Stunts, page 11
He reached for the kettle’s handle without thinking, and yelled “Sonofabitch!” when he burned himself. The kettle clattered back onto the burner, water spurted from the spout and hissed on the stove. A few drops landed on the back of his hand. He swore again and turned on the cold water, held his hand under it, and listened to the ringing.
“Coming,” he whispered.
The kettle whistled again, and he reached over, switched off the gas, and nearly fell against the stove.
“Well … damn!”
Grabbing a towel from a small rack above the sink, he raced into the living room and snatched up the receiver.
“Two-nine-eight-eight.”
His fingers stung. He tossed the towel aside so he could blow on them.
“Hello?”
The kettle shrieked. Christ, he’d turned the wrong goddamn knob.
“Hello!”
He flapped his injured hand, blew on it, and glared across the room. “Look, if this is a joke, I’m not laughing.” He hung up. Hard. Hurried back to the kitchen where he shut off the stove and used another towel to plop the kettle into the sink. He didn’t want tea now. He wanted something stronger.
The telephone rang.
Kill ’em, he thought as he strode out of the room; I’ll goddamn kill ’em.
“Hello!” he barked.
“How nice to hear your voice,” Addie said. “Are you in bed with a naked woman or something?”
He sagged against the sideboard. “No. Sorry. Someone just called and wouldn’t answer me.”
“It was me,” she said. “I could hear you, but I guess you couldn’t hear me.” She paused. “You thought it was Paul, didn’t you.”
“No,” he said truthfully. “He never crossed my mind.” He told her then that he’d tried to contact her earlier, and explained why. When she didn’t respond immediately, he wondered if he should have said anything at all. “Addie, it isn’t like we’re having him arrested.”
“I know that. I’m just hitting myself because I didn’t think of it before.”
He smiled at the front window. “My fault. Hysterical men, don’t you know.”
“Yes. I do know.”
He switched the receiver to his other hand, spat a curse.
“Are you all right, Ev?”
“An accident,” he told her. “Burned my hand making tea.”
“Wonderful. You do live an exciting life.”
“Yes.” He carried the telephone to the couch and sat heavily. “I am blessed.”
“Are you packed?”
“All ready to go.”
“Ah. Well. Will you call me when you get back?”
“I’ll do better than that. Why don’t you meet me at the station right now, we’ll tell Ludden, and then you can buy me a farewell-until-Sunday meal.”
He sensed a hesitation before she said, decisively, “Fine. Ten minutes?”
“Fifteen,” he said. “Ludden isn’t going anywhere and I have to use the—”
“Spare me,” she interrupted with a laugh. “God, you Yanks are a crude lot. What makes you think you can run the world?”
“Because,” he said, “nobody takes us seriously until it’s too late. Crude, you see. Very effective.”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
4
There was no problem with the sergeant. In fact, his concern for Addie was demonstrably greater than his concern for Paul; so much so, Evan was embarrassed. But his one attempt to make a humorous comment was received with a look that made him turn away from the counter and study the notices on a bulletin board nailed up by the door. When their business was completed twenty minutes later, and after a brief laughing discussion of Ida MacNair wanting to call out the fire brigade to extinguish a pile of leaves burning in someone’s yard, he walked Addie across the street, to an Indian restaurant not much wider than a fair-sized closet.
She was grateful he’d been able to think clearly.
That’s what she called it.
He called it almost too damn late, but she refused to hear it. And she looked as relieved as he felt. They hastily assured each other that they were not making light of Paul’s condition, but it was, wasn’t it, rather nice to know that something concrete was being done. Worrying would only make them paranoid. She admitted that she’d not been thinking straight all day and would, probably, have gone to London herself.
They had several drinks.
He walked her home.
On her doorstep she took his hand and covered it with hers. “You’re a saint, Kendal, you know that.”
Her hand was warm.
“I know nothing of the sort. I’m just helping out a friend.”
“And Paul.”
“Of course. That’s who I meant.”
Her hand was soft.
“I know that, you oaf. I was teasing.”
Her face, in the porchlight, was shadow and moth-wing.
“Paul,” he said, cleared his throat, spoke the name again. “I wish I knew what was wrong with him. Physically, I mean.” His tone was deliberately expectant.
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” she said, half doctor, half wife. “I’ve been trying to think, remember, hunt for symptoms I may have missed. But I can’t come up with a thing. And I can’t even think about a true diagnosis unless I see him.”
