Chapter 19: The Car on the Quai

"I'm not afraid," I said.

Nobody in the back room moved.

"Elise," Dominique said.

"I'm not."

"Then why are you shaking?"

I looked down.

My knees were shaking, and my hands, and my jaw.

I had been shaking for hours, and I had told myself it was wanting.

Dominique stood up and took his coat from the back of the chair.

"Get dressed," he said. "I'm taking you home."

"The game isn't over."

"It is for tonight."

He said it to the room, not to me.

Auguste, who never gave way to anyone, lifted one hand off the felt and let it fall.

"Go," he said.

Dominique's car was parked on the Quai, under the plane trees, with the river black and slow beside it.

He did not take me home.

He drove along the water, past the lit bridges, and stopped where the road ran out of lamps.

He turned off the engine.

For a long time he said nothing.

"Talk to me," I said.

"No. You talk."

"There's nothing to say."

"Tell me what the fear is."

I stared through the windscreen at the river.

"A room full of strangers," I said at last. "I'm not scared of what they'll do. I'm scared nobody will hear me."

"The signal."

"If I slap, and it's loud, and they're laughing..."

"We hear it."

"You hear it. I want you to hear it. But I'll be on a table, Dominique, with a lot of men's hands on me, and I'm afraid of how much I'll want it."

My voice broke.

"That I won't be able to stop. That I'll want it so much that I won't want the signal."

He turned in his seat.

He was angry. I could see it in the muscle that moved in his jaw.

"You think I don't know that?" he said. "You think I haven't thought about it every hour since the card arrived?"

"You said you'd come."

"I will come. I will stand against the wall. And if you slap once, I will break every window in that house."

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