Marguerite Deschamps was a rich, slender faced and lissom beauty, the possessor of social gifts that made her well-connected and an undoubted boon for someone running and owning a PR and Marketing company in Paris. She possessed skills that had helped her to get through the turbulence of straightened times.
She was a young woman, only thirty-five, who could rely on so many for a favour to be settled, were she ever to be in need of it. Everyone thought she had everything a woman could desire, and so it followed that she lacked for nothing. She had even come to believe that this was how her life’s story went, but that thought had only prevailed until the day she returned home early and found her boyfriend, Mathis Granger, in bed with her best friend Eloise.
She wondered just how stupid her man had been to take that chance. The woman he was pegging didn’t justify the risks, even if she was in their wide circle of friends.
After all that they had been through and shared, she couldn’t believe a man she had also given shelter to, while he had studied for his law degree, could betray her in this way; a man she had been seduced by and lost her virginity to. He’d been the man she had learnt fellatio from and had blown off more times than she could count and that he was the man who would betray her. would make her look and feel a complete fool for trusting him. All that, with the full knowledge of her supposed friends and confidantes.
The scales had really fallen from her eyes.
The situation had not been helped by discovering Mathis and Eloise rutting like demented beasts in her apartment and in the bed that she shared with Mathis. All her memories of the most intimate and poignant moments with the man had been erased in that crushing instance of acute reality.
She had gone berserk, of course, and had soon found the handiest of weapons from the hall coat-stand and beaten them with it until their naked bodies had marks, of quite a different kind and hue, soon to be seen on their skins. She had persisted until they had begged for mercy.
After a few minutes of ferociously lashing out she had let Eloise, her onetime trusted confidante, grab her clothes and run out of the building. She did not go anywhere near to granting Mathis such an easy escape.
He was denied that supposed privilege and had to save himself from any further humiliation if he complied with her uncompromising demands. Naked, he was ejected from her place, and she had chosen to throw his clothes, and any belongings she could lay her hands on, out into the street below her window. Let him shiver out in the cold for a while, and let his wayward dick shrivel to a stump…if that were ever to be possible. She might yet get to miss that of him, but it seemed unlikely.
Mathis would soon realise that it was over between them and that she would move on from this and from their affair, for that was all it had been in his case and not her way of seeing their relationship. That did not mean, however, that she would not exact her revenge on him, somehow and with someone. If Mathis’s best friend, Eden Dumant, had been in town she would have offered herself to him for an evening of carnal adventures, but he was skiing in Davos.
So it was that, just before dinner, and on a second night alone, she decided to go to Peregrines, one of Mathis’s favourite haunts, to see if some of his colleagues from college, and now work, were to be seen there. The opportunity might present itself to humiliate Mathis further.
Unfortunately, the only ones that she saw were accompanied by their girlfriends, or they were so stoned on something or other, so that they would be unable to fully serve her vengeful purposes and also see to her.
Disconsolate, and at a loss on what to do, she had soon left the nightspot, hugging her coat to her body. It served as a covering for a clingy cowl-necked shift dress, with its shortened hem, that she had chosen to wear. It fitted her slender, full breasted, figure beautifully and she’d not had any tucks or breast implants that some of her friends had resorted to.
Out in the stilled night air, her stiletto heels clacked on the pavement, in time with her raging mood and she was all but oblivious to anything, and anyone, around her.
‘Merde! Who’s there?’ The clack of her heels rose in pitch as she walked faster. A shadow had been seen to drift across the wall of a building she was passing.
‘Mademoiselle…can you spare me a moment, please?’ a soft, cultured voice asked out of the dim lighting cast by an ornate street lamp. The shadow, then the voice it belonged to, had roused her from deepening introspection.
‘Yes…what is it?’
Before she had reached her car, she had been approached by a man requesting some Euros to buy a simple meal. He was far from being the average beggar that made the city’s streets more unsafe than she had ever known them to be. So many tent encampments were springing up, on many boulevards, you wondered how an when it would all end.
Looking at him, Marguerite found the man to be well-dressed and in command of his manners. He sounded educated but appeared somewhat dishevelled with his lean face unshaven, and his hair worn engagingly long. In fact, he was not so bad looking that she would walk on and without another word being said.
