Crooked Hearts (25 page)

“I’m on fire,” she whispered. She threw her head back and moaned—a long, tortured sound that shocked him. He took her in his arms and started to say something comforting. She pushed against him with her whole body, her hands clutching at his coat. “I’m on fire,” she repeated, desperate, mashing her pelvis against his thigh.

He blinked at himself in the watery mirror over the washstand. “Well, now.”

“Touch me,” she pleaded. “No, don’t. Oh, God.” She buried her face in his shirt. “He gave me something.”

“He—what?”

“You like me, don’t you? You always—nnnh.” She gritted her teeth and ground her forehead against his breastbone. “Reuben, I’m burning up. If you don’t touch me, I’m going to burst out of my skin.”

He patted her on the back, trying to get it. “You’re saying …”

She growled low in her throat and pulled back to look at him. “Help me,” she commanded. “If you laugh at me, Reuben, I’ll—I’ll—” Her blue eyes welled with tears.

In wonder, he brushed her left breast with his fingertips, and she gasped. Pressing against him again, she got his thigh between hers. He couldn’t believe what was happening. She pushed into him four times, hard, and then she climaxed, a rough, pained, desperate-sounding orgasm that left her panting in his arms, limp-limbed and sweating.

He laughed—he couldn’t help it, it was his first stunned, uncontrollable reaction. When she went rigid, he remembered that that was the one thing he wasn’t supposed to do. “Not
at
you, Gus,” he muttered into her hair, “just—the situation, I couldn’t help—”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

They stood still for a few minutes, breathing quietly, while Reuben studied the reflection in the mirror of himself stroking Grace’s back, and the coming and going of numerous indescribable expressions on his face. Presently he felt a long tremor shudder through her. “Are you okay now?” he ventured.

“No.”

“Are you cold?”

She simulated a laugh.

“No? You’re not cold?” She was shivering all over. She still had his knee between hers, and she was starting to do that thing again with her thighs, squeezing his between them in a slow, steady rhythm that got him hard again fast. “Uh, Grace, maybe this isn’t such a good—”

“It’s happening again.”

“What?” He still didn’t get it.

“Reuben, they made me drink something!”

“You mean, it’s still …” She nodded. In the mirror, he watched his hands move down to her buttocks and pull her up tight against him.

She bucked once and cried out, and slowly collapsed in his arms.

He was sweating now. “Let’s lie down,” he suggested weakly. She turned without a word and climbed onto the bed, struggling with the top sheet. Her robe drifted around her body, loose and open. She might as well have been naked, so he helped her take it off; but even after all that had happened, it still felt like a presumption. Not that she was in any state to take offense. That was the problem. In the spirit of evening the score, so to speak, he said, “Grace, should I, um—”

“Yes.”

“Right.” He sat up and took off his clothes.

Before getting back in bed, he crossed to the bureau and lowered the wick on the oil lamp, a gesture toward discretion that struck him, under the circumstances, as pretty funny. He crawled under the sheet Grace had modestly pulled up to her chin. She had one arm over her forehead, in distress or embarrassment or both. He took it away to see her eyes. They looked haunted, the pupils still dilated. “It’s all right,” he told her, “you’re safe now, and you can have anything you want.” He brushed curls back from her forehead. “Do you feel like talking?”

She hid her face again in the crook of her elbow. Drawing in a deep breath through chattering teeth, she whispered, “Please … please … would you please …” She couldn’t get the verb out. He didn’t want to make a mistake, so he put a very light, very tentative hand over her right breast. The nipple rose to greet him immediately, a hot, hard little pebble he wanted to spend more time with. But Grace wasn’t interested in preliminaries. Capturing his hand, she dragged it down her stomach to the hot center of herself. He’d barely brushed her, hardly felt the soft wet heat, before she was gritting out another tortured groan, thighs locked around his wrist, jerking arhythmically against it.

“There now,” he said in a ridiculous quaver when it was over. Gently disengaging his hand, he dried it surreptitiously on the sheet. “Better?”

She turned her head away and nodded with her eyes closed. She was trembling a little, biting her lips, pink-faced with need and confusion.

“What did he give you?” he asked, stroking neutral territory—her arm from shoulder to elbow, up and down.

“Don’t know. Something red. Plum wine, he said.”

