All Through the Night

by Mixed authors

  Something had to be done about this Houston woman.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

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  “Stuck in your house with no one but a computer-generated hunk in a voice-recognition game for company? Great,” Kerry murmured as she hovered at her front window, looking out at the snow-covered bowers of Lover’s Park across the street.

  She couldn’t actually see the four stone paths that radiated like spokes from the park’s circular courtyard, but she knew they were there, dozing under the soft white blanket. Also heaped in graceful drifts was the statue the park was named for, a marble replica of a man and woman in a longing embrace. Her grandfather had told her the story of the couple who inspired the statue, and Kerry had been touched by its poignancy. But she couldn’t concentrate on anything except her own misery this morning.

  “Kerry, come back and play. It’s lonely in here without you.”

  Startled, Kerry turned and saw that her computer monitor was on. It glowed brightly from the maple secretary that was tucked in the far corner of the room.

  “Hey, I thought I turned you off!” she exclaimed.

  The image of a man’s face smiled from the screen, and his sonorous voice reached out as if to touch her. “Are you sure it’s me you want to turn off?”

  He was dead right about that. Moments ago she’d abandoned him—and the game she was supposed to be testing for Genesis. It was possible she hadn’t turned off the computer in her rush, but who could blame her. She was being seduced by the dark side! His voice was bad enough. Now she had his face to contend with, too.

  George, the game’s creator at Genesis, had responded immediately to her feedback about a male face to go with the voice. Maybe he’d already been working on the problem because in record time he’d come up with a breathtaking simulation of Jean Valjean, the lead character in Les Miserables. How had George known she loved Les Mis?

  The new and improved version of “Discover the Secret, Sensual You!” was waiting in her E-mail queue this morning when she woke up. And so was Valjean’s wounded, penetrating gaze, his strong features and sensual mouth. The main difference was his shoulder-length waves. This man’s hair was shorter, olive-black and cut adorably close to his head, a lush, curly crew.

  Of course, she would never have called it adorable to his face. Valjean was just such a guy’s guy, male through and through.

  Kerry’s mistake had been to download the game immediately, and nothing had been quite the same since. Whoever had coined the phrase “love at first sight” couldn’t have been thinking about a video game. Was it possible to be infatuated with a nonperson, with dots on a screen?

  And could she be more desperate?

  Kerry reached down and yanked up her wool slipper socks. The elastic was going and they kept slipping down. So very attractive it was, too.

  “Did I say something to offend you?” the screen image asked.

  She insisted on thinking of his face as an image to remind herself that he wasn’t a man. He was hundreds of pixels. Too bad she hadn’t been smarter about his name.

  “No, you didn’t, Jean. I’m fine.” He’d introduced himself as a guide and given her a set of verbal directions, which included assigning him a name. He’d encouraged her to pick one with personal meaning, and she’d impulsively said Jean, and then she couldn’t figure out how to delete it. How she wished she’d said Biff or Game Guy.

  “Because if I did,” he said, “just repeat the offensive parts, and then say ‘Down, boy’.” His smile hinted at irony. “I’m self-editing.”

  I wish I were!, Kerry thought. If only she could edit some of the lurid fantasies dancing through her brain. He had her thinking about handsome strangers whispering erotic things in her ear at the bank, about plundering highwaymen and huge trees! She could only imagine what her heart rate must be now, after a night of moist dreams about aroused slave boys. But then that was the point of the game, she supposed, to encourage fantasies. She could give it an A+ on that score.

  “Are you coming back, Kerry?” he asked. “We can’t continue if you won’t sit down and play. There’s nothing to be afraid of, unless there’s something you don’t want to know… about yourself.”

  “And what would that be?” she challenged. “Since you seem to know so much about me.”

  “It’s difficult to say, since you refuse to wear the finger glove. But I’m sure we’ll find something.”

  “Are you laughing?” Kerry walked over and peered at the screen. She thought she’d heard suspiciously muffled sounds, but she didn’t detect anything in his expression. “Jean?”

  “Mais, non,” he assured her. “How could I possibly take pleasure in your difficulties? That’s not what I’m here for.”

  “And what are you here for, pray tell?”

  “To free you from prudish notions and blocks to your sensuality.”

  Now it was all she could do not to laugh. “And you think quizzing me about my erogenous zones and suggesting smutty talk in financial institutions will do that?”

  “It’s a start.”

  There wasn’t a hint of sarcasm in his voice, which was more than she could say for hers. “I can hardly wait to see where we go from here.”

  “Excellent, let’s be on our way,” he said.

  But, of course, he’d taken her literally.

  Suddenly the computer screen was awash in color, and music swelled through the speakers. There were clouds, blue sky and a rainbow arch with dazzling colors that changed continuously. A silver bird soared from the bottom of the screen toward the top, dipped and soared again. Kerry recognized the music as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and it struck her that all the fanfare was incredibly corny, and yet, she was quite captured by it.

  Instead of a brick road, a sparkling staircase materialized, and a woman ascended it. Near the top she became a bird and ribboned through the clouds before soaring off to somewhere unseen.

  “What’s happening? Jean? Where are we going?”

