‘Me too,’ he said. His arms were propped on the doorframe and his head was close to mine, his eyes intent behind his glasses. He leaned in through the open window and gave me a light kiss on the lips. I pulled away, more from surprise than anything else. He backed off and stood up straight, looking embarrassed.
‘Well, goodnight,’ I said, trying to recover.
‘Goodnight.’
I rolled up the window and started the car. Let me correct that: I tried to start the car. When I turned the key in the ignition nothing happened. Not even a click. A ‘please tell me this isn’t happening’ feeling swept over me. I swore softly and tried again. He stood beside the car in the falling snow looking at me curiously. A glance at the dashboard explained the problem. The old-fashioned knob for the lights was pulled out all the way. I had left the lights on. I rolled the window back down.
‘I don’t suppose you have a jump?’ I asked sheepishly.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘It’s a good thing I walked you to your car,’ he said, the beams of his SUV bouncing back at us on the empty road. ‘You would have been stuck.’
‘Oh, I could have called triple A,’ I said, already thinking about how I was going to have to cross-country ski into town in the morning and get them to come start the car before it got a ticket. ‘You don’t own a fifty-year-old car without having triple A.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been meaning to ask you where you got your car. I think it’s older than my skis.’
‘I inherited it from a good friend.’
‘Isn’t that nice,’ he said.
We were coming up on to my turnoff and I pointed it out to him. He made the left turn and drove slowly down the narrow unplowed road. The Greenes’ house was lit and he asked me, ‘Here?’
‘Nope. I’m another quarter mile down the road.’
‘Neighborhood’s getting crowded,’ he said. The lit house receded behind us as we were absorbed in dark once again. We pulled up in front of my house. The A-frame was etched in darkness against the falling white. In my hurry to leave I’d forgotten to leave a light on.
‘Used to be a lot of little A-frames back east,’ he said, admiring my home through the windshield. ‘How’d you get this?’
‘I inherited it from a good friend.’
‘Same friend as the car?’ I nodded. ‘That was some friend.’
I gave another nod, kind of rendered speechless. I put my hand on the doorknob but didn’t pull on it at first, once again wanting to draw out the evening. Finally I opened the door and climbed out. The snow came nearly to my knees. When I turned to say goodnight, he asked, ‘Can I walk you to the door?’
‘You don’t think I can make it fifteen feet by myself?’
‘That snow looks pretty deep.’
‘My life is deep snow.’
He turned face forward and gazed out into the woods. ‘Could be wild animals out there. You might need protection.’
Now my mama didn’t raise no idiots. His offer to walk me to the door of my mountain cabin could only lead to one thing. As far as I could tell the only wild animal in the vicinity was the one sitting inside the car. But he was being a gentleman about it, keeping his distance, leaving the decision to me. I looked at his silhouette in the darkened car, the way his glasses sat on the mild slope of his nose, his head of sandy hair. He was looking at me in a way that went straight to my southern hemisphere without passing go. Putting my dog down, the loss of Warren, my worry about Toby had all built up inside me like a radiator ready to explode. It needed a little release.
‘As a matter of fact, I think I see a bear out there,’ I said.
He broke into a slow smile, the sides of his mouth turning upward and creasing a dimple into his left cheek. He killed the lights and the engine and came around to where I stood, taking my arm gently and escorting me up the snow-covered walk to my door. I bent down and retrieved the key from beneath the planter.
‘That’s a great hiding place,’ he said, his smile owning his face. ‘No burglar would think to look there.’
‘I don’t even know why I bother to lock it.’ I opened the door and reached inside to turn on the light.
‘Don’t,’ he said, taking my hand and leading me into my home. The door clicked shut behind us. Standing in the dark, he reached up and put a hand to my face, stroking my cheek and down my jaw. His hands were the smooth soft hands of a doctor, unlike mine that were more like those of a tradesman. His hand dropped and found mine and he put it to his lips, kissing the back and then turning it over to kiss the palm. One by one he took my fingers into his mouth, sucking in such a manner that I could feel the groove of his tongue. In the dark, the gesture was beyond erotic and my heart started beating harder, my pulse throbbing in my ears as he took my thumb into his mouth. He did the same to my other hand. The intimacy of the action made me squirm.
