The bedroom contianed only a king-sized bed, a dresser, a chair, and a small triangular table with a lamp and heavy glass ashtray on it. Beyond the foot of the bed was a wide window whose light was barely muted by gauzy white ceiling-to-floor curtains.
“You did say a rental agent was supposed to meet you here, didn’t you?” David asked.
“That’s what I thought someone said to me, but they might have been mistaken.”
He knew that the odds on a rental agent showing up were slim.
Deirdre walked to the wide window and located the pull cord. Rollers rasped in their traverse-rod track as she parted the curtains.
“Just look at this view, David!”
He dutifully walked across the bedroom’s plush rose carpet and stood at the window.
The view was toward the river and Queens. Afternoon sun highlighted the tall buildings so they were deceptively beautiful. The ornate steel suspension of the Queensboro Bridge was visible. Far below in the shadowed and sun-hazed canyons, tiny cars and foreshortened pedestrians crawled along in symmetrical puzzle-patterns of activity.
He heard, then felt, Deirdre move close behind him.
“What do you see, David?” Her voice was soft.
“New York. Too many people hurrying and not knowing where they’re going.”
He felt her fingertips on his shoulder and he turned.
“Now what do you see?”
She was standing even closer than he’d thought and had unbuttoned her blouse almost all the way down. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her large, firm breasts parted the fabric. One erect nipple was visible.
David opened his mouth, about to say her name, then her lips were closed over his, warm and writhing, soft and insistent. He felt the velvet wedge of her tongue.
With an effort of will and physical strength, he broke away from the kiss.
“Not a good idea, Deirdre.” He was breathing hard.
Desire glowed like fever in her eyes. “It was once. It can be again. Besides, you want to.”
“That doesn’t make it a good idea.”
He started to walk away from her but she blocked him with the length of her body smiling up at him. She kissed him again. He resisted again, but not as determinedly.
“Listen, Deirdre…” He hated the wavering note in his voice.
He felt her hand work between their bodies, find its way inside the front of his pants. She began to manipulate him, gently, so that it seemed such a natural thing to do. They had been intimate in a way never forgotten.
“At least once, anyway,” she breathed. “Don’t make me beg, David.”
Under the warm pressure of her fingers he felt himself go from tumescent to rigid. He threw back his head and stared straight up at the ceiling. His body cried to do what his mind was rejecting. “Jesus!”
“That sounds like a prayer, David. It can be answered.” Her hand continued its clever, expert work. She knew him; their bodies knew one another. Forever familiar. “We both want the same thing, the very same thing…”
The tightness in his body grew taut, and something in him gave.
He lifted her and carried her to the bed. Laid her down and bent over her, kissing her breasts as she pulled at his shirt. He raised his head then, and they virtually tore each other’s clothes off.
Pale and nude, beautiful as memory, she lay before him, gazing up at him with amusement and lust. “Want to hurt me, David? Want to whip me with your belt?”
He felt the mood shift.
“I’m not into that anymore, Deirdre.”
She gave him the most lascivious grin he’d ever seen. “Honestly?”
“Yeah, honestly. Straight sex is gonna have to be good enough.” He bent lower, kissed her.
When their lips parted, she gripped his earlobe and twisted it playfully. “Want me to hurt you? You been a bad boy?” She gave his ear an extra twist.
He gripped her hand and lowered it. “Straight sex, Deirdre.”
She pulled him down to her, on her. He kissed her lips again, her breasts, her stomach, the dark, wet center of her. She spread her legs wide, guided him up to kiss him again, then wrapped her legs around his waist as he entered her.
She made a deep, throaty sound and he began thrusting, slowly at first, spanning warm interior spaces, then faster and more violently as his passion took him. Her long, powerful legs clamped tightly around his waist like a trap. “Hurt me!” she moaned in his ear. “Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me, David! Please!”
He gripped her wrists and bent her arms back behind her head, watching her grimace and narrow her eyes. Her lips tightened, baring her teeth. He felt the core of her throbbing, then her fingernails clawing, digging painfully into his back. Her body arched with a power that surprised him. He knew she was climaxing as she whispered hoarsely in his ear. “Mine, mine, mine, MINE!”
She went limp beneath him and her legs fell to the sides as he thrust into her violently and emptied himself.
She kissed his ear, the one she’d twisted, as he slowly disengaged himself from her and rolled gasping onto his back.
Neither of them spoke.
He tried to analyze what he felt but couldn’t; his mind was still floating somewhere above body and desire, connected by only tenuous neural threads.
Finally, after he’d caught his breath, he stood up and went to the window, where he stood staring again at the teeming riddle of Manhattan. The scratches on his back felt like wounds from a lioness.
From behind him on the bed, he heard Deirdre say, “That was lovely, David. Aren’t you going to thank me?”
Twenty minutes later, as they were leaving the apartment, David knew how he felt: guilty and ashamed. Deirdre, he noticed with dread, looked smug. He couldn’t deny that he’d wanted her desperately, uncontrollably. Couldn’t deny it to her or to himself.
He held the door open for her and she edged past him into the hall, brushing him with her hip, glancing briefly up at him with a sated kind of lust that slumbered.
Behind them, and behind the louvered doors of the bedroom closet, a videocassette ran out of tape.
There was a soft click, a whir, and in the dark closet a pinpoint of red light winked out.
15
Molly emerged from Small Business among a swarm of parents and children. She carried Michael with one arm and used her free hand to guide the stroller down the stone steps to the sun-washed sidewalk.
When Michael was strapped into the stroller’s canvas seat, he and Molly both waved to Julie, who was standing in the shade of the canopy watching her charges depart with their regular guardians. The responsibility she’d carried all morning was now divided and dispersed; Molly wondered if Julia felt as suddenly free as she appeared.
As Molly pushed the stroller along crowded West Eighty-fifth, she found herself glancing uneasily from time to time across the street. Through the intermittent and glaring stream of noisy traffic, she half expected to see the woman in the blue baseball cap and mirror-lens glasses.
But there was no sign of the woman.
When they reached the apartment building, Molly entered the lobby then wheeled the stroller directly to the elevator. She pushed the button for the floor above hers, where Bernice Clark lived.
Bernice was a thin, thirty-five-year-old woman with a huge mass of tightly sprung brown hair that made her seem even frailer than she was. She’d been out of work except for occasional jobs arranged by Modern Office Temps since Molly had met her. Bad luck had left her harried but cheerful. Irrepressible optimism ran in her blood; a firing squad would have to fire into her smile to erase it. Molly felt comfortable leaving Michael with her.
Bernice looked paler than usual this afternoon as she let them into the apartment. She unstrapped then scooped up Michael from the stroller and kissed him on the cheek. He grinned, and when she placed him on the hardwood floor, he swaggered directly to the TV, where Martin and Lewis’s Jumping Jacks was playing without sound. Jerry Lewis was mugging and twitching around while Dean Martin stood calmly and stared at him with that odd combination of amusement and disdain. Michael plopped down in front of the screen and became engrossed.