Free Eighty Days White by Vina Jackson Page B

together. My heart was his, but my soul was torn.
    The room was on the top floor of a small hotel situated between the left bank of the Seine and the Boulevard Saint Germain. Leonard told me later that the famous French singer and dissolute Serge Gainsbourg had lived on the same street just a hundred yards away. You could even see the gated courtyard of his building from our window if you stretched your neck.
    The train had been delayed under the Channel Tunnel for half an hour and it was already dark when I reached my destination.
    The elderly man on reception looked up from his newspaper and just nodded when I mentioned Leonard’s name.I had texted him when the train had drawn in to the Gare du Nord and he had given me his room number. I was just carrying an overnight bag with a single change of clothes and toiletries.
    Leonard was sitting on the bed reading a paperback, wearing his usual dark slacks and a T-shirt. His smile as he greeted me was full of warmth. He dropped the book as I walked in. The door had been left unlocked.
    ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle Lily,’ he said. ‘Bienvenue à Paris.’
    ‘Hey, Monsieur Leonard. I’m pleased to be here …’ I was about to try to say something witty, albeit not in French, but words failed me. There was a sense of serenity about him, in this small, badly lit room, as he looked up at me.
    ‘Hungry? Most places wont be serving dinner this late,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure we can find something, a snack maybe. There’s a stall that does nice crêpes near the Odeon Métro.’
    ‘No need; I had a sandwich on the train, and I have a few apples in my bag.’
    He rose and took me in his arms.
    It felt odd, being with him here. On other occasions we’d entered rooms together, knowing all too well that we were planning to fuck. All of our previous meetings had been overshadowed by an immediate lust. We had never begun with small talk. But arriving separately like this, there was a sense of anticlimax, of doubt also, as if the whole process we were going through was artificial. I dropped my bag to the ground.
    Leonard pulled me closer to him and kissed my cheek, with his tongue lingering lovingly across my minusculetattoo, as if tasting it. He kept his eyes open, and I forced myself to do the same, although my initial instinct was to close them and surrender to his amorous intentions.
    He undid the buttons on my light summer jacket and helped me slip my arms out of it as I held them up to ease his task. I could feel the fleeting touch of his breath caress my face, and tried to kiss him but he took a step back.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘First I want to undress you.’
    I nodded obediently. He had visibly been rehearsing this moment, established its ritual. And I was willing to oblige. My mind flitted back to thoughts of the club and the conversation I’d had with Richard. But this was different. Even when he told me what to do. We were equals, indulging in mutual pleasure that sometimes varied in its form.
    ‘Slowly,’ he added and slipped down to his knees and began unlacing the knee-high boots I was wearing, giving me a full-on view of the top of his head as he concentrated on the task.
    From my elevated perspective, his wild, untamed curls were a thick symphony of black and white threads spreading towards every direction of the compass. I felt, all of a sudden, like burying my hands in that luxurious garden of hair, but held back for fear of interrupting the solemn way in which he wished to unveil me, one lace, one garment, one lingering whisper at a time.
    Below the window of our hotel room, I could hear the muted sounds of passers-by in the street, words I could not understand in a foreign language, like the murmur of a distant chorus to my agonisingly slow unveiling by this tender man I still knew so little about.
    What did he see in me? I wondered. I knew I wasimperfect, a work still in progress, with so much of my life ahead of me, so many adventures to come. But I also knew