Gabriel handed it to Sara, meeting her eyes head-on. She took it from him, wide-eyed, a question clearly in her expression. But all she said was “Thanks,” in a gravelly whisper.
“I recommend sipping it like wine or a beer. Don’t toss it all back at once. Why don’t we go sit down and watch TV or play cards or something. Do you play gin rummy?” He actually despised playing cards, because while he appreciated the logic of the games, he didn’t enjoy being subjected to chance, which was what pulling cards always was. But he would play cards with Sara if she wanted to. They couldn’t just sit there while she drank. He couldn’t just sit there while she drank.
“Cards would be fun. I was a card shark in my dorm in college.” She took a very tentative sip from her glass. Her face screwed up. “Well, it’s no margarita.”
He wouldn’t know. He’d never had a margarita. They hadn’t been on the menu in the nineteenth century and Gabriel hadn’t had a drink since Prohibition. “Lick some sugar if it’s that bad.”
She did, sticking the tip of her tongue onto the absinthe spoon and tasting the sugar that had remained behind, clumped from the water. Gabriel turned away, retreating to the living room in search of a deck of cards. He couldn’t watch her, couldn’t stare at the pink, wet tip of her tongue and not imagine touching it with his own, feeling it on his body, thrusting his own inside her mouth, her inner thighs.
It had been too long for him. He had stayed away from women entirely in the last eighty years. It had been easier in the early part of the twentieth century to visit a woman anonymously in Storyville and know she had no ability to track him down. He had made sure to have sex with women whose senses were dulled from drugs and alcohol, so they wouldn’t remember, wouldn’t respond to the interaction, wouldn’t want him irrationally and unnaturally. He could appease his physical urges and get the hell out before there were consequences.
But it wasn’t that easy anymore. There was no anonymity. Anyone could find another person if they really wanted to. And the thought of going to the lowest of the desperate low, the women who were strung out on crack and littered with disease, living on the streets, offended his aesthetics, not to mention his sense of right and wrong. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, use a woman like that for his base, physical satisfaction, and he wasn’t attracted to sex for the simple sake of release anymore. He could do that on his own.
And there was no way, absolutely no way, he would engage in a sexual relationship with a woman he knew, someone who would potentially fall for him, become addicted to him. He couldn’t subject any woman—like Sara—to that, not even for the most desperate sexual want. It was also true what he had told Sara, that sex was lifting the lid off of his control, and he wasn’t sure he could handle the consequences. So he had been celibate for nearly eight decades, and was feeling the effect of that acutely and painfully.
His hand could take the edge off, but it could never replace the feeling of burying himself inside a woman.
So he moved away from Sara, out of touching distance. After digging cards out of a drawer, he sat in a chair across from the couch, dragging it up to the coffee table. He busied himself packing up their Chinese food while Sara wandered in, sipping the absinthe.
“It gets better with each sip,” she said. “Maybe that’s because I’m actually killing my taste buds or something.”
“Maybe. Do you want to deal?”
“No, you go ahead.” She took another sip.
Gabriel found himself getting tenser as her glass emptied, while Sara got chattier, looser. With each sip, she relaxed her shoulders a little more, allowed her knees to gape apart another inch. While he gripped his playing cards, bending them in the tight fan he held, she waved hers carelessly around as she spoke.
And she talked about everything. Work. Housing. Him. On and on as he watched her get quickly and giddily intoxicated.
“I like my job,” she said. “I really should go back. Don’t you think? Except I’m afraid of screwing up. I don’t sleep at all anymore. Did I tell you that? Of course I told you that.”
He couldn’t even get a word in and she was onto her apartment. “My couch is purple. I hate purple. It’s a rich, syrupy color. It’s medicinal. And I would never wear purple. It’s like a cure for coughs on your clothes. The only time I like purple is when it’s a flower. Irises are beautiful.”
Gabriel discarded, not sure what the hell he was supposed to say to that.
But it didn’t matter because Sara was plowing through her second glass and speaking her thoughts out loud with confidence and clarity.
“Play the piano for me, Gabriel.”
“No.” The idea wasn’t even remotely appealing.
“Please. Pretty please?” She stuck out her bottom lip and pouted, her blue eyes glassy and bright from the alcohol. “I want to hear you play.”
“No. I told you I don’t hear music anymore.”
“You’re just being stubborn.” She tossed back the remainder of her glass. “How much am I supposed to drink? I don’t feel drunk at all. Just sort of relaxed, like everything is sharp and focused. I feel very logical, like all my thoughts are better organized. Am I acting different?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t a sloppy drunk—that wasn’t what the absinthe did. But it gave the illusion of intelligence to the drinker, like every thought one had was utterly brilliant. “You’re very chatty.”
“Oh.” She fanned herself with her five-card spread. “Am I bugging you?”
“No.” What she was doing was turning him on. Her legs were wide apart, her skirt hitching up past her knees. Her tank-top strap had fallen off her shoulder and she hadn’t bothered to pull it back up. “I like to hear you talk.”
Because if she stopped talking and decided to touch him, they were going to have a serious problem.
“You don’t talk enough.” Her finger came up and shook at him in reprimand. “You’re like Mystery Man.”
That made him smile. “Maybe I’m not worth listening to.”
“Or maybe you’re meant to express yourself through painting and music, not spoken words.”
That ripped the smile off his face. She might as well have kicked him in the groin. “Sara . . .” He meant it as a warning, to let it go, that she was too close, crossing a boundary, treading into something that was none of her business.