Salvation Army couldn’t give away, avoiding a barbell loaded with 315 pounds of steel plates, tapping her fingers on the keys of an old manual typewriter. Finally, she turned to me. “Where’s Rick?” she asked.
“Rick? Rick Gondolier? You came to ask me about him?”
I didn’t like my tone. Whiny, petulant. How could she still affect me like this?
“Do you know where he is? Nobody has heard from him.”
“You mean he hasn’t called you. Why don’t you ask your husband about good old Rick?” Whiny had become mean.
“I did.”
I just looked at her.
“He said, ‘Ask Jake.’”
“So here you are.”
“Well?”
“Your husband is a dangerous man, but you probably know that.”
“I think he’s gone off the deep end. This new project in the Everglades, the…”
“The casino.”
She stopped wandering and looked at me. “He told you about that?”
“Right down to the last crap table and the charter buses from Punta Gorda.”
“And the rest of it?”
“The rest?”
“Besides the gambling.”
“The town, of course. The expanded condos, the golf course, the complete resort.”
“Anything else?”
I tried to read the look on her face. “The museum,” I said. “Nicky told me about the museum and the living habitat.”
She stayed quiet. A thought was bouncing back and forth behind her black-rimmed blue eyes.
“What else is there, Gina?”
She wasn’t talking. Whatever she was thinking, whatever else Nicky was up to, was locked inside. She came to me, looked up from under her dark lashes, closed her eyes, parted her pouty lips, and said, “There’s this, just like always.”
Then she kissed me with open, salty lips. I knew it was intended as a distraction. So it shouldn’t have worked. I should have pressed her, cross-examined her, used all my skills to figure it out.
But just then, our tongues were dancing soft and slow, and while part of me wanted to toss her out the front door, if I could get it open, the rest of me, the part descended from the primordial soup, wanted something else entirely. I dipped a hand under her thighs and scooped her into my arms. She put her arms around my neck and giggled girlishly, then nuzzled my neck, as I carried her up the stairs.
“I should shower,” she said, but I shook my head. I wanted her overheated, flushed, and pungent. In the bedroom, she took off her sneakers and peeled down her socks. She stripped off the pink leotard and white tights, without any help from me. She fell backward into the bed and waved me aboard. I dropped my cutoffs to the floor and did a perfect swan dive that ended with my head between her breasts.
“Nicky knows about us,” she breathed into my ear.
I knew that.
“I promised I wouldn’t see you anymore.”
I knew that, too. Nicky had told me.
“He’d kill you…”
I figured that out all by myself.
A new lover is anticipation tinged with tension. The promise of unknown thrills, the possibility of disappointment. A familiar but occasional lover is comfort enhanced by exhilaration. And now it was intensified, the thrill heightened by the risk, the risk as real as a razor-sharp blade. We carried into bed the past and our own lost innocence. Together, apart, together again. Physical pleasure plus a depth of feeling that can never exist in a one- night stand. We carried, too, the present, a high-wire balancing act, the sense that this time could be the last, the next breath the final one.
After a while, there was no sense of time or place. Just an awareness of rhythmic movement, a dizzying trail of lips and fingers, breasts and loins, electric sensations, gentle pulsations, and firm pressures of two lovers who know themselves and each other. The pace increased, breaths chugging faster. Our bodies joined in a fury of urgency, conscious thoughts lost in the roar of each other’s engine, a syncopated meshing of gears, turning faster, thrusting deeper, clenching harder. In one explosive moment, the vise of her legs tightened, and she bit down hard on my lower lip, and her body and mine flowed into one.
I lay there on top of her, a drop of blood falling from my lip onto her breast. I kissed the spot, salty and sweet from the sweat and blood.
“My legs are shaking, Jake. I couldn’t stand up if I had to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Does that mean I can stay?”
“As long as you want, or until you have to make dinner for your husband, whichever comes first.”
“I don’t make him dinner. That’s what servants are for.”
Ah, how quickly they learn. “But Nicky will want his lovely wife at the table.”
She squiggled out from under me and gave me a shove. “Jerk! You can’t let it be, can you? I’m here with you in the afterglow of the deepest emotional experience I’ve maybe ever had, and you take a cheap shot like that.”
I rolled onto my back and locked my hands behind my head. Above me, the paddle fan whompety-whomped through its turns. I tried to keep my eye on one of the blades. It made me think of a machete. “Just thought it might be nice to welcome you back to the planet Earth after the talk about staying.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked me in the eyes. “You mean you don’t want me?”
“In a court of law, my actions would give rise to a contrary inference. A pretty big rise, as it were.”
“I mean it, Jake. If I left Nicky, would you want me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like permanently.”
“Gina, with you, nothing is ‘like permanently.’”
“Except you, Jake.”
“If I’m so permanent, why do you keep leaving?”
“I told you before. Because you never asked me to stay.”
“Look, Gina, it’s a little late in the game for soap-opera dialogue. ‘All this time it was you, Jake.’ Too many years, too many Rick Gondoliers. It’s too late to turn back the clock.”
She ran a pink fingernail over my chest. “I didn’t come here to ask about Rick. I came to see if you still cared.”
“Why do you need reassurance? You know I do.”
“Do you love me?”
The paddle fan kept making its circles. The fingernail kept making its figure eights. My mouth kept closed.
“Jake?”
I was sucking my swollen lower lip. “What difference does it make?”
“You do love me. Why can’t you say it?”
“Okay, let’s say, hypothetically, I loved you as much as Tristan loved Iseult.”
“Who?”
“From mythology…”
“Naturally. Love is pure myth to the blockhead, Jake Lassiter.”
“Tristan was a great knight whose job was to fetch the beautiful Iseult from Ireland and bring her back to King Mark in Cornwall who wanted to marry her. On the ship, Tristan and Iseult unwittingly drank a love potion and fell hopelessly in love.”
“Same thing used to happen to me with Chardonnay.”
