My fingers trailed her body as I spoke, committing her curves to memory.
“Fourteen years ago when I finished school in Switzerland, I had to stay in Geneva for a few days before coming home. One night I took a walk and came across an abandoned mutt. He was a big boy, and very scrawny. I bought him food, gave him water and before I knew it he was following me back to the hotel. I sneaked him into the suite, gave him a bath and a warm bed and named him Duke. There was no sending him back to the street after all that, and two days later he was on the flight back home with me. My twenties circled around getting my business degree and learning the family business, with very little social interaction. So it was very isolated at times. Duke was relentless with his companionship and refused to leave my side. He was just always there through my failures and my victories. One day, last year, we went on one of our runs and I noticed him struggling to keep up, and I realized my pup was getting old. We kept to the daily slow walk until he finally let me know he was fine just spending his time by the fire. I made my bed next to his in the final days, and one night we went to sleep and he didn’t wake up. It took me a long time to accept that he was gone. Evennow, I still catch myself looking at his bed, expecting him to be in his favorite spot by the fireplace.”
It was a quiet moment between us, one where we both weighed the burden of loss and the realization that despite everything, life went on, regardless of the pain it sometimes left in its wake. Neither one of us wanted to think beyond tonight. Not yet.
Tears glistened in Isabel’s eyes. She bit her bottom lip, the succulent lip that brushed my skin in so many places, and then she smiled the sadness away. “My mom always said if you want to know the character of a man, see how he treats a dog. Duke was lucky to have found you.”
“Oh I was the lucky one,” I said earnestly. “Believe me.”
Our conversation drifted to something less melancholy, and I learned that her favorite flower was the calla lily, and that her taste in music was spectacularly eclectic, ranging from classical to hip hop. Her love of good food came from her French mother, and books were her portal to happiness.
I couldn’t help but compare our worlds. Mine was glorified by excess and power, and hers was devoted to life and love. I saw the world as crude, and she found it beautiful.
“By the way,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you. What were you doing in the bookshop last night?”
“I had a meeting in town and decided to drop by and read a little bit. I like the atmosphere there.”
“And what were you reading?”
“Sapiens by Yuval Harari,” I said. “I’ve read it a couple of times.”
“Hmmm.”
I offered her a grin. Was it finally my turn to school the luminous nymph?
“It’s a brilliant book that explores the three major influences in human cultures: religion, money, and empire—” I stoppedwhen Isabel untangled herself from me and coiled up in a position I could only assume indicated an opposing view.
The look she gave me suggested that she was not as impressed as I was bySapiens. I bit a smile. “I gather you’ve read it.”
“I have,” she said.
“Of course you have.” I shifted up and leaned against the headboard, eye-level with my challenger. “Okay, so give me your take on it.”
Her fingers trailed over my chest and my abdomen, slowly, as if savoring me. “Sapiens is an entertaining read, I’ll give Harari that, but he’s very loose on fact-based details and he views everything through his personal opinions and the lens of his own prejudices.”
“Very loose on fact-base details?” I countered. “Explain.”
“Right off the bat Harari claims the scientific revolution got underway 500 years ago,” she said, drawing circles on my abdomen with her finger. “One can surmise he’s referring to the geniuses who lived in the 16thcentury: Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. Hararicompletelyignores the fact that Aristarchus of Samos first proposed heliocentricity in the 3rdcentury BCE, and was then cited by Archimedes in the 2ndcentury BCE. That’s just to mention a couple. Ever since we could rub two brain cells together, humans have been curious, and we’ve never been short on ingenuity when it comes to understanding our world. So I’m going to say, 500 years ago my ass. It was way longer than that.”
My cock responded keenly to that little colloquy. Or perhaps it was the way the nymph tilted her head and pouted her lips to emphasize her point. It awakened some prehistoric need in me to grab her, sling her over my shoulder and drag her off to my lair, in a till-death-do-us-part kind of way.
“You’re making a reasonable argument, I’ll give you that,” I said. “But that hardly affects the overall value of the book.”
And if she didn’t pinch her nose and sigh at my cluelessness. “That’s only one example. I have many more. And like I said, it’s entertaining-ish. That’s to say you ignore his crazy argument that the agricultural revolution was a blunder, the lives of hunter-gatherers were happier, and that humans are basically insignificant. He’s quite the cynic. I’ll bet he’s a blast at parties.”
We debated over more champagne, and I decided Yuval Harari owed me a thanks for defending the merits of his magnificent book. I could probably have put more fire into my arguments but I simply couldn’t bring myself to interrupt Isabel, who presented some very valid points.
“Tell you what,” she finally said. “I’ll read Sapiens again, and I’ll look at it more from your perspective.”
What I wouldn’t have given to hear her take on the book after that. My thumb wandered to the hollow in her throat, where I could feel her thrumming pulse. “And I’ll do the same. I’ll read it again with a different set of eyes.”
A happy smile blossomed across her lips, and my only resistance against demanding to see her again after tonight was that I knew she deserved more than I could ever offer her. There was a brief moment when I wondered whether this wasn’t a choice that she should make. If she wasn’t the one who should decide what challenges she could and could not accept in a relationship.
I chastised myself. As if I didn’t know a decision as enormous and complicated as this had to be made while sober, in broad daylight and not in the sex-soaked atmosphere where the dark North Atlantic was the only witness to our endless need.
And if I had to be honest with myself, Isabel would never settle for what I could give her, no matter the luxury that came with it as a consolation prize. I suppressed the desperation that swept through me with that realization.
Genuine curiosity finally prompted me to ask a question of my own. “What did you do with the handkerchief from last night?” I asked.