Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark Page A

mouth, his long fingers loosening the ribbons at her neck, slipping the silk from her shoulders. She sighed as his lips moved down the slope of her neck to her collarbone, finding the dip at the base of her throat, the tilt of her breastbone. She was tired, her body unresponsive, but it was several weeks since he had come to her and she had missed him. She clasped his head, burying her fingers in his red-gold hair, straining to stir in herself the heat of old desire. In the morning she would tell him about the letter. She closed her eyes as his tongue flickered between her breasts and over the cool skin of her belly, his hands tracing the curve of her hips and buttocks, the soft slopes of her thighs, easing her legs apart. She let them fall open. He pressed his forehead against her belly and the push of his tongue was hot and urgent.
    Afterwards he fell almost immediately asleep. Maribel slept too, though at about four o’clock she woke and slipped out of bed to smoke a cigarette. On the dark-smudged pillow Edward slept on, his mouth slightly open and his hair tumbled like a child’s. Maribel watched him, the jolt of the cigarette bright in her, and the desire that earlier had eluded her flared like a match in her.
    In Mexico they had made love almost every night, biting back their cries so as not to waken the dogs. There had been a hunger to her then, a wantonness she had not known she possessed. On the dusty afternoons, as the heavy sun thickened the air and the mules drowsed with their heads low, she imagined him against her and the thought had quickened her breath and set her blood to racing until she burned like the night sky, her skin alive with one hundred thousand white-hot pinpricks of light. She had not known it was possible to feel that way about a man, that a sideways glance might cause her heart to turn over, the taste of his name on her tongue enough to melt her flesh. At the house on the Calle de León, for the sake of discretion, the Señora had assigned the gentlemen names of her own choosing. Edward she had introduced as Santiago.
    ‘Sylvia,’ he had said, taking Maribel’s hand. ‘What a pretty name,’ and he had given her a private smile as though he told her a secret. She had not smiled back. Names might mean nothing in a place of that kind but it was discourteous to draw attention to the pretence.
    Privately, of course, the girls gave the regular men names of their own. There was Bisabuelo, the ancient lantern-jawed count, and Apestoso, who smelled like an old dog, and Sudoroso, whose perspiration gathered in his eyebrows and scattered like raindrops when he neared the end. Angélique’s nicknames were always the unkindest. Her most regular client she called Chinga, or Dog-fuck.
    Sometimes, late at night, when the work was over and the lights in the drawing room extinguished, she and Angélique had sat on the balcony, the long windows open behind them, smoking cigarettes to discourage the mosquitoes. Below them, in the courtyard, the fountain sang quietly to itself in the darkness. Angélique was from Marseilles, or so she said. She was saving up her money until she had enough to buy a place of her own. Maribel had not liked Angélique much. She had dark eyes and a full mouth and a body that swelled like ripe fruit inside its skin. Her mother had been a great beauty but her father died and her mother’s new husband had difficulty remembering which bedroom was his. Angélique had been obliged to leave. When she talked of men she made scissors with her fingers.
    Edward had come to the house every other day for three weeks. Then he went away. Though she did not admit it Maribel missed him, the clean pallor of his skin, the way he talked to her afterwards, as though she were a real person.
    A month later he returned and took her away. He had sat beside her as the train bore them towards Paris and, when she let her head rest sleepily upon his shoulder, he had kissed her forehead and told her that no