‘Well, what is it?’ she now asked, brusquely, but continuing to take in the look of the man before her. There was, even in the poor light, an engaging look of his eyes upon her. ‘Ships that pass in the night’ she took to thinking. She could not allow the idea to take a hold in her mind, risky as it was to even think of it.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I haven’t eaten for a couple of days. You look as if you won’t miss a few notes…’
‘Oh, do I really?’ She couldn’t help but smile at his forwardness. ‘What makes you say that?’
He had an engaging laugh. ‘Yes, you can afford it…rich and beautiful as you are and out alone, which is a wonder. Your man must be getting careless…or way too cocky.’
‘Don’t even go there,..and it really is none of your business!’ she snapped.
‘True, but it pays to be careful…no matter how rich or beautiful you may be.’
The man’s words came out with practised ease. She felt obliged to look at him for a few seconds more. She came to a decision. Yes she was alone, and she wanted company. He had said enough, and in the ways that he had spoken, to put her mind at rest…enough to have her take a chance. ‘Follow me to my car and I’ll take you for a meal.’
The man was in no mood for arguing and soon they were speeding towards Marguerite’s apartment. She did not want to meet anyone she knew in the elevator, and so she led him up the echoing stairs of the fire escape, her heels clacking on the treads and sensing that his eyes were on her with every step that she took. Her mood really didn’t justify the risks she was taking, but she chose to push that from her mind.
‘I don’t make a habit of behaving like this,’ she ventured and as her front door keys were sought.
‘And, somehow, I know that it’s so. We each have a story to tell…’
‘We’ll see about that, won’t we?’ she retorted, again pushing aside the intrusive thought of the utterly crazy risks that she was taking behaving in the way that she was. And yet, there was something about him that beguiled her and that had her push caution from her mind.
Once in the apartment, and shrugging off her coat, she took him into the bedroom, threw open Mathis’s closet, that still had a few of his things in it, and told him to take a shower and to help himself to whatever he needed, and that fitted him, while she rustled up some food for the two of them.
‘A man I once knew and who lived here, then, left these behind. Make of them what you will.’
Marguerite then left him to it.
When he emerged from the bedroom she was surprised to see how sharp he looked and that a sudden and acute surge of longing now possessed her. Mathis’ betrayal could so easily draw her into a very different maelstrom of emotions and behaviour with the man before her.
‘I hope you like omelettes and salad?’ she said in a distracted tone. ‘It’s the only thing I can think of doing at such short notice.’
‘Omelettes are fine,’ he replied. ‘I could even help you…’
‘No, just you sit down…you can pour out some coffee. There’s a baguette there on the table, as a start,’ she said, holding out a plate. ‘Make sure you leave me some…won’t you?’
‘Sure, I’m hungry but not ravenous,’ he laughed only too engagingly and looking her way once more. The discreet floral print on that night-blue silken dress of hers flattered the woman before him. She sure was eye-candy and had her captivating, feisty, ways about her that he liked.
He took a couple of pieces of bread and thanked her for her continuing and unexplained kindness. During the meal, she asked him lots of questions about how he managed to end up on the street. She found out that his name was Emile; that he was thirty years old and that he had once been a university professor but that he had developed a gambling habit that had gotten way out of hand.
‘When I’d spent all my own money and tanked out my credit cards,’ he explained, ‘I started to borrow from my colleagues. As I kept losing, there was no hope of ever paying them back. When word got out it caused some embarrassment to the college. In the saccharine words of these days…they let me go. That was a few months ago. Then two days ago they locked me out of my apartment, and I’ve been sleeping in the park or under bridges ever since…winos and druggies all around…women selling themselves to get by…migrants some of them. The place is an effing mess now…you wonder who’s in control.’
‘You learn who your true friends are then…at such low moments.’
Emile nodded and licked his fingers after the plate had been wiped clean with a morsel of bread. He did so under her watchful gaze. He took the opportunity to delight in the cut of her long, grey-blonde hair that he had seen women wearing and had to be some new fashion. ‘Yeah, there’s that too. So, you’re a new one in my life, from now on…a beautiful and charitable friend.’