Nikki (17 page)

He reared his head back and pushed disgustedly at her foot.

“Haven’t I got the prettiest toes you ever saw?” She wriggled them, then laughingly drew her leg back, sat hugging her knees and watching his handsome profile.

“You didn’t enjoy me?”

He tightened his lips.

“Well?” she prodded. “I enjoyed you.”

“All right,” he conceded. “Ditto. Physically.” Turning, he headed the car slowly out toward the road.

“More than physically,” Nikki said. “You liked being raped.”

He made an explosive sound.

“Didn’t you?”

“Once in a while my mother’s dead right,” he said unhappily.

“Oh,” Nikki said coolly. “She knew I was wrong for you, huh?”

He nodded, his handsome face set coldly.

“A boy’s best friend,” she said virtuously, “is his mother.”

“All I’m saying is that this time she was right.”

“Well, they say it takes one to spot one.”

A grin melted a little spot on his cheek, which glazed over again. Then there was a tickling at the corner of his mouth, and finally he turned his full, handsome smile on her.

“Ah-h-h, you beautiful little bitch, I can’t stay mad at you.”

She surged over to him, stood on her knees. “Stop the car!” He stopped and she swung herself around on his lap and kissed him. “Oh, you’re so damned sweet, Archer. You couldn’t stay mad at anybody. Please forgive me for being so bitchy-mean.”

He touched his lip gingerly, laughing. “Don’t kiss me so hard till my wounds heal … or at least this one. God knows what you’ll do next.”

She giggled. “Dolores used to say nobody could stay mad at me about any one thing because I was always coming up with something new for them to be mad about.”

“You mean you’re just generally hateful and there wasn’t any personal hostility toward me?”

“That’s it, darling.”

He laughed and kissed her.

“And you know what I thought?” Nikki said gaily. “I thought you were a superb lover. When you’re roused, you’re something. That’s all you need, just to get mad a little.”

He sat her off his lap, got the car started.

“You’re not icing on me, are you, doll?” she asked worriedly. She looked at him with a soft, coaxing little smile. “I say something wrong?”

“Why, no,” he said. His features formed a smile, but there was nothing back of it.

He drove in silence. She couldn’t reach him. She watched the road. “Don’t miss the turnoff to Dolores’s again.”

He passed the turnoff. “You were supposed to be doing some shopping. I’ll drop you at the center.”

“You’ll drop me plunk, and the quicker the better, is that it?”

“Of course not.” He laughed unconvincingly.

“You didn’t like my saying you needed to get mad.”

“Correct.”

“It’s only because you’re so sweet-natured, Archer; it worries me that the best thing about you will get you pushed around.”

“I do all right. I’m not interested in character revision, thanks just the same.”

“Oh, now, silly, it was just a remark. I don’t want to change you, and I don’t want this bad feeling between us. Please, Archer, be nice to me.”

“If there were any changes in either of us, the change would be in you.”

“You’ve got something there.”

She liked the idea that he might care enough, to be interested enough to want to take her over and change her. But what he involved himself with was the traffic problem at the shopping center entrance.

In the shopping center he glided to a curb space, turned a bright, empty smile on her and said, “It’s been swell.”

“Same here,” she said.

“Well …”

She searched his face, saw only that he was waiting for her to get out. “Maybe I’ll be seeing you around.”

“Sure.”

She unlatched the door, swung it open, and dropped one foot out, telling herself she was damned if she’d beg. She looked at him, then dropped her eyes and said, ashamed of herself, “I guess you know Dolores’s phone number?”

“Sure. Sure. I’ll phone you.”

She got out. She stood watching the car move away and felt chilled and conspicuous there half-naked and alone. She walked leadenly toward the cab stand; then, with a sort of terror, she remembered something. The children had assumed she’d be coming home with them; special treats had been bought for lunch; on the drive to the shopping center she had planned and enthused with them.

It hadn’t occurred to them that their Aunt Nikki could walk out on them without warning; they had made her part of their lives, had given their love, had trusted in hers. Then she had gotten sex-drunk on Archer Cole, and without the slightest thought she had waved them away. She remembered the look of surprise on little Val’s face. Val hadn’t looked at her when she’d said good-bye. Instead, the little girl had flung herself around and marched away, hurt. Nikki hurried to the toy store, sick with herself.

