I cleared my throat. “After this, you should hang out for a while. You know, just enjoy a nice soak. If you want to tell me where your phone is, I could play some soothing music.”
“Don’t need a phone, when I got you,” he answered. “How about you help me relax right now by singing me something in French. Anything but ‘La Vie en Rose.’”
I stared at him, stunned by the request.
“That’s one of your many talents, non? I thought I heard something about you always singing French around the house.”
“Yes. Back when I was in high school,” I admitted. It seemed that Mama Fairgood had told him a lot about me. “I had this teacher who made us memorize songs and sing them to the whole class. But…”
I was about to point out that “La Vie en Rose” was pretty much the only thing any lapsed French student could still sing by heart. But then I remembered my obsessed-with-Carla-Bruni phase, when she was the First Lady of France.
“Quelqu’un m’a dit,” one of her biggest hits of all time, suddenly came back to me like it was yesterday and I was memorizing it for Madame Hebert’s Advanced French class.
Running the towel down his muscular arms, I sang about the fleetingness of life. How it passed in an instant, the same as a withering rose, and how that bastard, time, made coats from our grief. However…
The refrain about how someone had told the singer that an unidentified “you” still loved her lodged in my throat.
“Go on,” Hades said. His voice was a dark shadow in the dim bathroom. “Finish your song.”
I refocused on my pronunciation and quavered through the refrain as quickly as I could before getting to the second pessimistic verse.
I’d been just a girl in high school. More concerned with getting the enunciation right and earning my A+ than understanding the words. Also, I got to get away with saying the word “bastard” in French.
But the song hit way different as an adult. Sad chorus. Hopeful refrain. Confession that she didn’t actually remember who told her about the still-held secret love. Until it ended with the original bittersweet verse and a refrain that didn’t sound nearly as full of possibilities as it did toward the beginning. Yes, the poetic you still loved the singing me, and then…
Nothing. Nothing changed for the singer, I realized. Nothing came from hoping.
There was just a bunch of silence when the song was done.
Silence that covered everything and made it still. I was no longer moving the towel over his body. We were two people, frozen in place, as if we were posing for one of the paintings that local artists peddled to tourists in Jackson Square.
Eventually, he said, “You have a pretty voice, ma belle.”
“Thank you,” I barely managed.
“But you missed the most important part of my body.”
Oh, no. Oh, no. I glanced at the long thing underneath the water, and my entire body flooded with heat. Not the kind I couldn’t stop from happening when I watched him have sex with that redhead against the wall. But the mortified kind that washed over me in waves whenever I had to tell a potential boyfriend about the virgin contract. Did he expect me to…?
He smirked. “My face. You forgot to wash my face.”
His face. I could tell he was laughing at me, that he liked seeing the naive virgin squirm.
My embarrassment suddenly gave way to anger. I was so sick of this. So sick of him having all the power.
Instead of washing his face like a good little subservient virgin, I dipped my hand farther into the water and wrapped the towel around the thing between his legs.
His entire face went slack with shock. “What are you doing?”
To my own shock, the thing I was holding came to sudden life. From snake to staff in a long and thicker-than-expected instant.
He was so much larger than any boy I’d ever touched, including Lukas. My pulse skittered.
But then I glanced at him and forced myself to calm. I liked the surprised expression on his face, the stunned and wary look in his usually mocking eyes. It was as if I was the predator all of sudden. Not him.
And that made me bold.
No, I wouldn’t suck his dick. Not ever. And especially not on camera.
