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“What’s this?”
Madeleine glanced over her shoulder at Claudia, holding a crumpled yellow sheet of paper with a jagged edge, as if it had been ripped out of a book and hastily folded into uneven squares. She turned back to where she was marking down Claudia’s measurements with a look of disinterest. “A poem from my schoolgirl days. Your manners are appalling, you know.”
“You haven’t had a single polite thing to say all the time I’ve known you.” It was true, and Claudia’s favorite thing about her: Her mouth was like unswept glass, always cutting when Claudia least expected it.
She considered the poem, worked the page between her fingers, and found it worn soft as fabric. It was written in Latin, a language Claudia learned by translating dusty texts across the continental US. That had been over a decade and three languages ago, though, and now, her memory stumbled through the lines, off-balance. Atque—had that been the same as the Spanish word aunque? Or the French atavique?
She rummaged through the manuals and catalogs littered on the desk, hoping to find a dictionary. Madeleine walked over and slapped her hand away.
“The pins,” she scolded.
Claudia ignored her. “What’s it say?”
Fascinatingly, Madeleine’s expression took on a blank, unreadable quality as she examined it—unnecessarily. She’d recognized the poem from five feet away as soon as Claudia picked it up, and now she was stalling for time, trying to decide which lie she could make ring true.
Claudia could easily pluck the truth from her mind, but she’d learned that some humans were eerily attuned to mindreading. They sensed her presence in their minds and locked up like snails sensing danger. She could never guess which category any given person fell into until she tried it, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it to Madeleine. For the first time, she understood the stories Louis told of Paul sometimes. Maybe in this regard the three of them were just alike: Given something beloved and fragile, their first instinct was to wrap it in paper and put it on a high shelf out of reach.
Finally, she said, “It’s a love poem by Catullus. One of his most famous. Nothing of particular interest.”
“And that’s why you have it hidden under samples and bills.”
They were standing close, close enough that Claudia could smell her cologne—vanilla, musk, and linen; almost heavy enough to be a perfume, but not quite—and imagine they were back outside the theater, Claudia throwing her leg over the closest Vespa like she’d done it a million times before. Imagine revving the engine and pretending she wasn’t hyper-aware of Madeleine’s hands on her lower belly or her mouth damp and warm against her hair. It was embarrassing how badly Claudia wanted to impress, wanted Madeleine to think this was who Claudia was. Not a girl dressed in a doll costume who walked the Parisian streets handing out flyers, but a woman who drove other women home.
“Yes, well.” Madeleine shrugged, setting the poem face-down with her fingertips. Claudia spared a moment to notice how attractive her wrists were.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said, only realizing she’d spoken when Madeleine’s gaze jerked to meet hers. “The poem.”
The corner of Madeleine’s mouth curled into one of those rare half-smiles, the kind Claudia was seeing more and more of each passing night. It was an awkward expression on her. Claudia rather adored it.
For the second time that night, her mouth moved without permission. “I want to keep it.”
Amused, Madeleine said, “Your manners are truly dreadful,” before pressing the poem into Claudia’s open palm. Reflexively, her fingers curled inward at the pressure, protective.
*
Claudia wasn’t Louis, who loved cars with the same zeal he reserved for books and despicable men. He tried to teach her about them only once. “You see this funny claw-lookin’ thing attached to the hub? It’s only got a single control arm. Clean design, but not much flexibility. Gets the job done if you live in a city, yeah, but for higher-performance cars, you wanna add another arm right here. The tires all get a mind of their own that way, better contact with the track, and you minimize drag.”
Absently thinking of the pianist (her favorite) two blocks away rehearsing an insipid little Berlin cabaret, Claudia said, “This conversation is a drag.”
But now here Claudia was, sneaking away each night to eat motorcyclists on the outskirts of the city only to drive back to Madeleine’s shop, where she would smoke a Galouises on the curb and wait for Madeleine to come out so she could ask her, “Want a ride?”
They drove aimlessly around the city those first few times, sometimes stopping to buy a chocolate crepe or a tarte tatin. On their third drive, they found the only other ladies' shop besides Madeleine’s open until late, and Claudia used the change from her collection of motorcyclists to buy Madeleine a pair of heels that made her legs look long and beautiful.
“How do I look?” she asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror. Claudia wanted to pin her up on her wall.
“Tall,” she said. “No man will ever date you.”
Then, on the night Claudia drove them to a hill that overlooked the city, Madeleine cornered her against the side of the bike and kissed her. The engine was still hot from the drive, clicking as it cooled, but there was no universe where Claudia was going to say no to Madeleine, not ever, so she did what she had been dreaming of doing for months: She caught her fingers in Madeleine’s hair and yanked her head sharply back to lick a long stripe up her throat, her free hand reaching down to fist the hem of Madeleine’s skirt.