“I know, I know, believe me. It’s just that he just looked so—” He stopped himself when he sensed her discomfort, when he saw Paul’s face and had to shake it away. Speculation was a waste of time, futile, emotionally horrid, but he knew it wouldn’t stop her. It hadn’t stopped him.
The only thing he could tell himself for sure was that Paul Burwin was crazy. The why would have to come later.
“I’ll call when I get back.” When she nodded, he tapped a finger lightly against her brow. “And if you hear anything while I’m gone, you call me, yes?”
She nodded.
“You have the number?”
She nodded again, and made a performance of clutching her purse. “Right here. I’ll make a hundred copies as soon as I get to work tomorrow.”
“Very funny.”
She looked up at him.
He couldn’t see her eyes; it made him nervous.
“Thank you, Evan.”
“Like I said.”
She glanced up and down the quiet street, then kissed him quickly, and softly. On the lips.
He walked back to the car, left around the corner from the restaurant, and drove slowly home. By the time he was in bed, tracing the cracks in the ceiling, he was glad he was on his way to Edinburgh in the morning. It would be a good time to consider what the hell he was going to do next.
While waiting for the police to find his friend.
While wondering if she knew that Paul, the bastard, had every right to be jealous.
IV
WEEKEND IN PORT RICHMOND
Twelve
Port Richmond on the Hudson, sprawling westward from the lip of a boulder-bound, tree-dotted cliff whose shadow in the water was barren and dark gray. Its north end was tucked into a U-shaped extension of dense state forest that merged with the woodland across the state line, south and west boundaries simply other towns that touched other towns that snaked-danced south to the George Washington Bridge; shops and garages and offices and restaurants and one twenty-unit motel and two movie theaters and two parks and a truck-laden highway that slipped out of New York State; Palisade Row and Forest Road and Tyler Avenue and Hemlock Terrace and no streets with numbers to give visitors and newcomers a hint of where they were, where they had to go, where they could turn to get to Oak Street or Raven Road; one bus line, one taxi, and a train station that few had been to since the day it had closed.
Port Richmond with a name that lied about its function, though not about its origin, when gunrunners and smugglers used the fifty-yard rock flatland at the base of the cliff to avoid British frigates and British patrols; a secret name among rebels, made public when gunrunners and smugglers and Tories decided to stay.
Port Richmond at night, from the air, a sprawl of lights winked out by shifting leaves.
Port Richmond, in autumn.
High and deep October sky.
Thirteen
1
High and deep October sky.
“Admit it, Brian,” the blonde said, voice low and husky. “This is something you’ve wanted to do practically since we met.”
No clouds; a flock of Canada geese, ragged, heading south and calling.
“C’mon, be honest.”
The morning’s light frost replaced by a startling reprise of Indian summer.
“Well?”
He couldn’t deny it; he had. Desperately. Foolishly. To the point of dreaming of it constantly—night dreams and daydreams and doodling dreams of it in class—wishing for it from the moment the weather had turned warm enough to temporarily shed overcoats and gloves and make the shade almost welcome again. From the moment he had stepped out onto Mickie Farwood’s patio for the first time he had wanted to, and had never found the nerve to ask her if they could.
His grandmother would shoot him if she knew what he was thinking.
“Bri-an.” Coyly. Teasing. Sing-song and low. One dark-nailed hand flat and warm against his chest, the other on the small of his back, pressing him to her without letting him touch.
“I guess,” he admitted at last. The smell of her, sun-warmth and turning leaves and just a hint of wine on her breath. He grinned. “Yeah.”
With a slow nod she moved away. Shorter by a head, slender, her hair cut high above her shoulders while his, three shades darker but still clearly blond, curled neatly an inch longer. To celebrate the break in weather, she wore a bumblebee-striped tube top and stone-washed denim cutoffs, her skin still lightly tanned from a sailing summer in the Caribbean. Her feet were bare; her legs gleamed gold.
When she looked at him over her shoulder, chin tucked, eyes narrow, he almost sagged against the wall.
She did that to him.
She knew it.
Every stride, every look; the flutter of her eyelashes when she was pleased, the moue of dark lips when she wanted something he wasn’t sure he could give her, the way she touched her right ear with her left forefinger, stroking it and tugging it, her arm crooked across her chest whenever she was planning her next move.
