The ballroom of the Villa Molinari was bathed in celebratory golden light, the wine was a good vintage, and the service had been impeccable all evening with not even a crooked bowtie to complain about to senior staff, but the sickness that had been incubating in Florian Hohenberg since he’d arrived in Florence two weeks prior had now spread to his blood, and nothing—not the concert, not the dinner, not the party—was capable of diverting his attention.
Strangely, it wasn’t a physical illness; he felt good, strong even, a fact he attributed to Italy’s warm climate and lighter cuisine. Nor was its nature mental, though it made him more irritable and stole the enjoyment out of even the Prosecco, which Giacomo had painstakingly refilled every time it looked like he was about to run out. (“Grazie, Giacomo.” “Un piacere, signore.”) He was certain it hadn’t been caused by the musicians of La Filharmonie, who had been welcoming from the start and—even now—quoted his rehearsals in adoring tones to the VIPs who were in attendance, the same VIPs who sent curious and approving glances his way.
Not physical, nor mental, nor external—after ruling out those possibilities, what could even be left? Florian was mystified. Two weeks and he had spent most of it contemplating not the Lalo he was supposed to unravel, but his mystery malady. He thought he had gone to dinners, sat in cafés, and ordered gelato, but he had only the dimmest recollections of ever doing so and a stronger memory of the dread that accompanied each. Even now, with fewer than thirty-six hours left in the country, he was thinking about it, the conversation around him as distant to his ears as the shore from Milan. He wanted to relax, to appreciate his success in spite of his distraction, but it was not to be. The venerated maestro who had taken centre stage in the Teatro and the man currently sitting in his place were different entities, and he couldn’t resolve this mismatch of experience within himself no matter how hard he tried.
He took another sip of wine and looked out the window, into the darkness of the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. Surely there was some reprieve from the party and its cries of jubilation out there—surely there was something, anything, to distract him from his current predicament. The plaza was mostly empty at this hour, the Basilica being the only building around whose face people were still congregating. On the benches around the marble obelisk he spotted a handful of youths, students at the local universities, in all likelihood... but then a shadow flickered in a side street, and his eyes followed the movement before he could think. There, tucked into a corner of the Via Degli Avelli, were two lovers conversing; how charming the scene was against the backdrop of Italy, as opposed to Germany or Austria! Their silhouettes would occasionally touch hands, listing towards one another and longing to close the distance. Romeo and Juliet—or Benvolio and Mercutio, he amended as he observed the two of them. Realising the true nature of their relationship, he glanced away. He doubted he’d been invited to witness this intimate moment under the plausible deniability of night. And yet...
“Cousin Floh?”
He turned, more to conceal the fact that he had been spying than to see who it was that had interrupted his thoughts. He had heard that voice for thirteen years now, it had uttered his name thousands of times, and he could no more mistake it for someone else than he could Bach for Tchaikovsky. He glanced at the young woman standing in front of his table, still clad in concert black. She shook her short, wavy brown hair out of her eyes as he appraised her, the strands catching the light. “Yes, Greta?” he said.
Greta hesitated, then slid into the seat opposite him and set her champagne glass on the table without asking—suicide, if she had been anyone else. She seemed to understand that, too, and shot him an apologetic smile as she did so. “I, I realised I hadn’t congratulated you on the success of the—your concert yet. So I came to say hi.”
He glanced over where he had seen her last. One of the flautists, an energetic young man named Matteo, was looking in her direction in between bouts of laughter with his colleagues and looked away again when Florian caught his eye. “Ah. Somehow you have forgotten that this was your evening as well as mine,” he said. “Congratulations on your first taste as soloist in Italy, Frau Geigerin Neidhardt. I am certain it won’t be the last.”
She blushed—or, at least, he thought she did, because her face was already pleasantly rosy from cheek to cheek. Was it the champagne, the embarrassment from the attention she’d been getting, or the heat of one hundred and fifty bodies packed into a ballroom? Perhaps some combination of all three. “Oh, I—I don’t know.”
