“If we’re lovers, you’re supposed to love me. Not just lay me. Not just make love to me. Love me,” Vanessa saidot just›Or what the hell did I go and get rid of Bryce for? She kept that part to herself: she had an accurate suspicion that Hagop wouldn’t care why. Bryce sure hadn’t cared why she’d dumped the guy she was living with before she met him. All he’d ever cared about was getting it in.
Hagop’s face remained studiously blank. “I am afraid you may ask more than I am able to give.”
“Oh, yeah? I’d better not.” Vanessa glared at him. “I’ve got news for you-I didn’t pack up and move to Colorado just to be your fuck toy.”
“I did not expect you to move here at all,” he answered with a shrug. “As long as you did, though, do you expect me not to enjoy it?”
Things were falling apart. Vanessa didn’t need to be the King of Babylon to see the writing on the wall. “You filthy son of a bitch!” she snarled-not the ideal endearment when they were both naked in her bed and his seed still dribbled out of her to make a wet spot, but most heartfelt. “You moved here to get rid of me!” It was obvious now. Why in blue, bleeding hell hadn’t it been while she was still back in San Atanasio?
With dignity, Hagop shook his head. “I moved here for exactly the reason I told you in California: I saw the chance to make more money.”
“Rug merchant!” she jeered. “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it?”
He got out of bed and started to dress. “I am going to pretend I did not hear that. Count yourself lucky that I am.” His voice held.. nothing.
Vanessa knew all about hot rages. Meeting a cold one gave her pause. She’d fight like a wildcat. All the same, it wouldn’t be hard for her to end up dead in this apartment where she hadn’t lived very long.
“So I did not move here for the purpose of getting rid of you,” Hagop continued tonelessly, tucking his shirt into his slacks. “That, as they say in the trade, was an added bonus.”
An added redundancy. But she didn’t say that, either. She did say, “What am I supposed to do now?”
He shrugged again. “This is no longer my worry. You are old enough to be an adult, unlikely as it sounds. You will land on your feet or on your back-whichever suits you. And then, before too long, you will find out that the next one, whoever he is, does not measure up to your imagination, either.”
He walked out of the bedroom. Pickles meowed at him. He didn’t answer the cat. The front door opened. It closed. It didn’t slam-Hagop was still holding things in. His footsteps faded down the stairs. With the door closed, she couldn’t hear them at all by the time he got to the bottom.
“You bastard! You stinking, shitheaded bastard!” she whispered. Then she all but ran into the shower. She’d used it not long before he came over, but so what? Now she wanted to scrub every trace of his touch off her body. She didn’t usually use a bath sponge. Tonight she made an exception. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand, too.
Once she finally came out, she stripped the sheets off the bed. She wanted to throw them out. She really wanted to douse them in gasoline and make a bonfire out of them. Wasn’t some ancient movie called The Burning Bed? If she could douse Hagop in gasoline and make a bonfire out of him…
But she couldn’t. Oh, she could, but she was much too likely to get caught. The asshole wasn’t worth doing hard time for. As a cop’s kid, she knew better than most how godawful state prison was.
And she couldn’t even toss the sheets. Replacing them wouldn’t be cheap. After making this move-making this move for that worthless, reptilian turd! — she couldn’t afford a lot of grand gestures. She’d just have to shove quarters into one of the building’s machines and wash that man right out of her bedclothes. Any of Amalgamated Humanoids’ products had more in the way of warmth, more in the way of feeling, than he did.
So why hadn’t she realized that when she fell for him after she gave Bryce the heave-ho? She shrugged. She’d been looking for a lifeline, and she’d found one. Now she discovered it had an anvil on the end, not one of those cork floats.
She pulled fresh sheets out of a cabinet in the hall. All the bed linen in there had been washed since Hagop’s nasty sweat last polluted it. It would have to do. Grimly, she started making the bed. Pickles thought it was a game, and tried to help. In lieu of punting him, she tossed a couple of kitty treats out into the hall and bribed him to go away.
Bryce Miller wondered if he would ever see a job after he finally finished his thesis. The way the economy looked these days, odds were against him. He’d played the grad-school game as well as anybody could. He’d been a reader. He’d had research assistantships and TAships. He’d tutored high-school kids. He’d taught at a couple of community colleges. The proof of his success was that he could see the end of the dissertation ahead, and he wasn’t broke. Yet.
Maybe if he’d chosen a sexier field than Hellenistic poetry… He shook his head. Wrong comparison. Hellenistic poetry could be plenty sexy. It could, here and there, be downright filthy. Maybe if he’d chosen a more practical field than Hellenistic poetry…
“But then I wouldn’t be me,” he murmured. He had his laptop set up on the table in the dining nook of the little one-bedroom place he’d hastily found after Vanessa decided change was in the air. Papers and books covered about two-thirds of the tabletop. When he needed to eat, he had to put the computer away.
If he hadn’t found a secondhand copy of The Persian Boy when he was in high school, he might never even have heard of the Hellenistic age, much less ended up trying to make a living studying it. Somewhere out in the big, wide world, there might be people, possibly even English-speaking people, who could resist getting drawn in by Mary Renault’s prose. There might be, but Bryce wasn’t any of them. He’d started trying to find out how much in the novel was real and how much she was making up. Most of it and not a whole lot, respectively, he’d soon discovered.
Writers were dangerous people. They could warp the lives of readers they’d never met, readers they couldn’t meet because they were dead by the time some beat-up old copy of one of their books fell into the right-the wrong? — hands.
Bryce wondered if he would ever write a poem that affected even one person as much as The Persian Boy had changed him. He laughed at himself. Talk about setting your sights high!
Out in the courtyard, one of the poolside regulars did a cannonball that raised a splash like a young mushroom cloud. Three or four of the others gave forth with whoops and applause. Maybe a dozen people-more men than women-pretty much monopolized the pool here. There was no law that said Bryce couldn’t swim in it. He didn’t think they would have gone out of their way to make him feel unwelcome if he had.
But that was the point. They hung out there, and he didn’t. The same kind of group, down to sex ratio and precancerous tans, had ruled the roost at the building where he’d lived with Vanessa.
He looked down at his own hands. He was pale almost to invisibility. No need for him to worry about melanoma, no sir. He’d probably die of some fungus infection he caught from an Egyptian papyrus of the second century BC, or else of pneumonia brought on by aggressive library air-conditioning.
Another cannonball, this one even bigger and wetter than the last. More cheers from the regulars. Bryce eyed the waves rolling across the pool and slopping over the coping on the far side. If you threw an asteroid into the Pacific somewhere near New Zealand, waves would swamp Los Angeles the same way.
“Cheery thought,” he said. The longer he lived alone, the more he talked to himself. He would have worried about it more if Vanessa’s dad (which was still how he thought of Colin Ferguson most of the time) hadn’t told him he did the same thing.
Susan thought it was funny-peculiar that he’d stayed friends with his ex’s father. It wasn’t even that they both found themselves in the same boat at the same time (or that the boat was named Titanic). Dammit, Bryce liked Colin, and for some reason it worked both ways. Had the older man’s life worked out differently, he would have made a good scientist instead of a good cop. He had that restless itch to know, to put pieces together till they formed a satisfying whole.