Free Coq au Vin by Charlotte Carter

contradict it, I didn’t examine it. I was too busy tearing out of my dress.
    I ran—ran—to my valise and tried to claw it open, looking for a condom. But he overpowered me, pinned me where I stood. I stopped struggling, fearing he would snap my windpipe with the strong hand at my neck. Fearing, period. I was afraid of him, but even more afraid of the brute strength of my own desire, which had me grunting like a half-wit as we fell to the rug with him tearing at my underpants.
    He was on me. Everywhere. Prying me open. Sucking. Thrusting inside me like a wild boar. Crying out. With my nail, I had accidentally opened a small gash over his left eyebrow. We were either going to come together or kill each other.
    There was unbearable grief in his throat when he finished. I dug my fingers into his hair, pulled his head up off my breast momentarily and looked into his eyes. His face was pasty and wet and he was sobbing. I covered his mouth with mine and we rolled over and lamely began to fuck again.
    Through his tears he spoke for the first time since we had entered the room. What he said was, “Belong to me.”
    â€œI do,” I said, not missing a beat.
    He made coffee with his back to me. Nothing on except his shorts. That wonderful barely there butt of his seemed to wink at me like a pornographic sign. A warming breath blew across my desire, heating me up again. Inside my head, I went to the next time I would lie gasping under him, barely able to lift myself to him; the next time I’d lick at the sweat in the hollow of his neck in syncopation with the stroking of his finger inside me. Greedy Nan, greedy girl. I pushed the image aside, busied myself with unpacking.
    He got the windows open, then poured coffee and brought mine over to me in a small yellow cup.
    â€œNan?”
    I looked up at him.
    â€œI have never done anything like that before,” he said. “Not even close.”
    â€œNeither have I,” I said, “and I’m a slut. By some standards, I mean.”
    The next forty-eight hours went by in a blur. I know I phoned Mom to tell her I’d—ahem—changed residences and to give her a no-progress progress report. I know Andre and I had two or three quick meals in the café across the street from the apartment. I know we made a couple of scouting excursions to low-down hotels and hostels to inquire about Vivian, and in desperation we did place an ad in the Trib . But mostly those two days, those hours, went by in a haze of the headiest, funkiest, sexiest sex I had ever taken part in.
    The caveman-type coupling gradually faded into long looks and longer kisses and driving each other wild with touches and tongues, and doing it in the bathtub, and feeding each other cheese with our fingers, and generally going through each other like two kids with a box of cookies.
    It was damn hard to keep my mind on Aunt Viv and her troubles. But on the third day the fog began to lift and I was able to focus a little better.
    Andre and I went back to the hotel on Cardinal Lemoine that afternoon, just on the chance that Vivian had come back to pay her bill and collect her things. No such luck on that score. But the madame, to whom we presented a staggering bouquet of flowers, was good enough to conduct another phone search for us: this time to determine whether Vivian was in jail under any of her various names.
    Andre and I were still unable to keep our hands off each other, but we had at least come back to earth sufficiently to be hungry for a homemade meal. On the way back to the apartment we stopped to acquire groceries and wine in the open-air market. I put the chicken in the small oven and set about peeling some potatoes. While I worked, he supplied a beautiful serenade—a medley of standards that sounded utterly fresh and even downright foreign on the violin.
    After dinner the concert resumed. I was eating his “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me” with a spoon, when