‘I want to do this very slowly,’ he said. ‘I want to savor every moment of making love to you. I want to lick every inch of you, Greta.’
It’s been said the sound of one’s own name is the sweetest sound to be heard, and in this case I would certainly make an argument for it. In fact, they could feature me on a testimonial. The way my name had rolled off his tongue made me delirious with happiness that Greta was my name, wrapping my name around me in a manner that made me feel like crying out, ‘Yes, I’m Greta. I’m Greta.’
He pressed his body up against mine teasingly, and since he was only slightly taller than me, our parts matched up nicely through our clothes and it wasn’t difficult to ascertain his immediate interest in me. He held my face in his hands and finally kissed me on the lips, gently at first and then with increasing intensity.
He took his lips from mine and pressed them next to my ear, whispering as if there were other people around who might hear what he had to say. ‘I’m your doctor. I had to undress you when they brought you in the day of the avalanche. Pulled off your parka and all those layers you were wearing.’ He put his hand to my chest over my turtleneck. ‘I’ve seen your perfect breasts. Not too large, not too small, and the perfect pink nipples.’ He touched a finger to my nipple over the cloth and it hardened to his touch. He pulled my turtleneck over my head and undid my bra, dropping both items of clothing to the floor.
‘I’ve seen that long waist and that flat stomach.’ His hands moved along my torso and down my body to my jeans. ‘I’ve seen those thigh muscles and that firm ass.’ He undid my zipper with an expert hand and slid off my jeans. They puddled around my boots and socks. I was wearing a cotton thong and he slid a hand beneath it. ‘This is the only part of you I haven’t seen,’ he whispered. ‘That wasn’t my department. Until now.’
He slipped my thong down my legs, stroking my skin in a way that made me fight not to scream in excitement. His hand returned to the flesh between my legs where he sighed out loud at the discovery of how my body was acknowledging his advances. I tried not to jump out of my skin.
There was no denying, I was reacting to this man in a manner I’d never known before. I’ve had more than a few lovers and some short-lived relationships, but no one had ever made me respond the way I was responding at that moment, like I just wanted to fuck and be fucked like nothing else I’d ever known.
And we were just getting started.
He pressed his still-clothed body against my naked one, our mouths locked together as we inched along the wall, my pants still around my ankles, until we reached the open bedroom door at the far end of the room. As if guided by instinct he walked me backwards until the backs of my thighs touched the bed. He lowered me on to it and went down on his knees and removed my boots and socks, my jeans and the thong from around my ankles. He parted my legs and his tongue teased me briefly with what was to come. Then he proceeded to make good his promise to lick every inch of my body.
I was ready to scream with desire when he finished, lying on my back on the bed wanting him more than anything. I could hear him taking off his clothes in the dark, feel him as h
e stretched out beside me. I reached out to stroke his skin, touch his smooth muscles, feel the hair on the back of his thighs.
‘Greta.’ He was whispering my sweet, sweet name again and it was a glorious sound. I have never liked my name so much as at that moment. ‘I’ve wanted to make love to you since I first met you. Wondered how it would feel to be inside you, to please you as much as I knew you’d please me.’
‘Dr Larsen,’ I begged, the first words out of my mouth since we’d breached the front door. ‘I know you wanted to do this slowly, but could we please get on with the procedure.’
And there in Sam’s old bedroom and on Toby’s unwashed sheets he put himself into me, and I was Leda and he was the swan and he made sweet, sweet love to me until I cried aloud with happiness. Three times.
