Under My Skin

by Jaye Maiman

  K.T. had started a fire in the living room. We shimmied toward the warmth, then I pressed her onto the oversized couch and explored her mouth, its silky depths, her tender, moist lips. I pulled back for a moment and stared at her. She rested her head against a throw pillow, her eyes closed and her mouth open, waiting for me. Something exploded in me, something far more potent than simple desire.

  I licked the center of her upper lip with the tip of my tongue. She shivered beneath me, and I felt myself grow wet in response. Our kisses grew deeper, more urgent, our bodies grinding together. I rubbed myself hard against her long, tight thigh, listening to her breath become more ragged, her moans deeper. She ran her tongue around my ear, then blew lightly on the spots she had moistened. Chills went through me. Over and over again, she whispered in my ear two words and only two words. I want. I want.

  We rolled onto the floor, the ache between my legs wonderfully excruciating. I tugged her shirt out of her pants and slipped my hand against her cool skin. She arched against me, and my palm discovered the delicate hollow of her lower back. Her mouth moved to my neck, biting lightly, teasing me with pauses that elicited involuntary groans. I began my own mantra.

  Yes.

  Yes. To desire. To making love. To taking. To being taken.

  K.T. shimmied under me till her head was at my breast. She opened my sodden shirt with a tug of her teeth, then began sucking a nipple through my bra. I flattened myself against her knee, craving the pressure. She moved against me, slow and sporadic by design. The irregularity made the tension unbearable. I could no longer hear the crackle of the wood in the fireplace, the wail of the wind against the corners of the cabin. I felt blind and dumb, with one purpose.

  I lifted her half-buttoned shirt over her head, but the sleeves caught on her wrists. I left them tangled in cloth above her head and propped myself up onto my elbows to stare at her small, pale breasts. Again she arched, till I lowered my mouth onto her hard nipples. They blossomed in my mouth, swelled under the flick of my tongue. I traveled between her nipples like a drunk reveling in her taste, her texture, her curves.

  Her whimpers were a dizzying symphony, an opera played only for my ears. She didn’t struggle to remove her shirt, but stared at me openly, with a vulnerability and a trust that briefly disoriented me. I kissed her eyes, whispered into her ear all that I intended, and was welcomed with a moan so deep that I felt it rumble through me as if it were my own.

  I removed her pants, running my tongue just below her belly button. Her thighs were full and tight. Suddenly, I wanted time to cease, wanted these exquisite seconds to last for an eternity. I slowed my pace, stroking her length with my fingertips, licking her so lightly I could feel the fine hairs of her body yielding under my tongue. She filled all my senses. The saltiness of her moist skin, her singsong whimper, the edges and curves of her sweaty limbs, the sharpness of her nails as they dug into my shoulders, and the scent of her desire.

  At last, I parted her with my tongue and entered her, beginning a voyage long overdue. I sucked and licked and probed her till I carried us both far beyond the stars.

  By the slant of light falling over K.T.’s belly like a lover’s arm, I guessed that it had to be late afternoon. Neither of us had left the bed for longer than the time it took to run down the hall to the bathroom and back. Once I took a few extra seconds to gum some toothpaste, then I was back in her muscular arms, nuzzling her salty neck, her supple lips.

  “Are we still on earth?” K.T. whispered hoarsely. Still half asleep, she rolled onto her side and smiled at me.

  I traced the line of her jaw and said, “Lady, we’re not even in the same galaxy.” She cuddled into me, her nipples hardening against my chest. Her mouth pressed against my ear as she began murmuring descriptions of what she wanted to do to me, specifying how often and how deep. I wasn’t about to argue.

  Just then, off in the distance, the phone rang. I groaned and buried my head under the covers.

  K.T. joined me under the sheets. “That’s the fifth time. Maybe you should get it.”

  It took less than ten seconds to convince her that we had more pressing business at hand.

