Then he remembered the rest—
Susan…
She’d slipped into the shower with him. Neither of them said a word. Her gesture should’ve surprised him, but it didn’t. It was nothing like that at all. Their attraction to each other was self-evident, so perhaps he even, in some unconscious way, expected something like this.
Oh, jeeez…
Beneath the cool torrent, they touched each other as if they’d been lovers for years. The water cascaded; her denuded beauty shone like a beacon. They alternately kissed, sudsing each other with the foamy soap. Their tongues frolicked, their hands strayed through bubbles over each other’s flesh.
She was so soft, so wonderfully warm. Her breasts squeezed against his broad chest as she slipped her arms tight about his waist to desperately draw him closer. The cool water turned hot the instant it hissed against her skin.
Her skin felt like fine, warm silk…
It was a dreamscape of sensation and cool rain. Of timeless kisses and wet, caressing hands. Of undistracted love. Phil was aware of nothing else in the world but her. This was his only world right now, a world of her beauty and his desire, a perfect domain where the only inhabitants were the two of them, and where the only sounds were their ardent breaths, their moans, their gasps, and their sighs, and the endless hiss of the water.
Dripping wet, they hauled each other from the shower. They kissed and fondled and stumbled across the hot room and fell onto the bed in one another’s arms.
She was beautiful. He’d always known that, but never in his life did he fully understand the meaning of the word until now. It was so much more than her body, so much more than her gleaming blue eyes, her damp silver- blond hair, her face. It was everything ineffable about their being together like this.
His passion became palpable. His passion delved into her, explored her every inch. His hands ranged over her perfect skin as a novice sculptor might touch a masterpiece. He touched and kissed and licked her everywhere, from her eyes to the tips of her toes, to her most secret and private places. Her ardor gave; second by second she opened herself to him.
But first, before he demonstrated his passion most fully, she stopped him, whispered into the crook of his neck—
“Phil. I—I need—”
“What?” he asked, trailing his tongue up the sleek, damp slope of her throat.
“I need to know something…”
“What?”
He kissed her, tasted her, reveled in her.
“I need to know…if you’re still in love with…with…Vicki,” she finished.
“No. I’m not,” he promised her, and it was no lie. If he was in love with anyone, if he ever could be in love with anyone, it was with Susan.
“I swear,” he said.
They made love for hours. It was beautiful. She explored him as he explored her, in every manner thinkable, by every position they could devise. Time and time again, they spent themselves with one another…
But—
Phil, now becloaked by the fervid memories, felt around in the bed.
Where is she now?
Did she leave? Did she go back to her own room while he slept? Or—
Oh, no.
Had he talked in his sleep? It was something he knew he did. It was something past lovers had made him well aware of. All too aware.
Had he muttered Vicki’s name in his sleep?
Jesus, don’t let it be so.
He couldn’t imagine it.
Despite the happenstance of the other night, Vicki meant nothing to him compared to Susan. He still cared about her, yes, he still wished her well and hoped that she could shed her addictions and make something good for herself, but…
He didn’t love Vicki. He knew that.
I love—
He got up, wrapped a towel around his waist, and rushed out of the bedroom, then sighed and leaned gratefully against the wall.
There she was, back in the long nightshirt.
Thank God.
She sat placidly at his cheap little desk in the den, her legs crossed. She was reading.
Phil came up from behind, kissed her on the neck. “Good morning,” he said. “Or I should say, to those of us on night shifts, good afternoon.”
She kissed him back very matter-of-factly, as though it were something commonplace, something expected. Something purely and honestly natural.
“What are you reading?”
“These books you got out of the library,” she said. “They’re really interesting.”
“Yeah, I know. I was reading some of them last night. It’s bizarre, but a little too technical for me; a lot of that genetic stuff went right over my head.”
“It says here that there are inbred communities in some parts of the world that are hundreds of years old. They’re rural or mountain settlements, completely cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. And it makes for a completely isolated gene pool. The inbreeding becomes so intensive that normal births almost never happen. It mentions one settlement, somewhere in Russia, where there hasn’t been a normal birth since the early 1800s.”
“And it’s all exponential,” Phil remarked from what he remembered reading himself. “Not only does the rate of normal births decline the longer the gene pool remains isolated, but the genetic defects become more severe. One of those books has pictures, but don’t look at them if you’re squeamish.”
Susan clearly wasn’t. She turned to the book with color plates. “Look at this, red eyes. Just like the Creekers.”
“Evidently, red eyes and jet-black hair are typical genetic signs of prolonged inbreeding,” Phil told her.
“Prolonged,” Susan repeated in a low murmur. Then she glanced up at Phil. “I wonder how long Natter’s Creeker clan have been inbreeding among themselves.”
“Who knows?” Phil replied. “Maybe centuries.”
««—»»
Eagle looked haunted when Phil met him at the bar.
And Phil knew why.
“Hey, Eagle.” Phil ordered a beer from the keep, glanced back at the stage to spy a trim, long-legged blonde doing splits. “You ever get ahold of Blackjack?”
“No, man,” Eagle morosely replied. “And lemme tell you something else. I haven’t been able to get ahold of Paul either.”
“Don’t fret it. He probably just went out somewhere.”
“All fuckin’day? When he knows our points are waiting on that pickup? This is serious biz, Phil. I tried to get Paul on the phone for hours, and there was no answer. So then I went to his place…
“Yeah?”
“The whole joint was busted up, looked like there’d been a riot in there.”
Phil smiled to himself.
Eagle went on. “His truck was there, but he wasn’t. What do you make of that shit?”
