Bolero

Noah

The last movie of the night, Bolero, ends with a wedding. Bo Derek spends close to two hours crossing Morocco and Spain in search of the right man to take her virginity, and she strips whenever the plot allows. Once she has found him and worn him out, she marries him in a church. Noah counts the wedding as the best joke in the film. All that hunting for a lover, and she ends up with a husband.

The others have gone up to bed one couple at a time during the last half hour, and while the credits roll, Kat and Rosa go too. Rosa walks behind Kat with both arms around her waist and her mouth against Kat’s neck. At the bottom step Kat turns in her arms and kisses her, long and slow, as if the room were empty. On the sofa above Noah, Tess groans and hides her face in the cushion. Noah is suddenly aware that the two of them are the only ones left in the house with nobody to take upstairs. Kat comes up for air and looks at them over Rosa’s shoulder.

“Night, you two. Giles at ten, if it clears.”

Noah glances past her at the windows. A flash of lightning lights up the whole cove for a second, the rain slanting white over the black water and the pale limestone bluff on the far side, and the thunder follows before he can count. “It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

Kat has checked the weather radar on her phone between the movies and glared at the storm on the screen, as if that would move it on. Giles Cove is ten minutes down the road, forty feet of limestone cliff over Lake Travis. Kat and Noah are out there most weekends, and Tess joins them every few weeks. They climb without ropes and drop into the water when their arms give out. Kat’s nose is still peeling from the last weekend there.

“Optimist.” Tess keeps her face in the sofa cushion.

Rosa tugs Kat up the first step by the hand. “Night, Noah. Night, Tess.”

Their footsteps climb the stairs, a door closes, and the house falls quiet under the rain.

In the quiet Noah feels how much he has had to drink. He had margaritas with the pizzas and Baileys all through Bolero, and now a sweet, loose warmth spreads through his chest. The room has gone a little slow at the edges. Being careful matters less than it did at dinner, and words slip out more easily than they would sober.

Diego’s parents lent him their lake house for the weekend to celebrate his first real job. The plan for Saturday is to swim in the lake and climb the cliffs at Giles. Tonight belongs to the bad-movie night they started at their old student co-op in West Campus, back when they all shared one kitchen. They opened with Batman & Robin, George Clooney in a rubber bat suit with nipples on it and Arnold Schwarzenegger making ice puns, then made pizzas, then put on Bolero. Downstairs the house is one long room, the kitchen at one end, a stone fireplace at the other, and a wall of windows facing the water. Rain drums on the metal roof. The kitchen island holds the wreck of the evening, three pizza pans crusted with burned cheese, a margarita pitcher with an inch of melted ice in the bottom, and the bottles Kat and Rosa carried in from their car, enough for twice as many people. The room smells of oregano and cut limes. Only the TV and one lamp are on. At the next flash the lamp flickers and dims. Noah waits for the power to go out, but the bulb steadies.

He sits on the rug with his back against the sofa, where he has been since the pizzas came out of the oven. Tess lies stretched out along the cream-colored sofa above him, one socked foot against the cushion by his shoulder. She kicked off her sneakers before the first movie, and her denim shorts and thin gray T-shirt have gone rumpled on the cushions. Her hair spills over the armrest, long and wavy, dark blond going lighter at the ends. The margaritas have brought color to her cheeks, under the freckles. He has known her since her first week at the co-op and long ago stopped noticing the small silver ring in her septum. Tonight he notices it again.

Tess has drunk about as much as he has. Her laugh has bubbled up quicker and easier through the last hour.

The names scroll up the screen, and a giggle escapes her.

“Oh my god. The honey scene.”

She covers her face with both hands, and her shoulders shake. “I’m sorry. I know we’ve been making fun of this movie for two hours, but that…” She peeks at him between her fingers. “He’s licking honey off a naked woman, and he falls asleep. Who does that?”

“A man who smoked too much of his own hookah.”

She drops her hands and grins down at him from the sofa. “And the worst part is…” She presses her lips together. “No. Okay. It was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.” She glances back at the screen, and her eyes linger there a moment longer than the credits deserve. “But it was also kind of hot, right?”

Noah takes his time with the question. “The acting is horrible. But yes, her body is beautiful.” He twists around so that he can see Tess’s face. “And you know what’s hot? Her stomach, when he licks her. How it jumps. You can’t act that. That’s real.”

He hesitates a second before he says the rest. “Maybe that’s why the acting is so bad. She was turned on for real and trying not to show it.”

Tess lets out a breathless laugh and covers her mouth with her fingertips. “Oh my god, don’t analyze it. Now I’ll picture her stomach every time I put honey in my tea.”

