Breathing Room

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “Va bene.” A small, courteous nod, and then he walked past her into the bedroom. He moved like a creature of the dark, sleek and damned. Or maybe she was the one damned because she didn’t leave. Instead, she followed as far as the doorway and watched him go to the windows.

  He leaned out to push the shutters back, and the breeze ruffled the long, silky strands of his hair while the moonlight glazed it with silver. He gestured outside. “Vieni vedere. Il giardino è bellissimo di notte.”

  Her feet felt like alcohol-soaked rags as she set her purse on the dresser and went over to stand at his side. She gazed down and saw half a dozen tables in the flower-filled courtyard, their umbrellas collapsed for the night. Beyond the walls she heard traffic, and she thought she detected the musty scent of the Arno.

  His hand slipped under her hair. He’d made the first move.

  She could still leave. She could let him know this was a big mistake, a colossal mistake, the mother of all mistakes. How much money did you leave a gigolo who hadn’t completed the job? And what about a tip? Should she leave—

  But he was just holding her. And holding wasn’t bad. It had been a long time. He felt a lot different from Michael. That unpleasant height, of course, but also a very pleasant muscularity.

  He lowered his head, and she began to back away, because she wasn’t ready for the kissing to start. Then she reminded herself this was to be a purging.

  His lips touched hers at just the right angle. The slide of his tongue was perfect, neither too timid nor too suffocating. It was a great kiss, elegantly executed, no slurping sounds. Pretty much flawless. Too flawless. Even in her haze she knew that there was nothing of himself in it, just an effortless display of professional expertise. Which was good. Exactly what she would have expected if she’d had enough time to expect anything.

  What was she doing here?

  Shut up and let the man do his job. Think of him as a sex surrogate. Reputable therapists use them, don’t they?

  He certainly believed in taking his time, and her blood began to move a little faster. She gave him points for gentleness.

  His hand slid under her sweater before she was ready, but she didn’t try to redirect him. Michael was wrong. She didn’t have to take control. Besides, Dante’s touch felt good, so she couldn’t be all that dysfunctional, could she? He flicked the catch of her bra, and she began to tense. Relax and let the man work. This is perfectly natural, even if he is a complete stranger.

  He pushed aside the cups and stroked her spine. She was going to let him do this. She was going to let him brush his finger over her nipple. Yes, just like that. He was very skillful. . . . Taking plenty of time. Maybe she and Michael had been too quick to race to the end, but what could you expect from goal-oriented workaholics?

  Dante seemed to appreciate fondling her breasts, which was nice. Michael had enjoyed them, but Dante seemed more of a connoisseur.

  He drew her away from the window toward the bed and pushed up her sweater. Before, he’d been able only to touch her breasts. Now he could see them as well, and that felt intrusive, but if she pulled her sweater back down, she might be proving Michael’s point, so she kept her hands at her sides.

  He cradled her breast. Lifted it, molded it, then bent his head and drew the nipple deep into his mouth. Her body began to break away from its moorings.

  She felt her slacks drifting over her hips. It was her nature to be cooperative, and she slipped off her shoes. He stepped back just enough to take off her sweater, then her bra. He was a wizard with women’s clothes. No fumbling or wasted motions, everything perfect right down to the meaningless Italian endearments he was whispering in her ear.

  She stood before him in beige lace panties and a gold bangle with the word BREATHE inscribed inside. He removed his shoes and socks—no awkwardness there—and unbuttoned his black silk shirt with the slow expertise of a male stripper, exposing one perfectly defined muscle after another. She could see that he worked out to keep the tools of his trade in good order.

  His thumbs settled over her nipples, which were still moist from his mouth. He plucked them between his fingers, and she floated away from herself, which was a good place to be—the farther the better. “Bella,” he whispered, the sound a deep male purr.

  His hand trailed over the beige lace between her legs and began to rub, but she wasn’t ready for that. Dante needed to go back to gigolo school.

