“No, suh. You ain’t got to go. I mean, you don’t got to go,” she replied.
He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties.
“Mr. Julian, ain’t you gonna use somet’ing?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window.
There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person’s before.
“You feel bad about somet’ing, Mr. Julian?”
“What I do is a sin. I’ve made you part of it, too.”
She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. “Feel my heart beating? It ain’t a sin when a woman’s heart beats like that,” she said, and held him with her eyes.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t give you satisfaction,” he said.
“It’s all right, s
uh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet’ing,” she said.
Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins, leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience.
Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom.
“I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night,” he said.
“I can do it, suh.”
“No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That’s where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I’m away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you.”
There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled.
Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave.
“Good night, Ladice,” he said.
She looked at him indifferently and did not answer.
You gonna be back. Won’t be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.
The following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle’s nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladice climbed the stairs and stood in Mrs. LaSalle’s doorway in her maid’s black dress and frilled apron. “Yes, ma’am?” she said.
Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grillwork over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle’s skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind.
“What happened to the other nigra girl?” she asked.
“Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma’am,” Ladice replied.
“That sounds like someone’s fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you.”
Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle’s pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed.
“Why, you’re a juicy little thing, aren’t you?” she said.
“Ma’am?”