"It's important to me."
"All right, then. Wait a minute, though, I think the soup is boiling. And you'd better get out of that wet swimsuit. I'll bring you a robe."
Joana sat up and freed herself from the blankets. "I'll get it. I know where it is."
"Sure you're steady enough to walk?"
"I'm steady enough for a lot of things. You go tend to the soup."
Joana went into the bathroom and peeled off the new blue maillot that nobody even got a chance to admire. She hung it over the shower head. With Glen's big furry towel she rubbed her skin to a pink glow, then put on the plaid Pendleton robe he kept hanging on the back of the bathroom door. When she went back into the living room, Glen had a bowl of hot soup waiting on the coffee table, and next to it a dish of crackers.
Joana found the canned gumbo delicious. Her tongue discovered new subtleties in the taste. She felt the way she sometimes did after smoking grass, and all her perceptions were especially acute.
When she finished the soup Glen poured them each a glass of brandy. They sat close together on the sofa and listened to the laughter and party sounds outside. Joana felt pleasantly warm and fuzzy. She did not bring death into the conversation again.
Glen kissed her. He slipped a hand inside the robe and gently squeezed her breast. Joana responded eagerly. When at last they broke apart Glen looked at her with some surprise.
"For a lady who nearly drowned a couple of hours ago, you sure can kiss. Are you feeling well enough to follow up?"
"Take me to bed and find out," Joana said.
Glen picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.
Very few things, Joana decided, made a woman feel sexier than being carried to bed. Some deeply repressed rape fantasy, she guessed.
They made love. Joana explored Glen's body as though she were just discovering it. In a way she was, as all of her senses remained extraordinarily keen. Her reactions to the textures, the smells, the tastes of him were stronger than ever before. She savored his touch on her body as though it were the very first time.
When she held Glen inside her it felt so ineffably good she wanted it never to end. When at last the climax came it was a series of soft explosions that wracked her body and left her limp and wrung out and indecently satisfied. At that moment she felt so completely close to Glen that she wanted to tell him of the miraculous thing that had happened to her tonight. She wanted to tell him every one of the details while they were still etched in her mind. But she was just too sleepy. She would tell him in the morning.
Joana closed her eyes and sank at once into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 4
Joana awoke promptly at seven-fifteen. It was her regular waking-up time on a weekday when she had to go to work. It took her a moment to recognize where she was-in Glen Early's king-size bed at the Marina Village. She stretched luxuriously and buried her face in the indentation left by Glen's head in the other pillow. She inhaled the scent of English Leather. Nice.
She rolled over onto her back and smelled that most delightful of morning aromas-frying bacon and coffee. Faint sounds coming from the kitchen told her Glen was up and making breakfast. Joana stretched again and smiled, feeling content and well loved. Then abruptly her smile fell away. For the first minute after waking she had forgotten the near tragedy in the swimming pool last night, and the terrible aftermath. Now the whole experience came rushing back into her consciousness.
Glen appeared at the bedroom door. "Hi. You awake?"
"What?"
"I asked if you were awake."
"Oh. Sure. Is that breakfast I smell?"
"It is. Hungry?"
"Starved."
He came over and sat on the bed. Joana rolled onto her side to face him. He stroked her lean hip through the sheet.
"How do you feel, kid?"
"Fine," she said.
"Really?"
"Really. Good as new."
He looked down at her with tender, serious eyes. "That was a close one last night."
"Closer than you know," she said.
"Do you want me to stay with you today?"
"No, you go on to work. I think I'll call my office, though, and take the day off."
"Good idea. Stay here if you want to."
"Thanks, but I think I'd like to get out into the fresh air." She hesitated. "Glen?"
"Yeah?"
"1 want to talk about what happened to me last night."
"What's to talk about? You went swimming too soon after eating. You got a cramp."
"No, I mean after that."
Glen's eyes, usually so direct, evaded hers. He said, "I'd better see about breakfast. Will you be ready in ten minutes?"
She nodded. He kissed her cheek and left the bedroom.
Joana lay for a moment looking at the empty doorway. She knew Glen was uneasy about things that could not be explained with formulas and computers, but she badly wanted to talk about her experience. The whole thing was as clear in her mind this morning as though it had happened five minutes ago. It was definitely no dream.
She took a quick shower and dressed in the clothes she had worn to the party last night. Someone must have brought them in from poolside. She went out and joined Glen at the breakfast bar that separated his small kitchen from the even smaller dining area. He had prepared scrambled eggs, bacon, toasted muffins, orange juice, and coffee. It was the only meal Glen knew how to cook, but he cooked it beautifully.
They ate quietly while an all-news radio station muttered about crises, real and pending. When they finished Joana took a second cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. Glen frowned slightly. He would have liked her to quit smoking, but he never nagged her about it, for which Joana was grateful.
He was saying something about the crowd at the party last night, but Joana found she could not concentrate on his words. At the first pause she broke in.
"Last night," she said, "after my leg cramped in the pool and I couldn't get out, I was actually out of my body for a while."
"Don't you mean out of your head?"
"No, I mean my body. I could actually look down and see it there in the pool, under the water."
Glen looked at his watch.
"I could see you and all the other people, and I could hear what you were saying. It was like I was floating there in the air, just suspended."
"Weird," said Glen. "Do you want more coffee?"
"No, I want to talk."
"What about?"
"About this, for Christ's sake, about what happened to me."
"You mean when you felt like you were floating in the air over the pool?"
"Not felt like, Glen, I was floating there."
"Okay, you were floating."
"But it was the things that happened after that that really bother me."
"Look, you don't have to talk about it now. You're probably still pretty upset."
"Glen, I want to talk about it. I want to try to understand it, and I can't do that if I don't start by talking it out."
He put his hand on the back of her neck, up under the hair, and massaged her muscles there. "You had a really rough experience last night. A lot of crazy things went through your mind. It would happen to anybody."
"Damn it, Glen, this is not a crazy imagining, I'm telling you this happened." She drew a breath and forced herself to speak in a gentler tone. "I was actually…in another place."
"Look, why don't you just spend today taking it easy. We'll talk about it later."
"You don't want to talk about it at all, do you?"
"It's not that. I just think you're getting altogether too serious about this business of floating outside your body, or whatever it is."
"Are you afraid to hear about it because it might not fit into your tidy little compartmentalized world?"