  I was on the edge of tumbling into a glorious black hole when the doorbell rang. I crashed back to earth with a painful thud. “Shit.” I grabbed an oversized flannel shirt from the back of the door and buttoned it as I ran down the stairs and into the living room. Whoever it was had better be wearing a bulletproof vest and one hell of a crash helmet. “Be prepared to defend your life,” I shouted as the intruder rang the bell again and slammed the knocker.

  “Cool your jets and open the damn door.”

  It was my friend Carly. I swung the door open and stared at her menacingly. She was pale and her bottom lip was trembling.

  I grabbed her hand, pulled her inside, and closed my arms around her tightly. The scent of fear rose from her skin. I glanced up over her shoulder and saw K.T. glaring at me from the top of the stairs.

  Christ.

  She spun around and stormed toward the bedroom.

  I half-grimaced, then moved Carly to arm’s length. I would have kicked her out, but she looked like hell. “Is Amy okay?” I asked, a knot forming in my throat. Carly and Amy are an anchor in my life. If anything ever happened to either of them. . .

  “It’s not Amy,” she said. “It’s Noreen Finnegan. She died a few hours ago, and Helen’s up at the house stinking of booze and wailing like a banshee. She thinks the police are going to arrest her for murder.”

  Chapter Two

  The kitchen smelled of Dewar’s and vomit. I watched with trepidation as Helen lit her cigarette, fully expecting the house to explode as soon as the match caught. Instead, she held the match with quaking hands and inhaled deeply. I watched the tip of the cigarette begin to glow and tried to ignore the fact that I was still throbbing from K.T.’s touch.

  “Let’s go over this again, Helen,” I said. “This time, take it slower. What happened after you left the party?”

  She squinted at me through the smoke. Behind her I could see Amy frown. I knew what my favorite herbalist-slash-chiropractor was thinking. The house would stink for days.

  “You saw what happened with Noreen,” Helen said. She paused to remove a leaf from the sleeve of the same straw-colored wool blazer she had worn last night. But the muddy stains were new. “She was in rare form. First she tells me she wants to make amends for screwing up my life for seven years, and the next thing I know she’s waving a flowerpot at me and threatening to bash in my head. Some goddamn recovery.”

  I nodded indulgently. Get to the part I don’t know, I urged her silently.

  “Last thing I needed last night was another one of her alcoholic rages,” she continued.

  I watched her tap ash into a lid from an empty mayonnaise jar. “You sure she was drinking?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Hell, yeah. Didn’t you smell her? That’s what got me started. I could smell the scotch on her and it propelled me right back to the good old days of drinking, fucking, and fighting.” The bitterness in her voice stung. So did the contrast in our memories. I could have sworn Noreen was sober when we spoke.

  Helen sucked the cigarette greedily, then sighed. “I left shortly after you stopped her from cracking my skull. When I got home, I collapsed. It was just too much. I mean, there had to be at least sixty people at that party and I was the only one by myself. Excluding you.” She pointed the cigarette at me meaningfully, and all at once I felt inexplicably guilty about having spent the night with K.T.

  “You know what I felt like? Like a damn ship without a port. Everyone else had someplace to dock. But I was running loose. Being home alone in my lousy two-bedroom ranch just made it worse. I kept thinking of how I had signed my house over to Noreen two months after I bought it just so I could escape from her, and now she’s living there with Manny like it was always hers. Christ,” she exclaimed, focusing on Amy with barely concealed rancor. “Do you know she was planning to sell it for a fraction
of its worth? It hasn’t even been ten months since she first became obsessed with the place and made me blow my inheritance on it!”

  She smashed the cigarette stub into the mayonnaise lid and strode to the glass doors separating the back deck from the kitchen. Suddenly, her tone turned strangely calm. “So I opened my cabinet and dug out a dusty bottle of whiskey and started chugging it.” She turned around and stared at me hard. “I haven’t done that in over three years. I just wanted the hurt to stop, Robin. I wanted to step out of my life. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded, remembering all the ways I’d tried to escape my own painful memories.

  “I just wanted to disappear. And that’s the problem.” She held my gaze and said, “The booze felt so good going down. I started feeling incredibly strong, like it was time for me to tell Noreen just how I felt about her, how she had fucked up my life. And that’s the last thing I remember . . . till this morning.” A shudder punctuated her final words.

