“Let me see it for a moment,” said Sergei, who was standing beside her. She handed it to him, and he gave her the warmest and most grateful smile yet… and folded the form in two the long way and in two again and slipped it into a pocket inside his jacket… smiling smiling smiling to beat the band.
Savannah’s bright luxodontic glow dimmed a bit. “What are you doing with that?”
“I must examine it in the better light.” Still smiling smiling smiling, he motioned to Magdalena, took her by the arm, undid the velvet rope, and headed toward the big gatehouse. “Thank you, dear Savannah, for everything.”
Savannah, honey’s, glow now dimmed a lot, and her voice rose. “Please—Sergei—that mustn’t leave here!”
::::::Sergei, she calls him! All that talk—he must have put her under a spell!::::::
Sergei quickened their pace and sang back over his shoulder in the cheeriest voice Magdalena could imagine, “Oh, my dear Savannah, don’t worry! Everything is for the best!”
Sergei smiled back at her as he walked, and he was walking fast. They didn’t follow the wiggly-curving walkway but cut straight across the lawn. He hailed a valet.
“Mr. Korolyov! Stop! That’s not yours!” Her voice had reached a shrill, panicked level—and it seemed closer. She must be coming after them. And then, “Oh, shit!”
Magdalena glanced back. The woman had tripped. She sat on the grass with one shoe on and one shoe off, rubbing her ankle. The pain distorted her face. Her high heel must have sunk into the lawn. No more glow at all.
The valet pulled up in the Aston Martin. Sergei smiled at Magdalena and chuckled and laughed and said something and laughed and chuckled some more. Any normal, unbriefed onlooker—such as the valet—would think here was half-a-drunk who must have had a cool time at the party… and got himself sloshed enough to give a valet a fifty-dollar bill. As they pulled away, Magdalena could see Savannah hurrying back to the house barefoot—with a very contemporary high-heeled kind of limp.
By the time they crossed the little bridge from Star Island to the MacArthur Causeway, Sergei was laughing so hard, he could barely catch a breath. “I wish I can stay and see the look on the face of that little toad, Munch, when the woman tell him what happen! I would give anything!”
As he drove, he put his hand on Magdalena’s knee and left it there for a while. Neither of them said a word. Magdalena’s heart was beating so fast and she was breathing so rapidly, she knew she couldn’t have said a word without her voice quavering. Then he slipped his hand three-quarters of the way up her thigh.
Now Sergei had reached Collins Avenue. Magdalena stayed absolutely still. If he turned right, it would be toward her apartment. If he turned left, it would be toward his… He turned left!—and Magdalena couldn’t help herself. Immediately she telepathed Amélia over the fiber-figmental chimericoptic connection she had left on all evening, “I told you! It depends, it depends!” Very gently Sergei slipped his hand all the way to her crotch and began stroking it. She felt a rush of fluid rising up in her loins and telepathed Amélia again. “I swear to you, Amélia, I’m not making a decision. It’s just happening.”
Sergei’s apartment was grander than anything she could have imagined. The living room was two stories high. The place had a very modern look but not modern in any way she had ever seen before—walls of glass so extravagantly etched with surreal swoops and swirls of women in phantasmagorical gowns, you could barely see anything through them. Sergei took her to the second floor up a curving staircase with a dark wooden banister inlaid with could-that-be-real ivory. He opened the bedroom door and bade her enter first… an enormous room lit by the sort of downlights she had seen in clubs… the bed—it was gigantic… walls of is-that-velvet—she didn’t absorb another detail, for at that moment he embraced her from behind, so powerfully she could feel the overwhelming strength of his arms, not to mention his pelvic thrust. He buried his head in the crook of her neck and with a single motion just like that swept her dress clear off her shoulders and down as far as her waist. ::::::Amélia’s dress—did he rip it?:::::: The V of the dress was so deep and so wide, it wasn’t made for wearing anything under it,