“How come you’re spending the summer here, then? It seemed so quiet when I arrived.”
“Last year I was.… how can I put it?… feverish … even, yes, even excessive, almost verging on self-destructive, I’m afraid. Someone at the house will be bound to gossip, so I might as well admit that I became far, far too involved with.… oh, hell … with a rock group … a bizarre episode, now that I look back at it, but not without its attractions.” Gigi smiled a slow, small, wry smile that contained many secrets. “In any case,” she continued, “Billy decided—insisted—that I stay home this summer so she could stop worrying about me, and since I love her, I agreed. Little did I guess it was going to be my chance to learn to … cook.” She gazed up at Quentin through her dark lashes with such wicked naughtiness in her eyes that he was jolted into a realization that the category of adorable was far too limited to hold a personage of Gigi’s worldliness.
“I understand why you said you’d been too busy to learn.”
“It wasn’t exactly a priority.”
“Obviously not. What, ah, which rock group was it, exactly?”
“Oh, I’d rather not say, Quentin. In fact, I’m trying to forget.” She turned slightly away from him and he saw the giveaway blush of memory rise on her fair skin from the bare base of her throat, which lay revealed by the deep neckline of the over-sized white silk shirt she’d tucked into her white jeans. Gigi blushed all the way up to her bangs, her long Indian silver and turquoise earrings swaying as she tried to hide a rush of emotion.
“I’m sorry, Gigi, it was stupid to ask that question. I don’t know why I did.”
“No, don’t be sorry—it’s been over for months.”
“Really over?”
“Completely. I’m totally recovered. In fact, as experience goes, it was as complete a one as I’ve had, and what more can one ask than that? Non, je ne regrette rien. Remember that Piaf song, Quentin, ‘regret nothing’? That’s my motto. Come on, let’s go home.”
Gigi was silent as she expertly guided the shocking pink car back to Charing Cross Road. For all of the past year she’d felt herself literally aching to grow up, fruitlessly stretching in every direction to find a way out of the silken skein of the chrysalis of girlhood, but nothing in her life had provided an opportunity. The boys in her gang were emotional children compared to even the least mature of the girls, but they’d continued to hang out together, forming a tight little crowd of their own in the huge senior class. None of them wanted to rock their enviably secure and safely familiar boat until the last year of school was over. There had been the usual amount of teenaged groping and smooching and harmless intrigue, but the boys had all been practically interchangeable as far as she was concerned, and less exciting, by now, than brothers.
As Gigi drove she couldn’t believe how passively she had lived inside an old skin she had long ago outgrown, how quietly she’d remained sheltered by Billy and Josie and Burgo and the routine of the great house and her friendship with Maze. As it had turned out, she and Maze might as well have been sent to a convent school as Uni, she thought, although among its thousands of students there were gangs as wild as anyone could imagine.
With each mile the car covered, she seemed to be speeding into the landscape of adulthood. Each time she glanced quickly at Quentin’s fascinatingly bony profile, her hands tensed resolutely on the wheel and she grew older and wiser and more sure of herself. He was a man and she was a woman, Gigi told herself, she had become a woman the instant she told him she didn’t know how to cook. But of all the amazing string of lies she’d told Quentin, surprising even herself, one thing was true, she didn’t believe in regrets. Now that she grasped just how sheltered she’d been, there could be no looking backward.
Gigi greeted the gateman, glided quietly up the long drive and parked her car in the garage. No one seemed awake in the house, to her familiar senses, as she opened the front door, trembling slightly with her intensity of purpose.
“No key?” asked Quentin.
“Not necessary with the security guards. You’ll learn about them.”
“But how do I find my way to my room? I’m lost without Burgo.”
“I’ll guide you, no problem. But come on up and see my apartment first. It’s worth the trip as another tourist attraction, especially after Pink’s.”
“Like sneaking a look at the Queen’s private rooms in Buckingham Palace?”
