Bullets of Rain (13 page)

    Art continued the motion and dumped her on her back, her head hanging off the edge of the bed, his own need shoving everything else aside and culminating as he began to piston, fast, hard, and mechanically, an endurance motion intended to destroy all obstacles to climax. Suzanne held on, her throat whitely exposed, her mouth open as she felt blood rushing to her brain, her view of the room upside down and distorted, as she let the pounding precipitate another orgasm, a bone-shaker that caused her to grab his ass in both hands and bite into his shoulder.

    Their bodies were attempting to fuse into a single being. She was fucking herself with him, pulling him home, ramming her pubic bone against his, and when he came he thought he could see sparks of lightning inside his eyelids. His balls were contracted, drawstrung, and the spasms had their way with him, but he could not have possibly delivered anything more into her. She had hoarded the drops, the fumes, and his tank was dry.

    She made a noise, a low, drawn-out hum. "That's… better," she said between breaths, with a tiny chuckle because she knew it was what she had said the first time. She crawled as though blind back to a right-side-up position on the bed, and managed to crawl several baby paces, hands and knees, before she collapsed like a canvas bag of rice, head hitting the pillow mostly by lucky accident. She curled on one side and was asleep before Art could start another conversation.

    He knew his crotch would feel scoured in the morning. He did not care. His senses were delicately beaten into general radiant numbness edged with a rawed sensitivity, and that's how he wanted it. The biggest turn-on for him had been Suzanne's sudden, unheralded, and almost desperate need, right out of nowhere.

    Lead filings began to sift into his brain. His throat was arid. He padded out to the kitchen naked, gooseflesh prickling his skin as thin drifts of chilly air eddied through his house, bullied by the blowing wind. He gulped club soda and remembered to retrieve the rest of Suzanne's rain-soaked clothing from the guest bathroom. While he urinated he noticed a fat packet of toilet paper in the trash, indicating a disposed tampon or napkin, very thoughtfully not flushed. Women tended to use a lot of toilet paper for every damned thing. Beside the small wastebasket a capsule rested on the grout between floor tiles. Before Art picked it up he washed and dried his hands, so it would not dissolve to shapeless gel in his grasp. It was like an allergy capsule, half-black, half-white. Some kind of speed? There were no batch numbers or fabrication symbols on it.

    Blitz sniffed him uncertainly as Art hung up Suzanne's sweater and gave the rest of her gear to the dryer. Art was apparently very interesting to smell, right now. He could not remember whether a condom had even been involved during that last bout, which had hit him, abruptly and powerfully, in much the same manner as the storm outside.

    Art left the capsule on his nightstand for future reference and Suzanne rolled, snuggling into his armpit. He couldn't inhale enough of her. Her hand found his cock almost tropistically, and they both plummeted in search of quality REM sleep.

    They had achieved a state from which the storm could not rouse them, though it tried mightily. The rain got worse.

    

    

    Art woke up at ten after one P.M., to the sound of heavy oceanic rainfall splatting in fat drops across the bedroom windows. He was alone in the bed and the old panic surged back right on cue. There was no Suzanne, only a particularly appealing dream, one of the few from which he could recall key details. He was so alone that most of his life had lapsed into an hallucinatory fugue state.

    "Hey," said Suzanne, tilting in through the hallway door. "I tried to make coffee on that big grindy machine; I think I got it right." She entered with two of Art's cappuccino mugs, the kind that could hold nearly a pint of liquid. "You tell me."

    Or, there was another possibility-Art had died and gone to Valhalla, or Paradise. The coffee was as rich and brown as the eyes of an Indian goddess. When Suzanne put the mug down, she noticed the black-and-white capsule on Art's nightstand.

    "Hey, where'd you get that?"

    He sat up, groggy, and oriented himself. "I think you dropped it. I found it in the bathroom. What is it?"

    "One of Price's party favors. Some kind of upper, I think." She seemed disinterested in pharmacology.

    "Want to find out, or do you want to keep it?"

    "Nah. I took one to wake up, basically. You should try it."