“I do. You’ve forfeited your right to be modest tonight, Greta. Think, your job was to do service to Lalo. And you did well.”
He held her gaze for the entirety of his response, and the pink in her cheeks slowly bloomed into a rash of scarlet. She dropped the eye contact a moment later; despite that, her eyes shone with a fierce pleasure, and the sight made something in Florian quake before it stilled.
What was that?
“You’re being so nice to me, Cousin Floh,” she said after taking a moment to recover. “I wish you were like that all the time.”
“If I were always ‘nice’ to you, I would be someone else entirely. And it wouldn’t mean anything.”
“Touché. I think. It is touché, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Touché. Touché, touché, touché. Doesn’t that just mean touch—‘touched’ in French? Why do people use it like that? ‘Ah, you’ve touched on a good point!’ Is that what it’s for?”
He stared at her long and hard. “I believe you are drunk.”
“I think you might be right. Or should I say touché again?”
“Tja. Be careful with that, yes? It’s far too easy to overindulge. If you pass out on your first unchaperoned trip outside of Germany, Jesus Maria, I’ll never hear the end of it from your father.”
Greta pressed her lips together, holding in laughter. “Will do. For your sake.”
They sat in silence for a bit then, observing the party, nursing their drinks. Matteo had broken off from the group and was now hugging the wall, a little closer to where the duo were sitting. A server stepped smoothly between him and a feather-hatted signora, spotted them, and approached with his silver tiers of pastries and light snacks; Greta seized the last petit four, a tiramisù, while Florian contented himself with an almond biscotti drizzled in chocolate. Once his companion’s attention had shifted squarely to her cake, he sneaked a glance out the window where the two lovers had been. They were gone, as were the churchgoers who had crowded the façade of the basilica—but it was late, after all. Perhaps he would do the same.
“So—” Greta again, this time a little more breezily. Florian wondered what she would say next, liberated from any sense of propriety. “So you’ve been to Flor, umm, Florence before?”
“A strange question.” He bit into the biscotti. “It does not really sound like a question. Who said I have been to la culla del Rinascimento in the past?”
The grey eyes blinked and focussed on him a third time, though they seemed to be having more difficulty with the task than they did ten minutes ago. “Well—Papa did.”
At that, Florian frowned. Had he gone to Florence with Ambrosius? It was at least twenty-five years ago—half his life, before Greta had even been born. He leafed through his memories, trying to hold on to the shadows that held promise, to turn up the brightness, but time had eroded them and there was barely anything left. He remembered the chandeliers of the concert hall, shimmering with the last silver note from the woodwinds. He remembered the face of his wife, pale and framed by her dark hair, smiling at him from the front row. He remembered his cousin as they examined a statuette at the Galleria degli Uffizi and Ambrosius, egging him on to raise hands with him and compare them to the bronze Apollo’s, said that Florian’s hands were more slender and graceful than either of theirs.
He remembered wanting to see his hands on Ambrosius’s broad shoulders, caressing his back, wrapped around his throat. No—no, he didn’t want to remember that, his spirit roiled with contempt at being reminded of his emotional adultery, but his blood—traitorous flesh—stirred. Ill. He was ill. Was this why?
Near him, movement. Greta had finished her tiramisù and was now fidgeting with her champagne glass, each tap of her nails against the crystal generating a buzz of electricity that rippled through the core of his being and left him cold. He grimaced. She was tipsy, utterly oblivious to the wound she had just opened, but he was fast losing control over his inner recesses and was soon to spill over into territory he did not know. How could he make her understand?
“Hm. I suppose your father was correct.”
“You suppose? But wouldn’t you remember?”
“No. I remember nothing.”
She made a noise and said something insignificant, like oh, that’s too bad or I guess it was a long time ago after all, and a flare of anger arose that he strangled before it ruined their night entirely. He bit his lower lip; he was fine, he told himself, he was fixating on something incredibly minor. He’d forgotten about it for years. It is not fine! his conscience shouted back, dashing every hope of his that it would be soothed against the rocks.
