She cursed herself for not having dressed first. She rummaged through the clothes that were still hanging on the rack. She covered herself with a white shirt, which she didn’t get a chance to button, because he grabbed her wrist and shook her.
“What are you talking about? You’re leaving?” He dragged her down with him as he swooped to grab the jar out of her suitcase. “What’s my gift doing here? Were you going to take it with you?”
“It’s ridiculous!”
“Ridiculous? I adore this jar!”
He shoved it back onto the shelf furiously. They stared at each other: he was shaken, his mouth hung open and strands of hair fell over his left eye; she was blushing, feeling hopeless, guilty and confused.
“Matilde, what’s going on? What is this madness? You promised me, you swore to me that you wouldn’t take unnecessary risks. Now I get back and I find you about to…”
“Why didn’t you call me all week?” she interrupted him, and was even more embarrassed to hear how squeaky her voice was. She hated herself for not staying calm. She hated playing the role of the jealous wife; she sounded just like Dolores, her mother. How she understood her at that moment! She had judged her harshly for her histrionics, the screaming, the crying and everything else, but she had never understood the pernicious bite of jealousy and doubt. “Forgive me,” she said, covering her face with her free hand. “I don’t have the right to demand anything of you.”
Seeing her upset and resentful excited him; he was both happy and nervous, and he started to laugh. Matilde snatched back her hand and looked at him in amazement. Al-Saud wrapped her in his arms, engulfing her in his blue cashmere coat, which was still cold and wet from the rain outside.
“I wanted to call you. I wanted to call you every second I was away from you, but I didn’t, I stopped myself, I resisted the urge.”
“Why? Juana told you that she’d always keep her cell phone switched on, even during class. I drove myself crazy trying to come up with explanations for your silence: he can’t because he’s on the other side of the planet and there’s too much of a time difference, he’s not calling me because his meetings went on too late and he doesn’t want to bother me and so on. I was inventing excuses, I knew that you had no problem getting in touch with Sándor, Alamán or Tony. You called everyone except me. Just this morning I realized that it was because you wanted to get rid of me and so I…”
“Matilde!” He pulled her to his chest again, happy but tormented; he had made her suffer, as if her life didn’t have enough cruelty in it already. “Forgive me, my love! I was cruel. I confess that I wanted to see you react like this. I wanted you to want me, to miss me, to yearn for me.” He fell silent, suddenly shocked by his own sincerity.
“But Eliah! You made me suffer so much. I thought…I thought…” Her voice faltered.
“I was dying of jealousy!” he roared, unable to contain his irate affection. “I don’t know how to explain what happens to me with you, Matilde. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said again, suddenly dispirited. “From the beginning I haven’t understood a thing,” he admitted. “I went insane from anger and jealousy over this Blahetter business. I was even jealous of your father. I’m jealous of the Congo and the people you’ll treat there. I’m jealous of Ezequiel, because he knows you better than anyone and you love him so much. And your classmates at the lycée and your colleagues at Healing Hands. I’m jealous of everyone and everything. That’s why I didn’t call you, to punish you. I wanted to know that I was important to you.” He put his forehead on her shoulder and slipped his hands under her shirt to span her tiny back.
“My God, Eliah.” Matilde lifted his face and stroked it over and over, his forehead, his unshaven cheeks and neck. She tucked back the loose strands of hair, which flopped back down again. “You’re so handsome,” she thought out loud. “You take my breath away when I look at you. I go weak at the knees, I swear it. I never imagined that I would see the day when I felt what I feel for you. How could I make you go through all that when, in fact, you’ve become the center of my world? What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he assured her avidly. “It’s my fault. I’m possessive, short-tempered and impatient and I really lack compassion. And you’re the opposite. I think it’s your compassion for everyone that drives me insane, because I’m incapable of feeling it, I don’t understand it. You’re too good for me, Matilde.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him very lightly on the lips. She stayed close and murmured, “Do you know the real reason I don’t want to go to Argentina for Roy’s funeral?” Eliah shook his head. “Because I don’t want to leave you, that’s why. The guilt upsets me, but I just can’t.”