She rolls onto her side and props her head on one hand, and the TV throws its light across her face. “Are we seriously sitting here deciding whether Bo Derek was really turned on?” She pokes his shoulder with her toe. “But okay. Ridiculous or not, you couldn’t look away either, could you?”

“I did look away. Once.” He waits until her eyes meet his. “To watch you. You looked hypnotized. You were biting your lower lip.”

Tess freezes, and for a second he does not think she is breathing. The color floods her cheeks, deep and sudden, and she sits up so fast that a throw pillow slides off the sofa onto the rug. She pulls one leg up under her.

“You were watching me?” Her voice is half laugh, half gasp.

He does not deny it.

“I wasn’t trying to look…” She tucks her hair behind her ear, and it falls straight forward again. “Hypnotized. I swear I was making fun of it in my head. I had a whole voiceover going.” She swallows, and her voice drops. “Okay. It did something to me. The music, the heat, all that skin. It was too much.”

She leans forward with her elbows on her knees and fixes her eyes on him. “And if you were watching me instead of the movie, you weren’t exactly studying the acting either.”

He cannot argue with that, so he doesn’t try. “Let’s watch the honey scene again. What do you think?”

Tess glances at the dark stairs. After a moment she reaches past him for the remote on the coffee table and drops it into his lap. “You’re the one with the theory.”

The remote belongs to a DVD player older than either of them. Noah skips back chapter by chapter, past the bullfighter and the sheik’s little airplane, to the camp in the dunes. Bo Derek lies naked, and the sheik leans over her with the honey.

“Stop. Right there.”

He pauses it with a thread of honey hanging in the air above her skin. Tess leans forward and squints at the screen.

“Look at her face.” Tess points, then pulls her hand back into her lap. “She knows exactly what’s coming, and she’s trying so hard to look like she doesn’t care. Your theory.”

She glances sideways at him and away again. “Kind of dangerous, isn’t it? When something feels so good you stop pretending.”

Noah can think of an answer or two, and keeps them to himself.

He lets the scene run until the sheik’s mouth climbs Bo Derek’s ribs and stops short of her breasts, and pauses it again. On the screen her whole body is caught mid-shiver.

“Look at her. She’s shaking.” He keeps his voice low. “I bet she would have loved it if he had kissed her nipples. For real, I mean. Don’t you think?”

Tess makes a short, startled sound, and her fingers tighten on the cushion. “Forget ‘bet.’ She wanted it.” Her voice has gone lower and warmer. “Five minutes without a line of dialogue, just skin and heat and…” She waves a hand at the frozen screen. “It isn’t subtle. It isn’t supposed to be.”

She draws one knee up to her chest, and her eyes flick between the frozen screen and his face. “Though if the two of us started making out covered in honey and chocolate syrup, I doubt anybody would call it art.”

“Is this a challenge?” Noah murmurs.

A slow, crooked smile pulls at her mouth. “A challenge? Are you asking if I’m daring you?”

He searches her eyes and waits for her to go on. Lightning flickers over the lake, and the thunder lags behind it now, farther off. Tess holds his look a long moment. Without another word she faces the screen again.

Noah presses play, finds the slow-motion button, and the scene runs on at half speed. The DVD player cuts the sound in slow motion, and all that is left is the rain on the roof. On the screen the sheik’s mouth creeps across Bo Derek’s honeyed belly, and under it her stomach jumps and quivers, each small spasm stretched out long enough to watch it start and end.

Tess watches with her lips parted.

“Okay. That’s cheating.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen.

Noah is hard, and his loose drawstring pants hide very little. He imagines his mouth on Tess’s stomach and wonders whether it would jump like that.

He pushes himself up off the rug, scoops his glass of Baileys off the coffee table, and drops onto the sofa beside her, close enough that his knee touches hers. He takes a sip and holds the glass out to her, and leans in until his mouth is at her ear.

“Take a sip. Imagine it’s honey. Look at the screen.”

She stiffens when his breath touches her ear. She takes the glass without looking at him and sips from it. Her eyes close for a second and open on the screen, where the sheik is still licking his way across the honey at half speed.

She laughs, embarrassed, and it comes out unsteady. “Oh my god.” She hands the glass back to him carefully. “That was a very unfair thing to do.”

She picks the throw pillow up off the rug and hugs it in her lap. She does not move away from him. She tilts her head, and her hair slides back over her shoulder and bares the side of her neck. He cannot tell whether she means him to see it.

He tries for a casual tone. “Does it arouse you?” It comes out lower than casual.

Tess’s arms tighten around the pillow. For a long moment she keeps quiet, and he watches her chest rise and fall too fast under the thin T-shirt.

“Yes.” He barely hears it. “Yes, it does.”

