Authors: Roberta Latow
Well into her meal she was unaware of the man watching her until the table stopped wobbling and she looked up to see who it was who had fixed the offending leg. He straightened up and Eden felt a glow of happiness warm her through and through. It had been years since she had seen handsome Sebastian Morrell. He was still, in his late-sixties, a big man in every way. Time had not bowed him. Tragedy had not marked him. Ever since that first day she had met him in Alexandria she had known that his good looks, charm, the openness with which he lived, his appetite for
adventure and will to live life to the fullest, were too strong for her to handle in any relationship but strictly no strings attached for either of them. He had been in those heady days of youth a womaniser, irresistible to women. She could see that nothing had changed. She wanted him now as she had wanted him then. She had not envisaged accidentally encountering one of her old lovers on her travels but here was one in the flesh.
They smiled at each other. He raised her hand and lowered his head to kiss it. She was aware that whatever the years had brought him, Sebastian had not changed. His entire life was still bound up with the sexual passion he loved to arouse in others. His sheer physical presence was overwhelming: the strong, masculine, Greek god-like face. He was like the more-than-life-size bronze statue of Poseidon, absurdly powerful, as if he too had just risen from the sea. It had been too long since Eden had felt the dynamism of such a man.
‘You look as lovely as ever. But I would have expected that of you,’ he told her.
Without asking he took the empty chair at her table and moved it round to sit next to Eden.
‘Sebastian – so many years. I can hardly believe we’re sitting here together.’
‘You came to Hydra and didn’t expect to see me? I’ve never really left the island. Yes, I’ve lived in other places for work, for the sake of my wife and daughter, but my heart was always here. It always will be.’
‘How are Betty and your daughter? Are they here with you?’
‘Betty and I made a big mistake but out of it I gained my daughter, something better than marvellous. I love her with all my heart though she’s dead now, and with her part of me died. So I returned here to Hydra to live out what’s left of my life. Marisol would understand that. I never lied to either her or Betty.’
Eden thought about Betty who had trapped Sebastian into marriage with her pregnancy and suffered tortures from his infidelities ever afterwards. That had been their deal. He had lived as he wanted to live, adored his daughter, played the part of husband for a few months of the year to keep Betty quiet. She
knew it, as did everyone who knew about that marriage, even though he had been discreet and never flaunted his private life in his wife’s face.
Eden wanted to bite out her tongue for having asked after them. She had in fact heard that his adored child, Marisol, had committed suicide while Sebastian was in the Far East on business. No one had had the slightest idea that she had been depressed or unhappy. No note had been left. Her death broke Sebastian’s heart. It was the tragedy of his life. He left Rome where they had lived then and retreated to Hydra. He also left Betty who, when she learned he was making a life without her in Greece, promptly committed suicide, using the same gun their daughter had. That was eighteen months ago. Eden had even sent a note of condolence to Sebastian at the time of Marisol’s tragic death. But seeing him unexpectedly, the years had rolled back and she had momentarily forgotten what had happened.
‘Why has it taken you so long to return here to your lovely house, your beautiful things?’ asked Sebastian.
‘I don’t know. I think I got swallowed up by the life I thought I had to have. I allowed myself to be sold a bill of goods about growing old, gracefully slipping out of the limelight of success before I was defeated by younger or more beautiful women on the make. As I once was and am no longer.’
‘Lovers?’ asked Sebastian.
‘Occasional dull ones. Men who have forgotten about the naughty side of their sexual lives – or if they haven’t are out there with younger women playing dirty old men and are too cautious with me.’
Sebastian’s food arrived and he and Eden finished their meal together through the many interruptions by locals who stopped by to greet them and offer drinks. Sebastian was well loved by the Hydriots and seeing him with Eden started tongues wagging. They thought of Sebastian as the stud of the island for there were not many foreign women who arrived in Hydra and left without him bedding them. That counted for a great deal with the Greeks’ both men and women, who either envied Sebastian or yearned after him.
Sebastian insisted that Eden and he go to the port to one of the cafes for a night cap. She did not need too much persuasion. Being with him had rolled back the years; the sheer charm and sexiness of the man rubbed off him and on to her. He was a master of seduction and it felt so good to Eden she could think of nothing else but the joy, the sheer delight, of being wooed for sex and satisfaction by a handsome stud like Sebastian.