Al-Saud felt the thick hair on his skin stand on end, incited by the feel of Matilde’s mouth just inches from his. The importance of her words nestled in his breast. As her breath dried the saliva from his lips, he was overtaken by arousal.
“I missed you so much, I needed you so much,” she continued, not at all perturbed by his silence. “The week was so long without you.”
They melted into a kiss that embodied the contradictory emotions that coursed through them: passion, anger, jealousy, doubt, desire and arousal. Al-Saud ripped off her white shirt and bestowed a collar of wet kisses on her neck. He bit her a little, and their pants were suddenly peppered with squeals, which lingered in the air until they became moans as he massaged her buttocks, pressed her body into his and pushed his hard penis against her naked stomach. Matilde simply remained on tiptoe, her hands tight around Al-Saud’s neck, responding to the voracity of his lips and his insistent tongue. He pulled his mouth off hers to lean down and take off her tiny panties. He looked at her with dark eyes as he slipped his arm underneath her to cradle her hairless mound of Venus with his huge, long-fingered hand. Matilde didn’t break eye contact and spread her legs a little, as if obeying a wordless order. She didn’t realize that she was holding her breath, that she wasn’t blinking, that her lips were parted; she was concentrating exclusively on his fingers, which separated the lips of her vulva and played with her clitoris. A moan of pleasure would intermittently slip out of her, although she tried to repress them so that nothing would distract her attention from his face or his work down below.
“Matilde, you don’t know how much I wanted to come home and do this.” Al-Saud looked at his hand, which was wet with her fluid. Matilde stared at it herself; it was still such a miracle to her that she could get wet like this. It had never happened with Roy, and they had even tried artificial lubricants.
“I’m so horny,” he panted. Without taking off his coat or his jacket, he unzipped his pants and, with a look of pain, pulled out his penis. “Hold it,” he begged, and leaned back on the wood of the closet with open arms, like someone allowing himself to be searched.
Matilde undid his belt, unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down to reveal his boxer shorts. She didn’t want to undress him any more than that; she enjoyed a perverse pleasure in the vulnerability she felt, being completely naked when he was almost fully dressed. Finally she gave in to his wishes and took him in her hand. She heard him let out a growl, and looked up at him. She loved discerning in his contorted face the pleasure she was giving and the effort he was making to contain himself. She passed his glans over her stomach, her mound of Venus—ma petite tondue (my little baldy), Al-Saud had nicknamed it—and, remembering The Perfumed Garden and the Position of the Blacksmith, turned her back on him and squeezed his member between her legs, sliding it back and forth, looking at his member and how it appeared and disappeared under her mound of Venus, smiling as she heard the change in Al-Saud’s breathing, which came faster and shallower. Al-Saud slid his hand over Matilde’s stomach and another under the tulle of her bra until he found her nipple and made her scream.
“Did you miss me?” he wanted to know.
“The whole time!”
“Why didn’t you call me then?” he teased her, without stopping the caresses that, h
e knew, were taking her breath away. “Why?” he insisted impatiently, and penetrated her brusquely with a finger. Matilde let out a sob, mixed with pleasure and pain. “I was waiting for you to call too,” he insisted, introducing a second finger, which knocked her off balance. Matilde grabbed a shelf in the closet and pressed her head against the backs of her hands. “I need you to call me to let me know that I’m all that matters to you.”
“I’ve already told you a thousand times. You’re all that matters to me,” she whimpered.
“Really? It doesn’t seem like it to me,” Al-Saud objected, grabbing her roughly by the hips and penetrating her from behind. He did so with a powerful thrust that lifted her off the floor and made her dig her nails into the edge of a shelf.