Nikki rode home in the cab thinking about the children and knowing everything was going to be all right. The toys were clever and they would love them. She could just see them! She smiled and shook her head in slow wonder; a child’s joy was one of the most rewarding things in the world.

The children weren’t there.

The housekeeper, ready to leave for the weekend, came over while Nikki was paying off the cab, and told her that Dolores and the children would be home at three-thirty or four. A couple of hours. Nikki went in and arranged the toy packages on the hall table, smiling to herself. She wandered through the downstairs rooms, a persistent look of pleasantness on her face, almost as though demonstrating to the silent empty house her good cheer, her good intentions.

She went up to her room, scanned it casually, looking for nothing. She went back down, only a trifle more quickly, and went into the kitchen again, because, she told herself, she was hungry. She stood at the open refrigerator looking at the wide assortment of foods, at the covered luncheon leftovers.

She shut the door, realizing she had no appetite. It didn’t matter at all that Dolores had left no note here or in her room or on the hall table or anywhere. Nikki laughed aloud at herself at the childish expectation that Dolores should have left a written account of her hour-by-hour actions. After all, she had left word with the housekeeper … although it was by the merest chance that the housekeeper had still been here.

Nikki went upstairs, shrugging off her sense of deflation. She took a shower, put on pink Capris and a red turtle-neck sweater, and combed her hair out loose and long around her shoulders, liking the effect of red on red. It gave her pale face a certain gravity. She wished Archer Cole could see this aspect of her, this seriousness and suggestion of depth and meaning; it might—she cringed faintly—wipe out or at least neutralize the silly-slut impression she must have given him.

She went in and lay on her back on the bed.

Dolores was punishing her. Dolores had seen for the first time the naked reality of her, the shocking, blind-lusting way she had thrown herself at that pretty boy, forgetting everything and everybody else, heedlessly subjecting the children to hurt and disappointment.

For herself, Dolores could take the Storm Front and kid herself about what her friend Nikki Duquesne really was. But when it came to emotionally damaging those tender children, she wasn’t going to have it; wasn’t going to let them put their trust and confidence in someone so unstable and undependable as “Aunt Nikki.”

That’s why Dolores had run off, taking them with her, taking them away from Nikki Duquesne. She lay holding her breath, feeling a dreadful ache in her heart. She reached her arms out to the edges of the bed and manipulated the two pillows to cover her head and just lay inert.

D. D., meaning Drop Dead; D. D. S. Drop Dead Slowly in a long and lingering agony and lie weak and helpless and suffer and suffer, Archer Cole, and phone when you’re sexually charged and come to me for discharge, you pretty boy mama’s boy, and I’ll set you craving till you crawl and whimper and beg, and you’ll never never move me and I’ll whet your need for me beyond endurance until you fall sick, your will crippled, your pain relentless and torturing. I’ll tease you beyond endurance with my body and promise relief again and again and you’ll feel a joy of anticipation and then again and again I’ll betray your hopes and fling you back into a pit all the blacker for the glimpse of hope I gave you.

The hate was like a tightened fist clutching and twisting her insides. It raged through her; it seemed to tighten the very walls of her arteries so that the blood seemed to ram its way like heavy sludge, and there was an almost bursting pressure within her, a throbbing in her ears and eyeballs.

She rolled agitatedly onto her stomach, then almost at once flopped onto her back, as if she had taken into her own body that imagined pain. She told herself desperately that he was insignificant to her life, that she couldn’t possibly react this violently to him. All this intensity belonged somewhere else. Wherever it belonged, she couldn’t stand all this hating. No, she never should’ve abandoned her outlet, her tennis, her competitive sports. Whatever else might be said of games, they had discharged the daily pus of venom in her, drained it off, given her relief and balance.

