and gasped for breath, chests heaving, hearts pounding. Her eyes
glittered as she looked at me.
The rain had begun to come down a little harder.
My face was so flushed I felt we must have been steaming there, the two
of us, boiling mists off the street. I'd never thought it possible to
want a woman this bad. I could feel the ache for her in every bone in
my body, through every inch of skin. And in a way just wanting her
that much was enough, fulfillment of a kind. Had a car come along just
then and plowed us down I'd have died in the rain slick streets a happy
man. Just to have had the moment. That pleasure, that desire.
So I wasn't prepared for the rest.
I saw her eyes glance away from me, over my shoulder to the theater.
The eyes were wide, her face wet and gleaming with rain. Her voice was
a soft, passionate whisper.
"She's watching. She sees us."
"We can go to my place."
"No."
"Please, Casey."
"No."
She pulled me close. She took my hand again and moved it slowly under
her skirt. I felt the coolness of her thigh turn slowly to a sleek
humid warmth as she moved it upward. Then there was only the soft thin
tuft of pubic hair under my hand and the naked depth of her.
"Here." Her lips stung my cheek. "Right here and now or not at
all."
Then suddenly she was all teeth and shifting flesh that turned and
stroked and grappled with me.
And suddenly the rain began in earnest.
A flash of light and rain and wind that rattled the storefront behind
me, followed by a distant thunder.
And there on the rain-drenched glistening streets of my hometown I saw
the strange wild pleasure in her face as she looked behind me and saw a
girl I'd known since childhood watch me plunge into her like a
prisoner, like a starving man, between naked thighs clamped hard around
my hips and waist, and heard her laugh with a terrible, awesome kind of
greed as I threw up her yellow T-shirt and felt the breasts soften and
flush beneath my hands. And then the moisture inside her flowed and
flowed until I poured myself into her and stood still, trembling,
finished.
They say that on a fighter the legs go first.
I dropped slowly to the black street, water running over my knees. Not
caring.
I looked up and saw her smile and slide down off the car, breathing
through her open mouth. She gave me her hand.
The wind whistled through the tree in front of Harmon's, broken long
ago by lightning.
"We can go now," she said.
SEVEA/
That night we slept together on my bed. In the morning she was gone
when I woke. There was no note. I'd have been surprised to find one
there.
I woke up bruised and charged with energy.
I wondered vaguely what she'd told her parents, if anything. I didn't
worry about it. I didn't worry about anything at all. There had never
been anyone like her in Dead River. In my mood I doubted there was
anyone like her anywhere.
I could never have expected her, yet I felt I'd waited for her all my
life. Some compensations for all those years of emptiness. It was
postcoital euphoria on a massive scale. And more.
I made some coffee and read the morning paper, lying in bed and sipping
at the coffee, and every so often the scent of her would waft up from
the linen or from me. Unwashed, unshaven, I felt clean as a baby.
It was Saturday, so there was nothing I was pressed to do. It must
have taken me two hours to get to the shower. When I came out,
dripping, looking for a towel, she was standing by the bed.
"Dry off. We already did that once, remember?"
We spent the day in bed.
Then most of Sunday.
I never did get around to asking her what she'd told her parents. It
didn't seem important. Obviously she was handling it one way or
another. There was not the slightest hint of tension in her, or of
conflict of any kind.
Maybe they knew what they had the same as I did.
Someone special. Someone to whom the rules did not apply. And, like
me, asked no questions.
We should have asked.
But there are all kinds of sins, aren't there.
I know them all by now.
I took Monday off. Called in sick. I'd never done it before, not
once, so there was no trouble. The rain had passed with the weekend.
It was a hot, bright morning- the first of July- and we decided to
drive to the beach again.
Steven picked us up in the royal blue Le Baron. He and Kim had already
gone on their little shopping spree, so the trunk was full of beer and
the usual delicacies. I felt glad to be left out of that particular
part of it. Steve was in a terrific mood. I wondered aloud if it was
the stealing
"Nah. That's always fun, sure. But my sister's home, see? And guess
who's left her little shit of a husband? Young Babs of Radcliffe,
that's who. Still all drawly and horsey-looking and completely tit
less but free at last. And god! Is she ever driving my parents' nuts!
All she does these past couple of days is give them tears and
arrogance and general craziness, and all those other good things that
come with shedding a rich partner and every bit of it's directed at
them.
"That's the best part. Because they got her into it, you see? They
just absolutely loved Robert Cowpie Jessup. Not to mention Jessup
Laboratories. Oh, they are catching royal fucking helll This morning
over breakfast on the pa-tee-oh she called them leeches. Can you
imagine? Leeches! And last night it was pimps.
"I am having a hell of a time, I tell you."
"Lots of good feeling between you and the folks, huh?"
You could have wished it to happen every morning. At least he wasn't
driving like a maniac. We took the coast road out at a nice, easy pace
for a change. A pleasant little drive in the country with a trunk full
of stolen caviar. When we passed the Crouch place he looked at me and
grinned.
"I saw lights."
"You saw bullshit."
His mood got us all happy.
Casey said that Kim's straw hat looked like something out of Elvira
Madigan by way of Kate Hepburn. Steve picked it up with peasant-girl
jokes and farm girl jokes, most of which centered on Kimberley's ample
breasts and thighs, her most conspicuous features. Kim countered with
references to the weekend "orgy" between Casey and me, and the whole
thing got pretty tasteless,
We did plenty of laughing. Finally Casey made some comment about the
inevitability of a discussion of Kimberley's breasts in any social
gathering in which she, Kimberley, was a part, and Kim pulled off the
big wide-brimmed hat and stuffed it under the seat and said, okay, you
want 'em, you got 'em, and proceeded to peel off the powder blue tank
top she was wearing and toss it over her head into the wind.
We watched it flutter down behind us.
We were about a mile from the beach and there she sat, half-naked, her
nipples puckering in the breeze.
"Cute," said Casey. "Now what are you gonna wear home?"
Kim giggled. "You worried about it? You shouldn't be. You better