Debbie felt herself getting tense again whenever Rick, dark and handsome and intense by the reddish flickering glow from the stove, caught her eye. Finally they were finished eating, and then Rick took her Coke out of her hand, set it aside, and gently pushed her down on her back. They were still in their swim suits. He started kissing her, then put his hand in the hot V between her breasts, his fingers curving around her breast under the halter.
She tore loose suddenly, and started sobbing. “I’m sor... sorry, Ricky. I just... I... please, be patient...”
“Patient? What the hell...” He was sitting up, panting, his eyes glowing angrily. Then he took a deep breath and nodded. He stood up. “Okay, Deb,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
In the kitchen he poured out orange juice from the old refrigerator into two glasses, then added vodka from the bottle his old man kept under the sink. He saw his hands were shirking. Goddamn her! Then he told himself to take it easy. She was a goddamn virgin, had to remember that. Big deal for her. Mustn’t blow it by coming on too hard, scaring her so she froze up. He’d never gotten a virgin, and he wanted to, real bad. Like one of those old kings or something in history class, take any one in the kingdom they wanted. Always a virgin.
He went back in with their drinks, and made his voice cheerful. “Screwdrivers, they call them, kid. Just orange juice and vodka. You won’t even taste it, but it’ll make you relax.”
“I’m sorry,” she said humbly. “I tried, I really did, I—”
“That’s okay, baby.” His eyes gleamed. “Just relax...”
And with three screwdrivers warming her stomach, revolving in her head, she did, letting her body take over, make its own responses to his mouth and hands. She kissed the back of his neck a little dizzily as he unsnapped her halter, and clung to his brown, muscular back as his mouth sought her bared breasts.
Then they were in the bedroom, and for the first time in her life she was gripped by that ancient urgency far older than the brief human species of which she was but a momentary spark. Her legs parted; when he entered her she cried out once, sharply, then moaned, and whispered his name again and again, fiercely, a talisman to carry her beyond the pain to the pleasure that sex education courses had promised her.
As she clung to him, whispering her love to him, Rick, above her, grunted and thrust and finally pumped, careless of her stifled outcries, the biggest man in the world, making it, balling a virgin, getting his.
When it was over they lay side by side, Debbie crying proudly into the hollow of his neck, by some miracle knowing that the strange urgency would grip her again in a few minutes’ time, and Rick, staring up into the darkness, complacent at having made his first virgin. Old Deb, she hadn’t been much this first time, but he dug being the first one, dug knowing he had hurt her and had made her like it. A whole different thing than with Mary, who you couldn’t get to even by hurting because she dug every sort of weird scene you could dream up.
But it had been sort of like getting Paula Halstead, all over again. Goddamn her! He wished that it was her next to him, not Debbie. He’d show her some things that would take that pitiless contempt from her eyes — that look he’d never been able to change or forget.
Thinking of Paula got him going again, and he turned toward Debbie as the chipmunk, that she’d seen outside the window earlier, scrabbled getting those silly damned walnuts or whatever the hell it was that she’d left out for him. Debbie heard it, too, but didn’t react. There was nothing in the world for her just then but Ricky.
Outside, Julio slipped off through the darkened woods, unaware of the city-bred noises he was making. Not that he would have cared even if he had been aware of his clumsiness in the undergrowth. He was half-blind with frustration and desire and hatred.
Dirty goddamn whorish bitch. Oh, she’d get hers. When the time came, and it wasn’t far off, she’d get plenty.
CHAPTER 22
It was 2:03 on Monday afternoon when Debbie rang Curt’s doorbell. Waiting, she straightened to draw in her already flat stomach and thus thrust her breasts a little more noticeably forward. I’m a woman now, she thought a little complacently. Ricky has made me a woman. As a woman, she knew, with a woman’s weapons, she had nothing to fear from Professor Curtis Halstead, even if it would be something about his wife.
The door opened, and Curt was looking at her.
“Miss Marsden? Come in, please.” He shut the door behind her; she was totally unlike anything he might have imagined. “Would you like some tea, or coffee?”
“I... tea would be fine.”
She’s nervous as a cat, Curt thought. He said, “I’ll just be a moment, Miss Marsden. Or may I call you Debbie?”
“Debbie is fine, sir.”
She sat primly on the couch, feet in their flat shoes flat on the floor, knees held tightly together. She watched him disappear through the double doors into the dark-paneled dining room. He was nothing at all like her vague remembrance from the faculty tea; he must be as old as her dad, maybe, but he moved the way that Ricky moved. She felt a momentary stab of uneasiness; he looked like a man who might be proof against the woman’s weapons she had thought to rely on.
Curt returned with the tea service on a tray, and was reminded vividly of that first morning with Monty Worden. But this girl was so young, so pathetically young. But he had to gel those names from her. The names of the predators.
“The water will boil in a moment.” Then he added, in the same conversational voice, “What time did you leave the phone booth that night? The night that Paula killed herself?”
“I... what do you mean, I... don’t understand...”
“The paper boy has identified you, Debbie. You must recall him.”
Debbie realized that she had half risen, made herself sit back down. Then she realized she was staring at her fingers, intertwined in her lap, so she quickly dropped her hands to the sofa. The paper boy! She remembered him, all right. But how had the professor found out about him? And... And... She mustn’t admit being there; she had promised Ricky she would never tell about him and Paula Halstead and...
She heard her own voice, like the voice of a stranger speaking from a great distance, saying, “I... about nine-thirty. I...”
“Paula killed herself just a few minutes before my return at about eleven forty-live. If I had returned directly following the end of my seminar, she still would be alive.” He said it entirely without visible emotion. The teapot began whistling thinly, and Curt stood up. He started for the kitchen, then whirled abruptly: Worden had taught him the value of shock tactics. “What were you doing in the phone booth?”
Startled, Debbie tried to counter weakly with, “What... does one usually do in a phone booth?”
“One usually makes a phone call — which you didn’t.”
Then he was gone, leaving her staring numbly after him. She fought an urge to bolt out the front door. She mustn’t tell. Mustn’t mustn’t mustn’t. Remember: if his old wife had left Ricky alone, none of this would have happened. It was her fault, not Debbie’s or Rick’s.
Curt returned, poured tea, added milk and sugar to his as Debbie added lemon and sugar to hers. Was it possible, just barely possible, that she had been there innocently? But her hands, holding the cup, were shaking slightly, and her eyes would not meet his.
He snapped at her, “Well? What were you doing in that booth?”
Debbie’s hands jerked, spilling tea; she felt her control slipping, knew she would start sniveling in a moment like a high school kid. He was watching her as if she were something from under a stone.