Page 180 of The Stranger

It might’ve been easier if he’d been angry instead of the maddening kind of polite that I told myself was disappointment. But right now, his expression gives me nothing as he plucks a couple of champagne glasses from a passing tray. He presses one into my hand.

“I don’t have a phone,” I say to the woman in the suit, employing the kind of imperiousness that doesn’t invite further comment. I jerk my head toward the grand-looking staircase, and a mildly bemused Luc follows.

“Did you make elite membership, or something?”

“Pardon?” He sounds impossibly French. I find myself wondering if it’s on purpose.

“Just…” I glance around at the walls the color of old champagne, the crystal sconces, the ambient light, the frescoed ceilings. Antique furniture is paired with expensively tasteful contemporary art as couples spill from nearby rooms, music that’s all velvet bass and suggestion curling through their conversations.

“You know what I mean. This place.” I note how his eyes alight on something behind me. I glance over my shoulder and see nothing amiss. A woman. Two men. It’s not like they’re naked. But then in my mind’s eye I see the way her hands rested possessively on each. Oversized gold keys change hands at a bar. And, next to us, a velvet rope cordons off a staircase that leads down.

My stomach turns in on itself.

“I understand where we are,” I say quietly. “What I don’t understand is why.”

For one tiny second, his eyes meet mine, and I glimpse something in that blue gaze that looks like pain. It vanishes so quickly I guess I imagined it.

He brings his glass to his mouth and slides a hand into the pocket of his evening pants, all insouciance. He doesn’t look at me then, not completely, composed and faintly bored. He was like this the night we met, dismissing me as beneath his notice.

Only now, it’s more like he can’t bring himself to look at me. And there’s something about the way his fingers flex around his glass that makes me wonder if he wants to take hold of my hand and flee.

“You said you wanted to test the hypothesis,” he says smoothly.

Those blue eyes bore into me, corkscrew sharp. For a moment, his gaze is all I can concentrate on. But then I remember, and I realize: he’s using my words used against me.

I find myself leaning closer, the height of my heels bringing me closer to getting in his face. “You want me to have sex with someone else?”

“It’s what you wanted,” he answers smoothly. “And here,” he adds, raising his glass as though to highlight the magnificence of the place, “you can be openly desired while you safely take the kinds of risks that make you feel alive.”

What in the fairy-tale fuck?

“And you thought you’d bring me here without asking me first?”

“If I’d told you, you would have had time to overthink. To worry about what it might mean. Wonder what other people might say about you. What I might think. You would’ve said no before you knew what you were saying no to.” He sounds so reasonable. Almost thoughtful. If you discount the part where he’s brought me to a sex club without my permission.

“If I want to take risks, I’ll stick a fork in the toaster when the bread gets stuck.”

“Primrose.” He makes a disappointment of my name. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“And water is wet.”

His brows lift.

“Facts,” I snap. His reasons are bullshit and his explanations utter crap. Leaves dropped over dog poo to hide the offense. This isn’t about curiosity or other men or giving me the opportunity to spread my freaky wings. I’m not even sure this is punishment, even though he made it quite clear weeks ago that he’s into that kind of stuff.

He’s brought us back to the beginning, trying to reduce what we have to bodies and appetites. Because if that’s all this is, then what he said didn’t mean anything.

And I’ll hate him for it. For doing this to us.

46

LUC

I tell myself that it’s necessary, that Primrose should return to London. To medicine. To her family and to the life she delayed for her friend, and my children, then complicated by my selfishness. I tell myself that she’ll recover from a few cruel words easier than she would from loving a man who could never give her what she deserved.

But most of all, I tell myself I’m doing it for her.

Her fingers tightened around mine as we’d entered the villa. A different city, a different setting, but the club, unmistakably Ardeo. Low lighting, velvet shadows, avaricious looks, and music that seems to pulse beneath the skin.