  She’d no sooner thought it than the tip of his finger began a slow tracing around the lace. She clutched his arm for support against the sudden weakness in her legs. Why did she always think she knew how to do other people’s jobs better than they did? This was one more reminder that she wasn’t an expert at everything, or even anything—not that she needed many more reminders about that.

  He flicked back the covers with an elegant twist of his wrist, drew her down, then reclined beside her, the motion so exquisitely executed it might have been choreographed. He should write a book: Sex Secrets of Italy’s Top Gigolo. They should both write books. Hers would be called How I Proved I Was All Woman and Reclaimed My Life. Her publisher could sell them as a boxed set.

  She was paying for this, and he’d touched her, so it was time to touch back, even though they hardly knew each other and it seemed presumptuous.

  Stop it!

  She began her tentative exploration with his chest, then his back. Michael worked out, but not like this man.

  Her hands crept to his abdomen, which was tightly ridged like an athlete’s. His trousers were gone—when had he gotten rid of them?—and his boxers were black silk.

  Just do it!

  She touched him through the thin fabric and heard the quick catch of breath. Real or feigned, she didn’t know. One thing, however, wasn’t an illusion. He’d been born with a natural gift for the gigolo trade.

  She felt her panties being slipped off. Did you expect to keep them on? He shifted his weight and began kissing the inner slope of her thigh. A warning bell clanged. Her tension grew as his mouth moved higher. She grabbed his shoulders and pushed him away. There were some things she couldn’t submit to, not even to clear out the past.

  He gazed up at her. In the dim light she saw the question in his expression. She shook her head. He shrugged and reached toward the bedside table.

  She hadn’t once thought about condoms. Apparently she’d developed a death wish along with her other hang-ups. He slipped it on as smoothly as he did everything else, then began to draw her close, but she seized what little sanity she had left and held up two fingers.

  “Due?”

  “Deux, s’il vous plaît.”

  With a look that had “crazy foreigner” written all over it, he reached for another condom. This time his motions weren’t effortless. He had to struggle to fit latex over latex, and she looked away because his clumsiness made him seem human, and she didn’t want that.

  His hand brushed her hip, then her thighs. He pressed them open again, ready to practice more refinements on her, but this intimacy was too much for her. A tear leaked from the corner of her eye. She turned her head and blotted it on the pillow before he noticed. She wanted an orgasm, damn it, not drunken, self-pitying tears. An exquisite orgasm that would clear her mind so she could give her full attention to reinventing her life.

  She tugged to pull him on top of her. When he hesitated, she tugged harder, and finally he did as she wanted. His hair brushed her cheek, and she heard the rough rasp of his breathing as he slipped a finger inside her. It felt good, but he was too close, and the wine sloshed uneasily in her stomach, and she should have made him lie on his back so she could get on top.

  His touch grew slower, more tantalizing, but she wanted to get where they were going, and she pulled on his hips to urge him inside her. At last he moved his legs and resettled.

  She realized right away that it wouldn’t be an easy fit, not like with Michael. She gritted her teeth and wiggled against him until his self-control gave way and he embedded himself inside h
er.

  Even then he wouldn’t move along, so she tilted her hips, urging him to hurry, to get her where she needed to be, to finish up so she could be done with this before the sober whispers invading her wine-soaked brain turned into shouts and she had to deal with the fact that she was violating everything she believed in and this was wrong!

  He angled, pulled back, and gazed down at her with hot, glazed eyes. She closed her own eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him, as superb as he was. He slipped his hands between their bodies and rubbed her, but his patience only made everything worse. The wine curdled in her stomach. She pushed his arm away and moved her hips. Eventually he took the hint and began a slow, thorough thrusting. She bit her lip and counted backward, counted forward, pushed his hand away again, and fought the bleakness of self-betrayal.

  Eons passed before he convulsed. She endured his shudders and waited for the moment when he would roll to his side. When it finally came, she leaped from the bed.

