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Georgina Orwell has never particularly liked her body.
Then again, she’s never particularly disliked it, either, has always seen it more or less as a vehicle for her mind, but as she squints at the faded snapshot – Ike must’ve taken this one, that’s why Josephine’s the only one looking at the camera – she can’t help but notice how trim she was then, how well she filled out the cream-and-navy swimsuit she’d worn to the Anwhistles’ beach party that year. What’s that about youth being wasted on the young?
Not that she’s let herself go to seed, of course, but it turns out that even a master hypnotist can’t impose her will on the aging process, and her keen optometric eye has no trouble discerning the softening of curves and the deepening of lines and the greying of hair and the protruding of bones and the multitude of other subtle inexorabilities time insists upon carrying out on her. Her innate fatalism enables her to tolerate these incursions where no viable alternative exists, but she fights them ferociously where one does, and will go to her grave swearing that she’s never so much as touched a box of hair dye in her life. (She hasn’t, of course. That’s what hairdressers are for.)
Perched on the edge of her bed in a green silk robe, one foot tucked underneath her, she frowns faintly at the photograph until the creak of a floorboard alerts her to a presence behind her.
Georgina has often wondered whether Esmé Squalor knows how to enter a room without first posing in the doorway, and this time she finally decides to ask.
Leaning back against the mahogany, looking every inch the Old Hollywood siren in her black Marabou dressing gown, Esmé takes a sip of something effervescent and neon green from a champagne flute before deigning to respond. “Of course I do, darling, but art looks best in a frame.” Crossing over to the bed, she settles beside Georgina and peers at the picture. “What’s this?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” Her forced nonchalance belies the statement. “Just an old photo from when – ”
“Is that you?” she asks, leaning down for a closer inspection. “It is! Did you lose a bet? Is that why you’re wearing that bathing suit?”
“Believe it or not, it was very in at the time.”
“Let’s see, if stripes and one-piece swimwear were both in, then this must have been…” Her brow furrows. “Twenty-two years ago, in August.”
Georgina raises an eyebrow. “You’re absurd.” Esmé looks at her expectantly. “But you’re also correct.”
“I don’t know why you act so surprised every time,” says Esmé as she goes back to studying the image. “That must get awfully tiring for you.” Before Georgina has time to formulate a retort, she reaches across her and lays the photo beside her drink on the nightstand with an air of finality. “Stand up.”
She complies out of curiosity rather than obedience, or at least that’s what she tells herself. Esmé pulls her by the wrist to stand between her slender thighs, then leans back on her elbows to gaze appraisingly at her, head tilted to one side.
“What are you doing, Esmé?” Georgina of all people knows she isn’t blind, knows she’s seen her in far less than a swimsuit, but just now she can’t shake her irrational jealousy of her younger, tauter self, or the equally irrational fear that her present self will be found lacking by –
“Comparison.” Esmé sounds clipped, as she tends to when she’s focusing especially hard.
Shit.
After thirty interminable seconds that affirm Georgina’s lifelong avoidance of such careers as artist’s muse, carnival freak, fashion model, professional police lineup extra, or any other occupation requiring protracted periods as the object of scrutiny, Esmé tips her head back to look her in the face as she pronounces her verdict. “Gorgeous.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” she mutters, “but I’m an optometrist. I know what I see. You don’t need to spare my feelings.”
Sitting bolt upright, Esmé narrows her eyes. “First of all, you take that back this instant.” She seems genuinely offended. “You know perfectly well I’ve never spared anyone anything. And anyway, how was my vision the last time you checked, Doctor?”
“You know that’s not what I mea –” A warning glance from below and she begins again, rattling off the information from memory in a brisk monotone. “Fine. You have 20/10 visual acuity in both eyes. Your contrast sensitivity is outstanding, and your eye movements are smooth and accurate. Depth perception and focusing speed fall well within healthy range, your color vision tested substantially above average, and you’re remarkably tricky to hypnotize.” She sends Esmé a devious little smirk. “Even when you’re the one asking for it, as I recall.”
Esmé recalls too, of course, but she also recognizes a diversion when she sees one and chooses to ignore it. “Then how about we trust what I see for a while, hmm?”
They both know Georgina can’t say no when that sultry lilt creeps into Esmé’s tone.
