Chapter 5: Denial Under the Keyboard — The Breaking Point

Twenty-three days. I’d sent the first text on Friday morning, standing in the pantry with the door stuck open and my thumb shaking.

Margot: Under the keyboard. Your mouth. Thursday.

Four minutes. I timed them.

Ansel: thursday. wear something that comes off with one hand.

Margot: And if I don’t?

Ansel: then i tune the piano and leave.

That was all, for a whole week. I read it perhaps two hundred times. I read it in the bath and in the car and at a charity lunch in Bowness, under the table, while a woman told me about her hip.

Thursday I wore a pleated grey skirt that fell just past the knee, a soft black jumper, and under the skirt a pair of black silk knickers with a single ribbon at each hip. One tug. One hand. I’d tied the bows at eight that morning in front of the wardrobe, and I’d been damp since the second one.

Ilse was at her dentist. Edmund’s blinds were up, and he was at his desk in a pale blue shirt with his phone beside him, typing. The rain had stopped for once, and the courtyard was bright and wet and horribly clear. With the lid up, the bench end was hidden from him. My face would not be. If he looked up he would see his wife sitting at his piano, and nothing else.

Ansel tuned for forty minutes first. He actually tuned. I sat beside him on the bench with my knees pressed together and my hands folded in my lap like a woman waiting for a train, and nearly lost my mind. Forty-eight years old, in silk ties, for a man of twenty-five. Every time the thought came I made myself sit up straighter.

When he laid the lever down on the felt, he didn’t look at me.

“Take them off,” he said. “Give them to me.”

“Here?”

“You asked for here.”

I reached under my skirt. One tug on the left ribbon. A breath. One on the right. The silk loosened against me, and I lifted my hips half an inch off the leather so it could slide free, and felt him watch that small lift as if it were the first thing my body had ever done for him. I drew the knickers out from under the pleats and put them into his open hand. They were warm. The narrow strip at the gusset was wet through, and I thought I might die of it.

He didn’t close his fingers. He looked at the black silk lying in his palm for a long moment, the way he’d looked at the scratch on the pin. Then he looped it over two knuckles, turned sideways on the bench so his thigh lay hard along mine, and slid his hand back under my skirt.

Up the inside of my knee. Up the soft inner thigh, the silk trailing ahead of his knuckles like a breath. I parted my knees before he could ask. His other hand came to rest flat on my left knee, no pressure at all, just there, holding me open by suggestion.

He drew the silk across me.

One long pass, front to back, the lightest pressure. Then back to front. The first time it was cool. By the third it was the temperature of my skin, and slick, and it dragged differently every time: slippery over my lips, a faint catch as it crossed my clit, where he tilted his knuckles so the edge of the fabric snagged. I was so swollen it caught on me. I was so wet it clung.

“Ansel.”

“Shh.”

Back and forth. The same patient pace as his lever. My hands gripped the edge of the bench until my knuckles went white. A tremor started in my inner thighs and climbed, a fine, steady shaking that reached my shoulders and then my jaw, and I clenched down around nothing at all, and across the courtyard Edmund reached for his coffee.

“You’re making it wet all over again,” Ansel murmured.

“Then stop touching me with it.”

“Say that like you mean it.”

I couldn’t. He knew I couldn’t.

He brought the silk out from under my skirt and lifted it to my face and pressed it against my lips.