“Come on, Dad. We need to get you into bed. It’s late.”
“Same stars, the same moon, same surf. None of the important stuff has changed.” Lawton opened the gate and started down the path. “That’s one bit of good news for you young folks. The important stuff doesn’t change. It isn’t allowed.”
“Too expensive,” Norman said.
“Come on, Norman, live a little. Let’s splurge.”
The woman at the check-in counter had been staring at Norman Franks since they’d walked into the room. Polished wood floors, screen doors, a vase of daisies on a shelf behind the counter. Bright white paint on the walls and exposed rafters of the ceiling. A lazy paddle fan. Looked like a summer-camp cabin. Summer camp for well-heeled adults.
“I don’t care how expensive it is,” Jennifer said. “I want to stay here.”
“Come on, Norman, we’re loaded. We’re swimming in loot. What’s the problem?”
The check-in lady had curly white hair and was wearing pleated khaki pants with sharp creases and a blue polo shirt with SEASIDE printed above her left boob. She looked like a recent widow who was doing this job so she could save up for a face-lift.
“Too expensive,” Norman said.
“Our friend thinks you’re asking too much.” Emma smiled at the woman, but she didn’t smile back. “Think maybe we could cut a deal? Negotiate a more reasonable rate? Maybe we could slip you a little hard currency for your kind assistance. The old payola palm-rub.”
“Perhaps you’d be happier down the road at the Marriott,” the woman said. “Their rooms are considerably cheaper.”
“I want to stay here,” Jennifer said. “It’s so pretty. After what I had to do tonight, I think I’ve earned it.”
“Jenny wants to stay here,” Emma told the check-in lady. “And look out, if she doesn’t get her way, she’s going to start whining. And believe me, you don’t want that. The woman is a very annoying whiner.”
“The Marriott,” Norman said.
The face-lift lady looked at him again. She’d never seen anyone so big. So big and so ugly and with such a heavy beard. Nobody had ever come into this room wearing sky blue pants and a canary yellow sports coat and a silver shirt with geometric designs. The check-in lady’s eyes slipped to the telephone below the counter. Like she was considering a quick 911 call to the fashion police. Hey, come quick. There’s a guy here with shiny hexagonals on his shirt. A few parallelograms, too.
“What do you call this place, anyway?” Emma smiled at the lady, trying for a sincere effect.
“Seaside,” the woman said dryly.
Norman was looking at the wall behind the lady, his eyes fixed on the daisies as if any second he was going to hop the counter, go over there, and sniff them. Godzilla meets Bambi.
“We know it’s Seaside,” Emma said. “That’s why we’re here. We want to stay at Seaside. But what the hell is it, a motel?”
“It’s a town,” the woman said, pronouncing it with two syllables.
“Well, it’s not like any goddamn town I ever saw. I mean, we drove around a little already and we didn’t see anybody walking the streets. If it’s a town, where is everybody?”
“This is off-season. The owners don’t live here year-round.”
“They don’t, huh? Nobody lives here at all?”
“We have six full-time residents.”
“Oh,” Emma said. “Six people, and you call that a town. I don’t call six people a town. That’s not even enough to play a good volleyball game. I think what you got here is a motel and you don’t want to call it that because that doesn’t sound classy enough, so you call it a town so people think it’s something special, some cute little village. But hey, as far as I can see, it’s still a goddamn motel.”
“Please watch your speech. I’m offended by your cursing.”
“Oh, my. Forgive me all to hell.”
“Will that be all?” The woman was giving Emma the schoolteacher’s stare. Get back in your seat. One more problem from you, young lady, and it’s another day of detention.
“You allow pets?”
“No pets.”
“How about roaches? Or aren’t they welcome, either?”
“I think the Marriott is what you want, not Seaside.”
Emma smiled brightly.
“Okay, I’ve decided. We’re going to take the nicest place you have. Big attractive house, three bedrooms, four, whatever’s the best in town. Wraparound porch. A fireplace, widow’s walk, tower, the whole ball of wax.”
