Emily eats in small bites because the small ones are the only ones her body will accept. She chews, taking her time, looking back and forth between George and Jason, watching how they talk to each other: What kind of doctor are you? The family kind. Are you a family man, then? Not yet”here there is a meaningful look, a shadow passing over his expression, absorbed by it”maybe someday. She swallows, easing the food past the fluttering in her throat, through muscles ready to spring shut like a trap. Below her stomach churns, turns over inside her abdomen, but it’s a gentle churning, the kind that percolates with adrenaline.
The waiter comes. He offers cocktails and a dessert custard. The thought of eating it, the soft gelid custard exploding sugar on her tongue, makes her stomach halt.
Jason nods. He says that yes he would like to have some of the custard, is it made with cinnamon, is it like a flan? The waiter nods and smiles, yes he says, yes; it is like crème caramel too. Jason orders the custard.
Emily imagines the taste of it in his mouth, the flavor on his tongue mingled with beer and the tang of his skin, whatever it is; she imagines it as thick and masculine, dizzying: looking at his profile, she notices the thickness of his jawbone and his chin, the prominence of his brow. A rugged bone structure comes from the surge of testosterone at puberty. Emily watches him talk. She watches him smile and tries to imagine his face soft and boyish, the foundation of what she is seeing, what his face might’ve been before the hormones unlocked inside his blood, and she can’t. His face is a landscape: the skin is soil declaring the latitude of its birth, the nose and chin old mountains eroded by years of rigorous kindness. The teeth, his smile, are a gate.
The custard comes.
It is white and creamy, set in the center of a white plate, floating on a spill of golden syrup. It trembles like the flesh. She smells the delicacy of the cinnamon, the flecks of vanilla. Jason takes the first bite. Emily watches him; she leans forward and leaves her body, passes through her skin to be near this moment, the first taste of sweet cream alighting in his face.
George sees her. She sits back, folds her hands. The darkness gathers on his face. The wind rattles in distant trees. Thunder rumbles in his eyes.
“This is delicious.” Jason slices a piece away from the mold with the edge of his spoon. He lifts his eyes to Emily. “Do you want to try some?”
She shakes her head and glances at George out of the corners of her eyes. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
She’s not. She looks at the spoon in his hand and sees herself leaning over, opening her mouth like a child, and at the imagined unfolding of the flavor she feels hot and cold and hot, shivering through the rapid changes in her chemistry. She isn’t aware that she’s doing it. In real time, through her real life, she’s leaning toward Jason beneath George’s gaze as it turns hostile, as it stings in her heart. The soft skins of her lips come apart. She breathes with her mouth and Jason’s expression softens through surprise, through pleasure, through to forgetfulness, innocence, down to the earliest sensual pleasures: the softness of a blanket upon a drowsy cheek, the touch of a loving hand, the reflex of saliva squirting into the taste of a peach; all of this alights on his features at the clink of the spoon against her teeth. She angles her head, looks up at him as she takes it into her mouth.
Her eyes close. The flavor fills the world.
“Jason, do you want some too?”
Emily is disoriented. She opens her eyes, turns a bewildered look toward Jason in time to remember that George had told Jason that his name was Jason too. It is a mean trick, a name tossed back and forth between them, from voice to voice, like infinity glimpsed in a mirror.
George takes hold of his spoon. He sounds sharklike, syllables slithering around inside a cloud of smoke. “I can feed myself.”
“Here.” Jason slides over the plate. “Have the rest.”
The room acquires a strange energy. It gains a life that wants to spin but stays still like a held breath. With each movement of her head, languor drifts out of the walls and settles into her bones. She blinks, tests her perception; she wonders if George put something in her sangria, if he did it while she and Jason were dancing. I’m too sharp, she thinks. Not he wouldn’t do that, but I’m too sharp.
Emily climbs down out of the chair. George watches her and Jason asks her where she’s going. The floor remains still beneath her feet. It remains still but starts to throb, like it has a heart, like the walls are its lungs and the vessels stretch beneath the floorboard and here, in this part, beneath her feet, there is a pulse.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says. “And then I am going to dance.”
She weaves through the bodies, through the darkness, her nose hopping from sweat smell to sweat smell, reading the secrets of skin. Inside the ladies’ room, she sighs and feels heavy, leans her face against the door.
I am drunk, she thinks That is what this is, it has been a very long time since I was drunk, I have no tolerance for it, I’ve had too much sangria and I am the only one drinking it, I need to stop. I need to have some water. I need to move, to burn the alcohol out of my skin. But she still doesn’t feel drunk. This is like being in Morocco, back then, she and Jordan and Susie sharing the hash candy, Susie was beautiful, her red hair aflame, a siren in the desert. Emily didn’t get enough of a buzz to cloud her up but got just enough to loosen her up, to separate her from her skin and make her feel like this, like she is sloshing around inside herself, banging up against her bones and the firm vitality of her organs, like she is a pinball in her own mind, banging off memories and blood vessels. The world swells, collapses, stabilizes. Emily’s fingers curl up against the wood. Clarity rushes into her head. She opens the door.