  “Annette?”

  She ignored him and shoved herself into her clothes.

  “Annette? Che problema c’è?”

  She reached into her purse, threw a handful of bills on the bed, and fled from the room.

  4

  Eighteen hours later her blinding headache still hadn’t eased. She was somewhere southwest of Florence trying to drive a stick shift Fiat Panda through the dark night on a strange road marked with signs in a language she couldn’t read. Her knit dress had bunched under the seat belt, and she’d been too groggy to do her hair. She hated herself like this—messy, disorganized, depressed. She wondered how many disastrous missteps an intelligent woman could take and still keep her head up. Considering the current condition of her head, this woman had taken a few too many.

  A sign flashed by before she could read it. She slowed, pulled off to the side of the road, and made herself back up. No worry about hitting anyone coming from behind, since she hadn’t seen another car for miles.

  The Tuscan countryside was reputed to be exquisitely beautiful, but she’d made the trip after dark, so she hadn’t seen much. She should have gotten an earlier start, but she hadn’t been able to drag herself out of bed until late afternoon. Then she’d simply sat in front of the window and stared, trying to pray but unable to do so.

  The Panda’s headlights came to rest on the sign. CASALLEONE. She turned on the dome light to look at the directions and saw that she’d somehow managed to stumble back onto the proper road. God protected fools.

  So where were you last night, God?

  Someplace else, that was for certain. But she couldn’t blame God or even all the wine she’d drunk for what had happened. Her own character defects had driven her to monumental stupidity. She’d rejected everything she believed in, only to discover that Dr. Favor had been right as usual. Sex couldn’t heal the broken places.

  She pulled back out onto the road. Like so many other people’s, her broken places originated in childhood, but how long could you keep blaming your parents for your own failures? Her parents had been college professors who’d thrived on chaos and emotional excess. Her mother was boozy, brilliant, and intensely sexual. Her father: boozy, brilliant, and hostile. Despite being authorities in their respective academic fields, neither could achieve tenure. Her mother had a tendency to indulge in affairs with her students, and her father had a penchant for getting into shouting matches with his colleagues. Isabel had spent her childhood being dragged from one college town to the next, an unwilling witness to lives that had spun out of control.

  While other children yearned to escape their parents’ discipline, Isabel craved a structure that never came. Instead, her parents used her as a pawn in their battles. In a desperate act of self-preservation, she’d turned her back on them at eighteen. She’d been on her own ever since. Six years ago her father had died of liver failure, and her mother had followed not long after. She’d done her duty at the end, but she hadn’t mourned them as much as she’d mourned the waste of their lives.

  Her headlights picked out a narrow, winding street with picturesque stone buildings set close to the road. As she drove farther, she saw a collection of shops shuttered for the night. Everything in the town seemed old and quaint except for the giant Mel Gibson movie poster plastered on the wall of a building. In smaller letters beneath the title, she made out the name Lorenzo Gage.

  That’s when it hit her. Dante hadn’t reminded her of a figure in a Renaissance painting. He’d been a ringer for Lorenzo Gage, the actor who’d recently driven her favorite actress to suicide.

  Her stomach felt queasy again. How many of Gage’s movies had she seen? Four? Five? Way too many, but Michael loved action films, the more violent the better. Now she’d never have to see another one.

  She wondered if Gage felt any remorse for Karli Swenson’s death. It would probably add to his box-office appeal. Why were nice women so fascinated with bad boys? The rescue fantasy, she supposed—the need to believe they were the only women powerful enough to transform those losers into husbands and fathers. Too bad it wasn’t that easy.

  She cleared the edge of the town, then turned on the dome light again to see the rest of the directions: “Follow the road from Casalleone for about two kilometers, then turn right at the rusty Ape.”

  Rusty ape? She envisioned King Kong with a bad dye job. Two kilometers later her headlights picked out a lumpy shape off to the side of the road. She slowed and saw that the rusty Ape wasn’t of the gorilla variety, but the remnants of an Ah-pay, one of those tiny vehicles beloved by European farmers. This particular junker had once been the famous three-wheeled Ape truck, although its trio of tires had disappeared long ago.