Everything snared him, as she knew it would, as he knew it would. And didn’t give a damn. In the real world, rich girls didn’t much care about boys who lived in boarding houses with their grandmothers; in the real world, boys who lived in boarding houses seldom spoke to rich girls because they seldom had a reason.
Only in his dreams.
“Okay then,” she said.
The hot tub took up most of the patio’s southern edge, redwood sides and turquoise interior, three shallow wooden steps to climb in, tiled shelf wide enough for glasses, plates, bottles. It seemed near the size of a modest swimming pool, and was already filled, the water’s surface rippling as a chilled breeze coasted across the backyard.
He looked nervously side to side.
“Bri?”
No one could see.
The two-acre yard, like all the others on the east side of Palisade Row, ended at a hundred-foot rocky drop to the sun-caught Hudson River. It was marked by an outer stockade fence and closely spaced trees—autumn-touched maples and hickory at cliff-side, two rows of evergreens on the flanks—and an inner boundary of flowering shrubs trained to grow high and wide and tangled. The flagstone patio itself, dead leaves huddled in one corner, had a wall of its own, knee-high and brick, topped at intervals by potted plants Mrs. Farwood tended as if they were frail children.
No one could see.
Unlike home, where everyone saw everything whether he liked it or not.
He jumped at a sudden hissing, a bubbling, and saw Mickie bending over the control panel.
She looked back at him around one bare arm. The cutoffs rode high. She raised her right foot and kicked lightly at her rump. “You want everything, Mr. Oakland?”
“Huh?”
She chuckled, and pointed at an inset panel of buttons he couldn’t see from where he stood. “Pay attention, boy. With this thing we got bottom jets, side jets, bubblers, shooters, a zillion combinations.” She giggled, closed one eye, and licked her bare shoulder. “I got one here, you could have an orgasm before you get your toes in.”
Oh hell.
Not even in his dreams.
“Well?” Still looking over her shoulder, she rotated her hips. Once. “Want me to turn it all on?”
Her hips rotated again.
He blushed, and felt it—heat on his cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun, and a tight band around his chest that had nothing to do with the snug T-shirt he wore. He had no idea why she thought she had to talk that way; she must have read it in one of her magazines someplace. The now way to talk for sophisticated young women.
And she did it deliberately.
To confuse him. Excite him. Make him putty.
He had long since stopped asking why me?
Only last week, just as the English department monitor had passed out the quarterly final, she had leaned forward from her seat directly behind him and whispered, “You get an A on this, stud, and I’ll fuck you bowlegged.”
He had been so flustered, he’d barely finished half the questions.
Nevertheless: why me?
She stood slowly, stretched and groaned, then crossed her arms and slowly pulled off her top. Her bare back showed no white stripes. The tan was complete. She didn’t turn around. “Brian, I’m not going in here alone. There might be sharks.”
Nervously rubbing his palms over his thighs, he glanced through the sliding glass door into the house, his reflection jumping when a gust kicked past him.
“They’re gone, Brian, remember? Golf, riding, something stupid. I don’t know. Who cares?”
He checked the yard again.
“Damnit, Brian.”
“Okay, okay.”
He walked as steadily as he could toward the tub, stripping off his T-shirt, unsnapping his jeans. Casual; you do it all the time, stud, do it all the time. Flex the pecs, bulge, the ’ceps. Hell, no sweat. Do it all the time.
Despite the temperature, he shivered. A kick took care of one of his sneakers. A second kick cost him his balance, and he banged into the tub’s wall, his knee taking the brunt. He hissed and turned around, swore at himself and at Mickie, who laughed quietly.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
Water splashed gently.
He turned back and saw her on the far side, sitting on a submerged ledge. The water boiled around her as she stretched her arms out along the shelf, froth and bubbles hiding all but her shoulders and the shining flat of her chest.
Don’t stare.
She winked.
Jesus, don’t stare.
She pursed her lips, kissed the air.
He checked the sky for a bolt of lightning, and decided, what the hell, I’m dead anyway. As quickly as he could, he stripped the rest of his clothes off and rushed in, backward. Catching his breath at the strike of water on his skin, sighing as he twisted awkwardly around and his buttocks found the ledge. He stretched out his legs and wriggled his toes. He closed his eyes.
“God,” he said, “it must be great to be rich.”
A feather-touch against his feet, sliding along his legs.
“It’s much better,” she whispered, “to be horny.”
And sat on his lap.
Oh God, he thought, throat dry and neck taut; oh God, now what do I do?
