The Undoing of Daisy Edwards (A Time for Scandal) Read Online Free PDF Page B

sigh, and started pulsing around me straightaway, but pulling me in higher, her nails digging into my shoulders, urging me on, as if I needed any urging, and I thrust like a wild animal and she laughed, this strange sound, and said yes, yes, yes, over and over, a harsh whisper in my ear, with each thrust, and I came quick and hard, harder than the first time, and just as lost.
    She put her hand over my mouth. That’s what made me realise I’d cried out. Her hand, soft on my mouth. I looked over her shoulder and saw my face in the mirror, skin dark and flushed, pupils huge. I barely recognised myself.
    ‘Don’t,’ she said, shaking her head slightly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Apologise.’ She gave me one of those smoky smiles, reading my thoughts before I had them. I’m not sure how I felt about that. I’m still not sure.
    ‘I’m not usually so—did I hurt you?’ I asked her.
    ‘No, but I think I left my mark on you.’ She pointed to my shoulder, and there it was, a purpling bruise where she’d bitten me. ‘I’m not usually so, either,’ she said, ‘but that’s the point, isn’t it?’
    She was right, but standing there, naked and emptied, I wasn’t that clear about what the point was, though I knew there was one—and that, really, she was avoiding it. I shrugged. I picked up my clothes and headed for the tiny bathroom in the corner of the dressing-room. Her self-possession bothered me, but when I came back and caught her unaware, wrapped in one of those Japanese kimono things, there was a moment, a split-second, when she was standing there, staring off into space and looking quite as shipwrecked as I felt.
    Then it was as if she’d smoothed her face over with her hand. She picked up my coat and handed it to me. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the play,’ she said.
    Making it perfectly plain that she wanted me gone. Making it perfectly plain that she was determined to stick to what we agreed—it couldn’t mean anything. Exactly what I wanted. Thought I wanted, until that point. Then something inside me sort of shifted. I took my jacket, but I shook my head. ‘Get dressed,’ I said, ‘we’re not done yet.’
    Daisy
    Was that the start of it? The point where, if I’d just ignored him, I could have walked away?
It can’t mean anything
, I’d said to him, but I hadn’t really been talking to Dominic, I’d been talking to myself. It couldn’t mean anything, because I couldn’t go through that again. I wouldn’t. I’m pretty sure now that it was already too late. I’m pretty certain that even if I’d simply left him as soon as I woke up in his bed, it would have been too late. Looking at Dominic, it was like looking in the mirror, in a strange way. Not that I saw myself, but I saw inside myself.
    Good grief, how utterly self-indulgent that sounds. Like something one of Poppy’s Hollywood friends would say. I don’t believe in fate, but if it had been another day, any other day than
that
day, that Dominic had hauled me out of the police cell, would I have done what I did? No, absolutely not. But it was that day, and I did do what I did, and I’d just done it again, and it was every bit as good. So when he told me
we’re not done yet
, I told myself that this was different, that because Dominic was nothing like Anthony I wouldn’t be so stupid as to care. He was my drug, that was all. I’d found my drug, and I was going to keep taking it until I didn’t need it any longer. That’s what I thought to myself as I pretended to consider telling him that we were done. That’s what I thought to myself as I washed in that tiny cubicle, and behind the screen I pulled on my favourite Chanel, the claret velvet with the long sash. Dominic was my drug, and I was Dominic’s drug, and we’d use each other, and then when we’d had enough of each other, we’d be—better? I didn’t think that far ahead. Looking back, my capacity for self-delusion astonishes me.
    * * *
    ‘We could go to the Café de Paris,’