She keeps her eyes on the screen, but the color deepens in her cheeks. “I know it shouldn’t. It’s so cheesy. But he takes his time with every inch of her.” At last she turns to look at him, and her brown eyes are dark in the light from the TV. Her mouth twists into a small, embarrassed smile. “Sorry. That sounds ridiculous.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He looks her over, her hot cheeks, her neck, the thin gray cotton over her breasts, and lower, before he turns back to the screen. “Me too.”

From the corner of his eye he catches her glance drop to his lap and stay there. When she looks up, he is already looking at her.

He smiles at her. “Unfair. You can just look. I have to ask.” He lets that sit a second. “It’s good to know, though. That you are too.”

“I guess I’m not as subtle as I thought.” She lifts her chin at him. “In my defense, you’re not exactly hiding it.”

She breathes in and out a few times, slow and deep, like before a jump at Giles, and straightens up.

“Did you…” She stops. “Sorry. You started with the intimate questions, so now it’s my turn, and I really want to know. Did you ever do anything like that? With honey? Or anything else you can eat, on somebody?”

He raises his eyebrows and turns his head toward her, and nods slowly. “Do you want the whole story?”

“Yeah. I’d like to hear it.” She settles back against the armrest and tucks her feet under her, facing him. “Don’t leave out any details. I won’t judge, I promise. I’m too busy being jealous of whoever she was.”

The word stops him. He hears his own voice drop. “Jealous?”

Tess laughs, too quickly, and waves a hand. “Oh! No, I mean in general. Hypothetically. It sounds fun, that’s all.”

“Okay.” He leaves the word where she dropped it, because he does not know what else to do with it.

At half speed the sheik has made it all the way to falling asleep. Noah presses pause.

“It was syrup. Years ago. In a shower that was too small for two people, with no room to sit, never mind lie down.” He shrugs. “We covered each other in it anyway. And I licked it off her.”

He remembers more than he tells her, the cold tiles at his back, the smell of maple rising in the steam, the syrup running thin under the hot water and pooling brown around the drain.

“All of it.” He watches Tess’s face while he goes on. “Her neck. Her breasts. Her stomach.”

Tess’s eyes widen a little with every word, and she shifts on the cushion.

“Lower, where it was stickiest.” He lets that sit. “And then lower still, where there wasn’t any syrup left.”

Tess catches her lower lip between her teeth, and a small gasp gets past it anyway. She lets out a long, shaky breath and looks away for a second, and when she looks back, her eyes are dark.

“That sounds…” she breathes. “Incredible.” She draws her knees up and hugs the pillow against them, and the thin shirt pulls tight across her breasts. “Did she like it?”

“She did.”

“Because honestly, the thought of somebody’s tongue all over me like that…” She doesn’t finish. A shiver runs through her, and goosebumps rise along her bare forearms.

“You don’t know? You never felt anything like that?”

He thinks of the men he has seen her with. The one from sophomore year checked his phone through most of her birthday dinner at the Thai place on Guadalupe Street.

Tess blinks at the question. “No. Not like that.” She runs a fingertip along the seam of the pillow and keeps her eyes on it. “The guys I’ve been with cared more about their own fun than mine. It was always a rush. Over before I really got going.” She forces a laugh. “Just my luck. I get the selfish ones, and you get syrup in the shower.”

Her voice is wistful under the joke. She glances up at him and keeps looking, waiting, and he cannot tell what for.

Outside, the thunder has moved off over the hills, and the rain has softened to a steady hush on the roof. Noah sets his glass on the coffee table beside the Baileys bottle.

“Would you like to know how it feels? Lips and a tongue over your whole body. Knowing you can take all the time in the world, and all of it is for you.”

Tess’s lips part, and for a long moment she only looks at him. “Are you offering?”

“Yes. I don’t have any honey on me, though. I’d have to improvise.” The corner of her mouth twitches, and he goes on, quieter. “No worries, no pressure, no expectations after. It’s all about your pleasure. Don’t think about me. This is only for you.” He holds her eyes. “Deal?”

She sits very still. Her fingers curl into the edge of the cushion, and her breath comes shallow. She leans forward for his glass and drinks the last of the Baileys in one long swallow, her eyes on him over the rim. The glass clinks against the bottle when she sets it down, and she licks the sweetness off her lower lip.

“Deal,” she whispers.

She tries the words again, carefully, as if they might break. “Just my pleasure. No pressure. No expectations.” A small, unsteady smile. “Just me?”

“Just you.”

She nods once and leans back into the cushions to wait for him. He wants her badly. He is sure he means the deal.

He looks from the Baileys bottle to the pale cushions under her. “Don’t go anywhere.”

He gets up and pads to the kitchen for a dish towel.