  “On a tour.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of you, a grand tour of Kerry. I’ll be your guide, but you’re the landscape and the traveler, so you choose the itinerary. Where would you like to start?”

  “How about my brain? I must be crazy for agreeing to this.”

  “How about your skin?” he asked, ignoring her comment. “Did you know that there are over a hundred receptors in the fingertips alone? The skin is our most sensitive organ. Of course, you have membranes that are richer in nerve endings, but we’ll get to those later. Why don’t we start at your toes and work our way up.”

  “Oh, please, not my toes.”

  The irony in his expression told her that he was coming to understand some things. Maybe he was programmed to know when he was dealing with a sexually repressed woman who was afraid of her own front door, and that was on a good day.

  “Let’s take a deep breath and start over, Kerry. Are you comfortable? Wearing loose clothing? Do you have a soothing cup of tea or a glass of wine?”

  Do I take antipsychotic medication?

  “Can’t get much looser than this charming sweatshirt dress.” She lifted her cup of Quiet Woman herbal tea and saluted him. She decided not to mention the L-tyrosine, an amino acid she’d found in a nutritional supplements catalog that was supposed to be an anxiety-buster. Couldn’t have proved it by her, anyway.

  “It’s okay,” she told him, “I’m ready. Lead on, fearless guide. Take me where you will, but be gentle. I bruise easily.”

  She actually wasn’t kidding, and maybe he could hear the sigh of resignation in her voice. She had ducked and dodged and avoided this adventure as long as she could, primarily because it had become personal. It wasn’t about testing the game anymore, although she certainly needed the job, and the money. It was about self-discovery and why that seemed to frighten her so. Was there something about Kerry Houston that she didn’t want to know?

  “Kerry, if I’m to be your gui
de, there are two conditions. First, you will have to entrust yourself to me for this journey,” he told her. “And while we’re on the subject, how do you feel about that?”

  “Entrusting myself to you?”

  “Yes, does that make you feel warm or cold?”

  Warm or cold? What an odd question. Still, all those receptors he was talking about on the surface of her skin were registering a chill in the air, but the blood flowing through her veins felt hot.

  “A little of both. I think I want to shiver.”

  “Exactly. That’s how it’s supposed to feel when fear and excitement go head to head. Don’t fight those feelings; they’re completely natural and the perfect alchemy in which to create… something combustible.”

  Oh, good, she was going to explode. At least she’d be warm.

  “I think you’re ready for the tour,” he said, “but let’s try a little experiment first, if you’re willing. I sense some romantic pain in your past, and I think that might be getting in your way.”

  He had to be kidding. Some romantic pain? She was riddled with it. She didn’t know where to start. All her life she had seemed to invite men who were users and takers. They took advantage, took her for granted, took her for a ride, took her for everything she was worth, emotionally speaking. She was Velcro for the jerks of the world. It was so bad, she’d sworn off the opposite sex three years ago, at just twenty-five. The only exception had been a certain CEO of Genesis Software, and he’d been the biggest jerk of all.

  “Is it anything you could talk about?”

  “I could talk forever. Got a minute?”

  “Let’s go for the most painful or the most recent, whichever is shorter.”

  Maybe he was sarcastic? That was probably not a bad thing. She wasn’t sure she could relate to a man who wasn’t at least minimally sarcastic, not given her affinity for meanies.

  “That’s easy, they’re one and the same,” she said. “Picture this, a brand-new software designer for a major company—that would be me—being blown off by the guy who runs the place—that would be him. He flirted with me, at least I think he was flirting, and then he subjected me to the worst kind of public ridicule and humiliation. It was awful.”

  She shuddered.

  “Tell me about the public ridicule part.”

  So she did. She told him how Joe Gamble had surprised everyone at Genesis by showing up at a company picnic. But it was Kerry who got the biggest surprise because she had no idea who he was when he joined her at a bathtub filled with iced beer and congratulated her on Women-Wealth, her idea for encouraging women to storm Wall Street with a game that simulated trading real stocks. Gamble was notoriously reclusive, and all Kerry, and most of the other employees at Genesis, had ever seen of him was a ten-year-old snapshot in the company newsletter.

  He arrived at the picnic fresh from a climbing expedition in the Italian Alps and he was still heavily bearded. Plus, he was wearing sunglasses. How was she supposed to know that the guy who flirted with her and gave her a card with only his E-mail address on it—gamesman@genesis.com— was the president?

  She’d sent him an E-mail that night, and maybe it was a little suggestive. She’d said, “Let the games begin, but beware, I’ve been known to play dirty. Naked at dawn, weapons drawn? Let’s see how big your gun is.”

  Okay, it was a lot suggestive. She’d probably had a beer too many at the picnic, but did he have to make such a big deal of it? By the time Kerry found out about her mistake, everybody in the design division was whispering, and Gamble’s assistant, a snippy little thing with Altoids breath and bright blue eyes, courtesy of her tinted contacts, had confronted Kerry about her “tacky and inappropriate” behavior.

