Nudger thought, though not as good as it had been before their newly defined relationship. He wasn't sure if Claudia was seeing other men. He never asked, fearful of the answer.
She sighed, propped herself up on one elbow, then swiveled to sit on the edge of the mattress. Nudger watched her with the familiar awe. Her lean body was breathtaking in the soft light. Half an hour ago his groin had ached for her, and now it was his heart. A compartmentalization the women's liberation movement would frown upon with unplucked brows. Maybe they were right; sometimes Nudger felt as extinct as one of those dinosaurs with two brains, each of which provided disastrously poor judgment.
Claudia stood up and turned to look down at him. 'I don't see how you can bear to stay beneath those covers,' she said. 'The radiator keeps it at two thousand degrees in here.'
'I'm cold,' he told her. 'Cold's a subjective thing, even at two thousand degrees.'
She shook her head, and he watched her walk away, into the bathroom. Some walk.
The shower hissed and gurgled for a while, then Claudia returned, still toweling herself dry. There were goose bumps on her arms and thighs, and her flesh was reddened where she'd rubbed too hard with the rough towel.
As she began to dress, she asked, 'How's Hammersmith doing?' She'd always liked Hammersmith, and she knew how what had happened worked on him.
'Things have returned to his idea of normal,' Nudger said.
'He must know some important people.'
'Better yet, he knows about some important people.'
The Board of Police Commissioners, after an appropriate length of time, had exonerated Hammersmith. They had become so incensed at Siberling that they suggested it was the judicial system that had been at fault in the Colt conviction and execution. Siberling blamed police procedures, politics, the sun, the moon, and the stars, everything and everyone other than Hammersmith. The buck that had stopped at Hammersmith had been broken down into small change that no one cared about.
The problem was-as with Claudia and Nudger-things would never be quite the same for Hammersmith. That's what life seemed to come down to, losing some small part of yourself here, another there, inching toward icy darkness.
Claudia was standing hipshot in her Levi's, buttoning a white cotton blouse. Nudger liked her best when she dressed plainly to set off her subtle beauty. Simply looking at her gave him a sensation of contentment and wholeness. He needed her more than he'd planned. So much more. He thought about Candy Ann and Curtis Colt, and wondered if love was a trap for everyone. His and Claudia's lives wouldn't go on forever; was it any wonder he was selfish about her? Okay, more than selfish. Downright greedy and possessive.
'Why don't we get away this weekend?' he suggested. 'Drive somewhere and find blissful isolation? Maybe rent a cabin.'
She missed a button. 'I can't. I've got plans for this weekend.'
'The entire weekend?'
She nodded, turned away from him, and began brushing her hair. Their eyes met in the dresser mirror. She looked away.
'With someone of my gender?' Nudger asked.
'Yes.'
Nudger's heart suddenly weighed so much he didn't think he could budge. Claudia's image in the mirror seemed to recede, change, as if he were watching her through wavering, distorting glass.
'I really don't understand how you can stay beneath that sheet and blanket,' she said, 'as hot as it is. You must be crazy.'
He listened to the sighing, faintly crackling strains of the brush passing through her long hair. It was almost like the sound of sizzling, high-voltage current, of dwindling time.
'Not crazy,' Nudger said, 'cold. Colder than before.'
But he threw back the covers and struggled out of bed into his world.
Some people you couldn't crush.
