They were in her bedroom. They had carried their brandy snifters into her bedroom, and they were sitting on the edge of Annie’s king-sized bed. They had kissed once, gently and exploratively, and then he started to take off her eyeglasses, and he was thinking now that it was starting wrong. If a woman refused to let you take off her eyeglasses, how would she react when you asked her to swing from the chandelier?
When Hawes was seventeen years old, he had dated a girl who wore eyeglasses, and he had done something he thought was very clever. He had gently taken her eyeglasses from the bridge of her nose, and had breathed on both lenses, and when she asked him why he was doing that, he replied, “So you won’t be able to see what my hands are doing.” The girl had asked him to drive her home at once. He had since learned not to breathe on girl’s eyeglasses; you could fog up a potential situation that way. The situation with Annie Rawles seemed fraught with potential, but she had just told him not to take off her eyeglasses, and he was thinking he had pulled a gaffe equal to the one when he was but a mere callow youth. He looked at her, puzzled.
“I want to see you,” she whispered.
He kissed her again. She kissed very nicely, her lips parting slightly to receive his, soft and pliable, a slight inhalation of breath causing an airtight seal between their mouths, he wondered how Sam Grossman at the lab would have explained the phenomenon of such a vacuum, lips pressing to lips, inhalation causing suction suddenly disrupted by the intrusion of probing tongues — he knew suddenly that everything was going to be all right, eyeglasses or no.
The first time was the most important time; he always listened skeptically when any of the squadroom pundits declared that sex got better as it went along, you learned with practice. In his experience, if the first time wasn’t any good, the next time would be worse, and the time after that would be impossible. In police work, that was an adage: A bad situation can only get worse. It applied to sex as well. He got a little dizzy kissing Annie Rawles, a sure indication that everything was going to be very good indeed. He could not recall ever having grown dizzy just kissing someone. There’s magic in your lips, Kate, he thought, and wondered which Shakespearean play that was from, or had Spencer Tracy said it to Katharine Hepburn in some movie? There’s magic in your lips, he thought, and said aloud, “There’s magic in your lips.”
“Kate,” Annie whispered. “Henry the Fifth,” and kissed him again.
It was funny how dizzy he got kissing her. His head was actually buzzing. Not too many people knew how to kiss nowadays. People rushed through kissing as if it were the curtain-raiser to the play itself, an introduction to be hurried through before the real performance started — Henry the Fifth? Was that where the line came from? He’d known once, he was sure, but he’d forgotten. Had Annie been an English major in college? Had she been a kissing major? Jesus, he really did like kissing her. He was reluctant to stop kissing her. He had never in his life felt that he’d be content to spend a night just kissing somebody, but he was close to feeling that now. He remembered that there were things besides kissing, but feeling the way he did — feeling! That was one of the other things besides kissing.
Once, when he was nineteen, he had dated a girl who didn’t wear eyeglasses, and he had done something else he thought was very clever, with almost the identical result. He had touched the lapel of the jacket the girl was wearing, and he had asked, “Can this be wool?” And then he had touched the collar of the blouse she was wearing, and he had asked, “Can this be silk?” And then he had put his hand on her breast and asked, “Can this be felt?” The girl hadn’t asked him to drive her home, the way the girl with the eyeglasses had. Instead, she just got out of the car and walked home.
Hawes wondered now if he should touch Annie’s breast. He was having a very good time kissing her, but he was beginning to think he should touch something, too, and her breast seemed a good place to start. His hand was cupped under her chin, he was drinking kisses from her mouth. He allowed his hand to slide tentatively over her throat, and past her collar bone, and onto the silky-feeling fabric of the blue dress she was wearing, and then onto her left breast—
“No, don’t,” Annie said.
He thought at once that there were some things grown men never learn, even if they’d been burned often as teenagers. He also thought that he’d been wrong about things going right. Maybe Annie was one of those ladies who thought it was perfectly okay to kiss the night away, something he himself had thought was okay just a moment earlier, but which was not really okay for consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, although the home was hers and not his. He was very confused all at once, in addition to being very dizzy.
“I want you to undress me first,” Annie whispered.
He was suddenly more excited than he’d ever been in his life. More excited than that first time on the roof with Elizabeth Parker (every time he saw Andy Parker in the squadroom, he thought of Elizabeth Parker, although the two were not related) when he was sixteen years old and she’d had to teach him where to find it. More excited than that time with a black whore in Panama, when he was twenty years old and serving in the U.S. Navy, a joyously beautiful woman who had taught him more about sex in two hours than he’d learned the rest of his life. (He had never mentioned this to Brown; one day he thought he might.) More excited than that time at a dinner party when the married woman sitting next to him and wearing a slinky green gown cut to her navel slid her hand under the table and onto his thigh, close to his groin, and said while forking shrimp cocktail into her deliciously wicked mouth, “Do you find you have to use your gun often, Detective Hawes?”
She looked like a schoolteacher in her simple blue dress, Annie Rawles did. Eyeglasses perched on her nose, a faint smile on her mouth. She turned her back to him as if she were about to write something on the blackboard. “The zipper,” she said, and lowered her head, even though she wore her black hair in a wedge cut that exposed the back of her slender neck and the place at the top of her dress where the zipper tab nestled. He kissed the back of her neck. He felt her shudder. He reached for the zipper tab and lowered the zipper on her back, exposing the line of her brassiere strap, a blue paler than the dress, crossing her pale white skin. He was reaching for the brassiere clasp, when again she said, “No, don’t,” and turned to face him, and shivered out of the dress, allowing it to cascade over her hips to her ankles. She stepped out of the dress.
She was wearing lingerie out of the pages of Penthouse, the schoolteacher vanishing in the crumpled pile of simple blue dress on the carpet, the hard-nosed cop transformed in the wink of an instant into a hard-porn sex goddess. A flimsy, lace-edged, pale blue bra lifted her cupcake breasts, revealing the sloping white tops of both, and — in the instance of her left breast — carelessly exposing the roseate and a stubby pink nipple already erect to bursting. The gold chain and pendant dangled between them, as if seeking sanctuary. She wore a garter belt under sheer panties of the same pale blue hue, the darker outline of her black pubic triangle forming a swelling mound at the joining of her legs, the garters taut against firm white thighs. She suddenly seemed full-blown without her protective blue dress, not half so thin as he’d imagined her to be, hips rounded and womanly, shapely legs molded by blue nylons tapering to narrow ankles and high-heeled, patent leather shoes.