He was beside the bed, quickly stripping off his clothes. As soon as he was naked, he stepped closer and pulled her to him. He kissed her and then pushed her onto the bed, and continued what he had been doing before.
“Here,” she said after a few minutes. She pushed the condom into his hand.
He tugged her panties off. He obviously had interpreted her gesture as a signal that she was ready to accept him, but she noticed he had tossed the condom aside.
“Aren’t you going to use it?”
He shook his head. “Don’t like them.”
“But we should. Would you please do it anyway?”
He stopped and held her at arm’s length, staring into her eyes. “What? Do you have AIDS or something?”
“No,” she snapped. “Do you?”
“What do you have, then?”
“Nothing!” she said angrily. “It’s just a normal precaution.”
He let go of her, then turned to pick up the condom, and sighed heavily as he tore the wrapper off and put it on. “There. You happy?”
She quickly made a decision. She lay back on the bed. She wriggled a bit to get closer. “Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”
She wanted it to be true, but something had turned sour. He had seemed a bit too rough and hurried before, but now he was distant, uncaring. He was very strong, and he made sudden, almost violent movements, grasping her too tightly and then thrusting too hard. She said, “Wait, be a little more gentle.”
“If you’d relax, you’d enjoy it.”
“Please.”
He seemed to get more quick, more violent, ignoring her voice. She decided that what he had said might actually help if she could do it, and it was all she could do, so she tried to relax all her muscles, to offer no resistance. She only had to endure it for a few more minutes, and it was over. He disengaged himself from her, and she kept still, staring at the ceiling. He lay beside her for a few seconds, then got up, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door.
Kira wanted to cry, but she knew she shouldn’t, or everything would be lost. A minute later, he came out again. Maybe he had been just so filled with lust, so sexually hungry for her, that he had needed to do it that way. Maybe that part was over now, and they would be closer to each other than before, and he would be kinder and in less of a hurry. She had proved she was not just a tease, getting him aroused and then not letting him find release. Maybe he had even been a little bit suspicious of her before, and resentful in advance, and now he would be okay. She cleared her throat and found her voice. “Come back and lie down with me.”
He looked at her. He didn’t smile, but he went back to the bed and lay there obediently.
She did not feel as though anything she tried was working, but she had decided that the only way was to advance, not retreat. “That was really nice. Thanks.”
He looked at her again, more curious than warm. Then he seemed to remember something. Before he said it, she knew what it meant. “We’d better see if he’s back.” He got up and rapidly pulled his clothes on.
She had known it would be something that required him to go away from her for a bit. That way, before he saw her again she would be dressed, and he could pretend nothing had ever happened. She watched him put on the jacket with the gun in it and slip outside.
Kira remained on the bed and considered. Ordinarily, a girl would be happy to acquiesce in the deception, dress while he was out, and by the time he got back, have her makeup fixed and be demurely brushing her hair. A girl would wait for him to speak before she would say anything about having had sex, and maybe he would never mention it again, just assume that the next time he wanted sex, she would agree. Maybe they would part, and never speak again about anything.
Kira sat up. She was proud of the way her body looked in the big mirror across from the foot of the bed. She instinctively did not want to let this incident be over, just out of some misplaced modesty or a fear of awkwardness. Tim would realize in a minute that room 1503 was empty. She was positive that Mallon could not have come back onto this floor and gone into his room without her hearing it.
She was beginning to feel frustrated about Tim. He was attractive, he was strong, he was a person who should be able to understand her, a person she didn’t need to lie to. She looked into the mirror again and fluffed her long blond hair. This should have worked better. He should be in here with her now, seeing what she saw, and marveling at his good luck.
CHAPTER 25
Kira pulled the halter top on over her head, brushed her hair a few times, angrily, and then put the last touches to her makeup. She had given Tim a half hour, but he still had not come back to the room. She was going to have to find him. She made sure her bag was packed and locked, took her purse, then went out and closed the door behind her.
She stopped at the door of 1503 and listened for a moment, but then she heard the ding of the elevator bell, announcing that it had arrived. She quickly moved away from 1503 and took the final fifteen feet to the elevator doors so she would be there, face-to-face with Tim when the door opened. She had time for an instant’s regret that she had not brought her overnight bag. The sight of her standing there with her bag-or maybe just brushing past him into the elevator without speaking-would have forced him to think quickly: if he wanted her, he would have to acknowledge it and make her know it, or she would be gone. She had not brought the bag, so she would have to do without it. She stood a pace back from the door, her head up and her shoulders back, and an expression in her eyes that would freeze a bird in flight.
The door slid open: no Tim. Instead, there were two men in their thirties who looked to her like businessmen. She lowered her eyes to avoid theirs and waited for them to move past, and as they did, she could detect the smell of liquor. They must have been sitting in the bar having a few drinks before dinner. She stepped into the elevator and pressed and held the “Close Door” button, pushed P2, the lowest button in the row, and felt the elevator begin to sink.
Kira was tired of men right now. Some time ago, she had discovered that after having acceptable sex, she often didn’t think about having it again for days. That had not seemed surprising. What was odd was that having really bad sex had nearly the same effect. Afterward, she imagined she should have been prowling around trying to satisfy unfulfilled desire, but she found that even desire could be used up, depleted. Either way, men seemed unappetizing until the clarity of her recollection of the experience receded.
She wanted to find Tim right now and salvage the investment she had made in him. There were not going to be that many get-togethers where she could meet young men, and most of the young men she had met at the camp had not seemed promising. She had bet the whole hunting trip on Tim-she could hardly expect to meet someone else now-and gone to the trouble of separating him from the herd, seducing him and then enduring him. She had a sudden vivid memory of how awful he had been in bed, but she did not linger on it. She could teach him to be better at it. She turned and stared into the mirror at the back of the elevator car, straightened her hair, pulled her halter top down a little and her pants up on her waist a bit. The elevator stopped. The door opened on the lower parking level.
Kira saw all three boys instantly. Jimmy and Lee were seventy or eighty feet from her, both crouching behind parked cars, one on either side of the aisle ahead of her. The spaces in this underground parking area were all diagonal; the cars on both sides of this aisle were angled away from Kira, so each was squatting behind the rear tire of a car. Tim was much farther from the elevator, nearly at the far end of the next aisle, but his reddish hair made him easy to see and impossible for her not to recognize. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car in which Jimmy had driven them all here. She stepped out of the elevator.