Hide and Seek (6 page)

"What is it with Steven, anyway?"

"You mean with Steven and me."

I nodded. She laughed at me.

"We were kids together. Next-door neighbors. When we were real little, we even talked about getting married some day. You know how kids do. Then we grew up. At least some of us did."

"He's going to Harvard."

"There are plenty of kids at Harvard, dear."

"So where does Kim come into it?"

"Oh, some seven or eight years later. I met her in junior high. I introduced them. His parents and mine and Kim's all became friends eventually anyway, so they'd have met sooner or later. All the same, I take complete credit for putting that together. And I'll tell you, back in high school it was a very heavy thing. They were both sort of... precocious, I guess you'd say. Kim developed quite a reputation.

Deservedly, of course."

"And they've been together all this time?"

"We have. We've stayed together. Sometimes I feel like we're linked at the hip, the three of us. We've had some rough spots, but they pass. If you want me, you take Kim. And if you want Kim, you take me.

Steve wants both of us, so it's easy. It's a weird relationship. We've never been lovers, never will be. But he's still sort of possessive of me, you know? And without me, I'm not sure he and Kim would still be together. Like I say, I think he wants us both both together. And he can only get me through Kim.

"I don't know how it works, actually. But I think I'm the glue in all this, somehow. And to answer your next question, yes, sometimes it is a big pain in the ass. But not usually."

I decided to throw her a curve ball, as long as she was in the mood to put up with my curiosity. I made it very casual-sounding.

"So where does your brother fit in?"

"My brother?"

Whatever it was, it came up fast and mean. I felt I knew how the rat feels when the trap snaps shut it was such a tiny piece of cheese in the first place. There was suddenly something dangerous scuttling around in the car with us.

"Who the hell mentioned my brother? Daddy?"

"I just saw his picture, that's all. In the living room. So I wondered."

She stared at me a moment, and I knew how cold those eyes could be. She twisted the key in the ignition and the car sprang obediently to life.

She pulled away. The tires screeched at us.

"Let's just forget about my fucking brother," she said.

I made a mental note to damn well try.

There was a local band at the Caribou that night. It was pretty bad.

Two guitarists, a fat lazy drummer, and a girl lead singer I vaguely remembered from high school. She was small and blond and squeaky, with no breasts at all and the stage presence of a plate of peach preserves.

Their repertoire was entirely cribbed from Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb records. You dreamed wistfully of bad Top 40. We drank our beers and when the boys in front stood up and applauded "Waltz Across Texas" we got the hell out of there.

She wanted to drive around some.

I talked and she listened. There was the urge to tell her everything, to give her the complete thumbnail Clan Thomas. But I held back here and there, wanting to keep it light. I avoided mention of my own brother. I didn't want her to think I was leading back to hers. What I wanted was just to amuse her, but there wasn't much I could think of that was very amusing. And as I talked I realized just how depressing Dead River was, compared to what she was used to in Boston. Compared to anything. But it was all I had.

So I told her about Rafferty and the night he and the Borkstrom twins got drunk and crapped in old man Lymon's water tower. I told her about the drag races through Becker's Flats. I told her about the old black dog we used to have who could whistle through his teeth. And I wondered what in the world she was making of all this, and me.

She wanted to know why I'd been caught setting fire to somebody's back lawn. I told her we were napalming plastic soldiers.

But it was uncomfortably close to the other thing.

So I drew her off of that.

It started to rain.

Just a light warm drizzle with a heavy fog rolling in.

We'd left the top down on the Chevy, so we pulled over across the street from the Colony Theater, got out and hauled it out of the well and snapped the snaps down. Across the street the movie was Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, one of those low-budget horror pictures. But I guess there wasn't much business. Candy Bailey sat in the booth reading a paperback mystery. The streets were quiet.

Casey walked over to me. I had my hand on the door handle on the driver's side, ready to let her back inside. She put her fingers down lightly on my forearm

Necking in the streets.

It felt pretty awkward at first. It was my town after all and there was Candy Bailey in the lighted booth a few yards away. The feeling didn't last, though. Only a few seconds before her mouth convinced me that it was a very good thing to do. After the first long kiss we parted and I saw how the tiny droplets of rain glistened in her hair under the theater lights from across the street. I saw the look on her face. The unexpected hunger there.

We kissed again. Long and wanting and hard this time, an animal shifting of the muscles along her back.

A man walked by behind us, walking a big mongrel dog, just ashadow in front of the closed-up shell of a drugstore that had failed three years ago. I was only just aware of him.

Her body fit with mine like none I'd ever held before, every curve and hollow melting into a perfect whole. Her tongue tasted sweet.

It flayed the inside of my mouth until the only thing in the world I wanted to do was climb back into that car and finish it before I exploded at her. Drive to my place. Feel her naked on cool fresh sheets, damp with sweat.

Her hand moved mine beneath the T-shirt to her naked breasts and belly.

They felt hot to the touch. There was a fragrant woman-smell rising off her flesh. She moaned softly against my mouth and moved us back against the Chevy.

"Lift me up."

"You'll ruin the skirt."

It was soft white linen.

"I don't care."

I moved my hands to her thighs and hitched her up onto the low front hood of the car. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me again.

The kiss was furious, amazing, touched with something crazy running between us like a thin white-hot wire. When it was over we pulled back and gasped for breath, chests heaving, hearts pounding. Her eyes glittered as she looked at me.

The rain had begun to come down a little harder.