  When she had awakened, it was a little after eight o’clock. She was curled up in Noreen’s gardening shed, shivering and sick to her stomach. Her first impulse was to get warm. She knocked on the back door. When no one answered, she tried the knob. Many homeowners in the community don’t bother locking their doors, so she didn’t find it strange that the door opened.

  “But the smell hit me right away,” Helen explained. She scratched at a dried splotch of paint on the glass door. “I remember thinking, man, she really tied one on last night. See, I recognized the stench. Scotch and vomit. But there was something else. Something that made me think of the time some kid crashed his ’Vette into a deer right outside our house. A peculiar odor, somehow sweet and musky. That’s when I saw her. She was lying in front of the sink, blood pooled around the back of her skull, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. Her skin was the color of putty, like on an old IBM PC. I knew she was dead.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. The headache from last night had returned. I glanced up and realized that Amy looked slightly out of focus. Maybe I need glasses, I thought. Or maybe I just didn’t want the image of Noreen to be so damn vivid.

  Death and I are old friends. I learned about it first-hand when I was just three years old. The gunshot still reverberates in my head. Even now I can see my sister Carol’s eyes flashing wide open in the darkness of the closet, a deer caught in headlights, the cry from her five-year-old body wrapping around me like a net, the gunsmoke searing my nostrils, her blood splattering my cheeks, my upper lip.

  I stood abruptly, crossed to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. This always happens at the beginning of a case — the razor’s edge of memory slicing through the years, skinning me like a hunter, leaving me raw and bloodless. Maybe this was why I turned my back on the bodice-ripping romance novels I used to write and became partners in a detective agency with a Bible-quoting ex-cop fighting demons of his own.

  I crossed back to the kitchen table and picked up the notes I had been jotting, then continued. “When did you call the police?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe five minutes after I found her. It took me that long just to stop shaking. I called Amy first. It didn’t hit me right away, you know, how it would look. But when the Starret Township’s police chief pulled up in the driveway, reality came crashing in.” She sat down heavily. “If Noreen was murdered, I could be in serious trouble.” She trained those soulful eyes on me and said, “I may really need your help, Rob.”

  I cleared my throat and asked quietly, “Why did you automatically assume she was killed? Maybe she just passed out.”

  The question surprised her. “Noreen’s a practiced drunk. She never passed out.”

  “You did.”

  My response flustered her. Staring at me with increasing distrust, she said, “Until last night, I hadn’t had a drink in years.”

  “Wasn’t Noreen in the program?”

  She crossed her legs and smoothed down her jacket. “Sure. She was sober for a few months. Big deal. I lived with the woman for seven years. I know how she drinks. She didn’t pass out.”

  Her certainty was disconcerting. “So you just assumed someone killed her?” I asked, the sarcasm in my voice evident. Amy shot me a warning glance over Helen’s head.

  “For God’s sake, Robin, her head was bashed in! Besides, it’s not like the woman was Miss Congeniality. I don’t know anyone who didn’t have reason to want to bop her good at least once. She was suing one of our neighbors for a damn fender bender she no doubt caused. She kept files on anyone who so much as sneezed in her direction. You should see the documentation she gathered on that shithead Bobby Gardener. I’ve never known anyone who took vengeance as seriously as Noreen. I think it was only second to booze. In her eyes, she was some holier-than-thou avenger. But she was just a mean drunk. Period.”

  She lit another cigarette and started pacing in front of the refrigerator. I poured myself a cup of coffee and said, “Last night Noreen talked about hiring me. Do you have any idea why she’d need a private detective?”

  She shrugged, her face as tight as a drum. “She did that periodically. Most times she just wanted a background check on people. Last year it was something else. You know she was raised in foster homes? Her parents died when she was just twelve. I think it was a car accident. I never pushed for the details. Last year she hired some guy from Philly to find her lost siblings. I think he’s the one who made her think about moving here in the first place. He had a cousin in real estate who knew about Telham. Anyway, the geezer died in August. Maybe she just wanted to start up the search again.”

