Read Online The Last Life by Claire Messud - Free Book Online

watched him, as I had done as a very small child, teetering in the steamy air. My eyes monitored the flesh at my father's nape, rolling and unrolling, damp curls appearing and disappearing, as he angled his chin for the razor. I was eager, and my eagerness felt wholly pure: for an hour, I was their golden girl. I asked about the dinner, and who would be there. I made jokes about the adults that I knew: the man with the funny shoes; the lech whose wandering hands, like heat-seeking missiles, found women's breasts when he moved in to kiss their cheeks. I imitated the owl-faced mining heiress who, slightly hard of hearing, parroted whatever was said to her to be sure she'd understood. I could sense my parents' surprise, and their pleasure. It seemed to me a sort of blessing, because I couldn't entirely believe that they didn't know of my plan, and in being so loving, forgive me for it.
    At the door, my father stroked my cheek (a tenderness for which, in the moment, I loved him) and my mother hugged me with particular force. "Be good," she said. "Have fun," said I.
    By the time I was myself ready to leave, Etienne was long asleep—I checked—and Magda had retreated to her apartment, from which emanated the anguished, overbright blare of some variety special. I stood in the kitchen for a while and listened to its rhythms. It would have been so easy not to go: the plunge into the seeping night seemed an enormous effort, a question mark.
    Thibaud made me wait. Even as I cowered in the shadow of a dwarf palm opposite the designated bench, wondering whether to go home, he sidled up, all darkness.
    "You came." I smiled in spite of myself.
    "Of course."
    "What do you want to do?"
    "To do?"
    "Well, we could hang out here, or walk down to the beach, or—I'd better not go into the hotel because—"
    "As if," he said. "Let's walk."
    He took my hand in his. It squirmed there, dry, for a second, then lay still, eliciting in me riotous palpitations. I could not speak. He did not speak. He led me, or we led each other (everything between us seemed suddenly to be understood), by the most circuitous route possible to the
chemins de la plage,
to their starting point beneath the swimming pool, where, in the pool's foundations, a porthole like a Cyclops' eye gave vista to the wavering, illuminated water. Perhaps fifty feet above us, the others sprawled and chattered; phrases and whole sentences drifted down—Marie-Jo's laugh, Thierry's voice, breaking occasionally in its insistent chirrup.
    From a bench cut into the rock we could map the coast and the sea ahead—the same view as above, interrupted at this lower level by the spikes and billows of the trees. The porthole, at our backs, watched with us.
    "We can eavesdrop," Thibaud said, gently scraping my palm with his fingernails. "Let's sit awhile. See if they wonder where I am. See if they guess." We giggled, titillated at the possibility of discovery, at our spying communion. The voices, the whooshing rise and fall of the sea, my blood, the noiseless fingerings between us: as ever, I listened.
    It was not long before he leaned into me and murmured "May I?" and kissed my neck. Then it was no longer a matter of the time, or of the others, or of my parents: too immediate and consuming for any of them, his tongue strayed into my ear and onto my eyelids and into my mouth (like a cat, I thought, cleaning her young). It was an intimacy novel and exciting to me; I was at once in the moment and apart from it, able to register the sensation of his saliva cooling and drying on my cheek, the slight roughness of his chin, the surprising coarseness of his curls to the touch, his lemony smell, anxious even as I matched his embraces with my own fervor that my kissing was too zealous, too passive, or too spitty.
    By the time we heard the others tramping to the poolside overhead we were lying flat on the bench, me beneath him, my T-shirt rucked up the better to admit his nimble fingers, and a