyone, she asks the boy. Was there a G7 cab waiting on

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.