“Thank you, Emma,” Jennifer said, and took her by the arm. “Thank you very much.”
The woman cut her eyes to the ceiling as if to summon all her good breeding. The shit she had to put up with for tightened skin.
“I’ll need to see a credit card,” she said.
“You got one of those, Norman?”
“Sure.”
“Well, give it to the fine lady, so we can stay in her town.”
While the woman was running his card, Emma said, “Oh, by the way, we were supposed to meet some friends of ours here.”
The woman gave Emma the schoolteacher’s thousand-watt stare.
“There’re two of them,” Emma said. “An old man and a young woman with long black hair. Rafferty is her name.”
Emma gave Jennifer a questioning look.
“Alexandra Rafferty,” Jennifer said.
“That’s right. Alexandra Rafferty. Know which house she’s staying in?”
“The Chattaway,” the woman said. “On East Ruskin.”
“Whew, now that’s a relief,” Emma said. “After driving all this way, we’d sure as hell hate to miss her.”
“So let’s get a house near hers,” Jennifer said. “Within shooting distance.”
Emma stepped back and grinned at Jennifer.
“Hey, Norman. I’m really starting to like this girl.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s something else.”
Emma turned to the schoolteacher and dredged up her best smile.
“The nicest house you have that’s close to Miss Rafferty’s. But it’s got to be within shooting distance.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Alexandra lay in the dark and listened to the wind heave against the house. There was a storm out over the Gulf, the lightning, muffled by massive clouds, was illuminating entire quadrants of the sky. Cool, sugary air seeped beneath the cracked window. She could see the lightning from her bed and hear the creaks of the house and a crackling sound that at first she thought was fire but soon realized was only beach sand peppering the windowpanes.
She’d been lying awake for over an hour, listening to the house and the wind and for any signs of Jason stirring in the living room. Wanting to get up, go out there, put a hand on his shoulder. Wake him, talk. But more than that, too. More than she’d allowed herself to consider. His kiss from the other morning still glowed on her lips like the tingle of the sun that abides in the flesh for days.
It struck her then that she was more familiar with Jason’s body than she was with her own husband’s. Its strengths, its tendencies, its quickness and restraint. She knew his scent at rest and after long exertion. The taste of his breath when straining and when calm. From dozens of clinches over the last few years, without ever intending it, Alexandra had made a study of his muscles and sinews, his fingers and nails and the dark hairs at his wrist.
In some ways, she knew his body better than her own. So many times she’d watched it blur toward her, demanding her quickest and smartest response. She’d learned to read it, to anticipate his mood, his disposition, the likelihood of his going left or right or down the middle. She knew him like a figure skater knows her longtime partner.
She stretched her legs, pointed her toes. She yawned without conviction, resettled on her side, and stared out the window at the erratic pulses of light. The wind was lowing between the houses like a lost animal. There was an itch in the air. A prickling aroma. Something off, some dissonant note. A hunger
ing silence that filled the house.
She pushed herself up and got out of bed. She was wearing a T-shirt of Jason’s she’d borrowed. Lifting her right arm, she pressed her nose to the cotton sleeve. Buried beneath the scent of detergent, she detected a hint of his bay rum aftershave, the sharp whiff of his accumulated musk.
She stood at the window a moment. Watched three quick strobes in the south. But no thunder and no rain. No release of the tension brewing in the sky.
Suddenly, for a few vivid seconds in the flashing light, she became again that girl at the cottage window long ago, and in another flash of light she was the woman she had become, teetering between those twin states. As she had her entire life, coexisting, never completely the one and never completely the other. Not then, not now. A lifetime of unease, an imperfect fit in her own body, in her own heart.
She turned from the window, took a long, strengthening breath, and stepped quickly to the threshold, and without a thought of what she would do or say, she drew open the door.