After fluttering a bit, his hands finally lighted on her waist, touched silk and didn’t dare move. She leaned forward, kissed him feather-light, leaned back and rested her hands on his shoulders. His own hands sank beneath the water, to the hard curve of her buttocks, where they froze for a second when they discovered the bottom half of a bikini.
It was time to drown himself.
Time to slip under the surface and let the cops find him naked; no way he could tell them he’d thought she was naked too.
I don’t believe it, he thought; I do not believe it.
“Brian.”
Okay. No problem. She’s mostly naked, right? That’s gotta count for something, so just be cool, that’s all, just be cool.
He grunted to prove he’d heard her, and let his hands drift up again, floating across her waist, not risking too strong a hold. At the same time, he was careful to avoid a direct stare at her breasts; it wouldn’t be cool, it wouldn’t be right, it would trap him the way her legs had trapped his thighs and her groin barely brushed his and moved away. And moved back. As if she were floating on the tide, unaware that she was moving at all.
“Bri?”
He focused on the diamond beads of water clinging to the hollow of her throat, quivering with the pulse he saw throbbing there. He didn’t dare look at her eyes; he knew they’d be laughing.
“Bri?”
He grunted again. Speaking would be the end of him.
“I want to do a stunt.”
He blinked, and looked up. “You what?”
Slightly forward.
“I want to do a stunt. I want to get in the school Halloween night.”
I knew it, he thought, close to anger, closer still to disappointment. Rich girls and boarding-house boys. Who the hell were you kidding anyway, Oakland?
He almost pushed her away.
Sounding like a jerk instead: “We’re not supposed to.”
Slightly back.
A lopsided sneer. “That’s the whole point, dope,” she said, giving his shoulders a shove. “Linholm says we can’t, so we do.” Her head tilted back and she laughed. “My god, we pull it off and he’ll shit a brick!”
Slightly forward.
“I don’t know,” he said reluctantly. “If he finds out—”
She leaned into him, and he closed his eyes, felt the give of her breasts against his cheeks, smelled her; she was warm. Her head came forward, her lips against his ear.
“He won’t,” she whispered. Her tongue on his lobe, circling. “But I will, if you will.” Her tongue again, nudging. “Brian?”
Loudly he mumbled deliberate nonsense into her skin, and she giggled, arched her back to free his mouth.
“Coming,” he whispered.
The kettle whistled again, and he reached over, switched off the gas, and nearly fell against the stove.
“Well … damn!”
Grabbing a towel from a small rack above the sink, he raced into the living room and snatched up the receiver.
“Two-nine-eight-eight.”
His fingers stung. He tossed the towel aside so he could blow on them.
“Hello?”
The kettle shrieked. Christ, he’d turned the wrong goddamn knob.
“Hello!”
He flapped his injured hand, blew on it, and glared across the room. “Look, if this is a joke, I’m not laughing.” He hung up. Hard. Hurried back to the kitchen where he shut off the stove and used another towel to plop the kettle into the sink. He didn’t want tea now. He wanted something stronger.
The telephone rang.
Kill ’em, he thought as he strode out of the room; I’ll goddamn kill ’em.
“Hello!” he barked.
“How nice to hear your voice,” Addie said. “Are you in bed with a naked woman or something?”
He sagged against the sideboard. “No. Sorry. Someone just called and wouldn’t answer me.”
“It was me,” she said. “I could hear you, but I guess you couldn’t hear me.” She paused. “You thought it was Paul, didn’t you.”
“No,” he said truthfully. “He never crossed my mind.” He told her then that he’d tried to contact her earlier, and explained why. When she didn’t respond immediately, he wondered if he should have said anything at all. “Addie, it isn’t like we’re having him arrested.”
“I know that. I’m just hitting myself because I didn’t think of it before.”
He smiled at the front window. “My fault. Hysterical men, don’t you know.”
“Yes. I do know.”
He switched the receiver to his other hand, spat a curse.
“Are you all right, Ev?”
“An accident,” he told her. “Burned my hand making tea.”
“Wonderful. You do live an exciting life.”
“Yes.” He carried the telephone to the couch and sat heavily. “I am blessed.”
“Are you packed?”
“All ready to go.”
“Ah. Well. Will you call me when you get back?”
“I’ll do better than that. Why don’t you meet me at the station right now, we’ll tell Ludden, and then you can buy me a farewell-until-Sunday meal.”