“My place is far more comfortable, from what I’ve heard.” Quickly Gigi led the way through the house and up the stairs. Last year her bedroom had been expanded and redecorated into a complete suite by breaking down the wall into the neighboring guest room, so that now she had a large sitting room, a small kitchen and a dressing room as well, all done in a combination of luxury and glamour that Billy hoped would be an enticement to Gigi to attend UCLA and live at home during her college years.
“It’s pure … Hollywood,” Quentin finally said in an astonished voice as she led him around, ending up at the pièce de résistance, the biggest bed he’d ever seen, hung from the ceiling in such a prodigal amount of striped pale green, white and pink silk that it was fit for Catherine the Great to use as a traveling tent.
“That was the basic idea. Would you like a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“Would you like a kiss?”
“Yes, please.”
Gigi reached up and put her arms around his neck and kissed him briefly on his chin.
“Well, I’d better get back to my room,” Quentin said with determination.
“What’s your hurry?”
“Gigi …”
“Yes?”
“What are you up to? Looking for the next encounter again, the next complete experience?”
“Exactly,” Gigi answered in a laughing voice, relieved that he’d taken the ball out of her unaccustomed hands. “But only if you’re interested. It’s not part of the job.”
“Jesus, Gigi, you don’t mince words,” he groaned.
“You have exactly five seconds to make up your mind,” Gigi informed him, clenching her hands with determination and holding her breath with impatience.
“Ah … Hollywood,” Quentin Browning whispered in surrender and took her in his arms, lifting her off the floor and depositing her on the bed. He kissed her eager, triumphant mouth over and over, and ever more deeply as he unbuttoned her shirt and freed her small, rosy, exquisitely young and pointed breasts. Quickly impatient with mere kisses, no matter how excellent, Gigi tugged on his hair so that he was forced to leave her mouth and bend down to her breasts. She took them in her hands and roughly thrust her delicately arrogant nipples into his mouth, as avidly as if she wanted him to bite them. “Wait, wait,” he muttered, but Gigi chose not to hear him, and hurried to wriggle out of her jeans and panties while he was still busy learning how much the little pink tips could swell and harden. “God, you’re greedy,” he mumbled as he became aware of her nakedness, “a greedy little girl, so greedy,” and he stripped as quickly as he could. She threw her arms around his chest and rubbed herself up and down against his bare body, as violently as if she were on fire and was trying to smother the flames with his skin, all the while kissing him ardently wherever her thirsty mouth landed.
“Hold it,” he commanded, pinioning her arms so that he could look at her, so that he could examine the deep indentation of her waist, the splendidly modeled swelling of her elegantly formed hips and legs, the slight roundness of her belly and the flaunted promise of her tangle of pubic hair.
Gigi closed her eyes tightly while he looked at her, panting with impatience, breathless with expectation, but unable to free herself from this inquisition until she started to move her hips from side to side on the bed in an instinctively languid cadence of such seduction that it made him forget his curiosity.
As soon as she felt him loosen his grip, she launched herself at him abruptly, opening her legs and pushing herself forward so that he found his penis imprisoned by her warm thighs. He
laughed at her impulsiveness and drew back so that he could caress her between her legs and open her properly. He traced a path through the silky, curly thicket of her gentle mound, trailing his fingers purposefully down to the lips he intended to see with his own eyes before he entered them. Gigi closed her eyes again, at his touch, clenching her teeth and writhing on the bed with such intensity that he caught fire from her eagerness and could resist no longer. He took his firm, quivering penis in his hand and thrust it all the way into her with one quick, brutal shove, too inflamed by her avidity to hold back. She was tight, he thought, because she was so small, and that was the last lucid thought he had as the movements of her body responded to his. She bit his shoulder until she drew blood as she met his relentlessness with an equal relentlessness of her own, urging him on quickly in the grip of an attack of such impetuous passion that it astonished him, experienced as he was. He tried to hold back, not sure if she was ready, but she didn’t allow him any hesitation, using her body at a breakneck pace, mercilessly, even clumsily, but to such potent effect that soon he was rearing and bucking in the grip of a vast and irresistible orgasm.
