“Alan-”
“Hold tight, pretty lady,” he said, and he was laughing, as if she weighed no more than a bag of feathers. She leaned back, almost unaware of his steadying hand in her growing excitement, only knowing he would not let her fall, and then he brought her forward again, and one hand was rubbing her back, and the thumb of his other hand was doing things to her down there, things she had never even considered, and she rocked back again, calling his name out deliriously.
Her orgasm hit like a sweet exploding bullet, rushing both ways from the center of her. Her legs swung back and forth six inches above the kitchen floor (one of her loafers flew off and sailed all the way into the living room), her head fell back so her dark hair trailed over his forearm in a small tickling torrent, and at the height of her pleasure he kissed the sweet white line of her throat.
He set her down… then reached out quickly to steady her as her knees buckled.
“Oh my God,” she said, beginning to laugh weakly. “Oh my God, Alan, I’ll never wash these jeans again.”
That struck him as hilarious, and he bellowed laughter. He collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs with his legs stuck out straight in front of him and howled, holding his stomach. She took a step toward him. He grasped her, pulled her onto his lap for a moment, and then stood with her in his arms.
She felt that fainting wave of emotion and need sweep her again, but it was clearer now, better defined. Now, she thought, now it is desire. I desire this man so much.
“Take me upstairs,” she said. “If you can’t make it that far, take me to the couch. And if you can’t make it to the couch, do me right here on the kitchen floor.”
“I think I can make it at least as far as the living room,” he said.
“How are your hands, pretty lady?”
“What hands?” she asked dreamily, and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the clear joy of this moment, moving through space and time in his arms, moving in darkness and circled by his strength.
She pressed her face against his chest, and when he put her on the couch she pulled him down… and this time she used her hands to do it.
6
They were on the couch for nearly an hour, then in the shower for she didn’t know how long-until the hot water started to fail and drove them out, anyway. Then she took him into her bed, where she lay too exhausted and too content to do anything but bundle.
She had expected to make love to him tonight, but more to allay his concern than out of any real desire on her own part. She had certainly not expected such a series of explosions as had resulted… but she was glad. She could feel the pain in her hands beginning to assert itself again, but she would not need a Percodan to sleep tonight.
“You are one fantastic lover, Alan.”
“So are you.”
“It’s unanimous,” she said, and put her head against his chest.
She could hear his heart lub-dubbing calmly away in there, as if to say ho-hum, stuff like this is all in a night’s work for me and the boss. She thought again-and not without a faint echo of her earlier fierce passion-of how quick he was, how strong… but mostly how quick. She had known him ever since Annie had come to work for her, had been his lover for the last five months, and she had never known how quickly he could move until tonight. It had been like a whole-body version of the coin tricks, the card tricks, and the shadow-animals that almost every kid in town knew about and begged for when they saw him. It was spooky… but it was also wonderful.
She could feel herself drifting off now. She should ask him if he meant to stay the night, and tell him to put his car in the garage if he did-Castle Rock was a small town where many tongues wagged-but it seemed like too much trouble. Alan would take care. Alan, she was beginning to think, always did.
“Any fresh outbursts from Buster or the Reverend Willie?” she asked sleepily.
Alan smiled. “Quiet on both fronts, at least for the time being.
I appreciate Mr. Keeton and Reverend Rose the most when I see them the least, and by that standard today was great.”
“That’s good,” she murmured.
“Yeah, but I know something even better.”
“What?”
“Norris is back in a good mood. He bought a rod and reel from your friend Mr. Gaunt, and all he can talk about is going fishing this weekend. I think he’ll freeze his butt off-what little butt he has-but if Norris is happy, I’m happy. I was sorry as hell when Keeton rained on his parade yesterday. People make fun of Norris because he’s skinny and sort of ditzy, but he’s developed into a pretty good small-town peace officer over the past three years. And his feelings are as sensitive as anyone else’s. It’s not his fault that he looks like Don Knotts’s half-brother.”
“Ummmmm…”
Drifting. Drifting into some sweet darkness where there was no pain. Polly let herself go, and as sleep took her there was a small and catlike expression of satisfaction on her face.
7
For Alan, sleep was longer coming.
The interior voice had returned, but its tone of false glee was gone. Now it sounded questioning, plaintive, almost lost. Where are we, Alan? it asked. Isn’t this the wrong room? The wrong bed? The wrong woman? I don’t seem to understand anything anymore.
Alan suddenly found himself feeling pity for that voice. It was not self-pity, because the voice had never seemed so unlike his own as it did now. It occurred to him that the voice wanted to speak as little as he the rest of him, the Alan existing in the present and the Alan planning for the future-wanted to hear it. It was the voice of duty, the voice of grief. And it was still the voice of guilt.
A little over two years ago, Annie Pangborn had begun having headaches. They weren’t bad, or so she said; she was as loath to talk about them as Polly was to talk about her arthritis. Then, one day when he was shaving-very early in 1990, that must have been-Alan noticed that the cap had been left off the family-size bottle of Anacin 3 standing beside the bathroom sink. He started to put the cap back on… then stopped. He had taken a couple of aspirin from that bottle, which held two hundred and twenty-five caplets, late the week before.
It had been almost full then. Now it was almost empty. He had wiped the remains of shaving cream from his face and gone down to You Sew and Sew, where Annie had worked since Polly Chalmers opened. He took his wife out for coffee… and a few questions. He asked her about the aspirin. He remembered being a little frightened.
(only a little, the interior voice agreed mournfully) but only a little, because nobody takes a hundred and ninety aspirin caplets in a single week; nobody. Annie told him he was being silly. She had been wiping the counter beside the sink, she said, and had knocked the bottle over. The top hadn’t been on tight, and most of the caplets had poured into the sink. They’d started to melt, and she’d thrown them away.
She said.
But he was a cop, and even when he was off-duty he could not put away the automatic habits of observation which came with the territory.
He could not turn off the lie detector. If you watched people when they answered the questions you asked, really watched them, you almost always knew when they were lying. Alan had once questioned a man who signalled every lie he told by picking at his eyetooth with his thumbnail. The mouth articulated the lies; the body, it seemed, was doomed to signal the truth. So he had stretched his hand across the table of the booth in Nan’s where they had been sitting, had grasped Annie’s hands in his own, and had asked her to tell the truth. And when, after a moment’s hesitation, she told him that, yes, the headaches were a little worse, and yes, she had been taking quite a few aspirin, but no, she hadn’t taken all the caplets which were missing, that the bottle really had spilled in the sink, he had believed her.