Read Online Hold Back the Night by Abra Taylor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Abra Taylor
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opinion that love, true love, involved quite a lot of heartbreak and pain. And if this was not love, what was it? Racked with the agonies of unrequited adolescent desire, with no past experience to guide her and no close friends to consult, she imagined it must be love.
A frank conversation with Berenice, during a weekend visit home, provided a lot of specific information about kissing. Berenice's gently amused smile held no censure. Domini decided she had been too hasty with her teeth and resolved, as a cure for her preoccupation with Sander, to let the next importunate student have his way. But there was no next. Domini's teeth had inflicted a good deal of damage; the story had spread like wildfire. No one tried to kiss her again.
And so she suffered. Her flesh was on fire, but she also had her pride. Never in her life had she been rejected, and Sander's rejection was a revelation to her, just as the physical impact of him had been a revelation. She made up her mind that she would never speak to him again in her life, not if he went down on bended knee and begged, a vision that occupied many of her young erotic dreams. Oh, if only he would!
Chapter 3
The next few weeks made Domini a little wiser about the world, and she began to understand that one could not be as frank and forward in Paris as her father had taught her to be. Forthrightness might be fine in the environment where she had been raised, but in this setting it only raised brows and set tongues to buzzing. She became somewhat more guarded in her ways, but even so there were times when some innocent remark would set a roomful of fellow students to roaring while Domini looked around her in bewilderment. At such times her natural resilience stood her in good stead.
Gradually she came to realize that her upbringing had been unique, not merely because her father was a great and famous artist but because he was a thoroughly unconventional man. She had been brought up as a child of nature because Papa was a child of nature; for all his genius, a man as rustic and unsophisticated as the great crude stone he kept in his courtyard.
During those weeks she filled several portfolios with charcoal sketches, still life studies, vivid watercolours. She painted a few canvases in oils and acrylics and stored them carefully on their stretchers, sure they would someday be important. Great artists always suffered with some great love, and she was suffering, wasn't she?
She also made friends, attended classes, and discovered Paris ... not just the Paris her father had shown her, the city of the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, of the Palais-Royal and Notre Dame, of the Place de l'Opera and Napoleon's Tomb. New smells and sounds and sights had always intrigued her, and so alone or with her new friends she explored Montmartre, stood on worn cobblestones on impoverished streets where Piaf had once starved and sung, found out-of-the way parks, shared cheese and wine in humble bistros, spent a whole day riding the m£tro, splashed her fingers in quaint fountains unlisted in any guidebook, discovered what it was to see a movie. She was enthralled and sometimes even forgot Sander.
It was at the Eiffel Tower, on a chilly morning in late November, that she spoke to him again. With no classes that particular morning, as other students in the pension had, she had gone on a sketching trip alone, but she had become dissatisfied with the angle from which she was rendering the lacework of the famous metal structure. She left the Champ-de-Mars and paid her admission to the tower itself, thinking to look over the surrounding streets from on high and choose a new vantage point for her work.
She was moving towards the rail on the top level when she happened to see him at some distance, brooding over the view. His eyes flicked in her direction, caught by the bright beacon of her hair. He swerved away from the rail at once, his goal the elevator that was about to make the long descent, but its
A frank conversation with Berenice, during a weekend visit home, provided a lot of specific information about kissing. Berenice's gently amused smile held no censure. Domini decided she had been too hasty with her teeth and resolved, as a cure for her preoccupation with Sander, to let the next importunate student have his way. But there was no next. Domini's teeth had inflicted a good deal of damage; the story had spread like wildfire. No one tried to kiss her again.
And so she suffered. Her flesh was on fire, but she also had her pride. Never in her life had she been rejected, and Sander's rejection was a revelation to her, just as the physical impact of him had been a revelation. She made up her mind that she would never speak to him again in her life, not if he went down on bended knee and begged, a vision that occupied many of her young erotic dreams. Oh, if only he would!
Chapter 3
The next few weeks made Domini a little wiser about the world, and she began to understand that one could not be as frank and forward in Paris as her father had taught her to be. Forthrightness might be fine in the environment where she had been raised, but in this setting it only raised brows and set tongues to buzzing. She became somewhat more guarded in her ways, but even so there were times when some innocent remark would set a roomful of fellow students to roaring while Domini looked around her in bewilderment. At such times her natural resilience stood her in good stead.
Gradually she came to realize that her upbringing had been unique, not merely because her father was a great and famous artist but because he was a thoroughly unconventional man. She had been brought up as a child of nature because Papa was a child of nature; for all his genius, a man as rustic and unsophisticated as the great crude stone he kept in his courtyard.
During those weeks she filled several portfolios with charcoal sketches, still life studies, vivid watercolours. She painted a few canvases in oils and acrylics and stored them carefully on their stretchers, sure they would someday be important. Great artists always suffered with some great love, and she was suffering, wasn't she?
She also made friends, attended classes, and discovered Paris ... not just the Paris her father had shown her, the city of the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, of the Palais-Royal and Notre Dame, of the Place de l'Opera and Napoleon's Tomb. New smells and sounds and sights had always intrigued her, and so alone or with her new friends she explored Montmartre, stood on worn cobblestones on impoverished streets where Piaf had once starved and sung, found out-of-the way parks, shared cheese and wine in humble bistros, spent a whole day riding the m£tro, splashed her fingers in quaint fountains unlisted in any guidebook, discovered what it was to see a movie. She was enthralled and sometimes even forgot Sander.
It was at the Eiffel Tower, on a chilly morning in late November, that she spoke to him again. With no classes that particular morning, as other students in the pension had, she had gone on a sketching trip alone, but she had become dissatisfied with the angle from which she was rendering the lacework of the famous metal structure. She left the Champ-de-Mars and paid her admission to the tower itself, thinking to look over the surrounding streets from on high and choose a new vantage point for her work.
She was moving towards the rail on the top level when she happened to see him at some distance, brooding over the view. His eyes flicked in her direction, caught by the bright beacon of her hair. He swerved away from the rail at once, his goal the elevator that was about to make the long descent, but its
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