Reaching out for the emerald-green sash, Esmé tugs slowly at one end of the bow and lets the robe fall open. “Turn around.”
Curiosity, not obedience, Georgina repeats like a mantra as she obeys.
Esmé adores silk, and the warm swish of the robe prompts a smile as she slides it down Georgina’s arms, draping it carefully over the bedpost rather than letting it drop to the floor. The bed sits high enough off the ground that she's at eye level with the shorter woman’s sleek brown bob, and she decides this is as good a place as any to start.
Running the tips of her fingers from the crown of her head to the base of her skull, she makes a mental note to use some of Georgina’s conditioner the next time she takes a shower. “You did make a lovely blonde,” she says, nails scraping lightly and pleasurably over her scalp, “but this suits you much better. You were a brunette naturally, weren’t you?”
“I am a brunette, thank you very much,” corrects Georgina, but the admonition comes out tart rather than sour and lacks its usual vitriol.
"And a thoroughly convincing one, darling, but I thought you didn’t want me to spare your feelings.”
The phrase hoisted by your own petard crosses Georgina’s mind, but midway through rolling her eyes she closes them instead as cool fingers massage the crook of her neck.
Pale as cream and flecked with freckles, her shoulders put Esmé in mind of summer; unable to phrase this in a way that won’t sound nauseatingly sentimental, however, she relies on an oblique sartorial recommendation to carry her meaning. “You really should wear more sundresses,” she says, and punctuates the proposition with a feather-light brush of her lips where the strap of such a garment would lie.
Georgina finds herself nodding. She’s never found fashion advice arousing before, but she supposes it’s all in the delivery.
If she’s agreeing with me about clothing, she must really be enjoying this, Esmé realizes with a barely-suppressed grin. And she swears she’s not vain…
In the interest of pushing her a little further, she trails her index fingernail ever-so-slowly down Georgina’s spine. “Or at least let me put you in something backless.”
“Nobody – ah,” Georgina interrupts herself to stifle a gasp when the nail reaches a profoundly delicate spot over her tailbone. “Nobody wants to stare at my bony back, Esmé,” she says, unable to see from her current position that the woman behind her is doing just that.
The angles of her scapulae and the knobs of her spinal column have grown more visible with the shifting and softening of muscle, and it occurs to Esmé that there’s something intensely intimate in the ability to see under her lover’s skin. She plants a series of open-mouthed kisses over the vertebrae she can reach, working her way up from between her shoulder blades to the nape of her neck, where she inhales delicately. “God, you smell good,” she groans, and Georgina feels her knees weaken at the heat in her voice. “Turn around.”
She turns, their lips meet, and she no longer cares why she’s following orders. Esmé slides her hands down, dragging her closer – and copping a shameless feel, Georgina notes with some pride – before wrapping her arms around her neck and her legs around her waist. It feels as if she’s on the edge of drowning in lithe limbs and filmy fabric, and she can taste the sweetly inebriating savor of Esmé’s cocktail on her tongue. Pear, she decides, pear and champagne and fuck, she’s delicious.
One hand slips under Esmé’s robe, but she pulls away and rises abruptly to her feet, eyes even blacker than usual. “Don’t. Tempt. Me,” she grinds out through clenched teeth, and Georgina realizes with a jolt of shock that she’s genuinely trying to restrain herself for once. “And lie down, because I’m nowhere near done with you.” In a minor tempest of black chiffon and feathers, she sweeps into the ensuite and closes the door behind her.
This doesn’t quite feel like foreplay anymore, and as Georgina arranges herself on the bed, piling her pillows against the headboard and sinking back against them, she begins to suspect that, as usual, the younger woman may have intuited much, much more about her reaction to Ike’s snapshot than she intended her to. It strikes her that Esmé’s genius has never really lain in her glamour or her seductions or her criminal competence, but in her ability to weave her lesser talents into a smokescreen of villainous frivolity to conceal her depth. Everyone knows still waters run deep, she thinks, so what better way to make yourself look shallow than by making a splash at the surface?
Very few people intrigue Georgina Orwell, and even fewer impress her, but Esmé Squalor hasn’t stopped doing either since the day they met.