Ambrosius, smoking a pipe on the portico of the Palazzo Corsini al Prato, close enough to touch. His blood picked up its primal rhythm; the voices around him were too soft yet too loud, as though being run through a bad equalising software. His sleeves rolled up, his eyes a dreamy grey. The atmosphere of the party, which he had earlier interpreted as golden, now cast itself in a pale, jaundiced light. The biscotti turned to ash in his mouth.
He remembered thinking: If I had been born a woman—if I hadn’t been born your cousin—
Greta rapped her knuckles against the surface of the table, and that too was too soft, as though he were hearing it while suspended under the water.
“Well, I’m—going to bed, Cousin Floh. Thank you for a lovely evening. I hope we get to see some of the museums we missed tomorrow! There’ll be time, right?”
He didn’t want to talk, this petty conversation was sandpaper on his raw, overexposed nerves, but he forced himself to answer her anyway, as was his duty. “We’ll have time,” he said quietly. “I think I am also going to retire. Shall we go together?”
“Sure!” She tried to rise from her chair, but even with the support of the table and the wall she had difficulty, and Florian arose—himself needing a moment to adjust to the heaviness in his body—to help her. Greta took the proffered arm with a smile and pulled herself to her feet.
Her hand nestled in the crook of his elbow, the other touching his upper arm.
He guided her towards the exit of the ballroom, careful to avoid the path of anyone who seemed even more intoxicated than his ward, and exchanged a few courteous remarks with the attendees who noticed that they were leaving. Greta burying her face in his sleeve any time she was complimented, the warmth of her skin seeping through the fabric of his jacket and dress shirt. As they drew nearer and nearer to the arch, freedom from the party finally within his desperate grasp, a lone figure approached from the right with perfectly coiffed hair and dazzling white teeth. No. No, not this right now.
“Maestro,” said Matteo with a playful bow. “Greta.”
Greta stood a little straighter, smiled, and waved at him. “Hi, Matteo.”
I don’t have time for this.
Matteo grinned back and returned the wave, all boyish energy and youthful self-confidence. “Hello, hello. Are you two heading up to your rooms already?”
“Yes,” said Florian. “Greta is drunk. And I am tired.”
“Sì, I can see that! Perhaps I can help? I have talents other than playing the flute. Like, eh, pushing elevator buttons and holding open the door. And talking.”
“That won’t be necessary. Thank you, Matteo.”
“Are you sure?” He came closer, extending a hand to Greta. “I can keep the two of you company while you walk.”
At that, Florian’s patience—worn thin—finally snapped. “That won’t be necessary. I can take care of Greta just as well on my own. Si faccia da parte, per favore.”
Matteo stepped back, his hands raised. “Che spavento. Maestro,” and he slowly dropped his arms, “I had no ill intentions at all. I swear on it.”
“I believe you. But you must learn to take a ‘no’ when it is given, Matteo. Now, buona notte.”
“Buona notte,” repeated Greta cheerfully; Matteo looked at her, smiled, and relaxed his shoulders, though his eyes were still slightly uneasy.
“Buona notte. You’ll still be in Florence tomorrow, is that right? Perhaps we’ll have a chance to meet then. I can show you the lesser-known nooks and crannies of the city.”
“That would be love—lovely,” she said. She meant it, too, although Florian doubted she would even remember by the time she woke up next morning. “We've got to go for now, but I'd like that. Come on. Let’s go to bed, Cousin Floh.”
Florian needed no further invitation. Deliberately avoiding eye contact with anyone else, he made sure Greta’s grip on his arm was secure, stalked to the aperture of the room, and stole into the darkness of the hotel.
•••
At last, the end was in sight.