Since she’d tried to live passively and lovingly, the hate had had nowhere to go. She thought with horror that she was filled with an ugly pus, a festering, expanding death, the hate overpowering everything else in her. The image of Archer Cole lying in pain became subtly transformed and the face was and was not his and it was wan with the suffering she had caused, but it was luminous too, with a shining inner beauty, and she stood, his nurse, not his torturer, and she took into her own body the pain that was in him, healing him so that he rose whole and clean and strong and she lay in his place dying, dying … dead. She lay very still and closed her eyes and a soft little quiver of sound came from her throat. If she were dead he would come tall and sad and solemn and look upon her, beautifully surrounded by flowers and hushed light and mourning organ music. He would know how much she had loved him, how fine she was, and it would be too late, too late. She could feel an oozing of warm tears and she pushed her face into the pillow.

Why, why, why had she had to clash with Archer Cole when all she had wanted was to love this goodness of his, to give herself wholly?

She moaned and rolled herself from side to side on her back and crammed the pillows over her head. Just because she wanted to give herself didn’t mean he would take her. Why should he? She was a crocodile. She bit. Nikki suddenly flung the pillows off, hoisted herself up on her elbows and stared at the door. It was opening. Her heart began to slam.

Jim Thelton stood there staring into the room.

“Oh, Jim! My God, you scared me!”

“I heard something. I was taking a nap.”

She reddened. “Sorry. Sorry I woke you. I didn’t know anybody was home.” She stared at him.

“I didn’t either. Well …” he hesitated, started to back out.

“Jim!”

He waited.

“Don’t go!” she said urgently. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Well …” He stood rooted for a moment, then, blinking, peered more closely at her and walked into the room.

Her physical consciousness suspended, Nikki remained in the same startled position she’d assumed when she heard the door opening. One leg remained flat on the blue-satin coverlet, her bare foot extended, the toes curling downward; she had drawn the other foot back and her knee was up so that her thighs were parted. During her writhings on the bed her pink capri pants had twisted and crawled up at the crotch.

As Jim reached the edge of the bed and stood over her, she became acutely aware of herself on her back. Propped on her elbows, her slender upper body was raised and the soft flesh of her upper abdomen formed a little hollow between the winglike contours of her lower ribs, and her breasts, unconfined by a bra and separately outlined by the cling of her red sweater, were lifted toward him.

Her pale face was turned yieldingly up to his, her green eyes round and shining. As he looked at her she felt a tickling sensation in the points of her breasts, a tiny crawling friction of her flesh against the knit fabric of her sweater as the nipples stirred and tensed, their instinctive femaleness alive to his maleness.

However she tried to suppress it in her mind, there was a memory in her flesh, in her very belly, of the night in her apartment, in his arms, her body hard against his man-body. Compulsively, Nikki’s gaze swept down from his face and up again swiftly.

He turned and strode slowly away, fighting his craving for her. She got herself out of that voluptuous position and was sitting up when he came back to the bed.

“Nikki, you haven’t been crying, have you?”

“Yes.”

“Why, kid?”

She lifted her shoulders in a jerky shrug. “I don’t know.” She drew her knees up and clasped her hands around them. “I don’t know … but I just don’t want to be left alone.”

He lowered himself stiffly, sat on the edge of the bed, his strong square face sober and genuinely anxious about her. “We don’t want you to be unhappy, Nikki.”

Impulsively she reached over and took his hand.

“I’ve been so happy here.”

“We want you to be.” He smiled at her.

“So happy.” She felt choky, and she lowered her face so that her red hair swung forward, across her cheek, giving her profile a veiled sensuality. “Jim, she’s mad at me, isn’t she?”

“Who?”

She gripped his hand tensely, turned her face and stared pleadingly at him. “You know. Dolores. She is, isn’t she?”

He laughed. “The Taffy Head mad at Nikki?”

“Jim! Don’t look away. Tell me the truth. I know I can count on you, Jim!”

“Ah, well, you know how sensitive the Taffy Head can be, sometimes.”

“I knew it,” she cried, her voice thin. Her underlip began to quiver. She nipped it between her teeth.

“Now, now,” he said, his low-pitched voice tender. “She gets miffed at me, too, sometimes. Mostly she was just disappointed that you weren’t here. She missed you. We all did.”

He looked at her with a longing that flickered excitingly on the edge of lust. The power of his desire for her had been constant, and sometimes she had increased the stress on him, making herself almost irresistibly desirable; his solid dependable quality had been proven under fire, and she thought that he was vastly more attractive than Archer Cole. She dropped her eyes, wanting him, wanting him terribly.