A few minutes of deep breathing and a few sips of Glenlivet from the bottle Georgina keeps in the cabinet beside the toothbrushes later, Esmé begins to trust her self-control again. On any other day, she wouldn’t have bothered with any of it, would have capitulated immediately and enthusiastically to the urge to abandon the task she’s set for herself and let Georgina fuck her into screaming oblivion, but at this specific point, sex would feel like a distraction.
Details have always stood out more clearly to Esmé than to most other people. Mathematical errors catch her eye as quickly as a misspelling of her own name, so she treats high finance like a lucrative hobby, and she can spot even the most painstaking designer knockoff from fifty paces, so she treats high fashion like open season. In her youth, however – earlier youth, corrects the part of her brain responsible for the ongoing search-and-destroy mission perpetrated against public mentions of her birthday – she tended to unnerve family friends at cocktail parties by asking about trouble they hadn’t told anyone they were having, and her own social circle dwindled to insignificance until she learned to differentiate intentional cues from inadvertent ones and pretend to gather information only from the former, setting the rest aside as ammunition.
It’s different with Georgina. She doesn’t share her penchant for minutiae, but they’re formidable allies in the the same game: The hypnotist, too, has weaponized her insight into the subconscious, and on that basis, Esmé has never felt the need to disguise her own.
From her position in the doorway that morning, she had recognized Georgina’s posture as one she often adopts when she talks about her youth, and she would have bet a considerable sum of money that it was how she used to sit in her childhood bedroom, or on the bleachers of a boarding school gymnasium. Sitting beside her, she had caught the way she tightened her abdomen and straightened her shoulders when she looked down at the photo, unconsciously displaying her body to its best possible advantage, and her slight flinch at the word comparison confirmed Esmé’s suspicions.
Georgina’s age – either independently of or relative to her own – has never struck Esmé as problematic, or even especially relevant. On days like today, however, she remembers exactly how personally the older woman sometimes takes the passage of time, and she does her best to distract her from it until the mood passes.
Taking one final, fortifying swig and returning the bottle to the cabinet, she checks her reflection in the mirror and tugs the neckline of her négligée a little lower, framing it with the feathery trim of her dressing gown before throwing open the door with her usual dramatic flourish.
One look at the scene that greets her and she forgets to pose in the doorway. Late-morning sunlight streams in through the windows, a cool breeze rustles the pages of the newspaper on the nightstand, and on the bed, surrounded by a heap of pillows, bare white skin against pristine white linen, arms stretched out to either side of her over the headboard, lies Georgina. Before the word regal has finished forming in her mind, Esmé is already on top of her.
“You got into my emergency scotch,” Georgina accuses when they break for air.
“It was an emergency,” shrugs Esmé. “Now, unless I’m very much mistaken, I was just about to carry on…how did you used to put it? Oh, yes, fixing how you see.” The woman beneath her swallows hard, and black eyes suddenly focus on her throat. “You know,” begins Esmé casually, “before I met you, I never really considered the neck an especially enticing body part. I mean, I suppose I enjoyed it when someone decided to kiss mine,” and here she plants a lingering yet somehow still too-brief kiss just beneath her jawline, “or lick,” and here she traces the tip of her tongue over a faint blue vein, “or bite,” and here Georgina moans as she nips at a flickering pulse point, “but I never really understood why they would want to until I saw you. Do you remember?”
“Mm, yes.” It’s not entirely clear whether Georgina intends this as an answer to the question or as a statement of general approval, so Esmé continues.
“You had your hair up, and I spent absolutely the entire evening wondering if the skin on your neck felt even half as soft as it looked, and when I finally decided to find out…”
“…I came very, very close to having my way with you on a table in front of a restaurant full of people about four hours after meeting you. Oh, I remember.” Her expression falls midway between arousal and amusement. “Distinctly.”
“I would have let you, you know.” Not that that's much of a surprise. “God, I wanted you that night…do you know what else I remember?” Esmé shifts backward slightly. “I remember how you kept leaning across the table for the salt dish, and I remember how low-cut that dress was.” Her hand skims over Georgina’s chest, approximating the neckline of her favorite black Chanel. “I remember how you caught me staring on three separate occasions, and I remember how hard you tried to pretend you weren’t doing even a bit of it on purpose.”
“Maybe I just needed the salt,” she says, though they both know full well that she didn’t.