TWENTY-FIVE
Dawn was just finding its way through the cracks in the shuttered bedroom window when I awakened. He was sleeping soundly beside me, the smooth muscles of his chest rising and falling as he took each barely perceptible breath. In the morning light I could finally see his body and I pulled the blanket back to get a better look.
His skin was a smooth olive and his chest and his legs covered with hair a shade darker than his head. I liked that. There was something so masculine about hair. I checked out his body. It was lean and masculine as I would have guessed, his biceps smooth and rounded, his stomach flat, the body of a man who works out with weights. I gazed down to the dark triangle where his legs met and where the object that had been the source of my pleasure in the night lay curled in grateful exhaustion like a sleeping animal. I bent down to kiss it.
My attention turned to his face. I hadn’t noticed before how long his eyelashes were or the tiny mole next to his left ear or the small scar on his chin. He was so beautiful. There is no way to explain my feelings at that moment. How grateful I was to be alive. I felt I had discovered some vast secret that rendered me nearly godlike, that the planet and I were one.
He must have sensed me hovering over him, because his eyes slowly opened, one green, one brown in the dark lashes. The way he smiled at me brushed the length of my body. He reached out a hand to touch my face.
And then the expression on his face changed quickly, all the languid beauty gone, replaced by a frantic look.
‘Oh, God, where’s my phone? I have to check with David and Nancy.’ He leapt from the bed, picked up his pants and began rummaging through the pockets.
‘Maybe you left it in the car,’ I offered, my balloon deflated as the hope of a bliss-filled dawn retreated to parts unknown, even as the soreness between my legs reminded me of the ecstasy of the night before.
He was pulling on his pants and the thick gray turtleneck he’d worn the night before. ‘I have to go get it.’
‘Your phone won’t work here, but I have a landline. It’s in the kitchen.’
He rushed to the kitchen, picked up the old rotary phone and dialed, which told me they were really close friends since he knew their number by heart. An eternity passed before I heard him say, ‘Dave. Any news?’
There was a dead silence, the kind that screams with bad energy as it drains all air from the room. I had gotten out of bed and was putting on my clothes when I heard him say, ‘Where are you?’ I finished dressing and went into the kitchen where he stood ashen, still talking on the phone. ‘I’ll be right down.’ He put the phone back on the hook, its mustard cord touching the floor, stretched beyond eternity. His eyes were filled with pain and disbelief.
‘They found a body off Castle Creek,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Blond woman. They think it might be Kimmy. Dave and Nancy are going over to identify …’ His words trailed off and then started up again. ‘I told them I’d meet them at the hospital.’ And then as if some force reminded him of the night before, of being together in the restaurant, of my dead Wagoneer, of the otherworldly experience that followed, he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a meaningful kiss. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d be making love this morning.’
The clouds had cleared and though the sky was still dim, it was going to be a beautiful sunny day. We cleaned off his car in the still early-morning air. He’d left his phone in the drinks holder, so naturally the battery was dead, its life sucked out by the cold. We rode into town together in near silence, his face a mitt of disbelief. Occasionally he would reach his gloved hand over to pat mine, but it was clear his mind was with his friends and their daughter. If I hadn’t been through a similar experience a week prior I might have found his behavior odd, but I had, so I didn’t.
He dropped me at my car. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay around to help,’ he said. He sounded like he meant it, but we both knew the best course for him to take now.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Your friends need you. I’ve got triple A.’
He drove off without another word. I felt desolate on his behalf, imagining having to try and bring consolation to a couple who have lost their daughter, especially under such bizarre circumstances, especially after he was the one who dropped her off at her hotel before she went missing.
I waited until his car was out of sight before calling for a jump.
TWENTY-SIX
What else to say? I spent the next hour in a mixed euphoria, my head so in the clouds from the night before I barely noticed my frozen feet in the numbing early-morning cold, my head weighed down in pain for Duane and his friends. Once triple A arrived and the Wagoneer was up and running, I drove to my usual parking spot and headed into work. Luckily my locker had a change of clothes as I had just thrown last night’s clothes back on to ride into town with Duane. I hadn’t showered before we left and probably reeked of sex, but I didn’t care. I had no desire to wash him off me. Not yet.
