Nothing Lord Eryq did ever left Rosalind feeling as deliriously wanton and powerful as she did immediately following a dustup between him and some unnamed flavor of the day with whom she’d chosen to innocently flirt. In that invariable instant that always found Eryq confronting the unfortunate, Rosalind was both girl and woman. She was goddesshood unbridled, undisputed, immortal omnipotence through whom flowed and to whose whims bent all the energies of the universe. She was an ebullient child at play, guiding two posturing puppets in circles about one another, choreographing their ritual dance to first blood, a ceremony that fed her evolution like nothing else.
Rosalind’s hands stole impressions of Eryq’s physique like lusting thieves. Her fingernails bit into his beefy shoulders. Sending his fingertips to swim amidst the curly sable sea of her hair, Eryq filled the windy, berry-painted O of her mouth with his tongue and discovered electricity in her kiss.
Lord Eryq’s gladiatorial spirit ran as rampant across her ivory nakedness as it had across the jaw of the lime-eyed brother at the chophouse. Rosalind lapped the aphrodisiac of his sweat from his every sinew as he stalked her most sensitive regions. Spreading spastic hues of coral and rose in anticipation of his mouth, she could do little but dance along with his tongue where it raved inside her, coaxing forth honey-sweet viscosity to glaze her inner thighs. Every shiver that he inspired was a village burned, every frenetic gasp a terrain surmounted. He slashed. She burned. And in truth, this was the way she liked it.
The truth, too, was that instances like this were the only times that Rosalind felt equipped to suffer his company, or to allow herself the briefest respite from loathing him.
But a deal was a deal.
“You and your white bitch need to learn some motherfuckin’ consideration for the rest of the people living in this building,” Eryq heard upon opening his apartment door to squint into the light of dawn. He no longer wondered on mornings like this how early his neighbor and onetime bedmate Celestine must have gotten out of bed in order to greet him at this hour, or how long she’d spent crouched beside her apartment door listening for the sound of him opening his door to retrieve his daily newspaper. It disgusted him sufficiently just to know that she had.
It served him right, and Eryq knew it did, that his every morning-after should begin with the crowing of the harpy next door. With him alone rested all fault for his having bro
ken the first rule of the one-night stand: you never hook up with someone who lives close enough to you to track your every move. He would not seek to blame it on the general air of New Yorkers’ emotional and sexual neediness that had marked that first New Year’s Eve following 9/11, nor upon the fifth of Cutty Sark that he’d helped his partner Tulane demolish at the New Year’s party they’d all attended in those days before Rosalind, before the club to which he now belonged.
Because he’d heard her voice before realizing he’d heard it, Eryq’s reaction to the head stuck out of the next apartment door down the hall from his was not immediate. His brain had registered only the vaguest impressions of scowling espresso-dark features, of a black gauze headwrap, of words that seemed to lean, indicative of the speaker’s Caribbean lineage. Failing to get an initial rise out of him, she squawked a second time.
“I know you can hear me, simple-actin’ motherfucker. We sure as hell heard the two of y’all going at each other like motherfuckin’ savages. I got motherfuckin’ children over here. Little ones don’t need to be woke up in the middle of the damned night hearing that motherfuckin’ shit.”
“Those little ones whose delicate little ears you’re so concerned about,” Eryq replied, “you talk to them with the same mouth you’re using right now to talk to me?”
Blindsided by the question’s implication, then affronted by it, Celestine raged, “Nigga, fuck you. You and that nasty-ass club you belong to.” A rarity was the conversation between Eryq and Celestine that did not end on such a note.
“Go inside, Celestine,” Eryq sniffed. “If words like nigga and motherfucker represent the extent of your arsenal, then you’ll never defeat me in a war of words.”
He closed his apartment door and immediately forgot about Celestine.
Eryq could be an arrogant prick, and he knew it. Eryq could fuck like a god, and the devil was in him knowing this as well, and knowing that Rosalind knew it. Turning that arrogance on the general public and then racing home with him to reap the bedroom benefits of the resultant altercations was the best vehicle Rosalind had yet discovered for reconciling the two. It was also the most effective form of precoital masturbation she’d ever known. Nothing brought the heat like watching her lover fight for her as if she were a prize to be won, as if her orgasms were spoils of war to be earned upon battlefields of her covert choosing. Knowing this to be a fool’s fantasy, one more befitting a prepubescent, did nothing to diminish Rosalind’s arousal at the mere thought. Their time spent together was as much her indulgence as it was his victory lap, one to be savored in any and every manner she and her victorious warrior saw fit to choose. That was the game’s first, final, and only rule.
“So what do you tell people when they ask you about meeting men the way you met me?” Eryq asked her the following evening after lovemaking.
“Those who have to ask wouldn’t understand it,” she assured him. “Those evolved enough to grasp the concept aren’t blind. They know what this is. They know what we are.”
“All right, then. By your estimation, what are we?”
Rosalind grinned at him. “Sugar, any way you spin it, we’re playas. Of a greater game.”
“Eryq might be an asshole, but I cum hard every time,” she would later tell her husband by cell phone. “Behave and tonight I’ll let you hear us fuck.”
She kept her word. Eryq came without suspecting anything.
Every so often, his guilt overwhelmed him.
“Hello?” The cracked, listless female voice sounded smaller than Eryq had known it to be in the past.
“Hey, baby,” he said, hoping the term of affection sounded less strange to her ear than it felt leaving his tongue. The five months since their last face-to-face encounter might as well have been five decades for the awkwardness he felt now.
“Hey. What do you want?”
It was the one question to which Eryq had failed to rehearse a satisfactory answer. “I don’t know. I guess I just miss you a little.”
“We agreed not to speak.”
“I just…wanted to hear your voice for a minute,” he admitted, cursing his weakness.
“Well, time’s up. Good-bye, Eryq.”
“Ananya, wait, please? I have some things to say.” He’d anticipated that this conversation would not go easily. That hadn’t kept him from hoping it might.