My face was so flushed I felt we must have been steaming there, the two of us, boiling mists off the street. I'd never thought it possible to want a woman this bad. I could feel the ache for her in every bone in my body, through every inch of skin. And in a way just wanting her that much was enough, fulfillment of a kind. Had a car come along just then and plowed us down I'd have died in the rain slick streets a happy man. Just to have had the moment. That pleasure, that desire.

So I wasn't prepared for the rest.

I saw her eyes glance away from me, over my shoulder to the theater.

The eyes were wide, her face wet and gleaming with rain. Her voice was a soft, passionate whisper.

"She's watching. She sees us."

"We can go to my place."

"No."

"Please, Casey."

"No."

She pulled me close. She took my hand again and moved it slowly under her skirt. I felt the coolness of her thigh turn slowly to a sleek humid warmth as she moved it upward. Then there was only the soft thin tuft of pubic hair under my hand and the naked depth of her.

"Here." Her lips stung my cheek. "Right here and now or not at all."

Then suddenly she was all teeth and shifting flesh that turned and stroked and grappled with me.

And suddenly the rain began in earnest.

A flash of light and rain and wind that rattled the storefront behind me, followed by a distant thunder.

And there on the rain-drenched glistening streets of my hometown I saw the strange wild pleasure in her face as she looked behind me and saw a girl I'd known since childhood watch me plunge into her like a prisoner, like a starving man, between naked thighs clamped hard around my hips and waist, and heard her laugh with a terrible, awesome kind of greed as I threw up her yellow T-shirt and felt the breasts soften and flush beneath my hands. And then the moisture inside her flowed and flowed until I poured myself into her and stood still, trembling, finished.

They say that on a fighter the legs go first.

I dropped slowly to the black street, water running over my knees. Not caring.

I looked up and saw her smile and slide down off the car, breathing through her open mouth. She gave me her hand.

The wind whistled through the tree in front of Harmon's, broken long ago by lightning.

"We can go now," she said.

SEVEA/

That night we slept together on my bed. In the morning she was gone when I woke. There was no note. I'd have been surprised to find one there.

I woke up bruised and charged with energy.

I wondered vaguely what she'd told her parents, if anything. I didn't worry about it. I didn't worry about anything at all. There had never been anyone like her in Dead River. In my mood I doubted there was anyone like her anywhere.

I could never have expected her, yet I felt I'd waited for her all my life. Some compensations for all those years of emptiness. It was postcoital euphoria on a massive scale. And more.

I made some coffee and read the morning paper, lying in bed and sipping at the coffee, and every so often the scent of her would waft up from the linen or from me. Unwashed, unshaven, I felt clean as a baby.

It was Saturday, so there was nothing I was pressed to do. It must have taken me two hours to get to the shower. When I came out, dripping, looking for a towel, she was standing by the bed.

"Dry off. We already did that once, remember?"

We spent the day in bed.

Then most of Sunday.

I never did get around to asking her what she'd told her parents. It didn't seem important. Obviously she was handling it one way or

another. There was not the slightest hint of tension in her, or of conflict of any kind.

Maybe they knew what they had the same as I did.

Someone special. Someone to whom the rules did not apply. And, like me, asked no questions.

We should have asked.

But there are all kinds of sins, aren't there.

I know them all by now.

I took Monday off. Called in sick. I'd never done it before, not once, so there was no trouble. The rain had passed with the weekend.

It was a hot, bright morning-the first of July-and we decided to drive to the beach again.

Steven picked us up in the royal blue Le Baron. He and Kim had already gone on their little shopping spree, so the trunk was full of beer and the usual delicacies. I felt glad to be left out of that particular part of it. Steve was in a terrific mood. I wondered aloud if it was the stealing

"Nah. That's always fun, sure. But my sister's home, see? And guess who's left her little shit of a husband? Young Babs of Radcliffe, that's who. Still all drawly and horsey-looking and completely tit less but free at last. And god! Is she ever driving my parents' nuts!

All she does these past couple of days is give them tears and arrogance and general craziness, and all those other good things that come with shedding a rich partner and every bit of it's directed at them.

"That's the best part. Because they got her into it, you see? They just absolutely loved Robert Cowpie Jessup. Not to mention Jessup Laboratories. Oh, they are catching royal fucking helll This morning over breakfast on the pa-tee-oh she called them leeches. Can you imagine? Leeches! And last night it was pimps.

"I am having a hell of a time, I tell you."

"Lots of good feeling between you and the folks, huh?"

You could have wished it to happen every morning. At least he wasn't driving like a maniac. We took the coast road out at a nice, easy pace for a change. A pleasant little drive in the country with a trunk full of stolen caviar. When we passed the Crouch place he looked at me and grinned.

"I saw lights."

"You saw bullshit."

His mood got us all happy.

Casey said that Kim's straw hat looked like something out of Elvira Madigan by way of Kate Hepburn. Steve picked it up with peasant-girl jokes and farm girl jokes, most of which centered on Kimberley's ample breasts and thighs, her most conspicuous features. Kim countered with references to the weekend "orgy" between Casey and me, and the whole thing got pretty tasteless,

We did plenty of laughing. Finally Casey made some comment about the inevitability of a discussion of Kimberley's breasts in any social gathering in which she, Kimberley, was a part, and Kim pulled off the big wide-brimmed hat and stuffed it under the seat and said, okay, you want 'em, you got 'em, and proceeded to peel off the powder blue tank top she was wearing and toss it over her head into the wind.