“I don’t know,” I said, my voice loud and harsh and weary in the silence. “I have to sort things out. I’ve got to get back to town.”
I expected protestations, pleadings, demands that we talk it all out here and now. But in a voice bright, casual and kindly, she said, as she patted my arm. “Too much is happening too fast, I know. Almost too much to take. And we have all the time there is, darling.”
We walked toward my car. I opened the car door and turned toward her. She was closer than I had expected, and she swayed into me, parted my jacket, hooked the fingers of both hands around my belt and pulled and held us tightly together, her face in the hollow of my throat, her back arched in a way that laid the insistent firmness of her breasts against my chest. I could not stand like a fool with my arms at my sides. I put them around her, my hands light and meaningless on her back.
“It’s a hell of a way to leave both of us,” she murmured. Already there was a muzzy formlessness about her articulation, a roughening of her voice. Her breathing was slowing and deepening and I felt the faint ripening sag of her as her knees drowsed under her tumescent weight.
“Haven’t we said...”
“I don’t mean more talk. Can’t you tell I don’t mean more talk? I mean it could be so much better now the terrible edge is gone. Starving people gobble the food, honey. They don’t take time for tasting. They fill their bellies, fast as they can. Too fast.”
I could feel the heat of her slow exhalations against my throat. “We shouldn’t have let that happen.”
“I know, I know, I know,” she said in a cross blurred voice. “But it did, and it’s done, so what’s wrong with getting all the good of it? Not starving now. Just a good hunger. Les’ go in an be gourmets, darlin’. A slow slow sweet sweet feast. With all the tastes and flavors. No gobbling. All slow and long and sweet...”
She kept murmuring but the singsong words had become indistinct. It was a fuzzy droning, like a summer-sound of bees, and her body had begun its soft, inadvertent pulsings. In the ultimate second, just before I was forever lost, I pushed her slowly and firmly away from me. When I released her at arm’s length I saw her waver in the starlight and catch her balance. She stood hunched for a time, her fists against her cheeks, and then straightened herself.
“You’re right of course, darling,” she said in the same tone she probably used for social telephoning.
“One guilt at a time.”
“I suppose I should feel spurned and degraded. But somehow I don’t. You do have a vast talent for turning me into... some unspeakable, panting thing, Gevan. Practically with no warning at all. Doesn’t that stimulate your male ego?”
“Good night, Niki.”
“With a friendship kiss,” she said, and came close. With great wisdom, I kissed her cheek. She laughed at me and called me a coward.
When I was behind the wheel she bent down and looked through the window at me, her expression mischievous in the dashboard lights.
“You do realize you cheated us by being so conventional,” she said. “Because next time we’ll have to be all fierce and fast again before we can be the way we want to be. Do come back soon. You could be terribly weak and inconsistent and come back a little later, or get out of the car right now, and I wouldn’t tease you about it, really.”
She laughed at me and backed away. When I turned in the drive the lights swept across her and left her smiling in the darkness; that smile, caught in an instant of light, grooved forever into the brain’s jelly — proud, strong and mocking.
I drove toward the pink glow of the city by night. I held the wheel stiffly and drove slowly, and tried to keep her out of my mind, tried to keep my mind blank and gray. When I was a boy of ten I spent a summer on a farm my grandfather owned. Ken and I were assigned chores. One sow showed the ingenuity of a demon in escaping the pen. When she was loose, we had to drop what we were doing, and herd her back. She was a savage and knowing animal, and we armed ourselves with stout sticks. It was a game of maneuver. Ideally we would work her slowly back until the nearest one of us could dart in and open the gate and the other would stampede her through it before the rest of them could also escape. But it never worked out that way. If we made the slightest miscalculation, if we left too large a gap to right or to left or between us, she would launch herself through it at a dead run and we would have to begin all over again.
I had the same feeling of trying to herd something that was endlessly alert to break loose.
And suddenly it did. All my desire for Niki came burning and torrenting upon me, spewing into my mind all the erotica of the solid, steady, metronomic surging of her hips while her eyes rolled wild and all of her was supple in her torment and her breasts were burning hardness, and her arms grew awesomely strong, and her broken mouth was lost in a demented babbling, keening and mewling between the whistling gasps that measured, by their frequency, her desperate climb to her peak of urgency. All the bright hotness of her in my mind, coming so strongly and suddenly, brought an icy sweat that soaked my body, and brought a knotted aching tension to my loins, and made me too sick and dizzy with my need to be able to drive. I pulled over onto a wide shoulder, able to despise myself for noting there was enough width for a U turn. I stopped and turned off the motor and had the maniac idea that I should throw the car key out into the darkness. I clenched the top of the steering wheel, my fists close together, my forehead resting on my fists. I rocked my head from side to side. In an abandoned ballroom in my mind, countless naked images of her danced to forgotten music, improvising obscene parodies I could not quite hear.
At one point I started the motor, I was that close to going back to her. But after a time the violence of my need began to fade. I had won, but I had no feeling of victory because I had won but one small skirmish. I had the sour wisdom of the addict who knows that the first episode of self-denial does not make future rejections easier. The need grows. All you can do is pray for increased strength with which to meet the next physiological assault.
I did not want to become the creature she could so easily turn me into. I did not want to release my grasp on pride and fall into the blind arena of sexual compulsion. Yet if there is no provable validity about any activity in which man indulges, if we are indeed but a ludicrous and self-important product of an accident of chemistry in the soupy sea of a brand-new planet...
I knew I could be too agile in such sly argumentation. Weak with emotional fatigue, I started the car and drove on into the city.
Chapter 11
As I walked through the hotel lobby, Joan Perrit got up from one of the lobby chairs and came toward me, earnest, pretty and worried.
“Mr. Dean, I’ve been waiting to—”
“You’re not in the office now, Perry.”
She flushed. “Gevan, then.”
“You look all wound up. Buy you a drink?”
She lowered her voice. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you, Gevan. I left her in the drugstore. If you’re free, I’ll bring her to your room in a few minutes. I tried to get you on the house phone and they said you were out.”
I told her that would be fine and she smiled nervously and hurried off. I went up to my small suite. A few minutes later there was a tapping on my door. I let them in. I knew I had seen the other girl before, and then I remembered that when I had gotten my pass from Captain Corning, she had been at a typist’s desk in the corner of his office.
She was a fluffy blonde in a cheap, bright outfit that emphasized her breasts and hips, She was the Hollywood ideal of the pretty starlet, her cheap, shallow beauty dependent upon the childishness of her features, the upturned nose, pouting mouth, bland forehead, staring blue eyes. Though at the moment she looked frightened and rebellious, she was predictable as being, in other moods, a giggler, a snuggler, full of kittenish mannerisms and teasings.