Spotted Lily Read Online Free PDF Page B

response. The harlequin glasses dropped to the floor, and I heard the lovely sound of crunching underfoot as their owner rushed to our table.
    She leaned toward Brett, breathing down his chest.
    'I'm only studying,' she panted. 'But that's the best act I've ever seen. Have I heard of you?'
    'I dare say,' Brett said, quenching his thumb with a panache that was sickening to watch. I had never come close to that level of self-assurance.
    'My dear Angela,' he drawled, 'Would you be so kind as to order for us both.'
    The coffee came, and then the cake, with parasols.
    He stuck his finger in his coffee, tasted it, and made a face. He stuck two fingers in his cake ( Over-the-Troppo: Troppo's own Devil's food cake Topped with Chocolate-covered Cherries, Filled with Hazelnut Cointreau Cream, and all Surrounded by a Lake of Raspberry Couli ) and held his fingers upright, splayed their widest. Then he tasted tentatively, each finger—one from the base up, the other from tip to base—at the same time, running the tips of his forked tongue up and down, down and up those fingers, and licking carefully around, sometimes having his tongue tips meet like mating snakes.
    He was doing it on purpose.
    'Eat,' he said.
    'I'm not hungry,' I answered.
    She was standing behind my chair like a waiter in a European restaurant. I could feel her there.
    'Eat,' he commanded, and handed me my fork, never taking his eyes from his fingers.
    I began to eat, choking back tears.
    The coffee was lukewarm.

    ~

    The finger and tongue performance ended. (I have excellent peripheral vision.)
    Then the next performance began.
    He removed the parasol from his cake and placed it by his plate. Then he played with his cake, using the long nail on his left little finger. I hadn't noticed this nail before, but it was the length of a hatpin.
    Every time I stopped eating, he stopped playing, and repeated his command.
    When he finally finished moving his food around, he stuck the parasol into it rakishly and sat back to admire his work. I was by this time finished with my cake, having pushed down the last of it.
    The mess on his plate was nothing less than something murdered for pleasure.
    He was not Gordon. Not at all.
    He got up and walked out of Troppo's. I followed him out.
    He was going in the wrong direction. Anyway, I needed to stop him. 'There wasn't any garlic,' I laughed (poorly).
    'That's true,' he said, slowing down. 'But I'm not a sweet tooth. And I like my hot drinks hot.'
    'We have to go back,' I told him gently. 'Home is the other way. 'And besides...' I had to add, hoping he wouldn't be angry, especially as it complicated matters because he hadn't paid the bill, which had never come. 'I forgot my sheets at Troppo's.'
    'You don't have to worry about them,' he said, stretching his lips in a rictus of a smile.
    He was trying. I felt enormously relieved.
    And that was so nice of him to remember the sheets, but where were they? He wasn't carrying anything that I could see.
    'You're not going back,' he explained, and began to walk again, away from home.
    'What?'
    'I can't live there,' he said.
    I grabbed his arm. 'But I do.' I could hear my voice shaking. 'We can move if you like. I'll give notice and we can look next week.'
    He peeled my hand from his arm, gently but firmly. 'No, my dear,' he said, and began walking again.
    His stride was so long that my side cramped.
    'But ... all my stuff is there!'
    He didn't deign to answer.
    There was a time when I was in a cathedral in Spain where the bannerless staircase corkscrewed up to a murk of infinity—and halfway up, I glanced down, towards blackness. I slid down the wall to grasp the stone step and the wall behind—unable to move, too frightened to cry. The next tourists found me, clogging the way. They tried to reason, but I was beyond that. As I heard their steps echo ever more faintly downwards, every muscle in my body locked except my sphincter, which relaxed so completely that half my insides, it seemed,