gloves exciting Rowan almost madly when they touched her naked breasts and went down between her legs. The house was gone now; so was the old woman; and the poor sad beautiful Deirdre. Just Michael, just this hard chest of which she’d been dreaming, and his thick cock in her hands, rising out of its nest of dark glossy curling hair.
Years ago some idiot friend had told her over coffee on the campus that women didn’t find men’s bodies beautiful, that it was what men did that mattered. Well, she had always loved men for both what they did, and their bodies. She loved this body, loved its hardness and its tiny silky soft nipples, and the hard belly, and this cock, which she took into her mouth. She loved the feel of these strong thighs under her fingers, the soft hair in the curve of this backside. Silky and hard, that’s what men were.
She ran her hands down Michael’s legs, scratching the backs of his knees, and squeezing the muscles of his calves. So strong. She shoved him back against the tile, sucking in longer more delicious strokes, her hands up to cup his balls, and lift them and bind them against the base of the cock.
Gently, he tried to lift her. But she wanted him to spill in her mouth. She brought his hips more tightly against her. She wouldn’t let him go, and then he spilled over, and the moan was as good as everything else.
Later when they climbed into the bed, warm and dry, with the air-conditioning blowing softly, Michael stripped off the gloves and they began again. “I can’t stop touching you,” he said. “I can’t stand it, and I want to ask you what it was like when that thing happened, but I know I shouldn’t ask you that, and you know, it’s like I’ve seen the face of the man who touched you … ”
She lay back on the pillow, looking at him in the dark, loving the delicious crush of his weight against her, and his hands almost pulling her hair. She made a fist of her right hand and rubbed her knuckles along the dark shadowy stubble on his chin.
“It was like doing it yourself,” she said softly, reaching up and catching his left hand and bringing it down so that she could kiss the palm of it. He stiffened, his cock poking against her thigh. “It wasn’t the thunder and crackle of another person. It wasn’t living cells against living cells.”
“Hmmmm, I love these living cells,” he purred in her ear, kissing her roughly. He mauled her with his kisses, her mouth coming back at him as disrespectful and hungry and demanding as his own.
When she awoke it was four o’clock.
Deserted down there. Quiet as a stage set. She loved early morning streets when they were like that, when you felt you could go down and dance on them if you wanted as if they were stages, because their white lines and signal lights meant nothing.
She felt clearheaded and all right, and safe here. The house was waiting, but the house had waited for a long time.
The switchboard told her there was no coffee yet. But there was a message for her and for Mr. Curry, from a Mr. Lightner, that he would return to the hotel later that day and could be reached this morning at the retreat house. She jotted down the number.
She went into the small kitchen, found a pot, and coffee, and made it herself, and then went back and carefully shut the bedroom door, and the door to the little hallway between the bedroom and the living room.
Where was the File on the Mayfair Witches? What had Michael done with the briefcase he’d taken from the car?
She searched the little living room with its skirted chairs and couch. She searched the small den and the closets and even the kitchen. Then she slipped back into the hallway and watched him sleeping there in the light from the window. Curly hair on the back of his neck.
In the closet, nothing. In the bathroom nothing.
Clever, Michael. But I’m going to find it. And then she saw the very edge of the briefcase. He had slipped it behind the chair.
Not very trusting, but then I’m doing just what I more or less promised I wouldn’t, she thought. She drew it out, stopping to listen to the pace of his deep breathing, and then she shut the door, and tiptoed down the hall and shut the second door, and laid the briefcase on the coffee table in the light of the lamp.
Then she got her coffee, and her cigarettes, and sat down on the couch and looked at her watch. It was four fifteen. She loved this time, absolutely loved it. It was a good time to read. It had been her favorite time, too, for driving to the hospital, running one red light after another in the great quiet vacuum, her mind filled with orderly and detailed thoughts of the operations waiting for her. But it was an even better time to read.
She opened the briefcase and removed the great stack of folders, each of which carried the curious title: The File on the Mayfair Witches. It made her smile.
It was so literal. “Innocent,” she whispered. “They are all innocent. The man in the attic probably innocent. And that old woman, a witch to the core.” She paused, taking her first drag off the cigarette and wondering how she understood it so completely, and why she was so certain that they-Aaron and Michael-did not.
The conviction remained with her.
Flipping quickly through the folders, she sized up the manuscript, the way she always did the scientific texts she wanted to devour in one sitting, and then she scanned one page at random for the proportion of abstractions to concrete words, and found it very comfortable, the latter outnumbering the former to an extremely high degree.
A snap to cover this in four hours. With luck, Michael would sleep that long. The world would sleep. She snuggled back on the couch, put her bare feet against the rim of the coffee table, and began to read.
At nine o’clock, she walked slowly back First Street until she reached the corner of Chestnut. The morning sun was already high in the sky, and the birds were singing almost furiously in the leafy canopy of branches overhead. The sharp caw of a crow cut through the softer chorus. Squirrels scurried along the thick heavy branches that reached out low and far over the fences and the brick walls. The clean swept brick sidewalks were deserted; and the whole place seemed to belong to its flowers, its trees, and its houses. Even the noise of the occasional traffic was swallowed by the engulfing stillness and greenness. The clean blue sky shone through the web of overhead foliage, and the light even in the shade seemed somehow bright and pure.
Aaron Lightner was already waiting for her at the gate, a small-boned man in light, tropical clothing, with a prim British look to him, even to the walking stick in his hand.
She had called him at eight and asked for this appointment, and she could see even from a distance that he was deeply worried about her reaction to what she’d read.
She took her time crossing the intersection. She approached him slowly, her eyes lowered, her mind still swimming with the long story and all the detail which she’d so quickly absorbed.
When she found herself standing in front of him, she took his hand. She had not rehearsed what she meant to say. It would be an ordeal for her. But it felt good to be here, to be holding his hand, pressing it warmly, as she studied the expression on his open and agreeable face.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice sounding weak and inadequate to her. “You’ve answered all the worst and most tormenting questions of my life. In fact, you can’t know what you’ve done for me. You and your watchers-they found the darkest part of me; and you knew what it was, and you turned a light on it-and you connected it to something greater and older, and just as real.” She shook her head, still holding his hand, struggling to continue. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say,” she confessed. “I’m not alone anymore! I mean me, all of me, not merely the name and the part that the family wants. I mean who I am.” She sighed. The words were so clumsy, and the feelings behind them so enormous, as enormous as her relief. “I thank you,” she said, “that you didn’t keep your secrets. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
She could see his amazement, and his faint confusion. Slowly he nodded. And she felt his goodness, and above all his willingness to trust.
“What can I do for you now?” he asked, with total and disarming candor.
“Come inside,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
Thirty
