Nicklin felt a gusher of pure joy shaking his intellectual landscape. It had not yet spumed up through him, but it was getting itself ready. This was the first part of an erotic dream, but it was a dream that was coming true—and all he needed to do was make the final check which would remove even the slightest possibility of his suffering a crushing humiliation or disappointment.
“Montane must have a dash of tax collector’s blood in him if he lets you go drive all the way out of town for a couple of orbs,” he said, forcing a grin. “Where’s your collecting plate?”
“That isn’t funny, Jim.” Danea gazed at him seriously from under heavy eyelids. “This sort of thing has never happened to me before, and you’re not making it any easier. You may be used to this, but I’m not.”
“I’m not used to… Danea, there was nothing actually said last night.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” she replied, her eyes holding steady on his, imploring. “Do you think I’m not quivering like a jelly over all the embarrassment I’ll have to go through if I’m wrong?”
“You’re not wrong,” he said, entranced, taking one of her hands in his. The gusher was exploding up through the ground now, blasting all that remained of the old Jim Nicklin into the high blue.
“Thank God!” She smiled and moved her hand in such a way that his knuckles were pressed into her left breast. “I didn’t sleep much last night, Jim—why didn’t you come back to me?”
“I did go back. I left Zindee with her ice cream for a few minutes and went back to look for you.”
“I was hiding in the marquee trying to calm myself down a little bit.” Her breast, beneath the sylkon blouse, felt like bare flesh against the back of his hand. “Anyway, a couple of minutes wouldn’t have been much use to us. I’m really hurting for you, Jim. I want you in me. Does that sound awful?”
“It sounds wonderful.” The former Jim Nicklin would have been reduced to incoherence by the question, but the new version remained more or less in control of himself, doing his best to act like the cool roué Danea believed him to be. “I have an apartment above the library—let’s go there.”
“No!” Danea looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the workshop. “That horrible person—the one who was hanging around the meeting last night—is watching us. I’d never be able to relax if I knew he was near us… listening… Does he work for you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Nicklin glanced back at the window in which the open-mouthed figure of Maxy was posed like a statue. “Only the Gaseous Vertebrate knows why I keep him on. I could send him home.”
Danea shook her head. “That would be too obvious.”
“Do you want to wait till tonight?” Nicklin said, his joy beginning to cloud with anxiety. He knew with absolute certainty, because it was in the nature of such things, that if he let this opportunity slip away it would never return. Tonight was an aeon away in the future, and by the time it came Danea would have recovered her sanity, or started menstruating, or been called away to tend a sick aunt. Or he would have tripped over something and broken both his legs, or—worst of all—the Mr Hyde potion would have worn off and he would be in such a state of yellow-bellied funk that he would be unable to set foot outside the house.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Danea said, nodding in the direction of the low crest behind his premises. “What’s on the other side of that hill?”
Thank you, thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, Nicklin chanted in his mind. “There’s nothing over there,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “No people, anyway. Just little hills and lots more little hills. It’s just right for walking.”
Danea gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Do you want to go in and fetch your hat?”
“No, the sun never bothers me much,” he lied, unwilling to risk leaving her side for even a few seconds.
Conscious of still being gaped at by Maxy, he linked arms with Danea and walked with her towards the grassy crest. There was silence between them as they moved up the slope. Nicklin wondered if he should try to maintain a flow of sophisticated and tension-easing conversation, but perhaps there was no real need for words. In a lower corner of his vision he could see the buoyant cones of Danea’s bosom-you were right, Zindee, good headlamps—and the easy, languorous, alternating movement of her slim thighs. And each time he reminded himself it was all really happening, and not part of a dream, his feet seemed to lose all contact with the ground. I’m walking on air, just as the cliche says. I want this to go on for ever. Love took its time in finding me, but when it finally got here it did the job in the classic across-a-crowded-room style, and I want this to go on for ever and ever…
As soon as they were over the ridge and out of sight of Nicklin’s place and the few other buildings dotted along Cork Road, Danea turned to him and they kissed. The smell and the taste and the feel of her swamped his senses.
“Not here,” she whispered gently. “It’s too near to your place—that person might follow us.”
Belatedly aware of having tried to sink with Danea to the ground, he said, “You’re quite right—I wouldn’t put it past him. There’s a better spot over here.”
He guided her around an egg-shaped hummock to its north side, from where endless green billows stretched to the up-curved horizon. Fringing the hill were clusters of bandannas which were just coming into full flower. The trailing red-and-orange blossoms which gave the shrub its name made a colourful outpost on the edge of the ocean of grass. One of the largest clumps had grown in a U-shape which was a good size to screen a recumbent couple and even provided some degree of protection against the sun. Nicklin had noticed the leafy boudoir on previous walks, and in his imagination—inspired by constant loneliness—had peopled it with lovers, never supposing that he would be one of them.
“How’s this?” he said.
For an answer, Danea began to undress, her solemn brown eyes never leaving his. Nicklin stripped off in unison with her, throwing his clothes into the nook to form a makeshift blanket. As soon as both were naked they kissed once more—breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.
Then they lay down together…
It might have been an hour—he had no means of judging the time—before Nicklin slowly spiralled back down into the mundane world. He was lying over Danea, but taking most of his weight on his elbows and knees, and was looking into her eyes. They were so close to his own that he was unable to focus on them. They registered as lambent brown-and-white blurs, lacking in detail, but in a little while he became aware that she was crying. He promptly rolled to the ground on his left side, disturbed by a lover’s fears, and touched the cool transparent ribbons on her cheek.
“What’s wrong, Danea?” he whispered. “You’re not sorry, are you?”
She pressed her teeth down on her lower lip to stop its trembling. “I am sorry, but not about us. Not about this.”
“What then?”
“Corey… The mission will be leaving Orangefield the day after tomorrow. I have to go with it, and that means…” She gave a sob and pressed her face into his shoulder. “I don’t want to leave you, Jim. I don’t want this to end.”
“Does it have to?” Nicklin’s consciousness, which had been totally absorbed with the present, suddenly reached out to the future and encountered—only hours ahead—a barrier of black jet, a dark wall where happiness ended and the old despairing solitude and futility began. “Do you have to leave? Couldn’t you stay here with me?”