Page 90 of The Lost Heiress
“Paris is the perfect place for that,” Gisele admitted.
Gisele and Hugo only left when all the wine was gone, so it was after midnight when Astrid and Florence got ready for bed. They undressed at separate ends, unbuttoning their blouses, unzipping their skirts, rolling down their pantyhose. Florence always turned away to dress or undress, facing the wall, but Astrid would strip down to the nude facing any which direction, without a stitch of self-consciousness. But then, what did she have to be self-conscious about? She was thin and beautiful.
“You never told me,” Astrid said as she slid her nightgown over her head, “was there a boy in school you were sweet on?”
“No,” Florence said, still facing the wall. She buttoned the top of her own nightgown and turned around to help Astrid turn back the coverlet.
“Have you never been kissed, Florence?” Astrid asked, very serious now.
Florence shook her head.
In truth, Florence had never felt an ounce of attraction when she looked at a boy. Even Adam Cunningham, arguably the handsomest, most sought-after boy at the high school she had attended—the quarterback of the football team and senior prom king. She could admit that he was objectively good looking, but she never felt that drop in her stomach when she looked at him. Her palms didn’t sweat, her voice didn’t quiver, her face didn’t flush when he looked at her. Florence always felt that women were more attractive and pleasing to look at than men. The soft curves of their hips, the thin circles of their waists, the fullness of their breasts—there was a poetry, a real beauty, in their shape.
“Every girl should be kissed properly at least once in their life by someone who really knows what they’re doing,” Astrid said as she climbed into bed.
“Mm, is that so?” Florence asked, sitting down. She turned to fluff her pillow.
“Yes,” Astrid said. “I’m no Elizabeth Taylor, but I fancy myself fairly experienced.”
“You?” Florence asked, finally catching on. “You don’t mean that you want to ... you’re not suggesting that we—?”
“Don’t be such a goose,” Astrid said. “I’ve kissed plenty of girls. We did it all the time at Choate. How else were we supposed to get any practice? We didn’t want to be complete ninnies the first time a cute boy kissed us. We wanted to know what we were doing.”
“I suppose that makes a certain sort of sense,” Florence said.
“Shall we give it a go?” Astrid asked.
They sat facing one another on the bed, Florence with her legs crossed in front of her, Astrid perched on her knees. Astrid leaned forward and tucked Florence’s hair behind her ear, and Florence’s skin burned in the wake of Astrid’s touch.
“Relax,” Astrid whispered, and her warm breath against Florence’s face sent goose bumps down her neck.
Florence tilted her chin up and closed her eyes. She felt Astrid cup the side of her face with her hand, and then Astrid’s lips were against her own, warm and soft—gentle, like a question.
Florence had never known anything like it before, the wanting that erupted low in her belly, the way her heart galloped in her chest. She leaned forward into Astrid, and the kiss shifted with a wild urgency. She reached up and touched Astrid’s neck and heard Astrid’s sharp intake of breath. After that, the kiss became something else entirely. They broke apart a few moments later.
“So that’s a kiss,” Florence said, slightly out of breath.
“I suppose we got carried away,” Astrid said, laughing.
Florence only nodded.
“Good night, dear,” Astrid said. She reached over and turned out the light and climbed under the covers.
Florence rolled onto her side, facing the wall, and pulled the covers close, even though it was a warm evening. She touched the tips of her fingers to her lips in the dark, still feeling the reverberations of Astrid’s lips on hers.
Florence worked at a café down the street from their apartment. She got there early, before it opened, folded pats of cold butter into the creases of dough that the baker made fresh every morning, piped chocolate into the hot centers of croissants. She always had flour dust in her hair and grains of sugar under her nails, and she stood all day at the counter, taking orders, handing the patrons their warm rolls in wax paper bags, frothing their milk at the espresso machine.
Astrid had worked for a while at a gallery when they’d first moved to Paris. She’d taken art history at school and was proficient in French, so she could talk at length about impressionism and postimpressionism,cubism and surrealism, and the burgeoning new realism that was all the rage. But while she was knowledgeable and charming, she often arrived late and left early. She was prone to taking long breaks, where she’d wander off from the gallery and leave it unattended, and once, the owner had found her napping in the storage room in the middle of the day. It wasn’t her fault. The pills the doctor had given her for her foot made her groggy, and then they started to wear off before they should have, leaving her in pain, so she’d take more than she ought to, until they were gone. Florence and Astrid both agreed when the gallery let her go that it was useless for her to work until she was fully recovered, and so she spent her days sleeping late. She took up sketching and painting and even cooking to some degree, making rabbit stew on the hot plate in their apartment.
In the evenings, they would go to the ivy-covered cabaret Au Lapin Agile and sit at a table in the back by the bar, sipping their beers as they listened to poets read their work from worn notebooks and activists ardently recite their anarchist manifestos to the dimly lit room. Some nights, they’d get dressed up and wander down to the Moulin Rouge to watch the girls dance the cancan. For the first time in their lives, their time was their own. Florence had never felt more alive. She couldn’t remember a time when she had been this happy.
Once a week at first, and then more often, they’d go down to the foot of Montmartre to Pigalle, the red-light district, where there was a brothel that doubled as an opium den. It was the only thing after the pills ran out that gave Astrid some relief. Florence never partook in the ritual, but she’d sit at the back and observe as they passed around the oil lamp; the ceramic pot of the tarry, amber-brown drug; a needle; and a bamboo pipe. The room was filled with an acrid smell. Afterward, Florence would put her arm around Astrid and help her home, tuck her into bed.
When Florence came home from the café late one afternoon, she found Astrid at the kitchenette, busying herself with the electric kettle,her back to the door. A well-dressed man was sitting at the table. It took Florence a moment before she recognized him.
“Charles,” Florence said. The shock stole the breath from her body.
“Florence,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
