Chapter 9: The Guest Room at 2 A.M.

Seven days. One week. I’d started counting it in hours without meaning to.

A green velvet dress, bottle-dark, long-sleeved, falling to the ankle, the kind of dress that looks like it has nothing to hide. Nothing under it. As promised. The velvet was heavy and warm and brushed against my bare skin every time I moved, and I spent the whole of the afternoon hyperaware of it, laying the table, arranging white roses, feeling the nap of it slide over my hips and between my thighs with every step, until I was slick before anyone had arrived.

Thursday’s tuning had been all business. Ilse on the landing the whole morning, Edmund in the music room for the full hour with his coffee, reading the paper at the island and asking about hammers. Ansel and I hadn’t so much as brushed hands. I’d gone to bed that night so wound up I couldn’t lie still.

Edmund had invited the Asquiths to stay the night. Julian was sixty, his business partner, a big, loud, genial man with a laugh you could hear from the lake. Celeste was fifty-five, fine-boned and silver-haired, and said about a tenth as much as her husband and noticed about ten times as much. I’d always liked her. Tonight I was afraid of her.

And Edmund had invited Ansel. “As thanks,” he’d said. “Brennan’s gone above and beyond. We ought to feed him.”

He’d put him on my right.

Candles. The long walnut table in the dining room, the glass wall black and running with rain. Edmund at the head, carving lamb and talking about the Hammerklavier. Julian opposite me, already on his third glass of the Margaux. Celeste to his left, watching the candles. Ansel beside me in a dark jumper, his knee six inches from mine under the tablecloth.

By the soup, the six inches had gone.

By the lamb, his hand was on my knee, over the velvet. Resting. I went on eating. I asked Julian about his boat.

When Edmund stood up to fetch another bottle, Ansel’s hand slid down and found the hem of my dress, and gathered it, a fistful of velvet at a time, until his palm lay on my bare thigh. His fingertips drew small circles, and moved higher. They found I’d kept my promise. His fingers stopped, then pressed once, hard.

Then Julian stood, tapping his glass.

“A toast,” he boomed. “To Edmund. Who will next Saturday give his finest recital yet!”

“Hear, hear,” said Celeste.

As everyone lifted their glasses, Ansel’s fingers pushed into me, two of them. I was so wet from the afternoon of velvet that they went in without any resistance at all.

I lifted my glass. I said, “To Edmund.” My voice held. His fingers curled and pressed, and I drank my wine and felt it go down my throat as if I’d swallowed a candle.

“Margot,” Celeste said, turning her pale eyes on me. “Edmund tells me you used to play. The cello. Professionally?”

I felt his fingers stop inside me. Waiting. He was listening too.