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Chapter One: Heloise
Heloise drove, hands gripping the wheel, pondering the haplessness of men. She was driven by her hunger for one man. Enclosed in the capsule of a rental car, she went without sustenance while her car devoured miles.
She was aware as she drove that her pulse was up. She thought of him and felt her heart flip. That old catch always got her, despite herself. She should have been better than that. She was better than that.
Even so, the thought of silver stubble studding the cliff of his jaw made her ache and sent shimmers of want from her gullet through her spine straight down between her legs. She was pinned to a moment in time by the clear grey of his eye under an arched brow. They held hands across a starched linen tablecloth, for the first time. Heat from his long fingers had warmed her cool palm that evening. As the waiter approached, he pulled his hands away. They slid back to his side of the table like guilty snakes. They would go on to finish the meal, and their eyes would be the only contact between them because it was a popular Chicago restaurant where many other lawyers ate, where many clients ate. Where friends of his wife ate.
Later she would grind her tender cheek against that stubble, in the parking lot, in his car. Over time, the sight of that sandpaper stubble would come to trigger a Pavlovian response in her and the mere sight of it would be the overture to being taken to his bed. But never to his heart.
And so, she was hungry.
He had kept her on a diet, all these months. For years now.
Her heart was ravenous for him. Her body too. She wanted him for herself. She wanted him for his genetics. She wanted, after all the other accomplishments in her life, to procreate with him the way other people wanted to complete marathons or land on the moon. She had a destiny to fulfill, via her body, via him, via their alchemical fusion.
He knew precisely what she wanted. He knew how deeply it clawed at her, from within, her want that had become a bloated need. And he kept her hooked to him, enthralled, hoping, month after month, cycle after cycle, knowing how deep the hormones had dug grooves into her brain. And he knew most of all — when she could easily have had anyone, made a brilliant match with any number of young hustling partners to be — that she wanted him. And he delayed her gratification to the nth degree. Neither of them admitted it openly, but that was the dry tinder between them. Her insatiable want, his coy ambiguity, his dangling of the faintly possible.
When they lay entwined together after fucking for hours, he would praise her long flanks, her lean muscles, her titanium bones, her ubermensch athleticism. What fine children she would make, he would say, seemingly without guile. He knew that every thrust, every climax was ferocious and hungry and wild and natural and voracious and welcome because they were driven by her baby need. They would fall against each other, flesh long against flesh, and right at the moment when she fell apart under him with want, he would pause for a jarring moment and conspicuously put on a condom.
The thin sheath stank of chemicals and power. It was his cruel, knowing denial. They would then rake each other’s flesh and inside she would die with want and hunger for what should be. But she would say nothing, with a fierce contempt for showing weakness.
He knew she was hooked, practically addicted to the hope of him and the day that he would deign to give her a baby. If they had kids, he would tease her with his gravel voice, of course they would be lawyers, super lawyers like them.
“Supreme court judges,” she would correct. “Presidents.” Provoking laughter. Later he would untangle from the hot, damp sheets, stride naked to the bathroom, and then casually say, “It’s just not in the cards, though, Babe,” as though he and he alone were the arbiter of everything that would or could be.
But her kind were rulers.
His kind were sheep.
How dare he dodge her, play with her, breadcrumb her with promises of month-long vacations, midnight invitations to his lake house, his endless fucking deferments of one day, really, I promise I will get divorced?
She would lie awake at nights, one hand across the pulse in his throat, thinking all this, when he had yielded to sleep, but, yet again, not succumbed to her will.
In the old days, her kind would have selected him, based on his strength and genes and smarts. They would couple and then she’d feed. The blood meal was critical to conception. Devoured, seeds and all. His husk would be discarded.
Of course, the old days were old for a good reason. Civilization had moved on from barbarism to tolerance. But in those lusty old days, those at the apex had walked tall, taken whatever they wanted, and kept the flocks enthralled through a delicious and unpredictable application of fear.
She had wished none of that for him. She’d wanted him at her side. He had foolishly thought all this time that he’d raised her — from college to the bar to associate to partner to pause here, at sex toy. She was perfectly content to allow him to continue to think that was so. And she was prepared because of the heat of his kisses and the hone of his thoughts and the shape of his cock and the meat of his muscles to raise him up to sit for a time by her side, her chosen equal. Her mate.
Her mind ferreted through remembrance of the taut texts that made him ever unavailable to her while she drove past the belching flames of the Hamilton refineries, speeding south toward the border. And that one text of his:
Babe, I just can’t see myself starting a new family. Ever.
She drove too quickly over the St. Catharines bridge, her gorge rising while she thought of how often he’d promised to finalize that divorce. She smiled sweetly at the border guards who kept their words professional but couldn’t keep from drinking in her brushed glossy hair, her perfect teeth, and her understated perfume. She dazzled them with tactical flirtation and enjoyed their dumbfounded gaze. They permitted her quick passage. They regretted doing so when she was reduced to taillights and memory. She knew how to cultivate hunger in others: she was herself always hungry.
In Buffalo she parked. She hailed a cab to a different car rental place and slipped behind the wheel of a plain grey Toyota. Under the murky orange of sodium vapour highway lights along the I-90, she permitted herself a few tears. This was a momentous trip. Everything would soon change. There would be regrets. But things had to be forced to a point. Change had to occur. As she drove she worried her tongue piercing, twirling the head against the roof of her mouth. He’d always loved it. Got so excited when he bore into her mouth with his tongue. Admitted how hot it made him to know that she always had it there, under the conservative navy-pearl-strand regulation-hem-and-neckline corporate shell she projected.
The whole drive was just over eleven hours. She had to stop in Toledo where she stayed in a roadside motel. She could not arrive before 9:00 a.m. In the hotel she checked her basal temperature. She was entering the release day window. She checked again before leaving at 4:30 a.m. She was wearing the stockings he always said he liked. He’d promised to buy them for her, many times. Ultimately, she bought them herself.
She left the car on the side of the road, up above his sprawling lake house. Her heels crunched grit against the glistening asphalt. The air was fresh here. So fragrant. She could read the scent like a newspaper, just like any predator. There were snails moving up a tree trunk, beside her. A rabbit had urinated somewhere nearby. A hawk circled overhead, tracking the phosphorescence on the rabbit’s pelt. Internally, she could feel the way her own hormones were synchronizing with flesh and fluids.
His modern Tudor mansion towered, peaks and stone cladding, over the sweep of the drive. Several of his vehicles peeped out of glass garages like mannequins on display. She let herself in the glass double doors, her face turned away from the security camera, using the key he’d given her with such ceremony. As if coming by to have wild, no-strings-attached sex whenever it pleased him was somehow a gift to her. It was still before 9:00 a.m., which meant he would be drilling figure eights in his private underground squash court. She descended flights of concrete and redwood steps to his home gym thinking about his sweat. His ragged breaths. The blood and oxygen streaming through his body. Despite herself, despite her anger, she was stirred. She loved the feeling of his sweat-slick skin.
At the foot of the stairs, the landing was littered with exercise machines and crossfit toys he never used. The Naugahyde benches, however, had frequently hosted intimate athletics between them.
He looked genuinely happy when he saw her framed in the glass doorway. And his grey eyes flashed with such warmth, the edge came off her hunger a little. She let him nourish her with it.