    "I'll save it for later." He dropped it into a leatherette box with a snap closure. The lid was filigreed with Egyptian glyphs in gold foil. The box had belonged to Lorelle.

    Why did he keep that box around, when all it did was cause him a minuscule pain every time he saw it again? Wouldn't it be better to get rid of it? He had always feared the answer, that it would be like consigning another piece of his life to the trash, and he knew he hated getting rid of anything. The box had been stationed in the same place on the nightstand when Lorelle had been taken. It endured.

    The "cold gray dawn" of cheap fiction did not penetrate the bedroom. Already Suzanne was lazily pulling on his penis, priming his pump for another round. He gulped half his coffee-she'd succeeded in making it pretty strong-and they were all over each other in another couple of minutes.

    For the duration of his marriage, Art had been faithful to Lorelle. Before her, he had juggled multiple lovers, keeping each at a safe distance with a menu of logical-sounding buffers. They all waxed and waned, came and went, each leaving something special while Art revealed precious little of his own heart. Then Lorelle had stormed into his life and swept him off his bearings. Her history had gone much the same way, so they sympathized, seeding on first contact their semitelepathic way of communicating; their secret language. They engaged each other on all the best levels and for the first time Art comprehended how valuable it was to have a soul mate who could be that mythological "one''-friend, lover, best buddy, partner. The myth was dashed by the naked reality of her. Their relationship held the peaks and valleys inherent in all human intercourse, but the special thing about Lorelle was that she scampered these outcrops with no thought that the fundamental bedrock of
her-plus-him
was ever in jeopardy. Nothing mattered more than the fact they had found each other; each was the reward at the end of the other's long desert quest. It never occurred to Lorelle that anything could threaten the core truth that they were together… not even when she had embarked on a brief, hasty, and ill-advised affair with someone up in the city. Art remembered the first time they had fought over this infidelity. Even then, blinded by rage, trodden by disappointment, and sinking down into sorrow, even then, when the words that confirmed the truth came from her painfully, measured in tears, he knew that for her it was not a matter of finding another, or giving up their life together. It was so simple it was outrageous. She missed the city.

    If that rift never closed, at least they had built a sturdy bridge over it. Ultimately, he never got the chance to propose to her, because she beat him to it. She asked him with amazement, as if she was channeling a phantom; she was as surprised as he was. She was a woman with sour views on marriage, conditioned by a lifetime of rotten, content-free, inadequate relationships, and all of a sudden this opinionated free spirit had found someone she deeply wanted to wed. Permanence had never been important before.

    In all the time Art had been with her, it had not occurred to him to be attracted away. It had never been an issue. He knew this feeling by its function, and the fact-easy to admit-that she was the person for him, rendered especially appropriate by time and circumstances no one could predict. But this was the first time he held the realization in front of him, examined it, and put words to the feelings. It had never occurred to him to be attracted away from her. No exceptions.

    Which meant that when Lorelle passed, Art had been sliced in half and cut adrift, with no backups, no old phone numbers, none of the fail-safes he had traditionally emplaced when dealing with lovers who were less important. It had been a long, lonely time since her death, and it had never occurred to Art to start shopping for replacements, since no one could fill that gap.

    Now, years later, Suzanne had materialized out of nowhere, and was busily trying to resurrect his gnarly carcass. She pounced and kissed him; he could taste his own ejaculate. Art's usual "morning bear" failed to put in a grouchy appearance.

    After some additional fooling around in the master bath's capacious shower, he loaned her an old steerhide motorcycle jacket to give her an extra layer against the cold outside. He donned a thick cable-knit sweater and threw a shearling coat over that, providing vinyl ponchos to waterproof themselves. They took the Jeep, thankful for the weight, the safeguards, the big knobby tires.

    

    

    In less than a day the coast road had become every bit the disaster area Art had anticipated, and progress was so slow it made the half mile to Price's house seem like a long-haul hour. Trees were down. Severed cable whipped from tilting light poles like deadly stingers; soon the poles themselves would topple. The road surface was completely treacherous. The storm was bumping the edge of emergency.

