I walk over and hug her and plant one on her cheek. She really doesn’t reek. She’s already showered at work. She always does. But sometimes, with the really bad ones, it’s a three-or-four-shower evening. Tonight, just a little tang of something in her hair. Just enough to let me wrinkle my nose at her.
“I know,” she says. “It wasn’t the Dutchman.”
“No? What did the guy in?”
“Booze, a Pontiac and an obstinate oak tree. He had a nice dinner before he died, though. Sauerbraten, red cabbage, potato pancakes and about a pint of vanilla raspberry-twirl ice cream. But the scent you detect belongs to somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Gentleman named Jennings. Turkey-farmer.”
“Ah, that lovely ammonia smell.”
“Right. He had all this turkey-shit piled up next to his barn. Looks like he was about to spread it out over his field when he had a heart attack instead. Fell right into the stuff. He was covered with it. We figure he was breathing in it for a good half-hour before he died too. The inside of him almost smelled worse than the outside. Did you say something about a shower this morning?”
“I did.”
“If you wash my hair you’re on.”
“I love to wash your hair.”
“You hungry yet?”
“Not really.”
“Turn off the stove.”
She turns the shower on, letting it warm up and I watch her undress. As always she’s businesslike about it but to me she’s a Vegas stripper. At thirty-eight she looks twenty-eight, everything tight, the bones delicate. We’ve both felt sad from time to time that she’s infertile, that we won’t be having any children. Me a bit more than her I think — I’ve got a brother for what he’s worth and a father and mother while she’s an only and both her parents are dead. So maybe I’m more used to family. But I shudder to think how far south her body might have gone were that not the case. It’s shallow of me I guess but as she is right now, she’s a joy to behold.
She throws the curtain and steps into the tub into the spray of water and I’m right behind her, watching her nipples pucker, watching her glisten. She turns toward me and shuts her eyes. Her long hair’s plastered to her head. I reach for the Aussie Mega and lather her up.
She smiles and makes these little mmmmm sounds as my fingers dig in for a good, firm, gentle massage. Little lava-eddies of shampoo roll over her collarbone, over her breasts and down to her navel.
“I think I could go to sleep like this,” she says.
“Standing up?”
“Cows do it.”
“You are no cow.”
She smiles and tilts her head back to rinse, straightens up and wipes the water from her eyes. Then looks down at me.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, really? Already?”
“I guess so. Turn around, I’ll do your back.”
She does. I wash her back, her ass, her breasts, her stomach. She raises her arms and I wash her armpits, her arms, then her back and ass again, into the crack of her ass, into her cunt. She soaps her own hand and reaches down to me.
She’s got my cock in her hand stroking the shaft and rolling around the glans and my fingers are moving inside her, my other hand clutching her breast and we’re both of us making sounds now. She’s gone baritone.
I know exactly how to touch her. I know exactly what she likes.
And god knows she knows me. What she doesn’t know is that my legs are giving out and I’m coming all over her ass.
“Okay, enough!” I tell her. She gives me this look over her shoulder. “For me I mean.”
“Thank god,” she says. And she comes too, for the first time that night.
The second time she comes we’ve already closed my own deal and I’ve got three fingers inside her. There’s debate about whether the g-spot really exists but she’s living proof there’s something there. She likes this hard, not smooth and easy like in the shower so that’s what I’m giving her. She’s starting to buck and groan and I’m grinning down at her like I’m listening to my favorite rock ’n roll song of all time.
Then she says those magic words.
I’mmmm commming!
I could cry or laugh out loud, this is such fun. I stay with her, ratcheting up the pace, the pad of my thumb buffing her clit, fingers pressing hard, sliding along the warm wet wall of her insides.
Oh! she says and ohhhh! and holds the moment suspended inside her so I hold too while she trembles all around me and then lets go. I work her a little more, smooth and gentle now and she jerks and spasms. Internal electricity. I know the feeling.
She laughs. The bawdy laugh. The one reserved just for me.
“Bastard!”
“You love it. You know you do.”
“I know I do.”
She kisses me the way you kiss your lover when he’s made your day. I kiss her back. She’s made mine.
While I’m heating up the bourguignon, preheating the broiler for the garlic bread and boiling water for the noodles I ask her to go into the study and have a look at Samantha, see if I’ve got the spatter right. She comes back in a little while.
“You’ve been doing your homework,” she says. “Studying the photos. Good.”
We’ve got morgue photos and crime-scene photos pretty much all over the place. In my study, in the bedroom, on the bookshelf in the living room. We have to hide them from the guests.
I’d made the mistake a few years back before her mother died of leaving a series of full-color shots of a Mexican drug dealer lying by the roadside — his severed arms and legs piled on top of his chest and his head split open by a machete — left it on my drafting table when her mom flew in from Boston. One look and her face went white.
Try explaining to a sixty-five-year-old woman that this was research for what she’d consider a comic book.
“It’s pretty much perfect,” Sam says, “in a larger-than-life kind of way.”
That makes me feel good. She’s got it exactly.
“Right. That’s what we’re after. Realistic and over-the-top, both at once.”
“I can’t wait to see how you’re going to put her back together.”
“Neither can I.”
Dinner’s fine. I don’t burn the garlic bread and the noodles are al dente. We’re lingering over our second glasses of Merlot when I get this look.
“What?” I ask her.
She smiles.
“I was just thinking,” she says.
Unusual for me to go twice in one night but not unheard of and we’ve had that excellent dinner and the wine. There’s a familiar moment of unease when I glance over her shoulder at the glassed-in hutch and her eight, thirty-year-old Barbie dolls are staring at me, not to mention Teddy Davis, her very first teddy bear, threadbare and crunch-nosed, with these strange, droopy, deeply-cleft buttons for eyes — buttons that actually resemble slanted squinty eyes — and this down-turned pouty mouth, so that he looks sort of like Bette Davis on heroin. It’s unnerving.
But that passes. She sees to that.
And this time, for me at least, it’s even better.
I go a lot longer and she’s right there with me all the time. We’re a two-man band. She’s on rhythm and I’m on lead. She’s figure and I’m ground. We don’t exactly come together but it’s so damn close that I’m still hard inside her when she does.
We always make love with the light on. We figure the dark is for sissies. So that when I roll away I’m able to see the sheen of sweat down her body from her collarbone to her thighs. Sweat that’s part her and part me.