And he was there, standing a foot before her, eyes agleam from the distant lightning, a half smile on his lips, immobile—as rooted to the hardwood floor as if he had been planted there for years, waiting for Alex to finally summon her courage.
“Jason?”
“Who were you expecting?”
“How long have you been there?”
“Years.”
She stepped forward and he opened his arms and absorbed her into his heat. They held each other in the dark and the distant rumble of thunder out over the Gulf mingled with the throb of her pulse. On the street nearby, something clanged, metal ringing against metal like a halyard in the breeze.
The wind was flowing off the water, sweet with the fragrance of rain. From the beach came a howl like the eerie lament of a whale passing dangerously close to shore.
She was not ready for this, this slow dance backward toward the bed. She was too disoriented, too fragile, too bewildered, too angry. But she didn’t resist as they swayed to the soundless tune, Alexandra fitting her body to his, feeling his strength rippling an inch below the easeful surface. His warmth, the relaxed embrace.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Of me?”
“Of this.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s scary.”
“Maybe we should stop right now. While we can.”
“Do you want to?”
“Of course not.”
She stepped away and looked at him in the flickering light. Then her arms began to rise as if she were spreading her wings, and Jason reached out and drew the T-shirt over her head and in one fluid motion stepped out of his boxer shorts.
In the yellow glow of the streetlights, Alex stood naked before him. She made a soft fist and aimed a slow-motion strike at his chin. He smiled and blocked it just as languidly, caught her by the wrist, and swiveled her so she was facing away, a karate minuet.
And he pressed himself flat against her backside and slid his right forearm beneath her chin, his wrist bone pressing lightly against her throat, a standard chokehold. He kissed her ear, then her other ear. She let him hold her for a moment more, his cock rising along the crease of her buttocks; then she gripped the thumb on his choking hand and twisted delicately against the joint, peeling out of the hold as she turned to face him.
“It’s not like we’re strangers. We’ve got a history. We’ve seen this coming for a long time.”
“Shut up, Jason.”
She stepped forward and kissed him on the lips and drew him closer into the lazy sway of the embrace. And then they were on the bed, inside the sheets, the cool cotton, bright white and pulsing from the strokes of lightning. Jason’s fingers whispered across her flesh, learning her body, reading the textures, tickling through the fine dust of hair on her arms and cheeks and belly—as if he was trying his best to memorize her angles and slopes and the exact grain of her skin.
And then it was her doing the same. The breathless tingle of discovery, massaging, molding, fingertips tracing this fresh terrain, the grooves of his ribs, the taut pucker of his nipples, the wedges of muscle, the trickle of hair that ran from navel to his groin, this man who was opening himself to her, who was lying back luxuriating in her touch, vulnerable, safe.
When the storm finally came ashore, its winds lashed the house for only a moment or two; then the rain swelled around them. Its sudden drumming resounded on the tin roof as if dimes were dropping from the stratosphere. Louder and louder, until there was no other sound but the rich clamor of rain.
They rode the surge of noise, burrowing deep inside its sheltering static. Alexandra felt herself letting go of the dense gathering of dread, releasing breath after breath that had been stored away too long, left moldering inside her. Loosening the steel cords that gripped her chest and kept her lungs pinched and shallow.
She was on top of Jason, controlling the moment; she was on her side and her back and he was inside her and she was opening herself to him, peeling back, drawing him in deeper and deeper until the two of them fused and there was only a wordless heat, a resonance. A thawing of that hard knot in her chest. Swallowed by the tumult of the rain, melting into the racket. And then it was over, as quickly as it had come; the storm moved inland. But by then, they no longer needed its reassurance, its concealment. They were on their own in its trickling aftermath. The pings and splats of gutters overrunning. A few xylophone plonks and the last drizzling patters.
They had blundered into these deep waters and now were thrashing to stay afloat in the sheets, a crawl, the breaststroke and butterfly, diving and rising, sleek forms in the airless sea. An hour, maybe two, impossible to tell. He chasing her, she chasing him, the two of them slithering away and slithering back. The touch, the groan. The gasping aftermath. Pulling up the pillows from the floor, propping them against the backboard.