He sensed a hesitation before she said, decisively, “Fine. Ten minutes?”
“Fifteen,” he said. “Ludden isn’t going anywhere and I have to use the—”
“Spare me,” she interrupted with a laugh. “God, you Yanks are a crude lot. What makes you think you can run the world?”
“Because,” he said, “nobody takes us seriously until it’s too late. Crude, you see. Very effective.”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
4
There was no problem with the sergeant. In fact, his concern for Addie was demonstrably greater than his concern for Paul; so much so, Evan was embarrassed. But his one attempt to make a humorous comment was received with a look that made him turn away from the counter and study the notices on a bulletin board nailed up by the door. When their business was completed twenty minutes later, and after a brief laughing discussion of Ida MacNair wanting to call out the fire brigade to extinguish a pile of leaves burning in someone’s yard, he walked Addie across the street, to an Indian restaurant not much wider than a fair-sized closet.
She was grateful he’d been able to think clearly.
That’s what she called it.
He called it almost too damn late, but she refused to hear it. And she looked as relieved as he felt. They hastily assured each other that they were not making light of Paul’s condition, but it was, wasn’t it, rather nice to know that something concrete was being done. Worrying would only make them paranoid. She admitted that she’d not been thinking straight all day and would, probably, have gone to London herself.
They had several drinks.
He walked her home.
On her doorstep she took his hand and covered it with hers. “You’re a saint, Kendal, you know that.”
Her hand was warm.
“I know nothing of the sort. I’m just helping out a friend.”
“And Paul.”
“Of course. That’s who I meant.”
Her hand was soft.
“I know that, you oaf. I was teasing.”
Her face, in the porchlight, was shadow and moth-wing.
“Paul,” he said, cleared his throat, spoke the name again. “I wish I knew what was wrong with him. Physically, I mean.” His tone was deliberately expectant.
“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” she said, half doctor, half wife. “I’ve been trying to think, remember, hunt for symptoms I may have missed. But I can’t come up with a thing. And I can’t even think about a true diagnosis unless I see him.”
“I know, I know, believe me. It’s just that he just looked so—” He stopped himself when he sensed her discomfort, when he saw Paul’s face and had to shake it away. Speculation was a waste of time, futile, emotionally horrid, but he knew it wouldn’t stop her. It hadn’t stopped him.
The only thing he could tell himself for sure was that Paul Burwin was crazy. The why would have to come later.
“I’ll call when I get back.” When she nodded, he tapped a finger lightly against her brow. “And if you hear anything while I’m gone, you call me, yes?”
She nodded.
“You have the number?”
She nodded again, and made a performance of clutching her purse. “Right here. I’ll make a hundred copies as soon as I get to work tomorrow.”
“Very funny.”
She looked up at him.
He couldn’t see her eyes; it made him nervous.
“Thank you, Evan.”
“Like I said.”
She glanced up and down the quiet street, then kissed him quickly, and softly. On the lips.
He walked back to the car, left around the corner from the restaurant, and drove slowly home. By the time he was in bed, tracing the cracks in the ceiling, he was glad he was on his way to Edinburgh in the morning. It would be a good time to consider what the hell he was going to do next.
While waiting for the police to find his friend.
While wondering if she knew that Paul, the bastard, had every right to be jealous.
IV
WEEKEND IN PORT RICHMOND
Twelve
Port Richmond on the Hudson, sprawling westward from the lip of a boulder-bound, tree-dotted cliff whose shadow in the water was barren and dark gray. Its north end was tucked into a U-shaped extension of dense state forest that merged with the woodland across the state line, south and west boundaries simply other towns that touched other towns that snaked-danced south to the George Washington Bridge; shops and garages and offices and restaurants and one twenty-unit motel and two movie theaters and two parks and a truck-laden highway that slipped out of New York State; Palisade Row and Forest Road and Tyler Avenue and Hemlock Terrace and no streets with numbers to give visitors and newcomers a hint of where they were, where they had to go, where they could turn to get to Oak Street or Raven Road; one bus line, one taxi, and a train station that few had been to since the day it had closed.
Port Richmond with a name that lied about its function, though not about its origin, when gunrunners and smugglers used the fifty-yard rock flatland at the base of the cliff to avoid British frigates and British patrols; a secret name among rebels, made public when gunrunners and smugglers and Tories decided to stay.