They left the cafe arm in arm and walked round the crescent-shaped port, past the fishing boats bobbing up and down in the water. They listened to the sound of the waves slapping against the wooden hulls, the quiet of the night, and were embraced by a nearly full moon and a black sky strewn with bright twinkling stars. Away from the port they climbed through the narrow streets of cobblestones and whitewashed walls and stopped to kiss. Several kisses later their hunger for each other peaked and Sebastian picked Eden up in his arms and carried her the rest of the way to his house.
Eden, overwhelmed by his passion for her, was naked to the waist by the time he carried her over the threshold. His hands roamed over her breasts and she felt herself melting with desire to be ravaged by Sebastian. That was the way he made love to women: by ravaging them with his lust for all things erotic, not with love and tenderness.
Sebastian recognised Eden’s sexual hunger and that for him was always an aphrodisiac in a woman. It was in haste that he climbed out of his clothes and stood naked in front of Eden, tantalising her with his body. So firm and masculine, so rampant with lust. He was a joy to look at, to touch. She caressed him with searching hands and kissed his flesh, licked it, nibbled on his nipples, rubbed her face across his chest, caressed his buttocks and slipped her finger down the crack that divided its muscular cheeks. The look of pleasure on his face drove her on to take his erect phallus into her mouth and deep into her throat while she caressed his ample testes.
Until Sebastian, Eden had forgotten how much she missed a man such as he, how much she missed lust, sex unbound.
Sebastian quite suddenly had had enough. He swept Eden off
her feet and carried her to his bed. There he placed her on her knees facing away from him and took her in one fell swoop. He thrust deeply into her and fucked her with long and steady movements that gave her maximum pleasure, while he caressed her breasts and bottom, kissed the back of her neck and sucked on her ear lobes. Eden had multiple orgasms that came swiftly one after the other and called out to the heavens from the pain of such exquisite pleasure.
She was still asleep when Sebastian arrived with a breakfast tray: scrambled eggs, bacon, hot coffee, a bowl of preserved peaches, a stack of buttered toast. He awakened her with a brief kiss on the cheek, arranged the tray and then, dropping his robe, carefully slipped into bed next to her.
He poured the coffee, hers black, his half coffee and half hot milk.
Eden watched how adroitly he managed the two liquids at the same time: the stream of black and white as they merged in the bottom of the cup. ‘I’d forgotten that you take your breakfast coffee like a Frenchman,’ she told him.
‘But I had not forgotten you take yours black. Why would you remember? It’s not as if we had that many breakfasts together. You were always afraid to stay the night. I never could understand that. An adventurer in all things erotic with me but unable to walk from my house in daylight.’
‘Quite simple. I didn’t want the island to know I was another sexual notch on your belt.’
‘But that wasn’t the case with Garfield.’
‘No. Well, he and I were in love. That’s quite a different thing,’ Eden told Sebastian as she forked scrambled egg into her mouth.
‘I was in lust for you and that’s another kind of love. My “in lust” is in its way as powerful as the love you sought with Garfield. Just different. Last night is a case in point. While we were in the throes of intense erotic pleasure, you were the only woman in the world for me. At that moment we shared a love as pure as any you
ever had with another man. I have no doubt about that whether you want to admit it or not. It’s true.
‘For a few hours, I was the only man, the only love, you wanted. The kind of sex we had is everything because I know how to reach down to the basic instinct in a woman where it all begins and ends. For a few hours together we made the entire world, with all its goodness, its badness, its emotional domination of our lives, fall away. What other act can do that and also give such pleasure, transform the here and now into another dimension where one can live in pure ecstasy, sheer bliss, with no strings attached?’
Eden watched Sebastian raise his coffee cup to his lips and sip as he looked over its rim into her eyes. He was right, of course, and his words and the fact that she believed them quite surprised her. For all the years she had known him she had never given him credit for understanding his own voracious appetite for sex, the compulsive need to fuck every desirable woman who appeared before him. Had she been such a hypocrite as to believe she had not used him as a stud herself? Most of the women she knew who had been to bed with Sebastian had done the same after all. But what of the many who’d labelled their lust for him love?
A question ran through Eden’s mind as she accepted a peach half off the silver spoon Sebastian was feeding her from. The flavour burst like a sparkling firework in her mouth and her taste buds ran wild with pleasure, distracting her from wondering if it was possible that all those years with Garfield had been spent in love as justification for lust, for her own need to love and be loved at any price? It didn’t bear thinking of. Whatever it was, it was in the past and no longer mattered. Eden was in search of life and the present. As Sebastian caressed her breasts and offered her her cup of coffee, she was aware that he was never going to be a part of her life in any way other than a source of sex when she was available and he wanted her. Sebastian did wonders for her ego and her invisibility but he was not what she was looking for, though he made a good beginning.