Exiting the elevator, the two lit into the seventh floor hallway, exactly as he remembered leaving it this morning before he’d headed to the Teatro. Quiet, the lights emitting fuzzy halos and a hum of electricity somewhere in the vicinity of G, the carpet so effective in deadening their shoes that the very footfalls could scarcely be heard as they made their way down the corridor. Impressionist paintings of Roman gods and unlikely dreamscapes broke the monotony of the walls’ smooth, off-white stucco—miniature art exhibit, as was almost everything else in Italy. Florian had never looked at the paintings despite passing them dozens of times on his way to something or other in the open city; now, coming across them for the nth time, one of the last times he would this trip, he wondered if anyone had ever truly stopped to marvel at the Cupid and Psyche that spanned nearly four feet across next to Greta’s room, if the pieces had been chosen with purpose or deliberation on the part of their owners, or if they were simply meant to lend the Villa an atmosphere of culture, a claim to Beauty that held value for a certain kind of customer, including—he was loath to admit—himself.
He was thinking cynically again. Good. The party had done a number on him, as had the Prosecco in which he’d slightly overindulged, but getting away from it all had restored most of his mental faculties, subduing the beginnings of a storm that had been brewing inside of him. Whatever was left would return after a full night’s sleep and perhaps some morning coffee. Yes. Of this he was certain, and with every step that closed the distance between his party of two and their twin suites, his resolution to go to bed and sleep off the day’s long chronicle of events grew stronger.
For her part, Greta seemed content; she had said a few things to Florian on the way up, still clinging to his arm, but he could scarcely remember what the exchanges had been about, something about Matteo and another thing about tomorrow’s plans, of which he currently had none. When they arrived at their suites, Rooms 732 and 734, respectively, she smiled up at him, held out her palm, and pulled her other hand out from the crook of his arm, finally leaving his side cold and missing the company that had been there just a precious few moments ago.
He produced a card from the inner pocket of his coat, attached to a brass key in the fashion of old. “Thank you,” she chirped as he handed it to her. “You’re always so reliable, Cousin Floh.”
She tapped the card against the reader, a green light flashed above the door handle, and she turned the handle to step into the hotel room. The aromas of fresh linen and citronella wafted out to greet him; she spun around and beamed, her eyes alive with a copper shine in that dim and beautiful hallway, her hair slightly mussed where she had leaned against him all throughout their journey.
“I’ll see—see you in the morning.”
Then she was closing the door, and the door should have closed, leaving Florian to retire to his own room and his own bed, to rest until tomorrow dawned and the day was born anew.
It did not.
She jerked back when the door swung in her direction, but the intrusion wasn’t even met with a scream, and a moment later he found her lips with his so that screaming would have been impossible, anyway. Her mouth tasted sweet, coffee and chocolate, faint traces of brioche in the champagne—gentle, gentle, he reminded himself, he wasn’t trying to terrify her, the last thing he wanted was for Greta to think her conductor, her father’s cousin, was trying to rape her in her own hotel room, but if he wanted her to think otherwise he couldn’t act like a wild animal, all instinct and no control over himself. He broke the kiss, brushed his thumb over her lips and trembling cheek; he was on fire, inside and out, but fire was to be used for comfort, too, not just destruction. What had man huddled around in the dead of night for protection before guns or societies were even ideas in their ancestors’ heads? What was it they had been made for?
“Greta,” he began.
She said nothing.
“Greta, Engelein. My grey-eyed angel. Are you afraid?”
The words tumbled out before he could think about them, their spontaneity surprised him, but he was even more surprised to discover that he didn’t particularly care, not with Greta in front of him and not with the prospect of warmth finally, terribly his. His soloist’s eyes widened; he expected her to start shedding tears, the shaking had gotten worse and her breathing came fast and irregular, but she had a third surprise in store for him and answered in a whisper, barely audible even in the silence.
“Yes.”
He thought the response would devastate him, but his stomach fluttered with some primitive human affection instead, and a whim arose to which he found himself helpless. She was afraid. He took her chin, tilted it up, closer, and kissed her again on the eyelids.
“I do not wish to hurt you, I promise. I have no intention of doing so. Do you trust me?”
