A soft touch on his cheek brought him sharply awake. His eyes flashed open.
Terry, leaning over him, kissed him.
He got up on his elbows. She pushed him back with a slim pink arm coated with a fine gauze of soft pale hairs. She was sitting on the edge of the bed; she drew the towel tighter around her; the tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. She looked pink and scrubbed. Inside, Mitch felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her — stupid, he said to himself; but out of his urgency of danger, his sense of hopeless failing, came a blood need that sent spasms into him, beyond reason or sensibility.
Her eyes locked on his; her mouth became soft and lost its smile, her eyes became drowsily heavy. With a finger he brushed back a stray damp lock of her hair. He didn’t want to think beyond this bed, this moment, her. He felt tranquil and sure. He pulled her down, drew her tenderly close; her head moved over his and she made a kitteny little sound in her throat and pressed against him and sucked his lower lip. Her mouth made deeper and deeper demands; he twisted, rolling her, grinding against her. She touched him — hot sensation raced through him. He pulled the towel away and laid his face in the softness of her flesh: her body, which looked like hot marble, was after all the softest of down. She pulled his head tight against her and he felt her stir, her breath coming as quick as his own; they made love with a driving hard urgency, hers matching his own.
When he lay back all the certainty drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled. A knotted muscle rippled at his jaw; he didn’t look at her until she made as if to get up. Then he put out a detaining hand. He pulled her against him and spoke into the turned hollow of her neck:
“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that — you don’t deserve any part of me. I never wanted to — turn you into something cheap, something to be ashamed of.”
She drew away, saying nothing. After a moment he reached for her hand. It was ice-cold. She said abruptly, “Is that how you feel? Cheap?”
“No — I didn’t mean—”
“You’re a puritan, Mitch. Underneath that hip exterior- is a pious prude. Don’t you think I wanted this as much as you did?”
He studied her gravely — the earnest wide beauty of her eyes, the soft curves of her body. Feeling almost burst his throat: he felt an overwhelming warmth course through him, an unreasoning reaching-out of his heart. “I must have been around Billie Jean too long — she’s the one that makes it seem cheap. I’m sorry I said that — I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I really meant. Well, look, I never said I wasn’t stupid.”
She lay back and smiled at the ceiling. “Don’t you feel fine?”
They waited in shared nesty silence, not needing to talk, until the grinding tensions began to return, setting his nerves on edge again, dispelling the moment’s grateful lassitude. Fear was a malaise never far from the surface, reminding him biliously that this wasn’t an idyll but only a momentary respite.
He said, “I think you’d better get in touch with your old man. You don’t have to tell him where you are but you ought to let him know you’re all right.”
“Not yet.” She sounded hard; she sat bolt upright and tossed her head, resentful, angry with him for having broken the spell.
He said, “Why?”
“It’s a long story.” She was curt.
“Look, I didn’t mean to step on a sore corn. I’m sorry. But he must be climbing the walls by now.”
“Good — let him.”
“You really hate his guts, don’t you?”
“Yes. No — oh hell, Mitch, I don’t know.” She pulled the towel up over her like a bedsheet and lay back. “Do you really want to hear about me, the sad story of my life?”
“Do you want to tell it?”
“Why not?” she said; and she did.
“My mother is still in the home,” she concluded. “He drove her into that. He drove my brother to suicide. He’s never had time for any of us, Mitch, and that’s why. That’s why I want him to endure the silence, wondering. My silence will hurt him the way his hurt us all. I want him to have plenty of time to think about that.”
He said, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but it seems to me it won’t get your mother out of the sanitarium and it won’t bring your brother back to life and it won’t make you any happier. And I imagine your old man’s too old to be changed by anything you do at this late date — you may hurt him but you won’t change him.”
“What am I supposed to do, then — forgive him?”
“I don’t suppose you ever could. But maybe you’re hurting yourself more than you’re hurting him. That kind of hate sort of festers inside you — it can eat you away like some kind of acid, you know? It’s not going to do you any good.”
“You sound like a schoolteacher,” she said sarcastically. “‘This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.’”
“Couldn’t you just make some kind of truce with him and go your own separate way?”
“I mean to. But first I — look, I don’t want to talk about it any more, all right?”
“If you say so. Only — well, a little while ago you and I made love and I kind of got the feeling it meant something to both of us. Didn’t it?”
Her answer was a long time coming. “Yes. It did, Mitch.”
“Then if you’re going to fill yourself full of hate, how much room’s left in you for—?” He left it unfinished, unsaid; he rolled his head to the side and looked straight at her.
Watching him, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She groped for his hand but he pulled away and got off the bed. His face hardened and he said, “I told you I was stupid. This is all ridiculous. I’m the guy that kidnaped you, remember? Shit, we’d make a great couple — a rich beautiful Ivy League debutante and a crummy flat-busted guitar player with a twenty-to-life rap hanging over my head. Sure... sure.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that, Mitch. I wouldn’t press any charges against you, you know that.”
“You wouldn’t have to. Your old man will be glad to take care of that little item.”
She didn’t have any ready answer for that. He turned away, feeling blue and bleak, and went into the bathroom. His drawers and socks were still wet but he put them on. The shirt was damp but he put that on too, and came out of the bathroom ramming his shirttails into his trousers. “Listen, it’s a funny thing but every week or so I do get hungry. Suppose we go get something to eat. I hope you like Mexican food.”
“I love it,” she said. She appeared to have joined in an unspoken agreement not to reopen the previous discussion. When she got to her feet she held the towel against her, picked up her clothes and went into the bathroom, and by shutting the door against him seemed to be shutting him out of her intimate life just as surely as she had opened it to him a short while before. And so when she reappeared in her dress he made his face a blank mask and said, “Okay, we’re just two people who happened to meet one night in the desert. We’ll leave it like that.”
She surprised him: she said, “I won’t leave it like that even if you will. Mitch, I thought I came on this crazy thing because I wanted revenge on my father, and it’s true, I did — I still do. But that wasn’t all. A little while ago I came out of the shower and saw you lying there and I knew I’d really come with you because I just wanted to be with you. If I’d let you leave me along the road somewhere I’d never have seen you again, and I didn’t want to lose you. Maybe it’s just a delirious reaction to this whole weird thing we’ve been through — maybe it’s something I’ll get over when I wake up one morning and the nightmare’s over. But I want to have a chance to find out. If that’s the way it turns out I won’t be scared to say so — let’s keep it clean and honest between us, can we?”