It was as if he’d been reading her mind when he asked, ‘What are you looking for, Eden? Why are you here?’
Sebastian had never been the sort of man Eden would confide
in and so it surprised her when she told him about the crisis she was going through. She followed it up with her story of the stranger in the tea room. Sebastian’s reaction was to throw back his head and laugh.
‘You’re laughing at me!’ she exclaimed, horrified.
He placed his cup and saucer down on the tray. Then, pulling her into his arms, he caressed her hair with both his hands and kissed her full on the lips. She struggled but he was too strong for her and she finally gave in to his kiss and caresses.
When she was calm again in his arms, he released her and told her, ‘Yes, I’m laughing at you.’
Then he attacked his plate of scrambled eggs by forking some of them on to a piece of crisp toast. He bit into it and Eden watched him savour every morsel and sip from his coffee cup. He was a joy to watch if for no other reason than his sheer enthusiasm for life’s pleasures.
Finally he spoke. ‘Women never cease to amaze me. I have met and passed by hundreds, thousands, who were no less invisible than in the scene you just described to me. I never gave them a second glance because they were lost, had given up their sexuality, their passion for lust and coming, exchanged it for some sort of second-rate existence that excluded sex. They wore that expression like a medal of honour, as if they had earned it in the battle of the sexes and won. Part-time or full-time celibacy their reward.
‘I could never imagine you, Eden, even contemplating joining that brigade. I would have given you more credit than ever to have allowed yourself to be hoodwinked into retiring to a life so foreign to who and what you are. You were sold the bag of senseless insecurities that comes to women with middle age. Or maybe being in love and lust with Garfield and falling out of it burned you out. Was it one of those decisions women make when they have paid too high a price for love? No, never again the pain, the laying down of one’s soul for a bastard to walk over? Better the occasional fuck where you can leave the love and sacrifice out of it. Go for an alternative that delivers peace and quiet, and is a safe house to dwell in.
‘Well, for a smart lady you took a wrong turn. You lost your
lustre, forgot how good it was to shine and spin the world in your hands. Now pass me that dish of peach halves, my beauty, and I’ll suck them from your cunt and you’ll love it.’
With that he removed the breakfast tray from the bed and pulled the sheet covering them from the bed.
Several hours later Sebastian walked Eden back to her house and she played the cello for him. Lost in the music of Schubert, she played with a passion that had been missing from her performances for years. She played as she had during the height of her career and was aware that a rebirth of some sort was already happening for her. Eden licked her lips. She could taste the sweetness of the peaches Sebastian had fed from his mouth to hers, and they were all the more succulent because they were tinged with her orgasms. Eden knew that she had been given a second introduction to an erotic world she had missed to the very core of her being. She looked up from her instrument and was not surprised to see that Sebastian was no longer in the room with her. No wonder so many women fall in love with him, she mused. Sebastian Morell always knew when and how to make an exit.
She put her bow down on the music stand and rose from her chair. Stowing her cello in its case, then the bow, she closed it and went to the window from where she saw Sebastian walking slowly down the path leading to the port. Her eye strayed from him to the closed and shuttered house that still belonged to Garfield.
While Eden understood Sebastian and how he felt about love, she could not accept, refused to accept, that the love she’d once had with Garfield had been no more than futile obsession with oblivion its destination. Was she still in love with him, after all the years that had passed? No, she thought not. It was more that she was still in love with being in love with another human being. Of self-sacrifice that was returned threefold by the mere opening up wholly to another human being who loved in the same way in return, no matter the length or brevity of the affair.
That evening Eden dined alone in the port at a restaurant where she and Garfield had shared so many happy and loving meals. The owner Niko’s very first question was whether Garfield
was about to reappear on the island. Had they made it up? Were they together again? It was from Niko that Eden learned Garfield had not been here for at least two years. Then there were interminable questions about why she had not been back for so long, where she was living, if she was going to stay on the island. News was out among the local residents, foreign and Greek, that she had returned and an endless stream of old acquaintances and friends appeared at her table.
Eden recognised Sebastian walking across the port when he was still a good distance from her, on his arm a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair. Eden was aware of the way the girl clung to him, the passion they obviously had for each other. She was not at all disturbed by having been replaced so quickly in Sebastian’s bed nor did she feel any sense of rejection.
