He didn't start it because he loved her. Or because he needed her. He didn't even really want her, not her specifically. It was the idea that intrigued him. He was a man who had been swaddled in silken sheets since the moment of his birth. It was the idea of doing something base that attracted him. That was why he started it.
That, and it seemed like she wanted it. The way her eyes (lingered? darted? gravitated? no,) focused on him, when her back was bent and her face was tilted down and she knew he could see her, polishing the china-cabinet doors.
When she happened upon him, fresh from the shower, wrapped in only a towel below the waist, only water above, while she was bringing fresh sheets to his room, she didn't look away fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. She didn't apologize frantically enough. Didn't move back to the door (she had closed it on her way in, he noticed) hurriedly enough. Didn't shriek or protest or gasp in surprise when he grabbed her arm above the elbow, shook the sheets free, propelled her onto the naked mattress, face up, back down, beneath him. That was why he started it. Not because he loved her.
He didn't know why she wanted it. What she wanted. She never tried to nuzzle him, the way some women did, to claim him, to remind him that possession goes two ways. Never tried to hurry him to carelessness, or delay him to imprudence. Never spoke to him when it was inopportune. Never spoke with an agenda. They hardly spoke at all. They held to the terms, implicitly, silently. He wondered what she was after.
When she said to him, as she wound her hair (dark, dark brown, and long, so long) back into its chaste bun, her back turned to him, he still lying against the upright end of the chaise, tuxedo trousers indecently low, slidingly low, after the eleventh time, (he kept track of how many times the way he kept track of when and where and how often and how – never the same twice – he did everything by the scientific method – how many men could say that?), that this was the last time, he said "OK."
She turned, faced him, full frontal, let her eyes linger, deliberately, and he lay, deliberately, especially un-still, daring her to recognize the little movements of his muscles. Daring her to blush. She didn't blush.
"The Master has reassigned me. I'm part of the personal retinue he's bringing to Versailles." The personal retinue of five – the one he always brought, although the faces changed, when he went on extended business trips. Just the right number, five: inconspicuous, unnecessary among the armies of native servants, almost insufficient, perfectly minimal, essential, the four to prepare his bath and place his newspaper beside his rice on the breakfast tray and to obscure the fifth, the important one, the one for whom refusal (my mother is ill, my brother is young, I'm scared of flying, I don't want to go, not with you, not with you, not with you) was not an option, the one of lovely face and lithe body and firm but tender years.
He smiled at her. Satisfied, smug, ironic. Conspiratorial. "Have a nice trip."
She kept her face empty, bowed halfway (the licenses mistresses are allowed to take: to withhold all pleasures but the one, and to perform the conventions of respect perfunctorily, sloppily, so he would know what she really thought), left.
He laughed.
He no longer wondered what she was after.
