This might be a bit slow and far too sweet for many people's tastes, but if you like a man who takes his time....
————
Raoul's library, suffused by the soft, warm tones of Rubinstein's 1965 recording of Chopin's nocturnes, rests in the moonlight filtering through its stained glass ceiling.
He sits on one of the sofas at the near end of the room, trying to read in a cone of light cast by a floor lamp. His eyes flicker between his watch and the doors, back to his watch, then the doors again, and finally back to the book for a sentence or two. He loses his place, listens to a few bars of the music, realizes he's watching the doors, then checks his watch again.
So when one of the doors finally begins to open, he knows that it's exactly seventeen minutes and ten seconds to midnight.
She's early.
————
"Hi," she says, her voice trembling just a little with nervousness and excitement.
As he stands to greet her, his "male gaze" travels her body.
May is absolutely the most beautiful woman — it's fair to call her that now — he's ever seen, and she's never looked sexier. A low-cut, lacy, bright red dress hugs her wondrously small waist and the graceful curves of her hips. It ends high on her long, thin thighs, but her legs disappear inches later, laced into tight high-heel black leather boots.
Longing to put himself between those beautiful legs, he can barely force his eyes away from that delicious gap between the top of those boots and the bottom of her dress. On their way back up her body, they are mesmerized by the seductive motion of her hips as she walks, awed by the fragility of her waist, tantalized by glimpses of her soft, dark skin through the lace of her dress, and then arrested by her breasts, pushed up into firm, round pillows.
When he finally manages to pull his eyes all the way back up to her face, he sees her smiling up at him, shy and submissive, uncertain and yet assured, but, above all, warmly affectionate and eager to please.
Glorying in the flattery of his admiration, and longing for more, she unleashes the full power of her beauty, her virginal innocence, her tender affection, her feminine hunger to feel safely loved in the arms of a powerful man.
In that instant of eye contact through the near-darkness, they understand each other perfectly. She perceives the intensity of his lust, sees him struggle to overcome it to treat her — for the moment anyway — like a gentleman. He sees her basking in his desire, surrendering herself, entrusting herself to his care.
"My god," he gasps, shaking his head. "You look am
a
zing."
"You like it?" she coos happily. His words send shivers of delight through her body. She unconsciously arches her back, making her breasts and hips even more conspicuous.
"I...," he swallows. "Yes. Wow."
When she reaches him, he takes her hand, bends to kiss it (noticing that she's wearing a ring he'd given her), and then twirls her around to appreciate the curves of her body.
————
If you already know Raoul or May, you might skip ahead a few paragraphs, but if this is your first time too, let's give them a moment of privacy while we notice the first mundane fact that everyone else initially notices about these two:
They're
very
tall.
Raoul is 209 centimeters and about 21 stone (that's about 6' 10" and 294 pounds for our American friends) of densely packed muscle. Now that he's 41 years old, he no longer has the chiseling that once made him the body of Barry Schwartz's Obsessed for Men, but he still has the presence and power of a heavyweight boxer.
Even before people hear his thunderingly deep voice, or find out how wealthy he is, they instinctively signal deference, ducking a little, shrinking their shoulders, hiding their hands. With the bearing of a man accustomed to command and assured of obedience, he doesn't interrupt anyone because people cease speaking when they suspect he might have something to say, often apologizing as if they were wrong not to stop sooner. People move when they see him coming, often apologizing for having been
almost
in his way.
He's just a big, big, powerful man.
If you do get to know him, you find out not only about his intimidating wealth but about his affinity for violence. Having striven to be a protector of the weak, a defender of the oppressed, and a bringer of justice, he bears the physical and psychological scars of combat, the pride and regrets of a warrior who has laid down his arms, the humility of a man who has seen too much, done too much, and not always lived up to his own ideals.
But he is no brute. Fluent in several languages, he has traveled the world exploring the great traditions of religion, philosophy, literature, theater, music, dance, art, architecture, food, and drink. If he has supped full with horrors, he has also surfeited himself with pleasure, and learned to consider nothing human, good or evil, alien to himself.
With the dark, rugged, brooding features befitting all that, he may even be as handsome as he is powerful.
May on the other hand is 191 centimeters (~ 6' 3") of beauty (even taller in those high-heel boots), and though she's minutes away from being the sweetest 18-year-old girl you've ever read about, we're not going to venture to disclose any information in the form of kilograms, stone, or pounds.
Not that she has anything to be ashamed of, for she's one of those bird-boned girls, exceptionally petite yet still softly feminine and curvy, with breasts and hips perhaps on the smaller side but an absolutely tiny waist. Indeed, she looks as fragile as he does powerful.