On seeing Eden Sebastian went directly to her. Taking her by the hands, he raised her from her chair, enfolded her in his arms and kissed her. Then he introduced her to Janine. The young woman was obviously distressed at his attentions to someone else. Eden wanted to tell her, ‘We’ve all been there one way or another with Sebastian so don’t make the mistake of many before you and fall in love with him.’ But she said nothing.
The following morning she knew how right she had been to keep her silence. Sebastian climbed the wall surrounding her property, entered through an open window and woke Eden with his lust for her. Neither of them mentioned Janine. During their erotic morning of sex and passion Eden found no time to think or feel emotional about rekindling a sex life with Sebastian. Their relationship had been too long dead and forgotten for her not to realise that at this time of her life she was aware of being two people: the woman of her youth, the brilliant cellist who emanated all things erotic, and the invisible middle-aged woman that time and life had changed her into.
At lunchtime Eden and Sebastian drank a bottle of champagne in bed leisurely, the winter sun streaming in at the window and warming their naked flesh. They touched and caressed each other and each retreated into their own thoughts. Eden’s: that she must change, begin a new and different way of living. She must begin
again, give up her old self to save herself. Once more Sebastian spoke as if he was reading her mind.
‘You haven’t asked me what I’m doing here,’ he said.
‘That’s right, I haven’t. What are you doing here, Sebastian?’
‘Recovering from years of life and what it has done to me. I am setting aside years of solitude that never suited me, ego-driven successes that stole away the spontaneous joy I once lived by. Through all the shit that life threw at me, I was smart enough to have never given up the sexuality that has always been a driving force in my life. For that at least I am grateful.’
‘You must be reading my mind, speaking the very thoughts and emotions occupying me. Sebastian, something, someone, is looking after me to have brought us together. You and I are both here weighing up the years of our lives and what they have done to us. Or, more to the point, what we have allowed them to do to us.’
With that she leaned across and kissed him passionately. First in gratitude, then in love for the path to freedom he’d laid before her, and then in lust.
For a long time after he’d left she stared out of the window at her beloved Hydra across the jumble of white houses and then out to sea, so blue and mysterious, romantic, very often looking up at Garfield’s house. For a brief moment she imagined she loved him still. Once that moment had passed she understood that it was only the memory of loving him, of being loved by Garfield, that still lingered, nothing more. A tremor of emotion ran through her body. Was it someone walking over her grave? Garfield himself, his second wife, their son, Sebastian … there once more trying to kick her back into life?
It had never occurred to Eden until her night of sex with Sebastian that until now, at this very moment, she had not recovered from her break-up with Garfield. When she had given up everything she had, everything she was, for him and there was nothing left to give, he’d walked out. His words rang in her ears now as if he were a ghost whispering from a corner of the room: ‘You have too many problems. When you have sorted them and yourself out, I’ll come back.’
She had loved him too much. All her youth and beauty, her talent, her money, were not enough. Had it been as simple as that? Yes, it had, if you stripped away the romance of love and lust.
Fame and fortune had been Eden’s for most of her adult life. Except for the tragedy of losing her mother and father in a plane crash six months before she met Garfield, hers had been a charmed existence. But charmed lives do not prepare one for tragedy or bad times. Leila had had a will to live life to the fullest. It had made Teddy love her all the more, but was a lesson in life that Eden had found it difficult to live by once she was bereft.
Leila was piloting one of her lover’s planes when she, her lover Randolf Herrere and Teddy were caught in a blizzard somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. After years of investigation the authorities were no closer to discovering the reason the plane went down. It had been hopelessly off course, that was all Eden had ever discovered about the accident. There had even been nasty rumours that the tragedy might have been more than an accident. A
ménage à trois
that went wrong. No one would ever know and once all the speculation died down Eden never wasted time on empty speculation. The loss of two fascinating and unusual people was all that occupied her mind.
As often as she could, on the anniversary of their death Eden returned to pay her love and respect to them by tossing flowers into the Aegean Sea off the island of Patmos where they had gone on their honeymoon after a grand wedding in Boston. They had always claimed that something quite spiritual had happened to them on that wedding journey that had bound them together for eternity and it was there that they wanted to return after death.
Eden at last turned away from the window and drew a bath for herself. Steeped in the hot water, she began to doze and time slipped away from her. Her thoughts drifted back to her second lover, Benjamin Gage. First Marshall then Ben. Who knows how her life might have turned out had they been different sorts of men? Not that she had any regrets about their being the men who’d formed her love and erotic life, then and for eternity. It was just a matter of curiosity and no more. Both of them were dead now any way, a part of her past, and nothing could change that.