“This may sound strange,” I say. “But I wanted to tell you I think you’re beautiful. You should know that.”
After the first surprise, she laughs—a mocking laugh but not for me. For herself.
“Yeah. Right,” she says, and I’m inspired to stay, to convince her. But even the impropriety of strangers in a strange place has its limits.
“It’s true,” I say, and I leave her with a smile.
I don’t look for her again.
Under the hot equatorial sun, I sweat and do the things tourists do: buy strings of polished beads and eat spicy shellfish and thick chunks of fried bread dipped in sauce. I go on bus rides and look at stone forts with silent cannons robed in green moss.
My fellow tourists snap pictures.
I keep pictures in my head.
“I should’ve thanked you,” she says behind me, and I jump, startled at finding myself not alone. Her voice is well bred but lazy, muting the consonants, drawing the vowels out, running them all together like notes strummed on a guitar.
By contrast, the voice of the sea is loud in this empty stretch of resort walkway where we stand: a wall hung with local art on one side and bougainvillea bushes lining the seawall on the other. It’s a secluded place, lit with incongruent fluorescent lights against the tropical dark, and I feel guilty simply being here.
The black dinner dress dips between her small breasts and shows delicate bones under the skin of her chest, reveals slender arms smooth with toned muscle. In heels, she’s half a head taller than I am. Even with her painted eyes and lips I can still tell she’s half my age.
I look at her and shrug.
“You want to fuck me.” The words from those cherry-bright lips in that ladylike voice shock me, arouse me, make me feel a little bit dirty. I want to deny it, desperately. Stutter that my words were just a compliment, a kindness, a moment of aesthetic appreciation.
All bullshit. And she doesn’t deserve bullshit. Something deep down in my conscience decided that for me when I first saw her.
“Yes,” I say. “I won’t though.”
“Why not? You’re here alone.”
I want to argue that I damn well have company, but something in that pretty face and sarcastic smile won’t let me lie.
“Don’t confuse solitude with desperation,” I tell her. She leans against the wall opposite, slouched, hands behind her back. That kind of come-hither, gauche posture perfected by models with their awkward sensuality. But for her the gesture is unplanned, unstudied and magnetic for it. I look away and take a deep breath. Beads swing and glitter against her skin.
“I never suggested you were.”
It’s not pride that makes me tighten my fingers on the strap of my bag and straighten my spine as I turn away. It’s something else that flutters, hot and cold and shivery, just below my navel.
Pictures are meant to stay whole, in completed perfection—not taken apart, dissected and undressed, played with and ruined as if they were plastic dolls with plastered smiles and silky, shining, nylon hair.
“That’s good,” I hear myself say. Walk away now, while the barrier of unfamiliarity still exists. Let her think I’m offended or neurotic or worse.
Don’t let her see how much I ache.
She catches up to me in two strides, maybe three: the advantage of having long legs and not wearing a pencil skirt. She catches my chin and cheek between thumb and fingers, forcing me to stop, forcing me to face her. My scowl doesn’t faze her for a minute. Used to getting her way, I tell myself. Spoiled. Bratty.
Cherry-red lips brush against mine. Light catching on the clustered diamonds of a bracelet dazzles me.
She draws back a little, still holding me, holding my gaze. “You should know I thought you were beautiful.”
A pause. Her gaze falters, drops to my mouth as her thumb grazes my lower lip. “I couldn’t understand why you’d noticed me. I was angry because…” I feel her sigh brush my neck. “…because I didn’t believe you.”
Like a caress or a slap, the fingers release my face. I watch her walk down the corridor, hips and hurried steps making the black dress sway, like a charm. I close my eyes for a second and inhale deeply.
I don’t know what the hell’s just happened.
All I know is need.
I look at black rocks stark against white powdered sand and think there’s someplace I ought to be instead of here. There are obligations somewhere in my life, but I don’t want to think about them now. I think about her until my head spins from heat, inside and out.
Skin on fire, I stumble back to my room and pass out on white sheets until the sun goes down. I shiver, reluctant to head down to dinner. Afraid I’ll see her again. Afraid I won’t.
Fate takes the decision out of my hands.
I’ve made acquaintances here at the hoteclass="underline" middle-aged divorcées, career women getting away from it all; they mistake me for one of them. So I get the dinner invitation phone call, and I can’t think fast enough to find a good reason to refuse.
I fill in the fourth chair at the table near the window, smiling and laughing, but my choice of seating isn’t accidental. I can see the entrance to the dining room and all of the room itself but the few tables behind us and the wall, and those are all taken. I don’t see her belonging to any of the framed pictures of laughing diners they create. So, like a covert spider, I wait.
I watch her stalk in, stunning in lavender silk splendor tonight, the dress sleeveless and short of course, showing off those fine arms and magnificent legs to every male in the place. They all look of course, and I decide I hate them all.
Her gaze slides over me. I feel its touch: much more than the bored disinterest her pout advertises, but her façade doesn’t falter for an instant. She goes to a table at the far windows, joins the couple seated there with barely a nod. They acknowledge her then ignore her, return to their wine and conversation.
I can’t see her face at this distance, but I watch her take a phone out of her purse and start tapping with rapid intensity at the keyboard. She waves the waiter away with a dismissive hand and a shake of her head, without looking up. Her hair is tied up tonight in a carefully styled ponytail, and the tips of smooth, gathered strands brush the sharp lines of her shoulder blades as she hunches over the phone, shutting out the world around her, oblivious to the way it adores her.
Then for a split second, a brush of movement, she glances up and looks across the miles of pretentious carpet and polished crystal. She meets my gaze without the mask, without the veneer of indifference; with simple longing.
I melt inside.
This, I think, is real lust. I haven’t known what the word meant before now. Beyond mere physical desire, or romance or passion, it resists having other words and adjectives attached to it. If I force myself, I can think of terms like primeval and devastating and ruthless, none of them even remotely adequate.
Swallowing, I look at my plate and see the fork in my hand shake. My dinner companions are giggling, bantering with the waiter, another twentysomething-year-old with a twenty-year-old body evident under the hibiscus-printed shirt and formfitting white slacks. He grins, enjoying the attention, probably hoping somewhere at the back of his mind for an older, richer lover with the promise of a green card.
And that would be okay; acceptable in the eyes of the world.
What makes my fascination any different?
She leaves a letter for me at the front desk.
This feels strangely old fashioned and fairly lame. But I think you’ll appreciate the irony. If this finds you. Carl at the front desk promises he knows who you are, even though all I have to give him is a face without a name.