He turned from the blazing stove, half expecting her to have disappeared in the time he’d spent absorbed in that housekeeping. But she was still there, pulling pins from her dark hair. Its lavish weight spilled over his hands when he held her. He put aside further practical concerns: should they lie on their coats; climb into one of the rowboats suspended from brackets on the walls? He braided his hands under her backside and lifted her off the floor, carrying her to a table pushed against the wall behind the stove. He perched her on its edge. There was almost no light here. He kissed her mouth and neck, then opened her coat and peeled up her dress and slip, exposing hose and garters. He kicked off his trousers and flattened himself along her bare belly, logs cracking in the stove behind them.
“Do you want this?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, at which the dumb, blind part of his brain lunged forward like a hound at a foxhunt. He peeled aside her panties and eased himself inside her, hearing his own relieved gasp as if from across the room. Moments later, he shuddered as if he’d been shot, knees buckling as he mashed her to him and spent himself. His own ragged breathing filled the room. When he could walk, he tossed their coats in front of the stove, where the heat had begun to gather, and helped her out of her dress and long gloves. He unhooked her brassiere and garter belt and unrolled her stockings slowly. She looked very young in the firelight. She lay back against the coats and shut her eyes, and now it could really begin, without a word. He moved his mouth over her body until she seemed not to breathe. When he parted her legs, she tasted like the sea, which he heard even now, a beat of waves just beyond the walls. She climaxed like someone in a seizure, and he was inside her again before she’d finished.
They slept fitfully, Dexter rising now and then to add wood to the stove. At some dark hour she woke him with her hands, touching him in the faint reddish light with such potency that he thought she must be on both sides of his skin, inhabiting him—how else could she know what he felt at each move she made? Her eyes were closed and he shut his own, drifting in a sweet agony that seemed to last hours. When at last she allowed him to finish, he left himself entirely, returning to his senses only to fall into laughter: in forty-one years of life, it had never been better than that. And all the while, another part of him was measuring the approach of dawn, eager to be done before it came. How much more would it take? She’d climbed on top of him, quivering like a bowstring for his touch, and he felt himself grow hard again. There would be no end, he thought—nothing but this, ever again. But he knew better than to believe it.
*
“Anna.”
The whisper pierced layers of filmy sleep and dropped sharply into her ear. She opened her eyes. Dull light leaked through the shuttered windows. The stove contained only embers. She was cold and needed to pee. He’d covered them with a coarse blanket, and she felt his bare flesh touching hers underneath it. “Anna,” he whispered, close to her ear. “I need to take you home.”
She held very still, her eyes barely open. She felt afraid to move. A memory of Nell’s date came to her from the night before: his unnatural stillness. Now she felt it, too: inertia to stave off disaster.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine.” But she was not. The dawn, which normally brought relief from the misery of her nights, now threatened a catastrophic exposure. Her heart beat spasmodically, and her ears rang.
He rose and crossed the room, the first naked man she had ever seen: a towering stranger with coils of dark hair that seemed to pour from his chest down his torso and pool around an assemblage of private parts that brought to mind a pair of boots dangling by their laces from a lamppost. Anna had never experienced the aftermath of passion, arriving in secret to the basement hideout and sneaking away separately from Leon. There had been no gathering of clothing in daylight, no retrieval of a gun, which hung in its holster from the back of a chair. The depravity of what had transpired between herself and this gangster appalled her. Had she been drunk? Out of her mind? She tried to reason away panic: her mother would never know; it was her day off from the Naval Yard—she wasn’t truant or even tardy. But how would she get back inside her building in last night’s clothes without giving herself away? She needed to get out of here now, before it was fully light; to pee, bathe, and fall asleep in her own bed before the new day properly began. She needed right now to be the last phase of a night already on its way to being erased.
She waited until he had his trousers on before rising unsteadily to her feet. With her back turned, she pulled on her panties, fastened her brassiere, and shimmied into her slip. She was still wearing her jewelry. One of her nylon stockings had caught on the stove and shriveled in the heat. She left her legs bare and stepped into her dress, signaling with her retreating posture that she wanted no assistance. Not that he was offering any. He seemed as distracted as she, squinting at the label on an empty liquor bottle. He picked up two cigarette butts from the floor, examined them, and let them drop. Anna buttoned her beaded cloak to the neck and pulled on her hat. Her bare legs were covered in gooseflesh.
She waited by the door while he checked his pockets. Now that they were two people in coats and hats, she felt calmer. When he joined her at the door, she smiled up at him, relieved. He held her chin in his fingers and gave her a perfunctory kiss—a kiss goodbye—before unbolting the door. Then he kissed her again, more deeply, and Anna felt a window fall open inside her despite everything—a wish to start again, even with sunrise approaching. The hunger he’d wakened in her banished every scruple—she would think about them later. And reentering the dream made her shame of minutes ago melt away.
He shot the bolt, took off his hat, and began to unbutton her coat. Anna felt how easily this could go on. On and on. How she wanted it to!
“We’ve met before,” she said, feeling the impact of these words only as they wandered from her mouth. “You don’t remember, I think.”
“In the club?” he murmured.
“No. Your house.”
She had his attention. His hands paused on her buttons. And even as Anna longed for him to continue, she knew she’d stopped it.
“My house.”
“Years ago. I was a little girl.”
He shook his head slowly, eyes on hers. “How is that possible?”
“I came with my father,” she said. “Edward Kerrigan. I think he might have worked for you.”
The name filled the room as if she’d sung it out. Or as if someone else had. For hearing it—her father’s name—seemed to vault Anna instantly outside her debauched circumstances. Her father was Eddie Kerrigan. Everything that had happened between her and Dexter Styles seemed now to have been leading her to this revelation.
He’d no visible reaction to the name, as if he hadn’t heard or didn’t recognize it. He turned a gold ring on his finger, straightened the lapels of his coat. But Anna recognized in his stillness the very dread and caution she’d felt herself, on first awakening. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked softly.
“I couldn’t find a way.”
“You said your name was Feeney.” He seemed less accusing than confused, as if patting his pockets for something he’d missed.
“He disappeared,” Anna said. “Five and a half years ago.”