“But these four weeks on the island, I really think it was starting to change me. Maybe the discipline. Running, lifting weights, working my ass off every day. Eating right, getting in shape, talking to my shrink on the phone every single night. I started to feel some pride in what I was doing. Some confidence, too. Things were starting to seem okay to be me. Like I’m not such a goofball fuckup after all.”
She scratched her check absently, thinking about it, looking outward but staring inward, processing the experience. “For the first time since I was a little girl, the world was starting to seem like a pretty good place. A safe place. When Gale and I were standing there watching the sunset, that’s exactly what was going through my mind. The world really is a cool place.”
I said, “Then all of a sudden, you look up and see two men in ski masks, one of them carrying a weapon.”
She nodded. “Exactly. The world didn’t seem so safe anymore.”
She went on. “What I felt was so weird. Like fear so strong it was almost… umm, like getting an electrical shock, but slower with the feel of the electricity moving through my spine. Or like someone’d squirted ether up my nose. I was frozen, couldn’t move. You know those terrible nightmares where you try to run but can’t? Same thing. I wanted to run but couldn’t, wanted to scream but couldn’t, and then the guy shoots at Gale and I felt my bladder go. Standing right there, I pissed my own pants. That really… really-” She stopped momentarily, her voice breaking, sighed heavily, looking away from me so I couldn’t see her face. “It really did something to me. For the first time in my life, I felt like a piece of meat. Something that could be… I don’t know, it was like those news videos you see after a flood. All the dead and dying animals. Like I could be killed and left to bloat in the sun. I was no longer the eccentric daughter of the great man. I was a female animal and about to die-and that’s when… that’s when…”
She stood and stepped to me, weeping softly now. Placed her hand on my shoulder as she said, “That’s when I saw you, Doc. Looked and saw you charging like one of those football players on TV. You had this expression on your face, complete focus, and it was like I was looking down from way up high, totally in slow motion, and that’s when I stopped being scared. I had urine dripping down my leg, but I knew everything was going to be okay. I don’t have a clue why, but that’s the way I felt. You looked a hell of a lot bigger and meaner than the guys with the masks, but it was more than that. Like I told you, I noticed you right away, your face, big and safe-looking, and I knew you were going to save us. I just knew it and I was right.”
Her hand had moved to the back on my neck, massaging it, and I let her. In her small voice, she said, “So you want to know my motives? Real simple. I came here to thank you in the best way I know how. I wanted to take you to bed and do absolutely anything you want me to do, then put you to sleep with my body still on you. You saved my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again. Maybe you’ve got to experience your own death to realize how much you really do want to live. For all that, I figured I owed you a big favor. Figured that now it was your turn to feel safe and protected.”
I stood slowly, feeling her fingers slide down my back to my hips and stop there. I took her by the shoulders, squeezed, leaned, and kissed her on top of the head. She was still weeping, her body spasming softly, and she fell comfortably against my chest, my right hand patting her rhythmically between shoulder blades. I said, “A generous offer, lady, but a bad idea. You need to go home, get some sleep.”
She buried her nose and face against me, then into me. I listened to a muffled question. “You sure? Last offer. They’re flying me out tomorrow first thing. They haven’t even told me where.”
My fingers were still drumming on her back. “Sorry, yeah, I’m sure. I may kick myself in the morning, but I think it’s the right thing to do.”
“You know, they say that the way you’re patting me right now? It reminds us of our mother’s heartbeat back in the womb, so it comforts us when we’re scared. If I promise to be good, and if I promise not to hurt your bad arm, you think we could lie down on the couch for maybe ten minutes? I could use some comforting. Something important happened to me today, and I’m not sure what. It’s maybe the only way I’m going to be able to sleep tonight.”
As I held her, I glanced at my watch: 1:45 A.M., nearly moonset over the Gulf. Two more days until the new moon. “What will the deputies do if they check your bed and you’re gone.”
“I left a note just in case, told them I went out for a walk. This’d be the last place they’d think of checking.”
“Ten minutes and no more,” I told here. “But the couch in there isn’t very comfortable.”
When I awoke, the porch screen was a black scrim of drooping palms and stars, no moon. Lindsey was cupped against me, back to stomach, like a spoon, air whistling softly through her nose when she breathed.
Somehow, my left hand had slipped up under her T-shirt, my fingers spread to hold the warm weight of her left breast.
I told myself I should take my hand away, but I didn’t.
Then I told myself it was alright not to remove my hand because my left arm was finally comfortable, no longer throbbing, and it was medically permissible not to move my hand as long as I held her in a friendly, nonsexual way.
I lie to myself so often and so successfully that I’m amazed that I even bother to continue to try to live up to my own flawed values.
I lifted the palm of my hand away from her skin, leaving only my fingertips to touch her softly, feeling heat and perspiration on the heavy underside of her breast. Then my thumb and middle finger found her nipple, first tracing the denser skin of the aureole, before rolling the nipple gently, feeling it react, the tip of it growing, becoming erect and slowly heated in my hand.
I felt Lindsey stir, then press her hips back into mine, rotating slowly and pushing, exploring me with her buttocks.
Thus I knew she was awake.
Heard the little-girl voice say, “Hey, buster. You’re no carpenter, so what you doing with a hammer in your pocket?” She had a furry, sleepy laugh.
I removed my hand from under her shirt immediately, got up on my good elbow and said, “Sorry. I was being stupid there for a minute. Which means you need to get off this couch right now because-” She flopped over to face me and pressed her hand to my lips before I could finish. “You think too much, Doc. Know that? Shut off your brain for a little while. Put it on autopilot. Your body knows what it wants to do. Stop being such a nerdy pain in the ass.”
Then she put her hand behind my head and pulled my face to hers, touching my lips with her tongue, moistening them, searching, as her free hand moved downward over chest and abdominal muscles. Her fingers found the elastic of my shorts, then they found me, moving to explore, her fingers spreading as wide as they could to hold me, her thumb moving in slow rotary massage.
“Do you like this?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not hurting your arm?”
“My arm? I’m not thinking about my arm right now. No, you’re not hurting my arm.”
“What about this? You like this?”
“Oh yeah.”
She stood suddenly in the gray light. I watched her step out of her shorts, then strip the T-shirt over her head. She was ivory-colored in the darkness, sculpted white and hard, skinny-hipped with ski-slope breasts and very long nipples. She shook her yellow hair free as she leaned to help me shimmy out of my shorts, then used her left hand to hold me erect and perpendicular as she mounted me, sliding slowly down onto me, wincing as her body stretched to fit itself.