Vertigo by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440336389
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Hours later—it was still night, but I could not say what time—I woke with a start. The rain had started up again and the wind was hammering at the open window, making a rattling sound as drops splattered against the floor. Hurrying to shut it, I saw there was now a small puddle where Chance and I had stood mere hours before.

Chance! What had I done?

Bending my head to the sheets, I inhaled the scent of us, of what we had done, coming off the linen in an unmistakable aroma of human earth and sexual life. I wanted to bury my nose further, summon up the night, ignore time.

But the side of me—a side that was growing smaller all the time—that was still practical, shrieked, No!

If I could inhale us so easily, anyone else—Lucy coming to change the bedding, my husband coming home too early—would surely be able to do so as well; smell us and know the masculine part of the smell was not that of my husband.

Locking the door on the desires of my heart, I whipped the sheets off the bed, the purple dress I had worn before still tangled among them. Realizing I was still naked, I dropped my bundle long enough to put on a dressing gown, then reclaimed it, setting off through the house.

I don’t know what I could have been thinking, save to get the evidence off the bed and out of my bedroom as quickly as possible, but I found myself tiptoeing through the pantry and the kitchen with its big vatlike sinks, big enough for when John entertained dozens of his literary and political acquaintances. What was I thinking, that I would go downstairs to the laundry or use the vatlike sinks right there, that I would somehow wash out the sheets myself and not be noticed?

“Can I help you with something, madam?”

I nearly leapt out of my skin.

“Timmins,” I spoke, hand to chest, awkwardly clutching the soiled items in the other, “you startled me.”

“I am sorry, madam.” He did not sound sorry in the slightest.

Had he been upstairs in his room above the kitchen, prowling around when he heard me down here? The fact that he was in his own bedtime clothes should have comforted me somehow, made me feel as though we were at least on equal footing. But it did not. In fact, I felt myself, as he peered at me closely, to be at a distinct disadvantage.

“Is something wrong, Timmins?” I finally asked.

“It’s just that…Perhaps it’s not my place to say, but…” He looked at me closer still. “Before, earlier this evening, you dropped your hairbrush…”

One hand flew to my hair, and yet in an instant I regretted the impulse. Did he see my horror? It was all I could do to keep myself from coming up with a sniveling alibi with which to appease the butler as to why I was disheveled.

“Shall I send Lucy to attend to it, madam? I thought you must be dressing

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