“Are you sore?”
“Not yet. Are you?”
“I can’t tell. Is numb the same as sore?”
“Oh, no. Did I make you numb?”
“I’ll let you know when I’m so numb I can’t go on.”
And she was pleasing herself and pleasing him and pleasing something beyond either. It was flesh and nerve endings. It was the rocking loss of breath and sailing off freely into the atmosphere. It was sleep that was an hour long and ten miles deep, a waking that was tender and aching. It was dawn showing at the curtains, blue light, perfect air, a stretching yawn, Alex filled beyond the brim with something so new, so inexpressible that she had to struggle for several minutes before she could remember who she was and where.
Emma let the roach meander along the peach-colored railing of the porch. She gave her lots of slack on the green thread. The roach’s antennae were waving wildly, as if she were nervous. Too exposed. Out in the full sun.
“What’re we waiting for?”
Norman wore a pair of black boxer shorts he’d bought that morning in one of the shops across the highway. A yellow Seaside T-shirt, triple extra-large. He was standing at the porch railing on the third floor of the Ooh-La-La, their seven-hundred-dollar-a-night cottage. Four stories tall, with two enormous bedrooms, a tower, and two porches that ran the length of the second and third stories. With the appliances and paintings she could steal from that one house alone, Emma could live for a year.
Across the street and two doors closer to the beach was the Chattaway. Cute little bungalow where the two million dollars was stashed. Emma’s Heckler & Koch with its glinting barrel lay at her feet; the Mac-10 was perched on a bright green Adirondack chair. With the ammo she’d brought along, they could hold off the Montana militia for a month. Or put so many rounds in the house across the street, its walls would disintegrate.
“What’s your hurry, Norman? You got a sudden urge to get back to Miami? Miss the grit and grime, do you? Miss the dead dogs rotting in the alley, the Dumpsters overflowing with newborn babies? Or maybe it’s your apartment. The garbage smell in the hallway, police sirens day and night. Tell
us, Norman. We’d like to hear, wouldn’t we, Jennifer? We’d like to know why the hell anyone would be in a hurry to leave this place and get back to fucking Miami.”
“Yeah, Norman, why?”
A cool breeze was coming off the Gulf, tossing Jennifer’s thick mass of golden hair.
“Forget it,” Norman said.
Jennifer was wearing one of the outfits she’d bought, too, an ankle-length paisley dress with a scooped neckline, turquoise earrings, sandals, and a baseball hat with SEASIDE embroidered on it. She looked good in clothes. She was smiling, relaxed. Emma caught her eye and winked at her, and Jennifer winked back.
Emma had on a pair of tan sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt with the Seaside logo on it. Nothing fancy, but still it made her feel good, a new outfit, a new start. An unexpected direction to her life. Taking some deep breaths, the all-new-and-improved Emma Lee Potts about to be unleashed on the world.
She and Jennifer had shared a king-sized bed last night. First time either of them had been with a woman. There was a little clumsiness at first, Emma reaching out, touching Jennifer on the hipbone, Jennifer yipping in fright, both of them fumbling around, apologizing, drawing back, then lying there in awkward silence for a long time.
But finally Emma said what the hell, rolled over, started with a big mouth kiss, giving her some tongue, then worked her way down Jennifer’s lean, smooth body, kissing and tweaking, until she found herself all the way down in Jennifer’s soft, damp, sugary folds, and suddenly she was doing to Jennifer all the things she’d always wanted someone to do to her. And it drove Jennifer so wild, she began to wail quietly like a wolf having a dream. The two of them writhing and bouncing so hard and so long that Norman came barging into the room to see what was the matter.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Emma said, looking up from her work. “We’re just getting to know each other, that’s all. We’re bonding.”
“You’re okay?”
“Better than okay,” Jennifer said in her drowsy voice. “About ten miles past okay.”
Body Language Page 24
