Perhaps a minute had passed, perhaps two, and he was leaving her there in silence just to unnerve her.
She smiled. He wouldn’t do such a thing … would he? How the hell could she know? It was too much; this was just too goddamned much!
She wanted to say something, anything. She started to move her lips, and then she stopped herself. What if this was nothing more than a simple parlor trick? What if only half a minute had passed, and she was folding up? Was this some way to test her resolve? Was there some other reason for this than David had told her?
She couldn’t help it, the tension had built inside her chest until she could hardly contain her breathing. She wanted to scream, wanted to say something, to hear something … anything.
‘Da … David?’
She heard the sound of her own voice, like the voice of a lost and frightened child. And that was all she heard.
‘David?’
Did she hear something then?
She tilted her head to the right, could feel the restraint of the blindfold.
Was that the sound of breathing?
Was he closer to her … closing in on her?
And then she felt angry, abused even, somehow invaded and ridiculed. She felt color rising in her cheeks, felt tightness in her chest. But still there was that sense of disturbing unease that seemed to edge along her spine and settle at the base of her neck.
‘David!’ she snapped.
Again there was silence, nothing that in any way indicated where he was, if he was even there.
The sensation was like pins and needles, but cold, constantly moving, making her skin crawl upwards. She could feel muscles tensing in her shoulders, her neck, and there was a feeling of nausea building in her throat.
‘David!’ she snapped again, her voice edged with fear. ‘David … where the hell are you?’
Silence.
Swollen black silence.
She reached up her hand and wrenched the scarf away.
David Quinn was seated facing her, exactly as he’d been when they were talking.
‘Thirty-seven seconds,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on his wristwatch.
‘No way!’ she said. ‘There was no way that was only thirty-seven seconds.’
‘Thirty-seven exactly,’ he said.
She balled the scarf up in her hands and tossed it to the floor.
‘What were you thinking?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing much –’
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘It’s part of the game … you have to tell me what you were thinking.’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, suddenly a little embarrassed.
‘You were afraid?’
‘I was afraid,’ she admitted.
‘Of what?’
‘Of what you might be doing.’
‘Like I was going to strangle you or suddenly plunge a knife into your chest?’
‘Something like that … hell, I don’t like this David, this isn’t fun.’
David smiled. ‘I’m sorry –’
‘It’s getting to be a habit,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘You apologizing to me.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right, it wasn’t fair. It’s a little bit of a harsh way to illustrate a point.’
‘And the point was?’
‘That we all imagine the worst,’ he said. ‘It seems to be basic human nature, to imagine the worst. I think it’s been influenced by the media, by films, by TV … led to believe that around every dark corner someone might be lurking with malevolent intent.’
Annie frowned.
‘How old are you?’ David asked. ‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?’
‘Thirty,’ Annie said, pleased a little that he’d placed her younger.
‘Always lived in New York?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘So, thirty years in New York, a city that’s reputed to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world, right?’
Annie nodded in the affirmative.
‘So how many times in the past thirty years have you personally witnessed an act of violence, someone being killed, someone being mugged?’
Annie thought for a moment, and then she started to smile.
‘What?’ David asked, smiling in unison.
‘There was a time when I was younger, a teenager, fifteen, sixteen years old, and my mother and I were walking down through Central Park and this guy was playing a guitar. He was just sitting there minding his own business playing guitar, singing a few songs, and people would stop for a little while and toss dimes and quarters into his guitar case. Suddenly this other guy appears, a guy in a business suit for Christ’s sake, and he grabs the guitar from this guy and starts whacking him with it.’
Annie started laughing, couldn’t help herself as the image came. A guy in a business suit attacking some poor hobo busker with his own guitar.
David was smiling.
‘So this guy just keeps whacking this guy with the guitar, and every time the guitar hits this guy there’s this sound of the strings. Wha-daang! Wha-daang!’
Annie started laughing harder, a little uncontrolled, and before long she and David Quinn were fit to bust, tears streaming down their faces.
‘And what happened?’ David asked eventually.
‘The poor guy just runs away, leaves behind his coat, his money, his guitar, and the guy in the business suit just drops the guitar on the ground, straightens his vest and jacket and walks away. He comes past us, my mother’s looking at him with this shocked expression on her face, and this guy turns to her and says “Fuck the Beatles!”, and then he just walks off down the path and disappears.’
‘Fuck the Beatles?’ David asked.
‘Fuck the Beatles, that’s what he said.’
Annie was still laughing, settling down a little, and then she
looked up at David and believed that perhaps there was nothing to be afraid of here, nothing but what she herself might imagine.
‘And that is the sum total of your experiences regarding firsthand violence?’ David asked.
She nodded. ‘It is.’
‘Not a hell of a great deal considering this is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, eh?’
She shrugged. ‘I s’pose not.’
‘See what I mean then? Most of what we fear is within ourselves, what we imagine, what we consider might be there if we look hard enough into the darkness.’
Annie watched David as he spoke. He was speaking to
her
, not to himself as so many men did. He was not speaking so passionately because he believed he had something worthwhile to say, nor because he liked the sound of his own voice. He was speaking about something in which he believed, and there were so few people these days who believed strongly about anything that she found it in some way admirable.
‘So whatever you thought I might be doing while you were blindfolded –’ David started.
‘Was all three inches behind my forehead, right?’ Annie interjected.
David nodded. ‘Right.’
She looked at him, at the intensity of his expression, and in the silence that unfolded she felt that tension, the sense of presence around them, and yet where there had earlier been a feeling of trepidation and anxiety, there was now something singularly … something undeniably sexual?
She felt her cheeks flush.
‘Okay?’ he asked.
‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘A little warm perhaps.’
‘So take off your sweater.’
Annie instinctively tried to remember what she was wearing beneath. A tee-shirt, a blouse? It was a tee-shirt, a long-sleeved cotton tee-shirt, and as she tugged the sweater over her
head her predominant thought was whether or not it was clean.
The sweater came off, she folded it neatly and set it on the floor, and then she looked down to straighten her shirt, to check that she looked presentable.
‘You want some more coffee?’ David asked.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m fine.’
Again there was a moment of silence, a moment she broke when she asked, ‘So, I thought we were going to unpack your stuff. Is that what we’re going to do?’
David smiled. ‘Is that what you want to do?’
She smiled back. ‘Not particularly.’
He leaned a little closer. ‘What do
you
want to do Annie O’Neill?’
She felt her cheeks flush again. She shook her head.
‘Tell me,’ he prompted. ‘What would you really like to do, right now?’
She looked back at him. ‘I want … I want you –’
‘To what? What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to kiss me David Quinn, that’s what I want.’
He closed his eyes for a second, just a split second, but within that second every thought and feeling, every emotion and sensation and desire she could ever have experienced rushed through her body like a freight train.
He came down off the chair and onto his knees, eyes open, and reaching with his right hand he touched the side of her face.
Annie closed her eyes. She sighed. Human contact.
She felt the warmth of his skin, the pressure of his fingers against her cheek, and then his hand was moving gently around the side of her face and over her ear. His fingers were in her hair, and then she felt the slightest pressure as he pulled her slowly forward. She kept her eyes closed, but she sensed his face approaching hers, and then the tip of his nose touched her cheek, and for a moment it seemed that he was breathing her in, inhaling her whole. She could smell him, something like
leather and cigarette smoke, and beneath that something warm and pleasant and musky.
His lips grazed hers and she shuddered. For some reason she wanted to cry, and then she felt the pressure of his mouth against hers, and at first somewhat resistant, tentative, and then slowly relaxing, she opened her mouth a fraction and felt the tip of his tongue trace a fine line across her lower lip. She opened her mouth a fraction further, and then she felt him close against her, could feel the pressure of her breasts against his chest, and then his left hand was touching the side of her waist, and she felt bound up in something so powerful she could so easily have forgotten to breathe.
She kissed him. She kissed David Quinn, her tongue finding his, her mouth yielding, and the way he kissed her was so gentle and sensitive, and yet somehow so passionate that she felt she would lose her balance completely and come crashing to the hardwood floor. But he was there, there ahead of her and somehow beneath her, and she raised her hands and closed them around his face, pulled him tighter, tighter again, and when she slid from the chair to her knees it was as if everything was in slow-motion. The sounds, the smells, the colors behind her closed eyelids, and she couldn’t ever remember feeling so close to something.
Eventually, and against her desire, he released her. He leaned back, and she imagined she was standing at the far end of the room watching these two people on their knees, their hands around each other’s faces, their eyes open, their mouths silent as they looked back at one another and didn’t know what to say.
At last she did say something.
Thank you
.
He smiled, pulled her tight, and for some eternity of silence he just held her.
Annie O’Neill believed she’d never felt so safe in her life.
Alone again later, she could not remember how the subsequent two or three hours had really disappeared so quickly. They had talked – that much she knew – but when she lay in the bath in her own apartment, the warm water enfolding her, giving her a feeling of security, she could recall neither the words used nor the subjects discussed, or how the minutes had passed. He did not press her further, he did not lead her quietly to his bedroom, and though she would have gone – willingly and without resistance – she also felt there was something so right in the fact that he had taken her request for a kiss and complied with that and that alone. He had granted her simple wish, and for that she was grateful.
Perhaps, had Sullivan been home, she would have told him about her day, that she had gone to David Quinn’s apartment, that he had kissed her. But Sullivan was out, and she was faintly relieved. Some things, perhaps, should be reserved simply for one’s self.
When it had been time to leave David, he had called a cab with his cellphone. He had walked her down to the street, paused for a moment facing her, never said a word, and then he’d opened the cab door and closed it behind her. Watching him in the cab’s wing mirror, standing there on the sidewalk, she had fought the temptation to look back, to watch him until he disappeared – he’d stood there patiently until the cab had turned the corner, and then she’d leaned back and sighed.
By the time she arrived home it was dark, sometime after eight, and she ran a bath and undressed. She tied her hair back and stared at her face in the mirror above the sink for a while.
She felt naked, not just unclothed but truly
naked
. Her features – her eyes, her nose, her mouth – all these things could be read. The details not only of the last few hours – her desires, her longings, her anxieties and the feeling that she had walked close to the edge of something, peered into a chasm and then slowly stepped back – but the entirety of her life, could be open to scrutiny. Is this what David had meant when he’d spoken of fear of discovery? He had discovered something within her, and truth be told she had discovered something within herself: she was lonely, she was
wanting
, and in the moment that he had reached out and made contact she had given more of herself than she could remember doing for a decade. She had surprised herself with her openness, her willingness to be led, but led only so far: to the edge, but back again. Temptation and passion had risen to the surface of her being, but she retained a quiet reserve that would have allowed her to walk only a certain number of steps before pausing, holding her breath, judging the moment, and then retreating. Was this love? Was she – after all – now
rising into
love?
She smiled at the thought, watched the small crow’s-feet and laughter lines around her eyes and mouth as her expression changed, and wished that her father were there.
How goes it Annie?
It’s okay Dad … how goes you?
Oh, you know? Can’t complain. But let’s talk about you … how was your day?
I met a man, Dad, a man I think I could fall for.
Is that so? Tell me about him
.