There was a pause, and then her chin moved in his hand, bobbing up and down in the universal sign of understanding: a nod.
Half turning, Florian gave the door a kick just swift enough to close it, and with the gesture sealed off the room from both any attempts to escape and invitations for outsiders to intercede. Secured, he took a moment to look at her, really look at her. And then—as if he had spent his whole life rehearsing for this dance with her at midnight—he closed the distance between them, took her face in his hands, and pressed his lips to hers, this time without the cruelty of the first.
Coffee and chocolate and brioche and champagne. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a woman; they were even more delicate than he remembered, all gentle curves and soft skin, the barest hint of underdeveloped muscle flexing beneath his wandering palms. How unlike her father—no, no, not this again, he was beginning to sound like a broken record, the needle hiccoughing over the same scratch in the vinyl until he was sick of it. His hand found Greta’s rump, cupped it, and squeezed; she gasped into his mouth and pitched against him, and a throb of masculine excitement, of the kind he had denied himself for far too long, drowned the rest of his thoughts in pleasure.
“Oh,” she said. “Cousin Floh—”
But there were to be no more interruptions, Florian decided. Supporting her back with one arm, he bent to hook the other around the backs of her knees, and a moment later she was clutching at his shirt, alarmed at suddenly being airborne.
“Ah! Sir—”
He laid her on the edge of the mattress and leaned over her again, intending to give her more kisses, lower this time, past the irritating neckline of her dress; she made a noise when the sharp edge of his glasses dug into her flesh, and he tucked them impatiently into his breast pocket before returning to his work. Then she put her hands on his chest and pushed, just a little, so that he remained hovering above her, unable to close the distance. It was a weak effort, and it seemed even Greta knew that. At the slightest pressure, her arms bent at the elbow, and Florian thought about pressing her until they gave way, until nothing was left to keep him from his prize.
“Sir, I’m sorry. I think—did I make you mad at me? Earlier? If I said something wrong, with the ch-champagne—”
“You have done nothing wrong.” It was the sound of his voice, and it spoke exactly like him, but Florian wasn’t in the least informed about the next thing his doppelgänger would say, nor could he find it in himself to care. “Except continue to interject. Be quiet now, Greta. You gave your assent tonight, didn't you?”
Greta’s eyes went round. Her hands withdrew slowly, until they came to rest in a limp heap. Florian didn’t comment; he had lost interest in continuing where he’d left off, and his hand left Greta’s neck, where it had been resting, for other avenues. Her body tensing and releasing, he ran his fingers over its thousand contours: the fine, delicate bones of her clavicle; the imprint of her ribs, like narrow furrows through the silk dress he’d picked for her; he even paused just below her navel, imagining the hot coil of intestines living underneath the skin and nourished by her blood.
Che spavento. Maestro, che spavento.
Down trailed his fingers, lower, over her abdomen, past her hips. Here he paused, raised his eyes to meet Greta’s; her chest rose and fell rapidly, erratically, though unlike earlier there seemed no threat of tears.
He nudged apart her knees. They twitched, as if catching themselves resisting him, and twitched again when the hem of Greta’s skirt caught his thumb and he caressed the white flesh of her inner thigh. Florian’s hand crept over her until it met with the crook of her groin; she was curiously hairless but for a few curls, but even these were soft to the touch instead of wiry, meadow where he had expected jungle. He savoured the heat and the moisture of her for a few moments, the hitch in her throat as he closed in on her sex. Shifting up, he pressed another kiss to her jaw.
“Now,” he said.
Greta’s chin bumped against his nose, and then her body stiffened, all at once, as if she had been shot. She wriggled against the knuckle he had put to her, but a soft hiss between his teeth was enough to remind her of her position, and the struggling subsided without further comment. He looked into her eyes, but she didn’t dare to return it. Her ribcage thudded a wild and jagged rhythm against his own.
His thumb found what it had been searching for through the cotton, the last bulwark Greta had against her subjugation. Florian circled the nub, gently at first, with the pad of his finger, and she tried to stifle a faint groan.
