The phone rang. She picked it up.
John Quinn said, “Molly? I was a fool. Can I come back and apologize in person?”
“Of course, Johnny. Give me ten minutes.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Who am I?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind, Johnny. I guess I have a problem of identity. Maybe it concerns you, and maybe it doesn’t. I’ll see you in ten minutes.”
There was a becoming shyness about him when she opened the door. He came in and stared at her, moistened his lips, and said, “You’ve been crying?”
“It’s never a secret, Johnny. It makes my eyes look like boiled beets.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I was crying over a great number of things, Johnny. Maybe you can take credit for ten per cent.”
Then Quinn said, “You’ve got a good right hand, Molly. And I asked for it. I had no right to be nasty. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be here, and Hamilton would never have made that offer. So it’s your party all the way. And your decision to make.” He turned and made himself a drink. “Just please understand why I had to try to rock you. For me, a chance like this is like finding a city made of solid gold. And for you, too, of course. But the difference is that I’ve been looking for it, and you’ve just stumbled across it.”
“I understand that.”
He sat beside her on the couch and put his drink on the coffee table. He looked down, studying his clenched fist, and said, “This would give me what I’m after, sooner than I ever hoped to achieve it. But it won’t work without you. You heard the man. I won’t get nasty again, Molly, but I want to plead with you, just a little. I’ve worked with you, and I’ve watched you. Molly, believe me, you enjoy all the little side effects and by-products of the wonderful job you’ve done with Andro. You relish being the fabulous Molly Murdock, who looks so delicately feminine and innocent and who has a mind like Univac and the instincts of a riverboat gambler.”
“My lust for power?” she asked.
“It’s a pleasure to be rewarded for doing something well. You know how this business is. If you quit now, inside of one year, people will have to think hard to remember your name or what you look like. Do you want that?”
“Why should I care, Johnny? Am I so insecure I have to have that kind of recognition?”
“I can’t argue that, and you know it. Maybe, from a completely mature point of view, you shouldn’t care. You shouldn’t give a damn. My point is that you do, and you are unwilling to admit it to yourself, because you feel there’s something sort of silly about it. Can’t you have the wrong image of yourself? A lot of people do, you know. Anyhow, let’s drop it for now.”
“Let’s try to, Johnny. I wish you didn’t come into it in any way. It would make it so much easier.” She glanced at him and saw the sudden brightness of his eyes, the look of speculation and hope. She laughed aloud. “You know me too well, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t look so innocent. You are a clever fellow. I let you trap me into letting you know I’m not as positive as I was an hour ago.”
He took a deep breath and gave a long sigh. “I think of how it could be, honey, and I feel hollow as a drum.”
They sat in a silence that began to feel awkward. She thought of the faint voice of her husband, submerged in all that windy whining, and of the words he would not say to her. “He is not a demonstrative man,” she said in a small voice.
“Tom?”
“It used to be different. Quite different. We always used to know what the other was thinking.”
“Molly, dear.”
“It could all be lost anyway, no matter what I do.”
The tears came again, thick and slow and relentless. She bent forward and rested her head on her knees, her clenched fists against her eyes. One small, heartbreak sound escaped. She felt the comforting gentleness of his hand on her back and knew he had moved closer to her. His hand stroked her back, timidly, and then it tugged at her with mild insistence, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to turn into his arms, sob against his throat, be held in strong comfort, feel the slight crustiness of the beard stubble on his lean jaw pressed against her temple.
Little by little, she felt everything changing for them, felt comfort and compassion turning into hunger. He shifted her and kissed the salty corner of her eye, and moved his lips down the curve of her cheek to her unresisting mouth. As the kiss progressed from tenderness to an almost brutal insistence, she heard a faraway clangor of alarm in the back streets of her spirit. Tom had always approached her gently, and she had responded to gentleness. Johnny Quinn, in his hunger, was bruisingly rough. She heard the rasp of his breathing and the thump of his heart, and she felt the grasping pressure of his strong hands.
This is cheapness, she thought. This sort of thing cannot happen to me. I am not this sort of woman. She strained against him with a burning mouth and a galloping turmoil of heart. This is from being lonely, she thought, and being in a strange place, and having that odd dream on the airplane. In a little while, I will make him stop. In just a little while. Pretty soon, I will make him stop. No harm will be done. None.
He forced her back, his mouth on hers. He fumbled with her dress. She heard a ripping sound. It seemed unimportant. She felt remote, dreamy, softly floating, deliciously helpless. Very soon now, she thought, I shall make him stop all this. But her thought seemed as far away as Tom’s voice had seemed on the telephone.
Tom’s voice?
Suddenly she began to fight Johnny, to push him away, saying in a smothered voice, “No! Please! Please don’t!”
He released her. His eyes were narrow and shiny. His dark hair was tousled. There were spots of color on his cheekbones. He was breathing rapidly, and his hands were trembling.
“We — can’t do this,” she whispered.
“Why not? What difference would it make? Nobody would have to know about it.”
“We’d know.”
“I’ve wanted you for a year, Molly. For a whole year.”
“No!”
“Don’t try to kid yourself, Molly.”
“Stop, Johnny. Please.”
He grinned at her. “Don’t be such a coward. We’re right for each other. And we’re going to be working together. So what difference would it make?”
“Working together?” she said in a faint voice.
“You know we are. You’ll find all the rationalizations you need. Tom doesn’t care. That’s what you have to face, sooner or later.”
She looked at his confident smile. She seemed to be in a humming place, on the verge of fainting, and his face seemed enormous, blotting out the whole world. “What difference would it make,” she whispered. Her mouth felt numbed. “What difference, indeed?”
And as he laughed aloud and reached for her, the phone began to ring. She got up quickly, teetered through a moment of dizziness, then went into the bedroom to take the call there.
“Hello?”
“Molly? Bless you, my darling! This is Ben.”
“Ben Hagerman! What in the world—”
“We got a wire from Tom.”
“Ben, I’m ashamed of myself. Truly ashamed. I completely forgot you’re right here at Texas Southern now.”
“We forgive you. Ginny and I have been aching to see both of you, but we’ll make do with one of you. I’m about six blocks from your hotel right now, and I’m under strict orders to pick you up and bring you out to the house, so if you have any important appointments with the local tycoons, tell them you are very sorry but old friends come first. I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby within five minutes, Molly.”