“How about some Nat King Cole?”
“Perfect. I need to go to the bathroom first, though.”
I had an album of ballads by Cole. It was Mathis or Cole or Darin when I wanted ballads. Hearing Bobby Rydell ruin a Jerome Kern song wasn’t something I dealt with very well.
I heard the glass smashing in the bathroom and a terrible thought filled my mind. The jagged glass from the Skippy peanut-butter jar I kept my toothbrush in-ripping across her wrists.
I lunged for the door.
She’d been emotional, after all-suicidally so.
The door swung open and there she was.
“Dammit, I broke your glass, McCain. You had it sitting right on the edge of the sink and I thought it wouldn’t fall off. But you had some kind of greasy stuff all over it.”
“Hair oil. I probably picked the glass up after I put the hair oil on.
Greasy kid stuff, as they say in the ads.”
“Hair oil, then. Anyway, when I picked it up, it slid right through my fingers. Get me a dustpan and a broom and I’ll clean it up.”
She fixed me with a sharp eye. “And it wasn’t because I was drinking, either.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, but it’s what you were thinking.”
“Guilty as charged, I guess.”
She looked so bedraggled and exasperated just then, her hair sort of mussed and her face damp from the heat and her clothes a little mussed, she just looked so damned sweet and lost and sad and nice and girly and true and just plain wonderful that I leaned forward and touched my lips to hers.
I forced my eager arms to stay put.
I said, “I’ll get the broom and the dustpan.”
A few minutes later, we were dancing.
“This is nice,” she said.
“It sure is.”
We were listening to “Lost April” and it was great, dancing there in the living-room of my apartment. I turned the light off. A quarter moon hung in a pane of glass and a coyote cried in growing flower-scented darkness. This was kind of a medical procedure for both of us. A healing, if you will. It had been way too long since I’d held a woman and way too long since this particular woman had been held by a man she trusted. It wouldn’t last long-dawn would turn us back into our real selves-but for now we were shadowshapes and nothing more.
“Is it all right if I kiss your neck, McCain? Because if I don’t I’ll start crying about you-know-who.”
“Well, in that case, because it involves you-know-who, I guess I don’t have much choice do I?”
One tiny little peck on my neck and I set a land speed record for getting an erection.
We got tighter.
I thought of Groucho’s old gag line, “If I held you any tighter, I’d be behind you.”
And then we were kissing. And I do mean kissing.
And thrusting. And rubbing. And stroking. And kissing and thrusting even harder. And then rubbing and stroking even harder.
“I want to if you want to,” I said.
“Well, I want to if you want to,” she said.
All this said in great swooping gasps on both our parts.
And then we started dancing at a slight eastward angle, toward the bed.
I could see over her shoulders into the bedroom.
Tasha, Crystal, and Tess seemed to sense what was about to happen.
They jumped off the bed as if it were a sinking ocean liner.
And then we reached the bed and then-“Thanks,” she said when we were all finished.
“Are you crazy. Thank you!”
“I’m not that great a lover, McCain.”
“Well, neither am I.”
“You were pretty good.”
“Well, look who’s talking. You were pretty good yourself.”
“At least we’re being honest.”
“Honesty is always the best policy.” I guess that’s the myth of Stranger Sex. The fury of it is great but sex is actually better -at least for me-af you’ve been together a few times. Get to know what to do, what not to do, when to do it, when not to… need I go on?
But I was already wondering if we hadn’t been a mite hasty about being perfectly honest about our first experience. We’d been expecting a Technicolor and Cinemascope musical.
What we’d gotten was a nice, lusty B second feature in black-and-white on a regular-size screen. And no reassurance.
And I think we both needed reassurance.
“You’re not telling me I am a great lover and I’m not telling you you are a great lover.”
“Yeah, but you did say I was pretty good, Kylie.”
“Oh, you were pretty good, all right. In fact, you were very good.”
“Well, that’s what I meant to say to you, too. Not that you were merely pretty good. But that you were very good.”
“And so were you, McCain. Not just very good. Very, very good.”
Now, that was more like it. Two verys.
“You got a smoke?” she asked.
“I thought you only smoked filters.”
“I’m being European tonight, McCain. Like Simone Signoret or somebody like that.
European movie stars never smoke filters.”
“There’s nothing more alluring than lung cancer.”
I got us cigarettes and got them going and gave her hers.
“God, that breeze feels good,” she said, inhaling with epic depth.
We lay inches apart on the bed. Letting the breeze balm us.
“I ever tell you what he did to me the first time I ever met him at a dance?”
“I guess not.”
“Could you stand to hear about it?”
“Sure.”
She rolled over and kissed me on the cheek. Her breast felt swell against my arm.
“Thanks for putting up with me.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, we met at this dance in
Manhattan, see. And we danced like every other dance together. Fast and slow. And it was obvious there was something going on. You know? So I said, “Be sure and save the last dance for me.” And he kissed me. Right there in the middle of the floor.
This big dramatic kiss. An Mgm kiss.
And then you know what the asshole did? He started dancing with this blonde who came in. Very Vassar, if you know what I mean. Vassar or Smith. One of those real bitch schools. And then all of a sudden he forgot me entirely. He not only danced the last dance with her, he took her home.”
“So how’d you meet him again?”
“Luckily-or unluckily, as things turned out-we’d already exchanged phone numbers by that point. I called him the next day.”
“What he’d say about the Vassar chick?”
“Said she was an old girlfriend and he was taking pity on her.”
“That Chad, always thinking of other people.”
We then proceeded to nuzzle, snuggle, cuddle, grope, bite, nibble, lick, groan, gasp, and giggle. I was almost ready but first I said, “Need to go to the can.”
“Don’t be long.”
“Thought I’d take a paperback in there with me.”
“Har-har.”
I got up and walked to the john and-since I have to reconstruct the thought process here-I guess the next few seconds went this way.
I walked into the john.
And stepped on a piece of glass we hadn’t swept up. Just a sliver. But it cut me enough to remind me of the glass I kept my toothbrush in.
And when I thought of the glass, I thought of it slipping out of Kylie’s hand.
And then I knew who had killed Muldaur and Courtney. Things work out that way sometimes.
She watched me as I yanked my clothes on.
“But where’re you going?”
“I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
“You’re forgetting something, McCain.”
“What?”
She was already throwing herself off the bed.
“I’m a reporter, McCain. And I’m going with you.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
She grinned. “Doesn’t matter.”
Twenty
On the way out there, we stopped at the Nite Owl grocery store and bought a can of lighter fluid. Then we were back on the road and I was explaining everything to her.