Port Richmond at night, from the air, a sprawl of lights winked out by shifting leaves.
Port Richmond, in autumn.
High and deep October sky.
Thirteen
1
High and deep October sky.
“Admit it, Brian,” the blonde said, voice low and husky. “This is something you’ve wanted to do practically since we met.”
No clouds; a flock of Canada geese, ragged, heading south and calling.
“C’mon, be honest.”
The morning’s light frost replaced by a startling reprise of Indian summer.
“Well?”
He couldn’t deny it; he had. Desperately. Foolishly. To the point of dreaming of it constantly—night dreams and daydreams and doodling dreams of it in class—wishing for it from the moment the weather had turned warm enough to temporarily shed overcoats and gloves and make the shade almost welcome again. From the moment he had stepped out onto Mickie Farwood’s patio for the first time he had wanted to, and had never found the nerve to ask her if they could.
His grandmother would shoot him if she knew what he was thinking.
“Bri-an.” Coyly. Teasing. Sing-song and low. One dark-nailed hand flat and warm against his chest, the other on the small of his back, pressing him to her without letting him touch.
“I guess,” he admitted at last. The smell of her, sun-warmth and turning leaves and just a hint of wine on her breath. He grinned. “Yeah.”
With a slow nod she moved away. Shorter by a head, slender, her hair cut high above her shoulders while his, three shades darker but still clearly blond, curled neatly an inch longer. To celebrate the break in weather, she wore a bumblebee-striped tube top and stone-washed denim cutoffs, her skin still lightly tanned from a sailing summer in the Caribbean. Her feet were bare; her legs gleamed gold.
When she looked at him over her shoulder, chin tucked, eyes narrow, he almost sagged against the wall.
She did that to him.
She knew it.
Every stride, every look; the flutter of her eyelashes when she was pleased, the moue of dark lips when she wanted something he wasn’t sure he could give her, the way she touched her right ear with her left forefinger, stroking it and tugging it, her arm crooked across her chest whenever she was planning her next move.
Everything snared him, as she knew it would, as he knew it would. And didn’t give a damn. In the real world, rich girls didn’t much care about boys who lived in boarding houses with their grandmothers; in the real world, boys who lived in boarding houses seldom spoke to rich girls because they seldom had a reason.
Only in his dreams.
“Okay then,” she said.
The hot tub took up most of the patio’s southern edge, redwood sides and turquoise interior, three shallow wooden steps to climb in, tiled shelf wide enough for glasses, plates, bottles. It seemed near the size of a modest swimming pool, and was already filled, the water’s surface rippling as a chilled breeze coasted across the backyard.
He looked nervously side to side.
“Bri?”
No one could see.
The two-acre yard, like all the others on the east side of Palisade Row, ended at a hundred-foot rocky drop to the sun-caught Hudson River. It was marked by an outer stockade fence and closely spaced trees—autumn-touched maples and hickory at cliff-side, two rows of evergreens on the flanks—and an inner boundary of flowering shrubs trained to grow high and wide and tangled. The flagstone patio itself, dead leaves huddled in one corner, had a wall of its own, knee-high and brick, topped at intervals by potted plants Mrs. Farwood tended as if they were frail children.
No one could see.
Unlike home, where everyone saw everything whether he liked it or not.
He jumped at a sudden hissing, a bubbling, and saw Mickie bending over the control panel.
She looked back at him around one bare arm. The cutoffs rode high. She raised her right foot and kicked lightly at her rump. “You want everything, Mr. Oakland?”
“Huh?”
She chuckled, and pointed at an inset panel of buttons he couldn’t see from where he stood. “Pay attention, boy. With this thing we got bottom jets, side jets, bubblers, shooters, a zillion combinations.” She giggled, closed one eye, and licked her bare shoulder. “I got one here, you could have an orgasm before you get your toes in.”
Oh hell.
Not even in his dreams.
“Well?” Still looking over her shoulder, she rotated her hips. Once. “Want me to turn it all on?”
Her hips rotated again.
He blushed, and felt it—heat on his cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun, and a tight band around his chest that had nothing to do with the snug T-shirt he wore. He had no idea why she thought she had to talk that way; she must have read it in one of her magazines someplace. The now way to talk for sophisticated young women.
And she did it deliberately.
To confuse him. Excite him. Make him putty.
He had long since stopped asking why me?