Exhausted, he fell away from Gigi’s body and lay speechless on the bed. Finally he gasped in weary admiration, “You really go after what you want, don’t you?” When she didn’t answer, he looked at her through his half-open eyes, and saw the unmistakable, flushed, expectant, suffused face of an unsatisfied woman. “Oh, shit.… you didn’t … I’m sorry …”
“I didn’t but I will … you’re not going anywhere,” Gigi said, hugging him. “I’m sorry I bit you.”
“Don’t do that again, that hurt.”
“I won’t have to … next time … it was only so I wouldn’t scream with the pain of it.”
Quentin sat up abruptly. “What the fuck? Wait a minute—what’s that?” He pointed accusingly at the small bloodstain on the bed.
“What does it look like?” Gigi asked, tremendously pleased with herself.
“It looks like you are the biggest liar I’ve ever met,” he said furiously.
“Most likely,” she agreed happily, “most likely.”
“But what about the bloody fucking rock band? What were they, all girls?”
“Oh, Quentin, don’t be so literal-minded,” Gigi giggled, smoothing back the hair that fell over his forehead. “I happen to loathe rock.”
“Oh God, what have I got into?” he cried. “What are you, you greedy little bitch, fourteen?”
“Certainly not!” she said with spicy indignation. “I’m well past the age of consent, there’s nothing to worry about. Now why don’t you lie down and take a little nap? You look as if you need it. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Gigi took the precaution of locking the two doors to her suite and hiding the key. Quentin was sound asleep with an expression of satisfaction on his ineffably lean, long, alluring features before she tiptoed with a slightly wincing step into the bathroom. As she ran a warm bath she trusted would soothe her various bruised, sprained and stinging parts, she hummed a rollicking counterpoint to Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” All things considered, Gigi decided, she wouldn’t tell Maze. She was too old now to reveal everything that happened to her. And the night had just begun.
If this was Gigi’s idea of flirting, he gave up, Burgo thought as he watched her obediently scraping carrots and chopping celery and learning how to plunge a tomato into hot water before peeling off its skin, a minor trick she had demonstrated for him three years ago. He gave up completely; the whole silly, childish thing was none of his business, and since Gigi was so backward that she thought playing the idiot in the kitchen was the way to attract a fellow, he washed his hands of it. There had been nothing to worry about after all. He’d been afraid, for a bad half hour, that she’d learned a thing or two from Mrs. Ikehorn, a woman who wouldn’t pussyfoot around peeling shallots when she had designs on a man, from what he’d heard about her past, but little Gigi was making no progress at all in that particular direction, thank the good Lord. He was the last person who had any intention of telling her what she was doing wrong.
Josie Speilberg, from her office, knew everything that went on in the house, and she was gratified to hear that the new chef had continued Gigi’s cooking lessons. There was always more to learn in an evolving discipline like cooking, each chef had his own techniques, and a dedicated student like Gigi could count on soaking up something important from each new teacher who came her way. She wished Jean-Luc could see that Gigi’s interest in cooking hadn’t diminished because he’d withdrawn his presence. As she always said, no one was indispensable.
As for the rest of the staff, they were so accustomed to seeing Gigi in the kitchen that they had long ago stopped asking what she was working on. All cooking seemed to involve identical preparation; only the results interested them.
Billy returned from Munich and spent a few days in Los Angeles before going on to Hawaii, where another Scruples had been built to take advantage of the huge business to be done with people on vacation and the growing troops of affluent, fashion-conscious Japanese travelers.
Billy had planned to take Gigi with her on this trip, and then on to visit the Scruples in Hong Kong. She didn’t like to be separated from Gigi for long, but apparently all the poor child truly craved, after the excitement and tension of her senior year, was to stay put at home, like a frog on a log, basking in an orgy of all-out laziness, sleeping hours later than she’d ever slept before, mooching around the kitchen as usual, swimming languidly every afternoon and slowly recovering from the strain of getting into college. She’d been accepted at Smith and Vassar and Berkeley, but she’d decided to go to UCLA, to Billy’s joy and relief.