“Spanish fly,” he muttered to himself.

But she heard. “Probably. I should’ve known. Oh, Reuben,” she wailed, “he took the tiger and kept the money, and it’s all my fault!”

“Never mind,” he said gallantly. “The important thing is that you’re okay.”

She didn’t look consoled. “That’s not all,” she said after a minute, and turned her face back to the wall.

“Tell me.” What else could there be?

“Opium,” she whispered. “He made me smoke from a pipe. I couldn’t help it, he made me.”

He lay without moving, trying to believe it, then trying not to believe it.
Goddamn son of a bitch.
“I’ll kill him,” he said wonderingly. “By God, I’ll kill him.” She covered her whole face with her hands, and he realized she was scared. “Don’t worry,” he said as calmly as he could. “You’ll be fine in a little while, just like it never happened.”

“When?” she croaked.

“I don’t know, an hour or so. You’re not going to become a dope fiend, sweetheart, not from a couple of puffs.”

“How do you know? What if I end up like one of those people in the den? What if it takes over my mind, what if—”

“It won’t, that’s not how it works.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.” She shuddered, still not looking at him. He put his arms around her, and asked his next question without looking at her. “Did he touch you, Grace?”

“No. I mean, yes.”

He sighed. “Which?”

“He did. And I let him. I didn’t care, not
enough.
I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh,’ but I didn’t try to make him stop. And then he went away to prepare himself, he said, and the woman came and took my clothes off, and—oh, God, I
wanted
her to—sort of, because I knew what it meant, I knew he was coming back and he could take this terrible—
feeling
away—but I knew it was wrong, too, but I—”

He stopped her by holding her face between his palms. “Let it go, Gus. You weren’t responsible, you couldn’t help yourself.”

“I know that, I know it, but—”

“No buts. It wasn’t your fault.”

A little of the anxiety went out of her eyes. She turned her head, and captured two of his fingers in her mouth. He went absolutely still. But when she made a slippery sucking sound, he couldn’t help himself—he draped his naked leg over her thighs. She didn’t protest Protest? She twisted around so that their bodies were flush against each other, private part to private part. Now he was the one who was groaning.

The drug had loosened her tongue along with her inhibitions. “Reuben, you can’t bel … believe how that feels,” she said hoarsely.

Unlike her, his voice sounded
higher
than usual. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” She blew all her breath out against his chest in what he took for a laugh.

Laughter: that was the ticket. He croaked out a chuckle. She followed with a harsh
ha ha
that made her breasts wobble against his hot skin. “Mmm,” she said next, scouring her nipples against his chest in little back-and-forth motions. He set his teeth and pressed his lips to her hairline. “I grew up in a room like this,” he gritted, scanning the water stains on the wall and the cracks on the ceiling. She didn’t seem to hear. “Yeah, it looked a lot like this. Something like this. I was nine, eight, seven, I can’t recall. Very hot in the summer. The mattress smelled like old logs.”

She stopped moving. Good: he could stop talking. She made an effort to open her eyes and focus on his face. “Sw … Sweetbriar looked like this?”

“No,” he said immediately. “No, Sweetbriar, of course, looked—Are you kidding? How could Sweetbriar look like this?”

He stared her down, his irate innocence no match for her at the moment. She blinked, acknowledging her error, and laid her cheek back down on his collarbone. “Mph,” she said.

They shared a few minutes of blessed rest. Reuben’s blood stopped pounding and his body softened to more normal contours. As soon as he felt like himself again, she let out a low, worried, rising wail, pushed him down flat on his back, and straddled him.

“Hi!” came out of his mouth before he could call it back.

“Hi.” Her inflection was entirely different. He started humming when she lifted her pretty breasts, one in each hand, and offered them to him. Her knees cut in on either side of his waist, and her warm, slick sex massaged his pelvic bone until he smacked his hands on her hips and forced her to stop.

“Hold it.”

“What?”

“Listen to me. I’m a strong man, I’m a regular shtarker. Women like me, always have, because I’m pretty good at this. But—”

“What?”

“But you’re driving me absolutely crazy.”

“Come inside me, Reuben.” She hadn’t been listening.

“Grace.”