“Have you ever done this before?” she asked as Claudia mouthed along her jaw, down her throat, along the wings of her collarbones. She shivered when Claudia grazed her teeth over her jugular, kept making these small noises whenever she touched her tits that sent a kick of heat up Claudia’s spine. She wanted to rip Madeleine’s clothes off with her teeth. She wanted to eat her whole.
“Yes,” she lied, fingers tracing the ever-tempting shape of Madeleine’s mouth, but Claudia was patient. First things first.
She sank to her knees.
It took her a while to figure out what to do, what Madeleine liked, how to touch her without hurting her, but soon Claudia had Madeleine’s leg hitched over her shoulder and her face buried in her cunt. Madeleine locked her fingers at the back of her skull and fucked Claudia’s mouth with a kind of unselfconsciousness that took Claudia’s breath away. “Yes. Your mouth is wonderful, darling. Oh, you’re so good to me. Keep going, keep going. God, you fuck like a dream.”
After, once Claudia’s hair was an unsalvageable wreck, she said, “That wasn’t at all the behavior of the prim Parisian girl you claim to be,” from between her trembling thighs.
Madeleine’s chest heaved as she stared at the starless night sky and said, “Okay,” before spreading Claudia out on the grass to ruin her completely.
“This is a beautiful dress on you,” she said as she pushed a second finger inside, her thumb rubbing slow circles around her clit. She hadn’t waited for Claudia to undress, hadn’t even taken the time to slide her underwear off, and it was so deliciously, unbelievably hot. “I’ll have to make you a new one.”
“Pay you a pretty penny for it.” She was rocking now, a frantic rolling of her hips that felt out of her control. It was like thirst, the way all she could think was more and would do fucking anything to make it happen. “How’s that sound? Maybe I’ll wear it next time, show up at the shop, send your customers away. You’d get pissed at me, but I’d make it up to you, wouldn’t I? Get real nice and let you fuck me right in front of your storefront windows.”
“Claudia—“
“You want that?”
She whined high in her throat, slipping into French. “Yes. Yes.”
Claudia gasped as Madeleine picked up the pace, really letting her have it. “Kiss me,” she said, thinking of the poem Madeleine stole from the Catholic orphanage, how badly Claudia wanted to steal Madeleine for herself, and if she finished this without getting kissed again she was going to die. Da mi basia mille.
Even after Claudia came, Madeleine didn’t stop kissing her.
*
Kiss after kiss after kiss: pressed up against Madeleine’s desk at the shop; in an alleyway, licking a stray bit of whipped cream from the corner of Madeleine’s mouth; in the backseat of a Bugatti she stole from a dead American tourist; in bed, tender and chaste. Give me a thousand kisses, and give me a hundred more. Gold proof that Claudia couldn’t be trusted to want in moderation, that there was a bottomless well in her that would keep taking and taking and wouldn’t stop until Madeleine was dead.
“It’s fucked up,” Claudia said into Madeleine’s chest.
“Very fucked up,” she agreed. “But I would let you.”
Claudia sat up. She felt hollowed out and almost sick. “Don’t just say that,” she snapped. “Don’t just—I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” She sat up, too, the covers falling away from them both. Madeleine whispered in the half-dark of the bedroom, “Oh, my darling.”
“I don’t need your pity,” she said tightly. “I don’t need you to say things because you think I’m some pathetic fucking Nazi youth begging for your attention.”
“You know very well I’ve never pitied you.” She shook her head and sighed, her expression balancing on the razor edge between irritated and resigned. “I have seen you read a person in the manner of a moment, yet you’ve shared my bed all these months and still you doubt.”
When she stayed silent, Madeleine went on. “You have all that I am, for as long as I am.”
Claudia had always been good with words. Words were all she had, but the year was 1949 in Paris, she was in bed with a mortal woman, and this was everything that Claudia had wanted since she’d learned what want was. All the words in all the languages she’d ever learned fell away from her like water through a sieve, leaving but two behind.
“Kiss me,” she said.
It was alright. Soon, she would have eternity to tell Madeleine the right ones.
-
*
“Let us live, my Lesbia, and love,
and the rumors of rather stern old men
let us value all at just one penny!
Suns may set and rise again;
for us, when once the brief light has set,
an eternal night must be slept.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand, then a hundred;
then, when we have performed many thousands,
we shall shake them into confusion, in order that we might not know,
and in order not to let any evil person envy us,
when he knows that there are so many of our kisses.”
- Catullus 5
-
*