As they lunched together, Billy observed Gigi closely and noticed how graduating from high school had changed her. Of course, graduation was one of the great rites of passage, Billy thought, noting a new and endearingly high-spirited happiness in Gigi’s manner, a new brilliance in her eyes, a heightened color on her tanned cheeks. Gigi seemed to have grown up in just a few weeks, which was clearly impossible, an optical illusion, but on returning from Munich she had been struck by it. Gigi had a sweetly thriving tartness about her that was new, a playfully minx-like quality that was new, a way of moving that was newly supple, a … a female quality that was new.
“Gigi,” Billy asked, shocked by a sudden, terrible suspicion, “have you been eating more than usual?”
“Probably,” Gigi admitted. “In fact, that’s just about all I seem to do. Lazy as I am, I haven’t missed a meal.”
“My God! Darling, you’ve simply got to just watch it! You can’t afford to get fat, and with your delicate bones even a few extra pounds will show. You may think you can get away with it, but believe me, when you don’t exercise and you eat normally, it just adds up, until one day …” Billy shuddered at the awful possibility of a fat Gigi. “You happen to look particularly adorable at the moment, that extra weight is still becoming, but there’s a thin line between blooming and being overblown, and you’ve got to promise me never, ever to cross it.”
“I promise, Billy, on my honor, I’ll start counting calories. If you don’t have to go to Scruples today, I’ll beat you at tennis, just to show you I can still sweat with the best.”
“You’re on,” Billy agreed immediately. If there was one thing she dreaded for Gigi, it was the traditional weight gain of college freshmen. She’d really have to watch her closely to make sure it didn’t happen, counting calories or not. Gigi wasn’t diminutive or tiny or short or petite or any of the other words that might have been used in honesty to describe her insignificant person when she’d first arrived from New York, Billy decided with the true impartiality she always gave to such vital assessments. Gigi had grown enough, just exactly enough, to be, in her slender way, quite, quite perfect. Actual inches were less important than proportion, and Gigi was so well proportioned that she gave the impression of being taller than she really was, especially since she
held herself with such upright, all-but-regal assurance. Still, she’d always been able to eat as much as she wanted, and everybody knew that such a state was possible only for the very young, a description that, somehow sadly, in spite of its inevitability, no longer fit Gigi at all.
While Billy was away, Gigi and Quentin sneaked up the back service staircase in the main wing to reach Gigi’s rooms on the deserted corridor. During Billy’s return they’d found other places to make love each night: the changing rooms in the tennis pavilion, where they threw dozens of thick towels on the floor to create a bed, and the storeroom in the orchid house, where bags of peat moss made a soft banquette and the controlled humidity and temperature were so perfect that they could lie naked and feel that they were in a forest.
Gigi was in a perpetual state of the obsession of first love, on a merry-go-round that never stopped, her head whirling, her heart yearning. During the day, too restless to read, indifferent to all her former friends, she lived in a state of breathless expectation as she waited for her cooking lesson, knowing that Quentin would soon be bending over her, showing her how to properly manipulate the blade of a chopping knife or the sharp edge of a potato peeler, for she was the most awkward, slow and ungifted of possible pupils.
He had to clasp his hand over hers a hundred times before she could learn how to crack an egg cleanly, without stabbing the yolk open with the jagged shell, and when it came time to scramble the eggs he had to stand behind her and demonstrate at length before she began to understand the coordination of grasping the pan and the spoon and the scraping, lifting, stirring motion that would keep the eggs from sticking.
In fact Gigi was unable to begin to attempt the simplest cooking technique until Quentin made physical contact with her, until he started to breathe too quickly and became mixed up in his instructions. Then she would discover that she needed to go find something in the storage pantry and he would follow her helplessly, knowing that they would stand there with their arms wrapped around each other, lost in a world of perilous kisses until the lesson was forgotten and all he could think about for the rest of the day was the coming night.
Scruples Two Page 18