“Mmm?” She slid back a little way on his thighs, and he jumped when her hand closed around him. She stroked him with more enthusiasm than expertise, softly at first, then more purposefully, up and down, and on every third or fourth pass she gave his testicles a friendly little squeeze. “Guess what,” she said with her eyes closed.

He got out a sound, vaguely interrogatory, while grinding his teeth.

“While I was lying there, waiting for Wing? I kept thinking I wished it was you who was coming to me. I kept thinking of you. I wanted it to be you. Oh, hurry, Reuben, let’s do it.”

“What about Henri?” he managed to ask.

“Who?”

He scowled at her. “Your husband.”

“Oh—Henry. He’s not my husband, we just live together.”

While he was thinking that over, she scooted up on her knees and got the head of his penis in position to enter her. A quick jerk of her hips, and he was in. But only an inch.

“Come—
in
—Reuben,” she gasped, “right now, right now, right now.” She kept shuffling closer, higher.

“You’re going to hate me in the morning,” he tried, hanging onto her knees.

She threw her head back and said to the ceiling, “Better then than now.”

She was a furnace, a long, cylindrical fireplace, a blast oven. And he was burning up, trying with all his might to hold still so he wouldn’t explode. He felt her tighten and squeeze on him, and they yelled out something in concert. But by some perverse miracle, he didn’t come when she did: he focused on a housefly on the sheet beside her humping thigh, and got through it by concentrating on its long, sucking proboscis.

She collapsed on top of him, whimpering. “My God, Reuben, how can you stand it? No—oh, please don’t move,” she begged when he shifted. He was still hard, still tilted up inside her like a tent pole. “Don’t—if you could just—how long can you stay like that?”

“All night,” he said confidently.
About thirty more seconds. Forty if you don’t move.

She had her arms around his head on the pillow, her face turned to his; when she spoke, her breath tickled his ear. “When do you think it’s going to stop?”

His heart sank. “You mean it hasn’t stopped yet?”

“For now,” she said ominously. “I think it’s coming back.”

He shut his eyes tight, and clenched his teeth to keep from groaning. “Well, it can’t last forever, it’s bound to wear off soon.”

“When?”

“Soon.” He patted her weakly, and reached down for the sheet to cover her. The sweat on her skin was drying as she cooled off.

She was quiet for a while, then surprised him by asking suddenly, “What’s a
sharker?”

“A shtarker? A tough guy. A hero.”

“It sounds like German.”

“German, right.” Why not?

“How do you know German?” she asked on a yawn.

“I don’t know German. That one word, I know. Learned it from an old girlfriend. Gretchen was her name. She used to—”

“Never mind.”

He put his fingers in her hair, smiling. Good thing she didn’t weigh much, he mused, because she’d wilted on top of him like a deflated balloon. “How’d you get this curly hair?” he asked, toying with the soft, springy ringlets.

“My mother, I guess.”

“Was hers yellow, too?”

“Mm. I thought it was so pretty. She used to let me brush it for her.” She yawned again, making the skin under his ear tingle. “She used a perfume that smelled like lilacs. I thought it was the sweetest smell in the world.” Her voice began to slur. “She put it on whenever she was going out, or whenever one of her … gentleman friends was coming to visit. I still think of her whenever I smell lilacs. It always makes me sad.”

Reuben lay motionless, not daring to breathe. If she’d fallen asleep, his faith in prayer, the Almighty, and the hereafter would be restored in one stroke. He ran a testing finger lightly along her backbone; her only response was a delicate little snort against his throat.
Thank You,
he prayed fervently.

Now the trick was to get her off his chest without waking her up. He wanted a big slug of whiskey in the worst way. She heaved a big, tremulous sigh, and he froze again until her body quivered and went still. Her hair didn’t smell like lilacs; it smelled like the pine soap in his bathroom. A familiar scent, but exotic on her. He put his palms on her sides, barely grazing, just to touch her. She had incredible skin, softer than an infant’s. And she didn’t have any husband at all, much less two of them.

The slow, gentle in-and-out of her ribs assured him she was fast asleep. Just then the oil lamp across the room sputtered and went out. He closed his eyes in the sudden darkness, thinking how far away the bureau was, and the bottle. How chilly the floor would be on his bare feet. How nice and warm it was here in bed, even with a hundred and some pounds of Grace passed out on top of him. I’ll move in a minute, he told himself, and fell asleep with his nose in her piney hair.