Vapor Trail

Broker floated on his back and stared up at the stars. He considered a world in which Diane Cantrell and Gloria Russell had to die while he and Harry continued to live.

Janey surfaced beside him, a gleam in the moonlight.

“Just relax, just let it happen,” she said.

An experiment at playing skinny dipping in the dark. Pale flashes of skin, like fish, curving out of sight. Laughter. Splashing.

Then the bodies grazing, just nibbles of touch at first.

So just let it happen. Forget the death. Embrace the life.

Chapter Forty

You think you lose it, that it’s gone forever, worn to nothing by the drip of familiarity that breeds contempt. You resign yourself that it’s never going to happen again. Not happen like it used to, not heightened and intense, and then you discover it’s been there all along and that all you needed was the right person to bring it back strong. Flint and steel. Sparks, flame, inferno. .

He was lost in his lovemaking.

God, it was like he was twenty-five again, and she made it all new. So good. Like secrets. All these cunning little physical secrets she revealed. Could she always do this? Or was it something kindled special between them?

Was it her? Was it them? It was like she was a mirror, and when he looked at her writhing in his arms, lips parted, eyes shut, slippery with sweat in this heat-all he could see was. .

Himself.

But he wanted to please her; he wanted to slowly gather her in, then herd her, then push her into a run until they ended in a happy stampede.

Shhh, she said. We have to be quiet.

It’s all right; it’s all right, he said.

We’re making too much noise, she said. But then she began to really like it and then she began to whisper loudly, Oh God, oh God; it’s perfect, it’s perfect, and now I’m afraid I can’t stop. I’m afraid I can’t stop.

I don’t want you to stop, he whispered back.

Oh yes you do. Yes you do.

Drew Hensen was more than impressed. What a surprise Annie Mortenson turned out to be on a sultry Saturday morning. One minute he was waving to her from his studio porch, inviting her up for coffee. An hour later they were in bed.

Now he studied Annie as she began her transformation from wanton to quietly prim, drawing her knees together, sitting up, and pulling the damp sheet over her chest. She leaned back and fluffed her bangs.

While she was still wide-eyed and puffy-lipped, he reached over and ran his finger across her lower lip. “Is it true what they say about librarians giving the best head? I always wanted to know,” he said.

She mock-arched her eyebrows and briefly took his finger in her mouth, then slowly slid it out, turned it around, and wagged it at him. “But if I give you some, that’s all you’ll want.”

Drew actually had a little run of goose bumps with the temperature in the midnineties.

Annie laughed silently. “Is this how you give all the girls a tour of your studio?” she whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Drew said. It was nuts, with the racket the TV was making.

Annie grimaced and stabbed her finger at the sound of the TV on the other side of the curtain that was drawn over the alcove where the futon on which they lay was located. “There’s a little girl out there.”

“Oh, c’mon, she can’t hear anything. She’s OD’ed on Shrek for the second time this morning,” Drew said.

“It’s not funny.” Annie squirmed deeper in the sheet. “What if she would have pulled the curtain back?”

“We were under the sheet.”

“Not all the time we weren’t.”

Drew stood up and slapped his stomach. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Abruptly he reached for the curtain.

“What are you doing?” Annie asked.

“I got to take a pee,” Drew said.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?”

“Hey, Annie; she’s six years old, she’s my daughter.”

“It’s not right to walk around like that. At least dry yourself off.” Annie flung a corner of the sheet at him.

Drew ran the cloth over his crotch and dropped it. “I’m not going to make my kid ashamed of her body.”

“We’re not talking about her body. We’re talking about your body.”

“Don’t be so uptight,” Drew said as he stepped past the curtain.

Annie hugged herself, stared at the space where he’d just been, and muttered, “That’s what my dad used to say.”

She’d thought he was going to be different. Heck, he drew pictures for children’s books; he should be different. That’s why she took a chance when she saw him standing on his porch this morning. He’d waved at her. He’d invited her a number of times before. But he was married then.

Now he had taken off his wedding band. He said he and his wife were separated, that he had moved in here. But he was smooth. A different smooth than Harry Cantrell. Harry was rough smooth, Drew was smooth smooth. But Harry had lied. After Harry got her good a couple of times, he still pined for that bodybuilding bitch. Already Annie was starting to worry that Drew would pull the same stunt. She’d seen the wife.

She pursed her lips and scowled. She didn’t like the idea of him out there parading his pecker in front of a kid. Any kid.

Uh-uh. Not one bit.

The TV audio turned off, and she heard Drew talking with his daughter. “You’re covered with grease and crumbs from last night; you need a bath.”

“But I thought we were going to Camp Snoopy,” Laurie said.

“We are,” Drew said.

“Is she coming?” Laurie said.

“No, no, she’s going home. But you have tomato sauce stuck in your hair. You know what that means.”

“I know,” Laurie said. “It means consequences.”

“Consequences, right. You got to do what you wanted, and now you have to get cleaned up.”

“You have to wash me because of my hands,” Laurie said.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Drew said.

After a few beats of silence, Annie heard the bathwater running. Him peeing in the bowl.

Consequences, consequences, consequences.

The toilet flushed. He was in the bathroom with her, taking her clothes off. And him not wearing any.

She could feel the steam from the hot water billow like a sail in the heavy air. Snatches of their father- daughter conversation.

Like. .

Slowly, Annie stood up and gathered her clothing, a pair of Levi’s cutoffs, a loose T-shirt with the arms and neck scissored out-hot weather gear. She pulled them on and walked barefoot through the studio, paused in front of the full-length mirror on the wall, and checked the tiny cuts and slight bruising on her knees. Not bad. Ice packs had helped a lot last night. She put last night from her mind and went down the wooden stairs to the street.

The late-morning sky seemed to be in motion; flickers of light illuminated deep, convoluted canyons of black and gray clouds. The world struck her as such a beautiful place. Why did it always seem she was watching it from the outside? Why couldn’t she step into it and lose herself? Be part of it.

Why did she have to go on cleaning up after other people, finishing what they started and left undone?