“Cousin Floh—”
He flicked his thumb sharply upward and drew from her a louder cry, a pelvic spasm. Ah, there it is.
It had been at least two decades since he'd been with a woman, three since a woman’s pleasure was as much a factor in their coupling as his own; he felt clumsy, awkward again, like the night he had consummated his marriage with Sonja, but Greta’s body, her expressions, indeed her personality, were honest to a fault, and he could grasp, within a few minutes of beginning, what gave her the most enjoyment. She preferred a light touch and an irregularity to his ministrations, for him to adopt new patterns and rhythms and even to leave her cold for a few moments before starting again. He almost smiled at how much work she was making him put into her, as always: the nerve of her, to need him so much.
He pressed his fingers to her sex again, the weakness that all women had. The cotton was damp, the feel of her fuller and fleshier than earlier, and Florian found himself wondering, at the exact moment that he was trying to coax it to orgasm, what attracted men to this wet, pulsating organ, this hidden canal capable of both whelping new humans into the world and swallowing them whole, allowing their owners to, as Freud once said, possess manhood for a limited time. He studied Greta as he massaged another moan out of her, concentrating on her pleasure; she bit back the next one, but her hips involuntarily rose to meet him, and the tension in her thighs was taut as a wire. He wondered, too, what had drawn him to Greta tonight. Greta, who, he had answered the sly questions of colleagues and acquaintances before, was merely family and his student, and nothing more.
Greta gasped. Her thighs clamped around his wrist, her fingers scrabbled for purchase on the silk sheets that had been provided for Room 734, and Florian pressed the thumb of his free hand into the hot cavern of her mouth as she came. She accepted it dutifully, muffling her cries; suckling him, she seemed as desperate as a weaning puppy, and the stimulation of her tongue and teeth on his skin sent a jolt straight to the base of his spine and neglected cock.
Then she fell limp. She panted, a thin sheen of sweat visible on her forehead and her thighs where he had spent so much time working her over; her skin flushed, rose and honey, from the tips of her ears to her décolletage. Heat penetrated the cotton barrier between her vulva and his thumb, which came away damp as he pulled back. When he tweaked her clitoris again, she made a noise as if in pain.
Florian withdrew his hand from Greta's mouth and felt himself up. Despite his efforts, he was less firm than he would have liked, and he swore under his breath. Hypertension is the silent killer, he heard Dr. Bremer, his physician, say in his cool baritone. And what will kill you, Dr. Bremer, he’d wanted to say at the last appointment. He ground his teeth. It was too late to call the front desk for a Viagra or Cialis, and the last thing he wanted was for staff to spread rumours about why he was having them delivered to Greta’s hotel room, anyway, rumours that were sure to spread to other visitors of note and make their way back to Weimar within the year.
Yet he couldn’t leave. He had made up his mind at the beginning of their encounter that he would fuck Greta, and he meant to do so, hypertension or not. He stared at his soloist, nonplussed, trying to think of something that would get his blood racing. She was beginning to recover, the pace of her breathing growing even, her eyes regaining clarity. She blinked as if coming out of a reverie and looked at him, and for a moment, it wasn’t Greta staring out at him from behind their luminous grey, but her father through the fog of twenty-five years.
Florian reached for her again.
Greta choked, her throat cracked like broken glass. “No, Cousin Floh, please.”
He hooked a finger around the crotch of her panties and pulled. The stitches ripped as he tore aside the last, useless piece of fabric that had been concealing her from him, the dusk pink of her exposed in the low light of the hotel room and the rest of the sparse fur surrounding it.
Greta clapped a hand over her mouth.
Florian ignored this. He brought his right hand to his lips, wet the middle finger, and spread her folds until her opening was visible to him. It contracted at his touch, trying to discourage him, but it was no use, he thought, it wanted, just as he wanted. “Have you had sex before, Greta?” he asked.
No answer, but pressed lips, turned head, colour flooding her cheeks.