  As she turned, stones clicked against the undercarriage. The directions mentioned the entrance of the Villa dei Angeli, “Villa of the Angels,” and she took the Panda around another series of uphill curves before she saw the open iron gates marking the villa’s main drive. The gravel road she was looking for lay just beyond. It was barely more than a path, and the Panda lurched as it rolled downhill, then took a sharp curve.

  A structure rose in front of her. She slammed on the brakes. For a moment she simply stared. Finally she turned off the ignition, killed the lights, and dropped her head against the back of the seat. Despair welled inside her. This crumbling, neglected pile of stones was the farmhouse she’d rented. Not beautifully restored, as the description from the real-estate agent had indicated, but a dilapidated heap that looked as if cows still lived inside.

  Solitude. Rest. Contemplation. Action. Sexual healing was no longer part of her plan. She wouldn’t even think about it.

  The house offered solitude, but how could she rest, let alone find an atmosphere conducive to contemplation, when she was locked inside a ruin? And she needed contemplation if she intended to come up with an action plan to get her life back in gear. Her mistakes piled higher and higher. She could no longer remember what it had felt like to be competent.

  She rubbed her eyes. At least she’d solved the mystery of why the rent was so cheap.

  She barely summoned the energy to get out of the car and drag her suitcases toward the door. Everything was so quiet she could hear herself breathe. She would have given anything for the friendly blare of a police siren or the gentle roar of a plane flying out of La Guardia, but she heard only the chirping of crickets.

  The rough wooden door was unlocked, just as the rental agent had indicated it would be, and it creaked like a bad movie sound effect. She braced herself for a flock of bats to come flying out at her, but she was greeted with nothing more ominous than the musty scent of old stones.

  “Self-pity will paralyze you, my friend. So will a victim mentality. You’re not a victim. You’re filled with a magnificent power. You’re—“

  Oh, shut up! she told herself.

  She fumbled along the wall until she found a switch that turned on a floor lamp with the wattage of a Christmas-tree bulb. She glanced around just long enough to note a cold, bare tile floor,
a few ancient furnishings, and an unwelcoming stone staircase. At least there were no cows.

  She couldn’t cope with any more tonight, so she grabbed her smallest suitcase and made her way upstairs, where she found a functioning bathroom—thank you, Mother God—and a small, stark bedroom that looked like a nun’s cell. After what she’d done last night, nothing could have been more ironic.

  Ren stood on the Ponte alla Carraia and gazed down the Arno at the bridges that had been built to replace the ones the Luftwaffe had blown up during the Second World War. Hitler had spared only the Ponte Vecchio, built in the fourteenth century. Once Ren had tried to blow up London’s Tower Bridge, but George Clooney had taken him out first.

  The wind whipped a short lock of hair over his forehead. He’d had it cut that afternoon. He’d also shaved and—since he intended to avoid lighted public spaces tonight—removed his brown contact lenses. Now, however, he felt exposed. Sometimes he wanted to step out of his own skin.

  The Frenchwoman last night had spooked him. He didn’t like misjudging people. Although he’d gotten the anonymous sex he’d wanted, something had been drastically wrong. He managed to find trouble even when he wasn’t looking for it.

  A pair of street toughs ambled toward him from the other side of the bridge, looking him over as they came closer to decide how big a fight he’d put up if they tried to take his wallet. Their swagger reminded him of his own youth, although his crimes had been limited more to self-destruction. He’d been a punk with a silver spoon up his ass, a kid who’d figured out early on that misbehavior was a good way to get attention. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Nobody got more attention than the bad guy.

  He reached for his cigarettes, even though he’d quit six months ago. The crumpled pack he pulled from his pocket held exactly one, all he let himself carry these days. It was his emergency stash.