No, the problem for May is that too many women — understandably — look at her with jealousy verging on rage, and, kind as can be, she wouldn't want us to incite any of those feelings unnecessarily.
With that startling figure, and her golden-bronze complexion, her upturned brown eyes, her wide smile and disarming dimples, her high hollow cheeks, wavy ombre hair flowing down to her waist as it gradually shades from dark brown to almost blonde, she seemed destined for a glamorous modeling career, almost against her will, until he rescued her from it and from so much else besides.
Her experiences of life and the world are not of course as broad as Raoul's, but she has known more than enough of fear, abuse, and neglect. She has seen the emptiness of too many of the world's promises, felt the sting of too many betrayals, too often found ruthlessly selfish imperatives where she needed to find acceptance, forgiveness, and love.
She is more than a match for him, though. Heir to a fortune many times greater than his (though from a family more given to ostentation than taste), she is also fluent in several languages, as steadily oriented to compassion as he is to justice. Sharing so many values, assumptions, aspirations, and even experiences, they intuitively understand each other, sometimes communicating more in a moment of eye contact than most people (your unfortunate author, for example) can express in entire paragraphs.
He may even have been the first person to appreciate her impressive intelligence and thoughtfulness. Consistently underestimated throughout his life because of his size, his handsomeness, and his athleticism, he quickly realized that May's unequaled beauty concealed a razor-sharp mind and a tender heart, features most people would never notice.
For May, to be admired for her intellect and complexity and kindness as well as for her astonishing beauty — appreciated for all of that, and by a man capable of real discernment, without any regard at all for who her father was or how rich she is — was frankly ravishing.
What finally unites them, however, is simply the need to love and to be loved. He only recently rediscovered this long-forgotten need, just in time to meet this special young woman who can perhaps even meet it for him, while she feels it so keenly that she fears it is some kind of irremediable deficiency in her soul. She hardly dares hope that it could be met, even by this extraordinary man.
They've known each other over a year now, and have gone through some ordeals together in that time. But everyone who has seen them together has realized that though they might not already be "a couple" in a technical sense, it's only a matter of time. The forces pulling them together are too powerful to stop.
Raoul and May have felt the magic from the moment they met. They are both aware that their stations in society allow them to take almost anything they want without suffering any consequences except scandal, but she has had more than enough public humiliation in her young life, and he has cared for her enough to restrain himself... at least until tonight...
————
We resume our account at the point when, having beheld the elegance — the relentless sexiness — of her twirling body, his bedazzled eyes rise to meet hers.
"Dear god," he gasps, and she giggles shyly.
"I hoped you would..."
"Yes."
"But I was afraid you might think it was too... "
"No. Not at all."
An incorrigible womanizer until recently, Raoul usually greets beautiful women with an arrogant, almost commanding smirk, but not now. Something of the smirk remains, but his mouth hangs slightly open in unaffected shock. Decades of experience seducing the world's most beautiful women have not quite prepared him for the way she looks now.
Of course he realizes some of the tricks she's used — a push-up bra, contouring her breasts, her catwalk strut — and women do those things for good reason! But the intensity of beauty that she has achieved tonight cannot be fabricated from nothing.
"Is the necklace pretty?"
She arches her back and lifts her chin to draw his attention... well,
supposedly
to the pendant nestled in the center of her décolletage.
Earlier today, during her party, he'd given her a jewelry set — earrings, bracelets, a ring, a choker, and a princess necklace — of platinum, diamonds, rubies, and pearls, woven together in delicate lacey flourishes. Only days after first meeting her, he'd commissioned this from Chaumbergé, and he'd bothered the team of designers assigned to the task until he felt every detail was perfect, with the brilliant artistry tempering the profusion of jewels. The result looks worth every cent of the 2.5 million euros he paid for it.
When she'd opened it, everyone around gasped. She'd held up the necklace briefly, but then felt it was somehow too precious for the moment, and far too fine for the jeans and t-shirt she was wearing then.
Carefully putting the necklace back in its place in the box, she'd passed it to her mother, instructing her to put it away in their room.
He'd felt disappointed then because he'd waited so long to see her wear it, but now, seeing her shimmer in the dim light, he realizes she was right to save it for a more intimate occasion.
"It looks so much better than I'd imagined," he says, pretending to look at it. "You really make it shine."
"Thank you," she sings, thrilled and bashful.
It took courage for her to put on this outfit, revealing so much of herself, to ask so frankly for his admiration, and receiving it now seems to affirm her entire existence.
"Would you like to sit down?" he gestures to a sofa. "You're, um," glancing at his watch he discovers that although he feels like he's been gazing at her beauty for an era, only a few seconds have actually passed, "several minutes early."
"I thought it'd be nice to chat for a bit," she says, lightly, but stopping herself just in time from saying "before."
