The Timeless Profession
Three days gone by since they were lovers, and it feels like fasting.
Nothing about her gives away the affair, except for a glimmer of calculation in her eyes, a fugitive's look. She's always been a high functioning addict, after all.
One, an encounter with Cole.
Two, a wafer-thin resolve to quit.
Three, Olivia's subsisting on air.
The curtains are drawn in the pool house, and he's surrounded.
Deep inside her.
You wouldn't expect her to have a bra on, like this scene has been edited for television, but such is the way of time-sensitive matters.
It would be ridiculous to want something so risky to last more than a few minutes. A few minutes wouldn't offend her, really. He can't help the fact that he's gathering strength as opposed to falling apart.
"It's-okay," she whispers in a burst of breath against his thrusts. "It's okay if you just…"
He tries to shake his head vehemently, but the movement is so slight it just looks like some kind of tic.. This isn't what she needs if she's still able to speak.
"Just fin-..." And there's the gasp that arches her whole back, the silent scream that- if brought to life- would scatter the birds on the beach.
Fin.
If you're looking for a story that's just a carnival wheel of sex vignettes, this might be it.
Maybe.
One night, he climbs the trellis to her window and picks a flower on the way up. She feels the bed sink down. She hears a greeting that's conspicuous of something in his teeth.
She smiles weakly, wanting to steal the flower from his mouth with hers, but she shows him a wad of crumpled tissues. The flower falls from his expression.
"I sound like a Scouser," is her congested-to-the-eyeballs reply. "I don't want to subject you to that, let alone typhus."
He presses his palm to her forehead, a gesture she nuzzles into beyond her control. It's a subtle tell that he can't leave without giving her something. He shrugs, and begins to kiss along her carotid. "It's okay. This part isn't a petri dish. Or this…" He suckles the curve of her pale shoulder.
"Love, I…" she whimpers as he mouths the lamb skin of her wrist. She uses the same endearment for old ladies and barristas, so he never reads too deeply into that. Sometimes she's simply more afraid of the way she empties herself into his name. "…it'll be 'bout two minutes until we're swapping fluids…I don't want you to end up feeling like this."
He realizes his own lips are parted, drawing air vulnerably into his mouth as he tastes her chills. "Already do."
She looks at the soft, ample hiding spots beyond the dutch door of the guardless room. The rusty service bell doesn't work. She chants to herself, Not in the coat check, not in the coat check, not in the coat check.
Well, a coat check is what anyone else would see, but to a mistress, it looks like the Shire.
She waits until the others are seated in the restaurant, and drags him in.
"I'm sorry," she whispers against his lips, the intimate pose sheathed by leopard and twill. "Cole…" He doesn't know how her voice embeds his name in frost and sets it aflame at the same time. "This is suicide, I just…I need…it's what he said."
"It's okay. Forget what he said." He knows he won't need long to release her- his hand beneath the lace of her underwear, the demanding rhythm of his breath curled around her nipple. She can be as quiet as a broken coat check bell, if need be.
The shelter of coats around them barely moves, but in Olivia's imagination, they're surely bucking around like some terrible, frozen beast.
She doesn't always rush for her scattered clothes. Somehow, there's something more sacred about Olivia letting you see everything after the act itself. She smiles quietly at his mudslide gaze. He says, "I could draw you right now."
Thunderstruck by creativity, he grabs a legal pad off the hotel desk and straddles a chair. He wants to remember this, to record it with the same hand that turned her skin rose, to transfuse himself into her with every stroke of the pencil.
"It's okay," she laughs. She props her head up with her hand, thrusting herself outward and putting on bedroom eyes she can never fully reign in. "But I have to say, for a cat burglar, you're no steadier at unhooking a bra than any other man, so I'm not very optimistic about drawing."
A laugh flushes his skin. "I don't blame you. So far you look like Ozzy."
She giggles as he looks up at her periodically, closing one eye, scolding her for moving. He gets to her breasts- still moist from his favors- and his eyes dart from her to the paper faster than she can follow them. His lips fold with growing discomfort, his lungs strain with desire.
He takes the pad and pencil and flings them over his shoulder, dives for her on the bed. "I don't know how anybody can finish one of these without-"
"What makes you think they don't?" she laughs as he makes his artful decent.
He knows she asks to shower together to hide that she's going to cry. He lets her hide it all she wants, positioning her under the spray as he shivers outside it.
He remembers that today is the anniversary of the day after her miscarriage.
She used to think the fact that the actual date- February 29th- only occurred every four years was a blessing. Truthfully…the years when the date doesn't exist, when the calendar flips straight to March, are even worse.
Is it any wonder it's called a Gregorian calendar?
He washes her body with nothing but his hands. Sometimes his lips, as he wonders what was ever so traumatizing about having his mouth washed out with soap. He leans his forehead hard into hers. She likes when he does this to segue into a kiss. Deaf and blind from the hot running water, their leftover senses have a feast.