The gondola had just started running and I climbed into one of the cabins alone, looking forward to reliving the night before in my head on the way up to the patrol hut. As luck would have it, Singh hopped in as the gondola car rounded the bull wheel, followed by Neverman and then Reininger, Meghan and Winter, filling the car to capacity and pushing asunder any thought of mentally relishing the night before, of replaying each delicious moment of his hands upon my body, not to mention his tongue.
Which actually may have been a good thing. For while I was totally absorbed in my own newly realized happiness, there was no forgetting the urgent nature of the activity that Duane was immersed in at the moment. There was probably no room for me in his mind, nor would I want there to be, not while he was with his dearest friends identifying the body of their daughter. In my private ecstasy, his personal pain had been selfishly pushed to the back of my brain.
So instead of playing my personal soft-core porn in my head or worrying about Duane and his friends, I dialed into my patrol mates as Neverman gave his blow-by-blow of the day’s activities. As the gondola moved higher up the mountain the fresh snow-covered slopes glistened like granulated sugar in the morning sun. I listened as Neverman assigned early-morning clearing work and who was going to do avi control.
Aspen Mountain inbounds is relatively safe as far as western ski resorts are concerned, unlike Snowmass that has a lot of inbounds terrain that has to be roped off to prevent skiers from getting into life-threatening slides. Every once in a while a rope-ducking skier defies fate and bites it and the whole Skico catches shit. That’s why the ropes are there, people, get it?
When it comes to snow conditions, one should never be lulled into a false sense of security. While Aspen Mountain has no huge uncharted territory, it still has aspects that collect enough snow to be dangerous. The odd thing about avalanches or slides is they often take place in some of the most innocuous-looking terrain. It’s being lulled into a false sense of security that’s the most dangerous.
Conditions have to be perfect, for the avalanche that is. Super-steep slopes aren’t usually a problem because when the snow gets too deep or unstable, gravity brings it down. And of course mild grades don’t slide because of the inertia. It’s those mundane pitches i
n between you have to watch out for, the friendly-looking rolling slopes that accumulate snow over the weeks with melt/freeze cycles in between, basically turning the surface of the snow into a roller board just waiting for enough accumulation until, whomp, tons of snow go sliding like a sunbather off a greased raft.
We did most of our avi work on Aspen Mountain on sweet-looking slopes that could turn deadly. But those slopes never turned deadly because patrol made sure they didn’t, dynamiting the snow loose before it took on ideas of its own.
Anyhow, Winter and Reininger were trash talking some woman while Singh faked being interested. Meghan raised her goggles on her helmet and rolled her eyes at me. We were more or less accustomed to listening to conversations that most women would find offensive. While the talk bugged Meghan, it never bothered me. I considered it valuable insight into the male mind. I mean, we could put a governor on their conversations, but we couldn’t put a governor on their minds. I’ve always considered better understanding of the male psyche good ammunition.
So, Meghan was sitting across from me and it occurred to me she was dissecting me in the knowing way of a fellow woman. Aside from the fact that I probably reeked, was she able to intuit that I had spent the night before having the best sex I’d had in years? Maybe in my entire life? Then it occurred to me that her dissection might have more to do with my physical wellbeing than my romantic.
‘Everything OK, girlfriend?’ she asked. She was barely younger than me, but sometimes I think she thinks of me as from an entirely different generation.
‘Beyond OK,’ I replied, suppressing a smile. ‘Why you ask?’
‘You look tired.’
She’d hit that nail straight on. Maybe Duane and I had slept for about four hours. Between the two of us. It was only fitting that I looked a little rough around the edges.
‘Had to get up extra early,’ I used as an explanation. ‘Left the Wagoneer’s lights on while I was out to dinner last night and had to come back into town this morning for a jump.’
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