  It took me a moment to catch on. “She was separated from her family after her parents died?”

  Pulling her hair back from her face, the cigarette dangling from her lips, she answered warily, “It was pretty traumatic for her. But Noreen didn’t talk about it much. I learned the hard way that it was one of those ‘off limit’ topics. All I know is there were three brothers and two sisters, or maybe the other way around.”

  She slumped toward me and I had to fight an impulse to cradle her. I had often fantasized about sleeping with Helen. She had salt-and-pepper hair cut in a shoulder-length bob, olive skin, cocoa-brown eyes, and full lips that curled in a perpetual pout. Her delicate features made me feel at once protective and aroused. But looking at her now, my only emotion was pity. It was as if she were crumbling before my eyes. Her shoulders started to heave, then her hands shook. Finally the sob broke free and she doubled over and wailed. Amy scampered over and gathered Helen into her arms.

  I turned away and caught Carly gesturing toward the front door. The two of us stepped onto the deck and gulped the frigid air. Then she asked, “What do you think?”

  Not waiting for my response, she lifted the broom from the corner of the deck and began sweeping the leaves over the side. I sat down on the top step, closed my eyes, and listened to the rhythmic shushing of the broom. In the distance, there was the faint pong-pong of guns exploding in the neighboring preserve — an ironic appellation for a piece of land on which hunters had carte blanche to chase down and slaughter defenseless game.

  I was sick of confronting death, sick of cleaning up the aftermath, and sick of trying to prevent the inevitable. Death was an opponent I no longer had the strength to battle. At the moment, all I wanted was to be back at the cabin, traveling along K.T.’s long, lightly freckled legs.

  I shook my head, suddenly recalling the embittered exchange I had overheard last night. Wearily, I asked, “Where’s Manny?”

  “At her mother’s. She drove back there after the party. Guess she wasn’t in the mood to face Noreen after what had happened between her and Helen. Amy’s the one that finally located her. Must be hard as hell losing a lover like this.” She paused and bent over. “She’s sedated now. If she’s not up to the drive tomorrow, Amy may go into the city and pick her up.”

  Carly was staring solemnly at a slug. Her gaze was so intent, her eyes almost crossed. Despite my mood, I smiled. “Love that c
ountry living, don’t you?”

  Carly and Amy used to live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, just across the street from my brownstone. They moved up here four years ago, but they still marvel at every annoying cicada and over-zealous gypsy moth.

  She looked up, a glimmer of her customary playfulness returning. “Just imagine, Rob, one day you too can —”

  “Own a home in the country,” I finished the refrain for her. “I know, I know. I can’t wait to discover my very own slugs.”

  Unexpectedly, the energy between us shifted again and I sensed that our thoughts had wandered back to the one place neither of us wanted to go. Carly spoke first. “Do you think Helen could have killed Noreen during her blackout?”

  I shuddered, imagining the impact required to bash in a skull. Then the professional part of me kicked in. Something was off. According to Helen, blood was pouring out from the back of Noreen’s head and her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. From that description, I had to deduce that she found Noreen lying on her back. A powerful blow from behind would have undoubtedly pitched her forward which meant that the head wound most likely resulted from the fall itself. The question was, what could have caused her to heave backward with such force?

  Helen is just 5’3”, a full seven inches shorter than Noreen. I wondered how much strength was in her wiry arms. Probably not much. But I had to factor in years of pent-up fury. That’s when I started to worry.

  “It’s hard to say. Let’s just wait for the forensics report,” I said coolly. What I was really thinking was: motive and opportunity. Helen had both in abundance.

  Carly scoffed. “Forensics? Get real, Rob. This is Starret Township, remember? Douglas Marks is our coroner. You know who I mean? The funeral director who owns the chalet on Forest, around the corner from the cabin you’re renting. He’s the one Noreen almost decked last summer just because he was nice enough to pick up her mail when she was away for a week. Believe me, he won’t be too aggrieved by her passing. And then there’s our damn police chief. He makes Barney Fife seem like a veritable Rhodes scholar.”