“Then why didn’t you ever put any of it on your food, darling?” Esmé looks down at her with mischievous eyes. “Admit it. You wanted me to stare. You love knowing I can’t keep my eyes off you.” Teasing a rosy nipple between her fingers, she decides to take the involuntary shudder as an affirmation. “Or my hands. Fuck…” Single malt and deep breathing can only stave off the crumbling of her resolve for so long, and she gives in to the craving for more contact, draping herself over Georgina and burying her face between her breasts. “Have I ever mentioned how perfect these are?”
The question is muffled but audible, and Georgina rolls her eyes. “You should have seen them twenty years ago,” she replies under her breath.
“No.” Esmé’s head snaps up and she fixes her with an unexpectedly defiant glare. “Not twenty years ago. Now.” She huffs, a sound of sheer frustration. “Georgie, I want you. Not her.” She gesticulates toward the photo on the nightstand. “I don’t even know her, and she’s very pretty, even in that ridiculous swimsuit, but –” A pause stretches between them, and she looks almost angry, but then her eyes search Georgina’s, her expression softens, and she continues with unusually quiet intensity. “Do you have even the faintest idea what you do to me?”
From any other person in any other context, that question would be rhetorical, but Georgina suspects that here and now, she may actually need to provide an answer. “You’ve…” She trails off, wondering which verb best articulates Esmé’s habit of dragging her into various stairwells, storage rooms, and partly-concealed alcoves when she’s not in the mood to wait. “Insinuated.”
“Then let me be a little more explicit, darling.” A breeze from the window ruffles Georgina’s hair and Esmé leans down to sweep a few errant strands away from her face. “You’ve ruined me.” There’s the barest hint of a growl beneath the words. “You ruin my concentration and you ruin my self-control and you’ve ruined several pairs of my favorite underwear, and I should hate you for all of that because I didn’t ask for any of it, but all I want to do about it is kiss every single solitary inch of your body until you understand precisely how much I need you, because for an optometrist, you seem to have an unusual amount of trouble seeing what’s right in front of your stupid, gorgeous face.” She inhales shakily. “Now, are you done questioning my taste?”
It’s good that she doesn’t wait for a reply, because Georgina is fairly certain she’s not capable of giving one.
Instead, Esmé kisses her way downward. The curve of her lover’s waist and the flare of her hips and the slightly rounded softness of her stomach strike her as exquisitely, achingly feminine, the perfect complement to her own sharp angles and narrow planes, but she feels the tension in Georgina’s abdominal muscles that always seems to creep in when her midriff is on display. “You,” Esmé reiterates, motioning toward the nightstand with a tilt of her head, “not her,” and after a moment's hesitation, the muscles relax. Apparently satisfied, she dips her head back down and flicks her tongue into her navel in an unexpectedly sensual gesture.
God, Georgina exhorts, I know we haven’t been on speaking terms since that bar mitzvah, but please let that be foreshadowing. She supposes prayers don’t traditionally end with a whimper and a buck of the hips, but even if the Almighty objects, Esmé certainly doesn’t seem to, and she knows which of the two she’d prefer to keep happy. “I know what you’re doing, Esmé." Her voice is pure seduction as she parts her legs invitingly. “You’ve made your point, so why don’t you stop teasing?”
“I’m not being a tease, darling,” says Esmé, and although the words are flirtatious, there’s an uncharacteristic gravity in their inflection. “I’m being thorough, and I assure you, you’ll know when I’ve made my point.” Still on her knees, she shifts further down on the bed, studiously averting her gaze from the one place it’s obviously wanted and focusing instead on skimming her hands over the outside of Georgina’s thighs. Grey eyes fall shut and several long moments pass in silence as strong, slender fingers work downward, massaging shapely calves into relaxation before releasing their hold entirely.
Georgina opens her eyes just as Esmé Squalor – the City’s sixth-most important financial advisor, a woman who considers first-degree homicide a leisure activity, a femme fatale of the haughtiest order – drops with consummate grace to her hands and knees, lowers her head, and brushes her lips over the top of her right foot.
The sensation is profoundly delicate, the gesture unspeakably erotic, and when Esmé looks up into her eyes, Georgina knows with the clarity of every last year of her age and experience that she has never seen anything as beautiful as the fierce tenderness on her face.
Breathtaking, she marvels. In every sense of the word.
“Breathtaking,” whispers Esmé.
For once, Georgina doesn’t argue.