He lowers Indy onto his bed. The baby beelines for the orange ball, slapping at it with the palms of her hands. Deanie lets it go and Indy embraces it, tasting it. Deanie laughs and the baby grins wetly at her. Sam takes the ball away from her and Indy stiffens, her little hands clutching after it, her body going rigid. He pushes her gently onto her back, peels off her leather-soled socks and tickles the bottoms of her feet. She chortles and pumps her legs maniacally. She twists herself onto her knees and scrabbles away. He catches her by the ankles and yanks her back. Immediately she’s up again, trying to escape, totally into the new game. She squirms out of Sam’s hands and dives onto Deanie, clutching at her clothes, climbing right up her. Alarmed for Deanie’s face, Sam reaches for Indy and flips the baby onto her back like a turtle. Indy keeps on rolling over and he catches her again and flips her and she decides this game is even better. The baby begins to roll over and over for the fun of it, while they laugh at her. Sam stops her, finally, and rocks her in his arms to calm her.
Deanie flops back down again and crooks an arm under her head and her tits tent the T-shirt. She catches him looking.
He finds the wet rag and Indy takes it eagerly. When he puts her on her back, she stays there, tired out by her exertions. Kneading Indy’s belly, he is intensely aware of Deanie’s body within his reach. His old shirt against her bare skin. Indy’s eyes roll up and she slackens, the rag still firmly clenched in her fist.
When he looks up, Deanie is watching him still. The fingers of one hand touch the tip of her breast in his shirt in invitation. Her hand takes his, moves it up under the shirt without resistance and he feels the beautiful thing, the smooth curve, and sucks in a panicky breath and snatches back his hand.
“Folks’ll be back any minute,” he says.
Her eyes darken and she rolls over on her stomach and hides her face in the pillow. He wants to comfort her, to explain all the reasons it’s wrong to start again but he knows if he touches her a second time, he won’t be able to stop.
“Fuck,” she mutters, “I’d kill for a drag.”
He makes himself get off the bed and make a business of taking an extra quilt from the closet to cover the sleeping baby.
“Want some cocoa?” he asks.
Mercifully, she nods and he goes downstairs to make it, and when he brings it back up, her eyes are closed and she’s either asleep or faking it, so he covers her too and dims the light. King’s birthday tomorrow, so they’ll have the day off, and she can sleep all day if she wants.
33
Taking that face with them, the Mutant sees in the shock in her coach’s eyes the first morning back after the long weekend. So far, she’s been on the injured list, no explanation, but as soon as she comes in range of even a smalltown rag’s stringer’s camera, there will be questions about what happened to Gauthier’s face that nobody wants to answer. When Coach hinted she should maybe stay out of sight until her face is in better shape, she pointed out that the questions are inevitable, given she is going to be wearing a mask when she plays again. So Coach is tensed to bark something vague about an accident to the first question and then to develop difficulty hearing further questions.
‘god likes the Mutant going to the game so he can keep an eye on her. He was cheesed at her for going back to work on the lunchline. Wait’ll he finds out she’s going back to work for the old women on Saturday too. He came backing and bumping his way into the serving area and checked up on her in front of everybody—wanting to know if she’d eaten her lunch and how she was feeling. She’d racked herself being glassily polite. And then had to be aware—she wouldn’t look at them—of him sitting there with Nat Linscott two chairs away fluttering her fat eyelashes at him.
Unable to use her Walkman because her left ear is still too tender, the Mutant has to listen to her teammates around her. Linscott’s in the seat in front of her on the bus so she gives it a good shove with her feet and gets a satisfying squeak out of Nat.
Head tilted, ears sealed with his headphones, Sam cuts out. He isn’t worried about the upcoming matches.
After the rough night, he woke half an hour earlier than necessary. And then she was in the bathroom forever, scraping her head with his blade, so he couldn’t shave, never mind taking a leak. When he went out to start the trucks, his battery was dead and he had to frig around jumping it, cursing himself for not having plugged in the block heater. She left his blade looking like she shaved a tank tread with it. In the whole frigging house, there wasn’t a blade fit to use. And when he finally got to sit down at the table, Indy promptly lobbed a gob of mashed banana onto his frigging game-day tie so it looked like he had blown his nose on it or maybe wiped a fistful of jizz on it.
In the truck he plugged in Duke Tomato to try to cheer himself up and she reached over and punched reject at the end
