As usual, though, Ric's skeptical ex-FBI agent instincts made me reconsider what had happened at Wrathbone's. It could be hard to tell CinSims from their CinSymbs.
"The police go undercover at Wrathbone's, for your information," Ric added.
"Great, so some of the CinSims and CinSymbs present could have been narcs. And then there was Haskell, not exactly undercover. Or even on active duty, come to think.
"That bastard! I didn't know he'd messed with you earlier at the Gehenna too. I wish I'd really hurt him."
His partisanship made me smile. I saw and heard the racist cop dismiss Ric as a "Meskin" in public and Ric kept his FBI-agent cool. The same cop laid a few fingers on me and Ric was ready to skin Haskell alive.
"I'm serious, Del. Kennedy Malloy told me she'd love to bust him off the force, but the police association would have to defend the sonovabitch."
"Captain Malloy," I said, invoking her title. "No wonder she's such a good police source for you, amigo. You have a thing for blond authority figures, as you just proved when you disarmed and strip-searched me in my Madonna wig. I bet she has a thing for you."
"You'd be wrong," Ric said, "and she'd be wrong. I have a thing for raven-haired reporters-turned-private-eyes."
He teased the bobby pins out of my platinum blond wig and threw it aside, releasing my hair to my shoulders. "I need to feel those midnight Rapunzel tresses of yours brushing my thighs and your lips brushing something else."
He slid down level on the sofa, pulling me down with him. I'd recently learned that I have no problem lying horizontal if I'm on top, and I set to work demonstrating exactly that.
"HOW do you sleep?" Ric asked much later when it was obvious we'd be spending what was left of the night on his red leather sofa.
"You don't want to get too close. I get ex-orphanage nightmares, so I might kick you."
"Kick away, you won't hurt me. No, I mean given your hatred of being on your back?"
"On my stomach," I answered, stretching face down to demonstrate.
Ric whistled something sexy in Spanish under his breath that I needed my Street Spanish dictionary at home to translate. He thoughtfully explained in English, "Nude, white-skinned, black-haired woman face down on red leather-would be quite the Maxim cover layout. I can work with that."
And so he went to work. His fingers teased the bottom of my butt and then strummed between my thighs. I burrowed deeper into the smooth leather, lifting my pelvis in lazy, content trust, all three of those conditions utterly alien to me before I'd encountered Ric. I loved being his sex object and making him mine, and was finally discovering what all the hooting and hollering about sex was for.
Ric hmmed his pleasure at finding me receptive for more, which only made my core heat flare along my nerves like liquid mercury. Not being able to see what he was doing ramped up my excitement.
He stopped doing anything for a moment and I lay there throbbing with sweet anticipation. I couldn't imagine not welcoming anything he wanted.
His voice came closer as he pushed higher along my side until his face was buried in my hair, his lips at my ear.
"Were you raped, Delilah?" he asked in a whisper. "Is that what's kept you unplumbed for so long? It's all right. You can tell me."
"But it's not all right! I don't think so. I don't think that's what happened."
"Something happened."
"Yes! No! I don't remember."
"And you feared it and it caused you pain?"
"Yes!"
"Does our having sex cause you pain?"
I tried to sort my tumultuous feelings, not wanting to hurt his. "Yes. But only a… little."
"You're virgin-tight, Delilah," he said tenderly. "Intercourse may be painful at times."
"Yes, I know. Muy delicado!' I tried to diagnose my feelings, the sensation I welcomed yet feared. "This, right now, it's just the pain of wanting so badly. I know it precedes pleasure. That old… other was only… pain. A lot of pain. And fear."
Ric sighed. I could feel his lips drizzling kisses on my neck and ear through the veil of my hair.
"Was anyone there?"
"From my nightmares, little gray men."
"Like ETs?"
He sounded so startled I had to stifle a laugh. Here I was, half-fucked, and we were discussing my very personal alien invasion nightmares. It occurred to me that Ric knew exactly how and when to draw out my most-buried fears and secrets: FBI man in bed.
"Were any of them women?" he asked.
"Women? No!" My reaction was visceral. Even I recognized that. I reconsidered. He was right to ask. "I suppose some of them could have been. I never thought of that. Why do you ask?"
"You went to an all-girls' high school and say you don't remember a lot of those four years. Girls can be vicious bullies."
"No! Some of them were snobby bitches, but the nuns would never have allowed it and they had eyes in the back of their habits."
"And what about the child abuse scandals in the Church?"
I was growing impatient with the interrogation. "That was mostly priests. Besides, what does it matter now, when you're holding me on the aching edge of an orgasm? Fuck me or forget it. You know you want to."
The relentless interrogator turned silk-voiced seducer. "You like me needing so bad to get inside you."
His words excited me. "Yes."
He swept the hair off of my sweat-damp neck, then strung a necklace of kisses around it as far as his lips could reach. I was melting with the need to have him inside me.
"I've always felt you flinch a little at first penetration. If you were abusively invaded, Delilah," Ric whispered, "you need to get past it. Sick people hurt others sexually because it mis-wires the lines between pain and pleasure. Whoever, whatever hurt you inside, it can be all pleasure now. Feel it. Feel how good what I want makes you feel."
Ric's voice was as soothing as a lullaby. "Don't worry, Delilah. We'll solve the mystery of your nightmares. We'll go back to Kansas. Investigate. This night, you're not dreaming. We're not dreaming. We're having sex. Does it still hurt a little? Or does it just hurt so good?"
I thought about it: his weight half on me, compressing my agitated nerves, this sudden, frank interrogation delving my lost past traumas, the throbbing tingle between my legs feeling oh-so-exciting.
"It hurts only because I want what you can give me more this instant than I ever have."
His hot fleshy tongue plunged into my bared ear as he finally pushed inside me. I was awash in salty, wet hot desire.
We murmured our litany incoherently. Our names. The word of love.
Amor.
And when I could feel him nudging the mouth of my womb, I felt completely sated, a sublime satisfaction at again accomplishing this for him, for me, every cell in the surrounding tissues touched and responding to such perfect possession, mine and his, that my panic popped like a bubble and vanished into the past.