“Why is that?” He probed her, carefully, almost tenderly, to the first knuckle. Her walls closed around him, their texture rough despite their natural lubricant, and the anticipation of being inside her, of being where no other man had left his mark, made his stomach and ass clench. He felt lightheaded, his mouth drier than it had been all evening. “Do you lack desire? Is that what it is?”
Greta inhaled deeply. “I wanted,” she said, and cleared her throat when her voice broke. “I wanted to wait.”
“To wait? Na ja, what were you waiting for? Were there no suitable boys at your school? At university?”
“That’s…,” said Greta, “I…”
Her eyes glazed over. Florian probed her deeper until she had taken him past the second knuckle, her body receptive to him even as she pretended otherwise; it was yet another thing he couldn’t understand, why women were incapable of admitting to what they wanted, even when their bodies revealled the truth.
“Silly girl,” he murmured, and found he couldn’t entirely scrub the pity from his voice. “To wait for something as fickle as love. Well. Like father, like daughter.”
He withdrew his finger. Greta didn’t react, at least not externally, and he worked his belt buckle perhaps a little more roughly than he intended. On the other hand, the rasp of leather against his slacks as he pulled it out caused her jaw to involuntarily clench: He could see the muscle in the soft light, agonised. It persisted as he freed himself from his briefs, the sick, still somewhat spongy instrument filled with sick blood. “Greta,” he commanded, even as he couldn’t follow his own order. “Look at me.”
She only turned her head a little, but the twitch of her eyelids and the dancing light on her irises told him she was looking at him askance. Caught between dream and nightmare, between denying her consummation and resigning herself to it, he wondered if she felt in the moment as he did, her old self sundered and ten hundred miles away. Her eyelids fluttered again when he leaned over her, made contact with her, skin to skin; she wants to close her eyes, Florian thought, but she won't, she'll do as she’s told. He ground his hips against her, her entrance hot and wanting despite herself. His own instrument was finally responding to the friction, the heavenly heat along its length, until finally it caught where flesh gave way to heat and heat to untold depth.
Two gasps erupted in the silence of Room 734, one of pleasure, one of pain. Yet Florian wasn’t sure who had uttered which, and Greta’s face, trying to smooth itself, failed to inform him either. He looked down. He had indeed made it inside of her—as deep as he could go, no, pushing her to her limit, not yet. He could scarcely believe it; inside her it was searing, and tighter than his wildest imagination. He rocked his hips into hers gently and was rewarded with a moan, the wet smack of thigh on thigh. His jaw set. Despite the aches he was nursing from the concert, despite rapidly approaching his own physical limit, he wanted more from the moment, so much more.
Greta squeaked as he fell upon her; his stomach crushed her ribs and abdomen, compressing her spine against the mattress. Hungrily, he sought her mouth again, found it, and crammed it full of himself too.
“Greta,” he breathed, “Greta.”
She had tried to be quiet, but this time, Greta whimpered. She pressed her face into Florian’s inner elbow, but there was nowhere to hide.
“Give me everything.” He pushed deeper into her until she could take no more of him; her body convulsed, her knees twitched at his sides, but she made no attempt to wriggle free, to move away from him on the mattress. “As you give Lalo everything—as you give Mahler everything—as you give your music everything.”
Greta yelped, the bed creaked from the abuse of its wooden frame, and Florian drove into her with a regularity even he was surprised he was still capable of at fifty; he had ceased to feel anything but the thrill of his victory, drunk on it as much as the Prosecco, and nothing, not Greta, not a knock on the door, would keep him from seeing it to its end. He squared his hips against her, the head of his cock kissing her where she was deepest, and she gasped the loveliest sound perhaps known to man, that of the beloved utterly overwhelmed by their lover.
“Oh,” she panted. “Please—”
“‘Please’? Please what?”
“—Please—pull out, Cousin Floh.”