Jason is there. It is dark in the corner, away from the lights, and he is standing there with this boyish look on his face, muted yearning mixed with shame like a radioactive charge everyone carries out of childhood, the half-life of shame, of finding oneself caught in the wallow of one’s feelings. People like him carry it the longest: straight-teeth men who grow out of straight-teeth boys, raised soft and studious inside their gated communities and then sent out into the ivy league to get polished up into doctors. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it. He looks at her. He keeps on looking at her and his eyebrows twitch closer together, as if they want to knot but cannot find the strength. Emily can’t bear the sight of his pink lips, that slanted mouth. Looking at it makes her angry, the way it trembles, it makes her yearn, it fills her with an itching lust that she doesn’t understand.
She reaches out through the open door, pulls him inside. He is heavy, his feet resist. She throws her weight behind her arm. He wants to talk and she covers his mouth, scraping him on the edge of the door in her haste to get it closed. His breath comes quick and hot, his mouth moves, she feels his mumbling vibrate into the tendons of her hand and it shortens her breath, makes the moment unbearable with excitement. She slows her breath, loosens her fingers on his cheeks, moves her fingers into the fine grain of his skin. His mouth is soft. The hairs scrape her sensitive fingertips, grind into the lines of her palm. His breath flies out between his lips, torn and fluttering.
“Hush,” she murmurs, lips flattened into her knuckles. She rubs them over the backs of her fingers, the long cool bones pressed between her lips and his. “Shhh, now.” Her breath is a steaming flood. “I want to kiss you.”
His eyes widen, lashes fluttering. His pupils tremble like a cat’s, some animal that’s filled to the brim with trust.
“Will you let me kiss you?”
His throat works as he swallows. He nods.
Emily takes his face in her hands. She molds her fingers around the shapes in his face, the soft thickness of his flesh. He presses back into the door. Her nose bumps up underneath his, rubbing, her mouth coming closer until she smells the sweat waiting inside his skin. Her breathing increases. The air puffs out of him, ragged, overlapping her exhalations, sweet with beer and caramel. She is soft as a whisper, like petals falling. He flinches at the first touch of her lips. She moves in, she is pulled into empty space, tugged forward by the flinching of his body, and her open mouth collides with his, loses its bearings before correcting itself. His hands slide over her face, urgent, rough, pushing into her pliancy. He tightens his grip on the sides of her skull. He tilts her face and the door rattles with the shift in her weight. His mouth falls onto hers, sighs into it; he surrenders to the weakness of her lips, to their softness.
Emily’s mind whispers around the tongue in her mouth: Run.
“Emily.” His lips move against hers, the sweet air shaping itself around her tongue. “Thank you,” he pants. “I want to,” he pauses, hands trembling. He breathes into her chin. “I-I…want…” She runs her tongue along the words. His breath climbs, hits a high note. “I’m serious.” He moves back, hits his head on the door. “I’m serious, I want…” He slides his hands up over her jaw. He leans his forehead into hers. “Come back with me.” He brushes the side of her nose with his. “I’m at the Talisman.”
She pulls his hands off her face. “I can’t.”
He pulls back and looks at her. His eyebrows pull together. The ragged tone of his voice sharpens. “Then what the hell is this?”
Emily traces the turn in his jaw; she starts below the earlobe and her finger slides, slow, to the tip of his chin. “Take it with you,” she murmurs. “The memory. Of this. Take it home with you.”
He pushes her away. “Fuck that!”
Emily tries to push past him and he pushes the heel of his hand into the jamb, tendons standing out along the inside of his wrist. The muscles ripple in his forearm. “Wait.”
“Let me out!”
“You started this.”
She sucks in a deep breath, puffs her cheeks, lets it out. “Yeah, so?”
He drops his arm. “Fine.”
“Look.” All the strength rushes out of her, floods the plain of her soul, the weakness spreading through her body like a poison. She wants to weep. ”You should…you should…” She looks away. “Go back to Ribeira Grande tonight.”
He watches the delicate shifting of her facial expressions, the hidden emotions creeping under their veils of shadow. He takes in a breath, holds it, and in that second something rises into his eyes, a burst of realization. His mouth opens. For the space of a heartbeat, his lips remains parted.
“Are you scared of him? Because…because you can end this,” he says, looking into her, laying emphasis on the words. “Right now. I’ll take you; look, I’ll take you to Ribeira Grande with me, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go if that’s what it is, if you’re afraid of him.” He’s looking into her eyes, so earnest, and she almost misses the tight anger at the bottom of his voice, seething down below his concern. “It doesn’t have to be about this, us, whatever you want to call it.” His eyes, searching hers. “Okay?”
Emily starts to nod when a fist pounds on the door. Jason jumps, turning around to face the intrusion. The voice bellows over the music; it’s something in Portuguese.
Jason looks at her over his shoulder. “What is he saying?”
“He’s saying that he doesn’t run this kind of establishment.”
“Okay. Okay. Look.” He turns around, puts his hands on her shoulders. “I’m in room 23. I’ll be there tonight and tomorrow night. For any reason.” He holds her in place with his eyes. “For any reason, at any time, I mean it. Okay?” He touches her face, a smile straightening his mouth. “Okay? No pressure.” The smile broadens. “No pressure. I mean it.”
Emily nods. “Okay.”
He opens the door.