    Price's place, from what Art could make out in the buffeting rain and dicey light, was a modernist white two-story deal with two wings that married in a central, lighthouselike turret, which faced the ocean from the apex of the V-shape. Two outbuildings extended the courtyard area to accommodate a liver-shaped swimming pool. Art always wondered about the brand of people who needed a pool, with the ocean a stroll away.

    Suzanne pointed at the southernmost outbuilding, raggedly cordoned by about fifteen parked vehicles. "That's the garage, and there's a guesthouse over that. The other one is a cabana thing, sun-room, hobby room, whatever you want to call it." Art visualized rattan mats and a wet bar constructed of bamboo, a surfer's hang.

    When Art parked, the downpour formed a curtain on the Jeep's windshield that flooded out all view. "Do you want me to just drop you, or-?''

    "No way. Come on in, by all means." She opened her own door. "Woo, get ready to get soaked again."

    As they dashed around the garage and through a wooden gate to a narrow walkway, Art could hear bass tones buzzing the walls. Suzanne led the way through an unlocked kitchen door as the music declared itself to be Asian techno-pop-drum machines hammering a high-speed beat against samples and a voice shrieking in Cantonese, with the occasional
Just you!
in tilted English. They shed the rain slickers and hung them outmost on hooks near the door, with other garments, some dripping, some humid and mildewy, some beyond help.

    Through the corridor of kitchen, Art could perceive the ebb and flow of a crowd, like goldfish in a pet-store display tank. An inversion layer of smoke hung above them as they shouted party talk over the music. They appeared monied and trendy, and summarized the world outside Art's secure cocoon.

    Suzanne dragged him by one hand into the melee.

    Art's eyes watched the walls. The place had probably been tacked together in the mid Eighties, if the long rectangular windows were any clue. The fixtures were mostly brass. Carpet everywhere. He could see the seams in the drywall, plastered over to imitate stucco. The picture-window moldings were plastic strips patterned after wood veneer, the tinted all-weather glass held in place mostly by its own weight. Bad news, if the storm got worse. Art would have replaced these with his own special polymer. He could see an exterior deck hemmed by tubular aluminum rails. Definitely a rental party place, not a residence.

    It was pretty clear which one was Price. He held court in one corner and had just smoked a cigarette down to the filter, his attention on his immediate circle, his eyes sweeping the whole room. He was ectomorphic and sinewy, tall but not thin, wearing a skintight T-shirt under a zippered leather vest and worn jeans cuffed above low-heeled engineer boots, all black. As Suzanne maneuvered Art closer, Art could see the guy had the sort of head that clearly indicated the contours of the skull beneath. Price's features were totally symmetrical, and his slightly receding hairline had been buzzed into a military crop that fit him like a skullcap. His ears were pierced, but he wore no jewelry, not even a wristwatch. Long, pianist fingers with nails bitten or trimmed to nothing. He'd suffered bad acne as a teenager, but the rough complexion somehow fit him, as though his visage had been hammered from pitted pewter. His eyes tracked Art all the way across the room.

    "This would be our Good Samaritan," Price said.

    "Price, this is Art." Impressing him seemed important to Suzanne.

    "Art, as in the Art?" Price tilted his head sideways, as if he had just been introduced to an inflatable toy as someone's beloved date. "You sure it's not Artemis or something spelled weird?"

    "Just Art, I'm afraid."

    "Fear nothing, neighbor." Price shook Art's hand-not crushingly, not blandly, just right. "Here you can be whoever you wish to be. We all need to thank you for rescuing our little lost Suzanne.'' He kissed Suzanne on the cheek and then forgot about her. "This is what you call your basic party. We got food, booze, drugs, boys and girls-help yourself." Price had mastered the art of making his voice heard above the music.

    Art had to lean forward, like someone getting the feel of a recording booth. "You've probably heard there's a hell of a storm coming in."

    "We're not going to talk about the weather, are we?" Price shot his eyes sidelong, as though awaiting a knowing, on-cue laugh from his cabaret audience.