“When you laugh like that, it’s hard to keep going,” Bash says, and he pushes harder.
“Oh—no—it’s”—she needs a breath or two for each syllable—“it’s—per—fect. Don’t. Stop.”
“I never do.”
He doesn’t. Bash at fifty-three is as priapic as a teenager, always ready, inexhaustible. Well, always ready for Lu, whom he sees once or twice a month in this sterile “corporate” apartment in Bethesda. She’s not sure he’s always ready for his wife of seven years, a hard number who lives in Capitol Hill in what Lu assumes is a drop-dead gorgeous town house. She has never been invited there. AJ, who has, dismissed it as “showy,” which told her nothing. But is it in good taste? she had yearned to ask her brother. Or just a little tacky? She knows the wife is drop-dead gorgeous and not the least bit tacky. Bash brought her to Gabe’s funeral, although his flirtation with Lu had begun a few months earlier. It was probably only the timing of Gabe’s death that kept Lu from becoming an adulteress; she was well on her way to sleeping with Bash when Gabe died. One might think that a husband’s sudden death would shake a woman up, force her to wonder if the universe was sending her a message about the affair she was considering in her head.
One would be wrong. Lu tried to resist Bash, but he had picked up a scent on Lu and pursued her relentlessly. He knew before she did that she was a woman who would revel in a truly secret affair, one that was all about sex, sex that pushed past some boundaries. Lu had been a late bloomer—a virgin until college, married in her twenties to her third-ever real boyfriend. In blue jeans and T-shirt, hair under a baseball cap, she could still pass for a boy from the back. Which explained why she didn’t wear such things. It had been a bizarre kind of relief when the flirtation—e-mails, phone calls, odd little gifts left anonymously at her office—finally ended and they settled into a straight sex thing. The flirtation had been the real betrayal of Gabe. The sex—that’s merely the betrayal of Lucinda, Bash’s wife. But that’s not Lu’s problem. Is it?
Spent, she makes her way to the bathroom on wobbly legs. She has a large bruise on her buttocks, but who will see it there? She doesn’t wash, not yet. He will probably want to go again, given how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, how hard it is to find time since the election. She has let her secretary infer that she’s in therapy in D.C., which would require about three hours with travel time. She has confided something similar to Andi, although indicating she was seeing someone for ob-gyn issues of a vague-but-serious nature. Andi obligingly spread the gossip through the office, then blamed it on Della, who would never betray Lu that way. Thank God she never told Andi the real story, back when they were deputies together. Even then, before Lu had decided to own her real ambition, she understood that this must be a locked room inside her life, a place to which no one can ever be admitted. It scared her at first, the things she wanted to do with Bash, the things she let him do to her. But it thrills her more.
They do not consider what they do to have a name. Not quite an affair, yet more than sex, with a singular appetite for each other, although Lu assumes Bash sees other women. They are rough, but not particularly kinky, sexual soul mates who think it should be sweaty and athletic. Her other lovers, all five of them, were so damn careful with Lu, probably because of her size. Occasionally, she and Bash have sweet, tame sex, although that’s usually when one of them is a little under the weather. Last time, way back in November, a week before the general election, Bash had lain beneath her and said, “Fuck this cold right out of me, State’s Attorney Brant.” And she did.
She had not been drawn to Bash when he was part of her brother’s group. She’d had a crush on Noel, then Davey, never Bash. He was a bigger, brawnier version of her, which didn’t appeal at all. And she was a child, eight years his junior, precocious of mind, but not body, so he had certainly never noticed her. Their chance meeting in a Whole Foods six years ago had not seemed particularly portentous at the time, not to her. Bash says it was lust at first sight for him.
“Lu?” asked the man in the expensive cashmere coat, who a few minutes before had been staring morosely at the sausages and blocking her access to the good bacon.
She needed a beat to place him. “Bash. I’m sorry, you probably don’t go by that nickname anymore. AJ tells me you’re a lobbyist.”
“Is that what I am? Today I am a henpecked husband, trying to find sausages for my wife, who says they can’t have so much as a gram of sugar. But I can’t find a single sausage that meets her criterion.”
Lu flipped through the packages. They were in Baltimore’s Mount Washington neighborhood, only blocks from the home she shared with Gabe at the time, but certainly far afield for a Washington lobbyist. “What are you doing here?”