To his surprise, instead of burying this day in cries of a different kind, she begins to talk about the dead baby. Spontaneously, here in the shower.
"I think…I've always tried to pretend he was just an undercooked Sean. Like I tossed a soufflé back in the oven and fixed it. He wasn't Sean. He was an entirely different person, with talents and dreams and beautiful flaws. I'd give anathing just to spend one day with who he would've become," she weeps.
"It's okay, Olivia…" He knows how much it took for her to say that. He molds her otter-slick body to his chest, wanting her to know how hard his heart is beating from her candidness.
She breaks it off with him at least once a month. She's never wearing a wide-brimmed hat, or waiting for a train- as Hollywood dictates- but it's painful just the same.
He isn't surprised that March's Breakup of the Month occurs within days of the miscarriage talk in the shower. The usual stock phrases come: we both know better, trading baggage for more baggage, it will only hurt more down the line.
Sometimes, he's genuinely okay with it.
Sometimes, he goes to his little apartment above the Waffle Shop and turns up the most visceral Otis Redding songs he knows, until they shake the patrons' dishes downstairs.
Sometimes he acts like a male hummingbird, puffing out his throat feathers, zipping and diving all around her to get her back.
Gregory throws a cocktail party in honor of the Sentinel's acclaimed reporter, Vanessa. Cole hasn't seen Olivia in one and a half weeks, and can't suppress his look of finding the lost city of gold.
Olivia feels the parlor floor tilt, her eyes scaling the silk of his necktie. Then she goes back to Gregory's periphery, singing praises for the woman who's been in his direct line of sight all evening.
The article was a three part feature entitled, "Gregory Richards: Trial By Fire." Yes, his high regard is valuable, Ms. Hart, but it's no Pulitzer, is it? Olivia muses, feeling a bit haughty for a wretch, but you do what you must.
It's been a long time since Cole has seen a proper champagne table with brandy, Vermouth and all the fixings. Swanky. He feels in his element again, but when added to watching her flicker and dim like the 'O' in a NO VACANCY sign, it leads to drinking a little too much.
Olivia creeps beside him. "Did you just put a sugar cube in your champagne? What is this, 1942?"
He gives her a squinty, etherized grin behind the rim of his glass. "Mus' be…cuz an English bomb just dropped on me," he says darkly, cocking his brows and spreading his eyes over her body.
His condition washes over her, and her gasp leaves the air thin. "Cole? Are you mad?" she whispers with wide eyes. "You could let something slip to everyone!"
"Hey. Heyy. I need a little help mixing with these journalist types, okay? They're all putty in Caitlin's hands and I've got nothin'. I'm not exactly as smart as anyone in this room."
She leans closer. "…Darling…Caitlin's gift for entertaining came from having to cover for me when I was…indisposed. Chew on that for a moment and you won't feel so badly about yourself."
"Olivia…"
"And by the way, what these types think of you is irrelevant. Any flavor in their work comes from pure embellishment, and you require none. The printed press is becoming a relic, and your profession is timeless. You should be proud that your only use for newspapers is to hide your face with them on the Continent," she winks.
He shakes his head wistfully, his heart resting its tipsy load on her. "…what would I do without you…?"
"What would you, indeed, you lightweight?" she sighs. "It's okay. This is the plan. I'll find Caitlin and tell her you had a bad scallop. You go lie down upstairs. Please don't let her see you like this."
He nods, knowing he would lie on the ocean floor for the duration of the party if she asked him to.
"Olivia…" He ushers her to the shadow of the column beside the stairs, his dry fingertips catching on the fabric of her dress. The aside has the intimacy of a serenade, yet no one would even notice. "This party should be for you. The article should be about you. Look how far you've come."
Her hand is steadfast on the breast pocket of his suit until he slips softly upstairs. Her mouth is frozen in the position to make the hard consonant of his name, but she fails, a phoenix stuck in the ashes.
When everyone is asleep, she goes to the little guest room turned drunk tank. He's sleeping on the comforter, still dressed sharply. Sometimes when he's asleep, he looks more alive than anyone awake. She climbs next to him in the bed and his arms encircle her. Even though they've known each other for a whisper of time, he reaches for her so instinctively in his sleep, in a way as old as humankind.
His eyes blink and draw up slowly, and his smile fills his cheeks with bursts of shadow- that sacred hollowness with room for two. They just lie in that moment for a bit.
This can't be the boy I sold for Gregory, she often tells herself, looking at me like I'm the salt of the earth.
Even with alcohol slowing his blood, he sees her tears before she even feels the prick of them. "It's okay, Olivia," he says, that harmless phrase that has come to mean a million things.
Tonight, their meanings have intersected. "It's okay, Cole," she says, removing her blouse, her flesh with a will and a fight of its own.
THE END