“I won’t so!”
“You will.”
“Won’t!”
“You will, you will, you will. Shouldn’t have told you.”
So, as he had hoped, in an instinctive effort to affirm her reliability, her trustworthiness, her gratitude, she kissed him again, and he shifted quickly to hold her more strongly, to adjust his body to hers, flesh in contact from knees to lips, right arm under her neck and around her, forearm clamped across her back, left hand in the small of her back, pulling her close.
The crucial question now was whether he could move her quickly enough through the period of alarm, realization, fright. Her whole body had tautened with the sudden and surprising awareness that somehow she was in a man’s apartment, on a man’s bed, nearly naked and locked in close embrace, a mouth hungry and demanding pressing against her lips. He had to maintain the embrace long enough to get the deep engine of her healthy sensuality started, fueled by the rum and sun and swimming, primed by his cautious and indirect conditioning over eight months. Her hesitation would be caused by her guilty realization that she had initiated the first kiss, and the second also.
When she tore her mouth free and craned her head back, he kissed her throat. “No,” she said. “Oh no. Please. Please don’t.” There was an edge of panic in her voice. He found her mouth again and she let it continue for two long seconds before she pulled away again. “Stop now,” she said. “Please stop, Aldo. Please don’t.” But the edges of the words were slightly blurred and softened, her voice huskier, and it was easier to find her lips again and hold them longer. She pushed at him with less emphasis, almost sleepily.
At the proper time, in proper sequence, he moved his left hand down from the small of her back, up the mounded hip and buttock, and little finger first, worked the edge of his hand under the taut upper edge of the bikini bottom. When he rolled his hand, it forced the narrow clinging band of fabric downward an inch or so.
She stiffened again and clapped her right hand onto his, hooked her fingers around his wrist, and pulled his hand away. “We can’t,” she said in a groaning voice. “Oh please don’t any more.”
He put his hand back on the small of her back. It all comes down to this, he thought. Eight months. All the processes of friendship, creating trust, taking Lee Rountree under his wing, improvising the trip to Miami, plying her with drinks, bringing her up here at the right time and working her into the right position, it all came down to whether or not a couple of ounces of coral fabric could be moved far enough to become loose, to encircle a narrower dimension of her young ripe body. After the long stalk, the prey was now in perfect range, motionless in the sights, and the task was to pull the trigger by slowly squeezing the whole hand. Because once it was done she was lost, and she knew it. And it would be done only if she wanted to lose — not in the brain, in the loyalty, or in the heart, but only in the yearning body.
When he moved his hand precisely as before, she put her right hand on his hand to hold it still but did not pull his hand away. A hungry kiss had been going on for a long time. He moved the band of fabric slightly. Her hand finned each time to stop him. Then it was down far enough for him to cup the abundant, firm, velvety buttock in his big hand and pull her closer. Her right arm lifted and slid around him, and he felt the stub and pull of her fingertips in the muscle of his back, felt rather than heard the sigh of want and resignation she made against his mouth.
The moment of mercy, he thought. Groan and shove her way and show abject remorse. Guilt. Despair. And it will take her fifteen seconds to yank that bikini bottom up and be off the bed and out in the living room, sitting in a chair, knees pressed tightly together, her breath and her body quieting quickly.
No bullet when you pull the trigger. Just a click and a beautifully exposed Ektachrome transparency to project on the screen in the little lab in the back of the mind. Specimen of employee wife, brought right to the point of inevitable copulation and then, out of charity, released to dart back into the thicket of marriage, far warier than before, never to be caught again.
But she was too sweet, too close, too promising. And there was all the roving and rambling to be done, all the newness to be explored. For a matter of perhaps fifteen minutes one portion of his attention stood aside, involved in a cold objective observation of all physiological phenomena, directing, altering, varying his actions so as to flood her sensory inputs. It was a feedback system, precisely aware of the moments when there was a dim and distant alarm within her that dropped her back to some prior degree of mounting tension, so that he could then lift her back up beyond her previous high before risking the next necessary interruption. Lost ground, carefully regained, after the small disruptive acts of tugging the band of fabric off over her feet and dropping it aside, of swiftly and deftly baring her breasts, of hitching and moving around to a head-and-foot orientation with the bed, of peeling his own trunks down and dropping them on the floor, of coupling for the first time, establishing the unmistakable finality of it with a few long heavy strokes before disengaging. Because the objective was not merely the taking of her. That was only a qualified possession, far more easily achieved than the total possession which could come only from turning her face ashen, her lips icy, her expression to agony, from making her breathe like a runner, making her body burst with a sudden sweat, making her go into her hard, deep contractions.
During the second fifteen minutes of her, because all of it took only half an hour from the moment her slow arm went around him and her fingerpads dug into his muscles to the time when she faded slowly down and down into a drugged relaxation when she had ended, the watcher part of him had slowly moved closer and finally merged with his immediate sensual identity and had stopped the weighing and measuring and planning. It was no longer necessary. There was nothing else remaining to set her back. It was all a broad delicious road from there right up to release, knowing his would be all the greater by holding back until her body made its primitive, insistent demand.
Now, leaning on the patio railing in the dying light, he turned his head and saw that Anne Faxton was so far down the beach she was a stick figure, unrecognizable, still walking slowly. I did remember about being merciful, he thought. But too late. Too late for me. Too late for her.
He straightened, slid the door open quietly, parted the draperies, and closed the door. He went to the end of the draperies and found the right cord and pulled them all the way open. All that was left of the day was an ember band across the horizon over the black sea. He turned the small desk lamp on and went over to stand by the bed and look at Mrs. Lee Rountree in her sleep. She lay on her side, facing him. Her palms, pressed flat together, were under her cheek. Her sun-harshed hair spilled across her face, some blond strands stirring with each long exhalation of deep sleep, an exhalation from lips apart. Her leg underneath lay straight toward the foot of the bed. Her left leg was hiked up, knee sharply flexed, the round of the knee braced against the crumpled terrain of the pale wrinkled sheets.