Except for the extravagant piece of jewelry, little was left of the girl she had been in the piercing parlor in Paris.
Elias slowly tilted his head, as if to say Very well, then.
“Black to move,” he said.
She obliged.
Later, when they returned to the bed, she imagined he was holding her hips more firmly and thrusting into her a little harder than usual. He wouldn’t suffer jealousy well, she understood, taking in his austere face and black eyes while he moved inside her; no, she couldn’t see him with the blasé attitude aristocrats so often displayed toward their spouses’ special friends. He was like her, intense in his emotions. She wouldn’t share him, either.
Afterward, he sat in the armchair by the open window with his legs stretched out and smoked a cigarette. He was in half profile, and the well-defined curve of his bare shoulder gleamed in the sunlight.
She reclined in the pillows, absently fingering the piercing.
The idea to have it done had been hatched in Bern. It had been winter and the river Aare wound through the city smooth and still like a frozen blue snake. The students’ demeanor toward Catriona had been just as frosty, thanks to the stupid chimpanzee incident. Alexandra had still liked her. The night Catriona had learned about nipple piercings, all the girls who shared her dorm except Alex had snuck out to a not-so-secret party in Georgina Rowbotham’s room. Catriona had lain next to Alexandra in Alexandra’s narrow bed, careful to keep her hip and shoulder from touching her friend’s, and they were reading an article about Paris in an American travel magazine. In great detail, a scandalized journalist was warning the reader about a parlor that offered intimate piercings.
“They rub a solution onto the breast that freezes it,” Alexandra said. “Then they clamp tongs around the tip. Aua.”
She held the magazine in one hand; the other rested on her nightgown over her small breast. Catriona kept her eyes on the page.
“Then the lady will plunge the piercer through the tubes,” Alex read out. “As it passes through the nipple, it is barely felt. The tongs are unscrewed and removed, leaving the piercer still sticking through the nipple. Oh, I’d give anything to go there and do it.”
Catriona blew out a breath.
Alexandra turned her head on the pillow to look at her, gray eyes gleaming with excitement in her kittenish face. In moments like these, it was obvious why the young princess had been sent down from her school in Prussia for bad conduct.
“I tell you a secret,” Alex said. “You want to know it?”
When alone, Alex spoke English to her instead of French—“to practice”—and her German accent colored every word.
“I do, yes.”
“I have two hundred Goldmark in a stocking under this mattress. I think we should take it, and go to Paris, and have our nipples pierced in this parlor.” She tapped her finger on the address at the bottom of the page.
That’s silly, they won’t let us leave the school grounds for even a minute, Catriona thought, but she was learning social graces. “That would be fun,” she said. “Ha ha.”
“I shall have a ring in each,” Alexandra decided. “Then I could connect them with a chain.” She traced a path with her fingertip from one breast to the other. The diaphanous nightgown revealed an eyeful, and the thought of a needle maiming the pretty, rosy tips made Catriona want to thrust a protective hand over them. She looked back at the magazine page, her tongue tied, her fingers curled. She had understood the meaning of her feelings for a while now, but after Charlie, she’d rather not have them; besides, she was uncertain what to do. It was ill-advised to make assumptions about a girl, whether she was one of those, and it was plain foolish to risk losing her only friend in a hostile environment.
Alexandra took in her red face.
“I shocked you,” she said. “How innocent you are.”
She sat up and her vanilla-scented hair brushed over Catriona’s face.
“Come,” she said. “I’ll make you a braid for bed.”
Her fingers delved in, and the scrape of her nails felt like fire on Catriona’s oversensitive scalp. She shot off the mattress. “No, thank you.”
“Wie du willst,” Alexandra said with a shrug. As you wish.
In the end, Catriona had gone to the parlor on her own, a quick stop on her hasty flight back to Scotland with a treacherous Alexandra’s Goldmark in her satchel. She remembered the room vividly: the gleam of the clean-scrubbed tiled floor, the pungent smell of benzoline and chloride. The “hold her nice and still” from the woman with the piercer to the pretty blond assistant who had put her arm around Catriona’s shoulders. It hadn’t hurt; all her sensitive parts had been frozen beyond the point of feeling. As usual, the pain had come later. “Bathe it in camphor water whenever it is sore,” the blonde had advised, her arm still around Catriona, her voice soft as though she truly cared. Cool-blooded like a reptile then, Catriona had read the girl’s eyes and perceived the light press of her body against hers. “Do you know a café nearby?” she had asked, with a knowing emphasis on café. “Ah, oui. Venez avec moi! Je finis à cinq heures.” I finish at five. She went to the women-only café at five, because all the kisses she had saved for Alexandra had wanted to go somewhere, and she had been quite done with placing romantic feelings on a pedestal. No more slinking around like a gloomy young Werther, feeling too much while never actually doing a thing.
“You went far away, in your head,” Elias said. He had finished his cigarette and was sprawled in the chair, watching her.
“Just to Paris,” she said.
His eyes lit with interest. “Paris.”
“It’s been years since I went. The government was still in Versailles.”
“Let us go there,” he said idly. “Perhaps to Provence. I would like to enjoy you in a sunnier place.”
The breeze blew through the window, billowing the curtains and ruffling his curls. She watched, transfixed. Everything that was normally unremarkable, love transmuted into something interesting or meaningful. The way his hair moved, how his eyes expressed a range of emotions with just a flick of his lashes, how his laugh began in the right corner of his mouth. What came first: The love that made one person out of millions look perfectly appealing, or a perfectly appealing appearance, which brought on the love? An emotion moved through her, pressing outward; it felt as though her whole body wanted to break into tears for some relief. Had she learned nothing about not feeling too much? How dreamlike the past and life outside this house now seemed to her, and how starkly real she felt in Elias’s presence, when it should have been the other way around.
She left the bed, slipped on her robe, and began a circle through the chamber, absently touching the spines of the books on the shelves, the trinkets on the mantelshelf.
“Tell me about Beirut, not France,” she said.
He gave an amused huff. “Beirut. Where to begin.”