Only last week, just as the English department monitor had passed out the quarterly final, she had leaned forward from her seat directly behind him and whispered, “You get an A on this, stud, and I’ll fuck you bowlegged.”
He had been so flustered, he’d barely finished half the questions.
Nevertheless: why me?
She stood slowly, stretched and groaned, then crossed her arms and slowly pulled off her top. Her bare back showed no white stripes. The tan was complete. She didn’t turn around. “Brian, I’m not going in here alone. There might be sharks.”
Nervously rubbing his palms over his thighs, he glanced through the sliding glass door into the house, his reflection jumping when a gust kicked past him.
“They’re gone, Brian, remember? Golf, riding, something stupid. I don’t know. Who cares?”
He checked the yard again.
“Damnit, Brian.”
“Okay, okay.”
He walked as steadily as he could toward the tub, stripping off his T-shirt, unsnapping his jeans. Casual; you do it all the time, stud, do it all the time. Flex the pecs, bulge, the ’ceps. Hell, no sweat. Do it all the time.
Despite the temperature, he shivered. A kick took care of one of his sneakers. A second kick cost him his balance, and he banged into the tub’s wall, his knee taking the brunt. He hissed and turned around, swore at himself and at Mickie, who laughed quietly.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
Water splashed gently.
He turned back and saw her on the far side, sitting on a submerged ledge. The water boiled around her as she stretched her arms out along the shelf, froth and bubbles hiding all but her shoulders and the shining flat of her chest.
Don’t stare.
She winked.
Jesus, don’t stare.
She pursed her lips, kissed the air.
He checked the sky for a bolt of lightning, and decided, what the hell, I’m dead anyway. As quickly as he could, he stripped the rest of his clothes off and rushed in, backward. Catching his breath at the strike of water on his skin, sighing as he twisted awkwardly around and his buttocks found the ledge. He stretched out his legs and wriggled his toes. He closed his eyes.
“God,” he said, “it must be great to be rich.”
A feather-touch against his feet, sliding along his legs.
“It’s much better,” she whispered, “to be horny.”
And sat on his lap.
Oh God, he thought, throat dry and neck taut; oh God, now what do I do?
After fluttering a bit, his hands finally lighted on her waist, touched silk and didn’t dare move. She leaned forward, kissed him feather-light, leaned back and rested her hands on his shoulders. His own hands sank beneath the water, to the hard curve of her buttocks, where they froze for a second when they discovered the bottom half of a bikini.
It was time to drown himself.
Time to slip under the surface and let the cops find him naked; no way he could tell them he’d thought she was naked too.
I don’t believe it, he thought; I do not believe it.
“Brian.”
Okay. No problem. She’s mostly naked, right? That’s gotta count for something, so just be cool, that’s all, just be cool.
He grunted to prove he’d heard her, and let his hands drift up again, floating across her waist, not risking too strong a hold. At the same time, he was careful to avoid a direct stare at her breasts; it wouldn’t be cool, it wouldn’t be right, it would trap him the way her legs had trapped his thighs and her groin barely brushed his and moved away. And moved back. As if she were floating on the tide, unaware that she was moving at all.
“Bri?”
He focused on the diamond beads of water clinging to the hollow of her throat, quivering with the pulse he saw throbbing there. He didn’t dare look at her eyes; he knew they’d be laughing.
“Bri?”
He grunted again. Speaking would be the end of him.
“I want to do a stunt.”
He blinked, and looked up. “You what?”
Slightly forward.
“I want to do a stunt. I want to get in the school Halloween night.”
I knew it, he thought, close to anger, closer still to disappointment. Rich girls and boarding-house boys. Who the hell were you kidding anyway, Oakland?
He almost pushed her away.
Sounding like a jerk instead: “We’re not supposed to.”
Slightly back.
A lopsided sneer. “That’s the whole point, dope,” she said, giving his shoulders a shove. “Linholm says we can’t, so we do.” Her head tilted back and she laughed. “My god, we pull it off and he’ll shit a brick!”
Slightly forward.
“I don’t know,” he said reluctantly. “If he finds out—”
She leaned into him, and he closed his eyes, felt the give of her breasts against his cheeks, smelled her; she was warm. Her head came forward, her lips against his ear.
“He won’t,” she whispered. Her tongue on his lobe, circling. “But I will, if you will.” Her tongue again, nudging. “Brian?”
Loudly he mumbled deliberate nonsense into her skin, and she giggled, arched her back to free his mouth.
