Read Online The Heat of Betrayal by Douglas Kennedy - Free Book Online Page B

threaded his hand in mine. We both stared up at the emerging daylight.
    â€˜Do you know what this time of day is called?’
    â€˜You mean, besides “dawn”?’
    â€˜Yes, besides “dawn” or “the break of day”.’
    â€˜The last one’s poetic.’
    â€˜So is “the blue hour”.’
    There was a pause while I let the phrase resonate for a moment or so. Then I tried it out myself:
    â€˜The blue hour.’
    â€˜It’s rather lovely, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Indeed. Neither darkness nor light.’
    â€˜The hour when nothing is as it seems – when we are caught between the perceived and the imagined.’
    â€˜Clarity and blur?’
    â€˜The pellucid and the obscure? Simplicity masking enigma?’
    â€˜Nice image,’ I said.
    He leaned over again and kissed me deeply. And said:
    â€˜
J’ai envie de toi
.’
    And I wanted him so much too. Especially right now after all that restorative sleep. After that business in the alley. With the blue hour enveloping us.
    He lifted me right out of my chair, his hands under my T-shirt. I pulled him towards me, feeling his hardness against me. Then he was steering us towards the bed. Some time later, as I bit into his shoulder, I came again and again. And then he let out a cry and shot into me.
    We lay there, arms around each other, bewildered and, yes, happy.
    â€˜Our adventure begins now,’ I said.
    â€˜In the blue hour.’
    But in the world beyond our bedroom window, emerging sunlight had already eradicated the dawn.
    â€˜The blue hour has passed,’ I said.
    â€˜Until sunset this evening.’
    â€˜The beginning of a day is always more mysterious than the onset of night.’
    â€˜Because you don’t know what lies ahead?’
    â€˜At sunset you are more than halfway through the day’s narrative,’ I said. ‘At dawn you have no idea what will transpire.’
    â€˜Which is perhaps why the blue is always bluer at dawn. And why a sunset is always more wistful. The entry into night, the sense of another day of life spinning towards its end.’
    Paul leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
    â€˜As the Irish would say: “There’s a pair of us in it.”
    â€˜How do you know that expression?’
    â€˜An Irish friend told it to me.’
    â€˜What Irish friend?’
    â€˜Someone long ago.’
    â€˜A woman?’
    â€˜Perhaps.’
    â€˜Perhaps? You mean, you’re not certain if a certain Irish woman told you that?’
    â€˜OK, since you asked, her name was Siobhán Parsons. She was a professor of art at University College Dublin and not a bad painter. At the university in Buffalo for a year. Unmarried. As mad as a lamp, to use another of her favourite expressions. It lasted between us maybe three months. It was all around twelve years ago, when neither you nor I were aware of each other’s existence.’
    Paul kept so much about his life before me in a room marked ‘Off Limits’. And there was a part of me that was jealous about his past. Jealous about the fact that there were women who had known him intimately before me. No man had ever pleasured me the way he had, so I didn’t like to think there were others who’d felt what I’d felt when he was inside me. Yet thinking all this here, now, I couldn’t help but feel ridiculous.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
As stupid as wandering off down that murky alleyway.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
    â€˜Don’t be sorry. Just try to be happy.’
    â€˜I am happy.’
    â€˜That’s good to hear,’ he said, kissing me.
    â€˜Hungry?’ I asked.
    â€˜Famished.’
    â€˜Me too.’
    â€˜There’s no way I’m going downstairs dressed like this.’
    â€˜But the outside world beckons. And do you really think anyone will care that you’ve gone native?’
    â€˜I’ll care.’
    â€˜I