“Eliah!” she cried, insane with pleasure, suffocating from the lack of air, from the saliva that was filling her mouth, from the words she wanted to say and the moans that came out instead. She screamed out heedlessly when the climax became the devastating sensation that only Eliah had made her feel and that hours later, when she analyzed it, she realized included her whole body, even her toes, which curled under her until they touched the floor. She screamed even though she knew that Al-Saud hadn’t closed the door to the dressing room and that the door to the bedroom was probably open. And as the wave passed, he whispered quickly to her, wetting her ear, and squeezed her breasts painfully, urging her not to let the pleasure between her legs go, to hold on to it, to keep moving with his rhythm, telling her that he wanted them to come together, and she, though her legs were shaking from her pointed feet, with her behind thrust upward, closed her eyes and imagined Eliah hitting her with his pelvis every time he thrust at her body, his dark hands hiding her breasts, her nipples emerging bright red from between his fingers with their pure white nails. If someone had caught them in this position, they wouldn’t have seen her. Matilde had disappeared, or rather she was entirely engulfed by his height and the back of his blue cashmere coat, which flared out with each thrust. The only evidence that she was there, on her feet, with her back to him, facing the shelves of the closet, were her moans, and perhaps even those were drowned out by Al-Saud’s hoarse bellows. They finished together, just as he wanted, and Matilde never imagined she could feel a happiness as full as what she felt right there and then, pressed against the wooden closet by Eliah’s weight.
Sanity returned as his heartbeat slowed to normal. He looked upward and opened his eyes as if he was emerging from hours of sleep. He looked around him. He lowered his gaze and fixed it on Matilde, her little hands still tense on the shelf, her forehead resting upon them, her ribs expanding and contracting with each breath, and after the avalanche of lust that he had just experienced, his heart was overwhelmed with a tenderness so vast that he felt it bursting out of his chest. Still inside her, he embraced her and kissed her shoulders, struck dumb by emotion, something that had only happened to him with Matilde.
“Eliah?” she said quietly, and he leaned down and put his lips on her cheek.
“What?”
“I wanted our reunion to be different.”
“Different? Why? You didn’t like what we just did? On a scale of one to ten, I’d give it an eleven.”
Matilde’s giggle ran through his body like a soft, warm electric current.
“I mean I didn’t want you to find me here, in a bad mood, packing my suitcase. I didn’t want to reproach you or demand anything from you. I had been dreaming of your return since the second you left, I got too worked up, I was thinking about you the whole time.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” he persisted with a certain hardness in his tone.
“I didn’t want to bother you. You’re a very busy man, and don’t think that I don’t know that you’ve neglected your businesses for me.” On that subject, what exactly is your business, Eliah? What do you keep behind the door that Leila sneaks by and needs a password to open? And that garage on Rue Maréchal Harispe that I see cars entering and exiting? How is it that you earn so much money? She didn’t dare to utter the questions out loud; she was afraid of the answers.
“You’re lucky that I’m in a good mood from what we just did. If not, I’d be furious by the stupidity of what you’re saying.”
“I thought that you had gotten tired of me, that you had gotten sick of the problems I bring with me.”
Matilde gritted her teeth at the ferocity with which Eliah encircled her with his arms.
“Tired of you? What have I done to make you think that? Tell me, what have I done?”
“You were strange after Roy’s death.” Al-Saud snorted to show that he had heard enough and made to move away. “No!” Matilde burst out and, with a desperate movement, she put her hands under his jacket and dug her nails into his ass to keep him inside her. “Don’t pull out of me, please. Not yet.”