Florian laughed. Perhaps he was gone, truly gone; the request seemed absurd on its face. He caressed the side of her cheek with the back of one hand, admiring her for a last time in the low light of the hotel. Then, gathering up her feverish body in his arms, he sped them towards their end, wave upon wave of ecstasy ebbing and flowing into him until, finally, some line was crossed, some final boundary of their conjointment breached.
There was no fanfare, no cry of triumph or exultation as he spent himself inside of her. For a few golden moments, Florian basked in his achievement, in the successful union between him and Greta and, by extension, the ghost of her father. Greta twitched as he pulled out of her, and he stood at the foot of the bed to catch his breath. The small of his back and his chest throbbed from overwork; he tucked himself away into his trousers, no longer capable of invading anyone in his current state, and took stock of what he had done.
The golden feeling curdled and turned to lead. He did an about-face and pushed open the door to the bathroom. There Florian dropped to his knees in front of the toilet, heaved, and emptied the contents of his stomach into the porcelain bowl, the remnants of coffee, almonds, biscuits, and wine somewhere in the bile he flushed away.
•••
He awoke, not as he expected, on the floor of the bathroom, but in bed still in his evening clothes.
Florian sat up. Too quickly—his temples pounded, and he clutched his head with a hiss, massaging the temples to try and dissuade what felt like an oncoming migraine. Colourless flecks crowded his vision, the sheets blurring into abstract shapes on his lap, and the sensation of prickling began in his left hand, radiating up his arm to the shoulder. He focussed on breathing, on counting the pain away. The pounding faded to a dull ache, the same as it was in the rest of his body.
Cautiously, he rose from the bed, testing the muscle groups by stretching and rotating them as his occupational therapist had instructed him—his shoulders, his neck, his back, his knees, everything was sore in the way only a man who had undergone strenuous physical activity in the last twenty-four hours might feel. The concert, then. And…
His stomach clenched again, but there was nothing left to empty from it, and so he only gagged into his fist. Shaking, he leaned against the wall and entertained the thought of going to confessional, to the basilica located across the hotel. Surely, the priest…. He looked down at his hand, clutching the front of his rumpled dress shirt. Perhaps the first order of business this morning was a cold shower.
—No.
He couldn’t will himself to move, to conduct the real first order of business for the day. He glared at the door of Room 732 as if it were at fault for extracting him from the neighbouring room, or for being 732 instead of 734 so he could have asked her as soon as she was awake. So that he knew where they stood as of this morning.
And when her father hears of this, when he finds out what I've done—
Knock knock knock knock.
Florian stared at the door uncomprehendingly. Then, a second time:
Knock knock knock knock.
“Cousin Floh? Are you there?”
Florian answered, still leaning against the wall as he staggered towards the door, but he couldn’t remember what he said even as the words left his mouth. Visions swam in his mind’s eye of the previous night, and the nausea began to climb its way back up his throat.
“Oh, good morning,” said Greta’s voice through the door. He tried to parse it for an emotion, fear, shyness, anger, even, but it was frustratingly neutral as it continued to talk at him. “I’m, umm, going to visit some museums today. Do you want to come with me?”
He pressed his head against the door, pondering the question. It wouldn't have been his first. But then, he wasn't Greta.
“With Matteo?”
“No,” came the answer after a pause, “on my own.”
“Ah.”
“I honestly—forgot that was even a thing.”
“Ah.”
“So, will you come?”
Florian stared at the white paint of the door, trying to hold back the heat pricking the corners of his eyes as he had done with the migraine. It was nonsensical; he felt nothing, there was nothing, in his recollection, worth crying about. Crying was reserved for children. Children and women.
Could an illness ever truly be expunged, or would you carry the seeds of it forever?
“Cousin Floh?”
“Pass,” he said, more coldly than he meant it. “Enjoy the day.”
“—Okay. I’ll talk to you later, sir.”
The footsteps faded away on the carpet. An elevator dinged faintly in the distance, and for the first time since Greta had become his pupil at the age of fourteen, Florian felt that he was well and truly alone.