There was something contradictory in him and her mind struggled for definition. He was primitive and animal, perhaps even coarse and depraved, yet there was another very different side to the coin…
He was neat. Irritatingly neat, like an old maid. After what they had done together on the bed, it was astonishing but true. She thought of her neatly folded clothing on the chair as she watched his actions in the kitchen. He took out two fresh glasses for their now-watery drinks and washed out the old ones, putting them on the drainer rack to dry. He tore off a wad of paper towels and mopped up the melted ice, filled the new trays and picked a bottle cap off the floor and threw it into the trash can. It seemed so fussy and spinsterish, laughable when you saw his well-hung groin bobbing like a buoy throughout all his ministrations. He was…
The word froze her heart in terror.
He was thorough.
Whatever he did, he did it with a chilling efficiency. What did it mean, she wondered? What did it reveal about him? What threatening facet of his personality was exposed by that mechanical neatness?
Neatness was a form of self-control. Overly neat people were uptight, afraid of something wild and dark in themselves. What was it in Leo that was wild and dark? Suddenly she hated his name. Leo Rudd. Short and hard, like a merciless slamming fist.
He was coming back to her now, carrying two glasses in a careful way as though dreading that a single drop should accidentally splash out. How could he be so fastidious and yet have made her do what she had done in the bed? The haunting certainly that he was two people made her want to jump up, dress and escape from him into the garish Village crowds. Two people… a split personality. Madness, dangerous and deadly, lay behind that swarthy, handsome face. A schizophrenic. He handed her the glass and turned to balance himself as he lowered to the mattress. His profile looked like a sharply honed, slicing ax blade.
Suddenly she knew. He had done something to Ginny, worked some evil on her that had driven her away to some hideous fate. Ginny would never return, and Leo had therefore been right. She was the heiress to the apartment; everything in it belonged to her, but most important and most frightening of all, she belonged to it!
She had to question him about Ginny, find out what he had done so that she would know his secret and thus have some power over him.
But nothing she could do would make her voice or her questions sound natural. She spoke in an unnaturally high, strained voice, a voice filled with fear.
"What was – I mean, it's funny moving into someone else's place, seeing all their things. I've never done that before. You start to put together a picture of someone. I'm curious about Ginny. Tell me about her."
He turned eagerly to her, giving her that bright, vulpine glance.
"Are you?" he said quickly. His whole body seemed to stiffen with anticipation. "Why?"
The short little word penetrated her like a stiletto, probing into her deepest recesses.
"Just because," she answered, shrugging and trying to sound casual though her heart thudded in her chest.
"I've already told you about her, haven't I?"
"Yes, the kooky California girl. But… what did she look like? Did she…"
He waited, smiling. "Did she what?"
"Did she look like me!" The echo of her shrill voice hung in the room.
His laugh was dry and toneless. "Why does it matter to you?"
"Because…" She cast about in her mind for some excuse, something that would sound like a normal curiosity. She could not tell him of her terrifying feelings, that she was gradually becoming Ginny.
"Someone in the building, some woman, spoke to me and called me Ginny, then realized she'd made a mistake."
His eyes weighed the lie and threw it back in her face with a mocking glint.
"Why, yes, as a matter of fact, she looked a little bit like you. Same coloring." He drank off half the highball and carefully placed the glass on the floor, away from the bed.
So he won't knock it over, she thought. That would enrage him, to do something clumsy. He's smooth, so smooth…
A scraping sound distracted her. It was a dry, sliding noise from the other side of the room. In the fraction of a second that it took her mind to register it, she knew what it was even before she saw it.
The poster of the cherry-lipped girl sagged to one side as a tack popped out of a corner and fell on the floor.
"Oh! My God…"
She shrank back on the mattress, flattening herself against the wall, getting as far away from the opposite wall and from Leo as she could. Her hand went to her throat and she froze in terror as she stared wide-eyed at the crooked face.
"What's the matter?" he laughed, looking from the poster to her ashen face. His lips twitched with a cruel mischief, an amused malevolence that only made her more afraid.
Cold sweat trickled down her ribs. The slanted green eyes of the poster were still locked on her, even in the topsy-turvy position.
"It… scared me." She grasped wildly at some logical reason to give him. "I-I thought it was a bug or a mouse or… something like that."
He looked at her for a moment, then got up, stepping in a wide circle around his drink as he bent to pick up the tack. He climbed on the sofa and righted the poster, holding his hand flat against the wall as he turned to her.
His face was washed clean of the threatening evil that had been there before. It was bland and politely inquiring.
"Is it straight?" he asked impersonally.
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
He was like a schoolmaster at the blackboard giving her a chance to prove her sums. Of course, Leo could not endure a crooked picture, and his eye would discern a fraction of discrepancy.
She looked again, "A tiny bit higher…"
He thrust the tack in with his thumb, stepped down from the couch and observed the repair carefully, then nodded, satisfied.
He came back to the bed, "Ginny probably tossed it up there one day on the spur of the moment. I'm surprised she used thumbtacks instead of a hairpin or an old heroin needle," he said dryly.
She tried to laugh but it sounded like a dry gag. "Was she – I guess she was helter-skelter, impetuous?"
"Very," he said with a sudden frown, "She stapled the curtains together, did you notice? Got them up in twenty minutes flat. Including the rods."
He rolled over on his stomach and grabbed her hand.
"What's your sign?" he asked.
It just didn't register. "What?"
"When is your birthday?"
"Oh. May twenty-second."
His smile began with a barely perceptible tremor in his full lower lip and stretched lazily across his face like that of someone watching the slow progression of a torture victim's agony.
"Gemini," he said softly, caressing the word. "The twins. You're like quicksilver, can't be captured and pinned down to one personality. First you're this… and then you're that. Is that right?"
A sickening wave of powerlessness struck her. She was Brenda and she was Ginny… Ginny and Brenda. And he knew it!
"I don't know," she said with a short laugh. "I don't believe in that stuff, do you?"
He answered too quickly. "Oh, no, of course not. But it's fun."
His hand cupped her full breast and molded over its roundness.
"But something else is more fun," he whispered. He played with her tits, rubbing them lightly at first, then concentrating on her erecting nipples as he pinched them between thumb and finger until her shoulders twisted sinuously. She forgot everything at his touch and pulled his head down to the round white orb she thrust at him.
He sucked noisily on her stiff nipple while his fingers tweaked the other. She looked down at her soft swelling flesh and watched in fascination as his hard fingers turned the pink tip into dark red. She felt the blood engorging the erectile tissue of her nipples, sending shivers over her ribs.