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15
Nina filledher coffee cup and walked to her living room. She and Moni took turns manning the gallery on Sundays, and Nina settled into the sofa with a sigh, happy to have the day off with no plans. Jack would be back the next day and would undoubtedly expect her to beavailable.
Not that she didn’t want to be available. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since he’d left. Her body, used to multiple sessions of mind-blowing sex a day, was amped like an engine in fifth gear with nowhere to go. She tossed and turned in her bed as scenes played across her closedeyelids.
Jack between her legs, his dark head moving as he worked her pussy with hismouth.
The rope crisscrossing her body as Jack’s cock disappeared insideher.
The knowing expression on his face when he filled her with a vibrator while he fucked her ass, when she screamed her orgasm into the room, as if he’d known all along she’d been filled with these dirtydesires.
It had gotten difficult to focus on anything but him, on the hours they spent after dark wrapped in each others arms, pushing the limits of her inhibitions, which seemed increasingly nonexistent. She’d lost more weight and waited eagerly for her shifts at the gallery to end, her appetite for Jack and the things he did to her overwhelming allothers.
In the throes of it she didn’t care at all. Nothing else existed for her but the sensations rocking her body, the lust that flooded her veins when he made her do things she would not have done for anyoneelse.
It was only at times like this, in the pure sunlight shining through the windows, Virginia purring on the couch, the apartment quiet and comforting, that it seemed unseemly. Then she couldn’t help the self-disgust that heated her face, the sense that she was allowing herself to be pulled deeper and deeper into the whirlpool that would eventually push her so far underwater, she might not be able to swim to the surface forair.
She reached for her computer. She was being melodramatic, falling back into the habits of her conditioning, of the belief that women weren’t allowed to have unconventional sexual desires, that in order to be good, they had to be pure, and in order to be pure they had to beuptight.
She opened her laptop, pulled up her search engine, and typed in JUDITH CHAMBERS NYC. Nina had been thinking about the woman ever since they’d met in the park Friday night, replaying their conversation and wondering if there was anything more she could have said to convince the woman to let the gallery show herwork.
Nina was surprised when a series of hits immediately came up for the name. She’d expected the woman to be obscure, her story difficult tofind.
Nina clicked on the first entry, an old article from the New York Times titled NEW YORK GRAND DAME AUCTIONS HUSBAND’S ART COLLECTION. The article detailed how Judith Chambers, wife of transportation magnate Samuel Chambers, had given the rights to auction her husband’s collection to Christie’s in 2012. The collection had been built over a period of decades and included two Picassos, a Monet, and three Renoirs and was valued at well over five hundred milliondollars.
According to the article, Judith had been a well-known pinup model in the 1950s. Apparently her marriage to Samuel had been scandalous at the time: a New York City blue blood forgoing a plethora of wealthy socialites eager to become his wife in favor of an unknown pinup, a profession that was considered seedy by the standards of theera.
Samuel had passed away in 2005, leaving Judith a fortune estimated to be worth at least ten billion dollars. The article featured not a photo of Judith, but a stock photograph of Christie’s and an accompanying photo of a painting described in the caption as Algerian Landscape by Pierre AugusteRenoir.
Nina took a drink of her coffee, her mind trying to connect the woman in the article with the one she’d met in the park Friday night. What was a woman with that kind of money doing roaming Washington Square at night, taking pictures with an old Leica, leaving them around for strangers to discover when she’d given up a half billion dollars in covetedart?
I adore startingover.
Nina flashed back to the dreamy expression on the woman’s face, proof that she meantit.
She skimmed through some of the other articles, looking for more information, but it was obvious Judith wasn’t one for the spotlight. Details were sketchy on the fortune she’d inherited and how she’d opted to spend it other than a mention that shortly after her husband’s death, she’d sold all but the New York City apartment on Central Park West and an apartment in Paris. The last article was dated two years earlier, when the world seemed to forget about Judith with herblessing.
Nina pictured Judith in her mind. She thought of the fur coat, the careful makeup and elaborate hat, the humor that seemed to linger beneath her carefuldiction.
Had she changed to become Samuel’s wife? Taught herself to speak and dress differently? Had she been happy? In love withhim?
Nina suddenly wanted the story more thanever.
She thought of Jack, of all his money and power. The parallels were undeniable. Nina wasn’t a pinup model, and she didn’t consider her status as a divorcee to be embarrassing in the least, not in this day andage.
But she was taking her cues from Jack, allowing him to introduce her to the ways of the wealthy, feeling alternately excited and uncomfortable with it all. Had Judith felt that way too? Had she loved Samuel so much that it hadn’tmattered?
Did Nina loveJack?
The question came to mind all at once. The subject of love hadn’t come up between them. What they had felt more powerful than love, morenecessary.
Was someone like Jack capable oflove?
She considered the question idly. She wasn’t sure she needed Jack to love her, wasn’t sure she needed to label her feelings forhim.
She neededhim.
Needed his touch. Needed him insideher.