Matilde’s plea and the feeling of her fingers through the fabric of his pants excited him. He bent over to nestle her in the hollow formed by his torso and restarted the caresses, to invite her to repeat the experience they never seemed to tire of. He took off his coat and jacket, which fell behind them, and guided Matilde to the floor, where he made love to her again, inside the cashmere coat, on top of the jumble of clothes, inches from the suitcase. With his arms tense, Al-Saud raised his torso above her, as if he didn’t want to touch her. They stared at each other in silence, the moans Matilde made every time Al-Saud drove into her barely audible. She saw an unusual fire in the depths of the green eyes that bored into her with desire and a sensation of ownership that weakened her, obliterated her, made her curl up in fear. Those eyes spoke of an immeasurable power, one that was capable of destroying her, and yet she wanted to submit herself willingly, motivated by a primitive feeling that both drove and shamed her, because it conflicted with the idea of the modern, independent woman she wanted to be. She could even sense his power in the ferocity with which he expressed his relief, in the energy of his roars and the way he pounded into her in the final seconds, and she, held tight in his arms, encouraged him, begged him for more, yes, more, Eliah, my love, don’t stop, don’t stop, deeper, my love, more, and paradoxically, with these words, delicate little Matilde tamed the wild beast inside him, which endeavored to please her the way a mortal strives to appease a goddess.
“Matilde, Matilde…” he said, almost breathless, with his lips plastered all over her forehead. “You have no idea what these days away from you were like. I bought you so many gifts.”
“Yes? Really?”
“Yes, lots of gifts, even though you might not want any of them.”
“I want them all! Because you bought them for me.”
“Even if they’re expensive designer products that you consider unbearably frivolous?”
“Yes, I’ll want them anyway. To me they’re proof that you thought about me. What did you buy me?”
“I bought you a dress for my mother’s birthday party. It’s tonight.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Yes. Do you want to go?”
“Yes.”
He smiled at her tiny “yes.” It sounded like the chirp of a little bird.
“Shall we take a bath together?”
“Yes,” she chirped again.
* * *
* * *
CHAPTER 18
* * *
* * *
Al-Saud gave Juana money so she could buy a dress for Francesca’s party. They planned to do their shopping at Galeries Lafayette, where they would also have lunch and then go to the hairdresser on the second floor. Although they were excited about their plans, they looked at each other in silence. They were thinking about Ezequiel.
“It isn’t the same to go to Galeries Lafayette without Eze,” Juana said.
Ezequiel, like his family, had left the day before for Córdoba, with Roy’s coffin in the hold of his grandfather Guillermo’s plane after a week of bureaucracy that had gone much more smoothly than they had expected. Both the French police and the employees at the
Argentinean consulate had been very solicitous and made the paperwork easier for them.
“Juani, I don’t think Ezequiel is ever going to forgive me for not going with him to Roy’s funeral.”
“Was he angry with you yesterday when you talked on the phone?”
“No, but he did seem strange. He asked me again to go with him. Jean-Paul wasn’t going because his grandfather forbade it. I left him alone, Juani, at a moment like this.”
“In any case, we left him alone.” Since tears were flowing from Matilde’s eyes, Juana clucked her tongue and hugged her. “The funeral is the least of it, Mat. He’ll be surrounded by lots of people. You were with him when he called you desperately from the hospital. And you stayed and took charge of the situation.”
“What’s going on?” When she heard Al-Saud’s voice, Matilde broke away from her friend’s hug and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Are you crying, Matilde?”
“Our darling Mat is sad because she thinks Ezequiel is never going to forgive her for not going to Córdoba for Roy’s funeral.”
Matilde didn’t dare to look at him, though she could see he was approaching out of the corner of her eye.
“Don’t cry, my love, I don’t want you to suffer anymore. Can’t we forget everything, even if it’s just for today?” Matilde nodded, and Al-Saud put his thumb under her chin and pushed gently to make her lift her face. “Aren’t you going shopping?”
“Yes, we’re going now.”
“You’re not coming, stud?”
“No. Diana and Sándor will accompany you. Matilde, I’m going to work all day at the George V. If you need anything, you call me there or on my cell phone.” He took her arms and pulled her toward him so that Matilde ended up on tiptoe. “Be careful,” he warned her. “This isn’t over just because Blahetter is dead. You may still be in danger. We don’t know who assassinated him or why. Juana,” he said, glowering at her severely, “do I have your word that you won’t do anything that puts you at risk?”