  She’d actually used the words “appallingly lewd” and warned that a sexual harassment suit was in the offing, and before it was over Kerry had been told to fold her tent and leave Genesis. The assistant’s parting remark was that Gamble had sent her to deal with Kerry rather than do it himself to avoid “embarrassing” either of them further.

  Chicken, coward, yellow running dog.

  “I walked out that afternoon,” Kerry said, still smarting from the fiery sting of rejection, “and I haven’t been back since.”

  She hadn’t told the whole story, but it was as much as she was willing to say. She’d left that afternoon, but she didn’t officially quit until the next day, and it wasn’t totally because of Joe Gamble’s cadlike behavior. The next morning as she was leaving for work, she collapsed on her doorstep, gasp-ing for air, and that was as far as she got. She’d been dealing with anxiety symptoms because of the muggings, but nothing to compare with these. She’d barely left her house since.

  She couldn’t blame that on Joe. It was her neighborhood.

  Kerry finished her story with a shrug of indifference, but she was sad inside, and even though her “fearless guide” couldn’t see it, he could probably hear it. Maybe it was in how she phrased things, her syntax, but he seemed to be able to detect her moods. He was good, and so was the game.

  “That was your most recent?” he asked.

  “Romantic fiasco? Yes, and my quickest. So now you know why I’m wary of men.”

  “I know why you’re wary of that man. He’s not worthy of your pain. He’s not worthy of anything. Kerry, save your tears for someone who knows what they cost, someone who will treasure them—and you—because he knows how deep your feelings cut. Don’t waste another drop on him.”

  “Jean?” Kerry sat up to look at him.

  He’d spoken with so much conviction—or was it passion—that he’d brought her up out of the chair. She studied his features, surprised at the furrows in his brow, the tension in his mouth. He could have been scowling, but he wasn’t angry. She could almost believe that he cared.

  “Do you actually feel things, Jean?” she said. “I mean human feelings?”

  “I’m not sure. Can a man feel things without a body?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but a woman can not feel things with a body. I haven’t felt much of anything but fear in quite some time now.”

  “Which is why I’m here, to help you throw open the doors and windows and feel whatever you want to feel, the entire rainbow.”

  She smiled and so did he. Was that coincidence or could he see her?

  “How do you feel about riddles?” he asked her.

  “Pretty much the same way I feel about men… but go ahead, if you must.”

  “I must,” he said with a tone of wry forebearance. “Remember the fantasy I promised you, the one that could anticipate your every need, wish and desire? I’m going to need a little more information.”

  Kerry bent over and hitched up her socks, which made it that much more convenient to get up from the desk and walk over to the window. A fluttery chill passed over her, like curtains caught in an updraft. Maybe she should put on another sweatshirt.

  Who said she wanted all those things anticipated?

  Several moments passed, and the chilliness felt less and less like a draft. It was her skin. She was a porcupine inside out. The quills pricked her. So far, she wasn’t too crazy about this rainbow of his.

  Abruptly, she said, “What’s the riddle?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s just a riddle isn’t it?”

  “Kerry… is something wrong?”

  The way he said her name brought her gaze to the screen, to him. Something inside her lifted and spilled over as softly as sand in an hourglass. It turned on its head, and took her with it. Not that it was a bad feeling. Oh, no, no, no, she would have traveled the world over for that feeling. It was wonderful, as light as a handspring. But that was the good part. His voice did everything else sand could do, too—sift, drift, swirl—and suck you down into its depths.

  They should offer medical coverage with this game, Kerry thought. It was dangerous.

  “Riddles can be pretty annoying,” she said.

  “You’ll like this one,” he assured her. “All
you have to do is describe two things you would do with a strawberry that have nothing to do with eating it.”

  “A strawberry?” Not the kind of puzzle she expected. “Well, they don’t make good doorstops. I dropped an entire box of them once. Didn’t find the one hiding behind the door until it was too late. Strawberry puree.”

  The small room was silent except for the soft music coming from the speakers. But outside, the neighborhood hooligans were at it again. There were shouts, cars backfiring. Kerry blocked the sounds from her mind.

  “What would anyone do with a strawberry besides eat it? I suppose you could drop it in a flute of champagne.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “I was hoping for something a little more imaginative.”

  “Sorry, I can’t think of a thing.”

  “I can tell you what I’d do with it.”

  “Down, boy,” Kerry murmured. His voice had a sexy edge that warned her not to go there, but the remark hung in midair like a helium-filled balloon, daring her to let go of the string.

  “Okay, what would you do? Make puree and massage my toes?”

  “No, but that’s not bad. Actually, if I had a very ripe strawberry, I think perhaps I would crush it in my hand, let the juice run down my fingers and pool in my palm. When it was warm, I’d drizzle it over a very tender part of the body and delicately lick it off.”

  “Lick it off,” she echoed faintly. “But that would be eating… wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re right. Shall we go for number two?”

  “No!” She was too far away to turn the machine off. Computers ought to come with remotes, dammit.

  “Too bold?” he asked.

  “No, no, it was fine. I always gasp as if I’d just finished a marathon.”

  “Kerry… maybe you should come back here and sit down?”

  She almost gasped again. “How did you know I got up?”