Nikki (23 page)

He fitted his hot, wet lips to hers, and for long seconds their mouths remained fastened. Her hand embraced his head, holding him tightly. She released his head and pushed his face aside.

“I couldn’t do it,” she said in a barely audible voice. “Do you know what I wanted to do?”

“What, sweetest?” he said tenderly.

“I wanted to vomit in your mouth.”

Shock and revulsion froze his body in mid-stroke. For a second she thought he might beat her face with his fists. “You sicken me! That was the most disgusting thing I ever heard. You turn me cold with loathing.”

He started to withdraw, and he couldn’t do it. She laughed at him. His fever and desire locked and held him until he had used himself completely. For her, the big bed had no magic after all; the session left her tense and completely unsatisfied.

He seethed in silence while they dressed.

Downstairs again, afterward, Nikki stood indifferently at a mirror, combing her hair, while he paced like a caged tiger in back of her, throwing sizzling glances in her direction.

“Cat got your tongue, lover?” she said coyly. “Bet you want to say something pretty to me.”

“Pretty! To a nasty slut who’d puke in my mouth?”

She turned and gave him a tight little one-sided grin, looking directly into his eyes. “Considering how messy it would have been for
me
, you’ll realize I never had the slightest intention of doing such a thing. Now, Jim, if my few words failed to convey what I feel about your love—”

“Love!”

“Can you mean,” she faltered brokenly, giving him a mock-tragic look, “that you have ceased to love me?” She shrugged and changed her tone flippantly. “Oh, well. With rest and vitamins your love will rise again.”

He pulled in a long breath and expelled it, saying in a soft, fervent half-whisper, “Damn you. Oh, damn you to hell. I can’t stand the sight of you, you spoiled, arrogant bitch.” His voice became guttural and quivering, and his mouth twitched. “Why, you’re not fit to sweep Dolores’s floors. You said the truth the other day. You destroy. Whatever is good and solid and fine, you destroy. You’re not a loving, but a hating, woman. Not even a woman, but an animal creature. You’re … you’re …” His voice clogged with outrage and he spun, walked stiff-leggedly away, came back, stood with his arms rigid at his sides, his fists clenched.

“Evil!” she said in a knife-thin voice. “Evil. That’s the old word you’re reaching for. Don’t be so modern … say the old word. Say it. Fie, and for shame, on the evil creature. Point your finger, why don’t you? Take a high stance! I corrupted your purity and goodness. The Devil owns me and sent my luring flesh to tempt you.” She snorted. “The Devil was in a bored, trivial mood. No, don’t chicken out and walk away; just you take an earful from
me
, minister!

“I thought you were a man, but you’re a child. Dolores marches you up to bed when she wants you. She orders you to admit you got your hands on me, like Mama talking to a naughty boy, and you bury your little face in her skirt and weasel out I took your man’s word, your honorable word, after that business in my apartment, that you’d let me alone. Then yesterday when I was down, crying, upset and off balance and wanting your love so much I knew I couldn’t resist, I left it in your hands. You
wouldn’t
use your strength.

“All right, I asked too much. I can’t blame you. I could have avoided a lot of things; I made myself provocative too many times. The pressure I put on you was too much. But the more you could take the more I loved you. I felt protected and good and safe.” She broke off with a hopeless sigh. “But of course, you’re right, you’re right—the blame is mine, all of it. There was a compulsion in me to test you to the breaking point, past the breaking point.”

He walked out of the room. Presently he reappeared in the doorway in his coat and hat. “Where are you going?” she cried.

“Out!” He pulled his hatbrim low, looked at her bleakly. “For the night.”

“But I want to get out of here. Somebody must stay with the children till Dolores gets back.” He was out of sight; she ran and followed him down the hall, outside to the garage. “What can I tell her?”

“Whatever you damned please!” He got into his car and slammed the door.

After an hour the waiting became unbearable. Nikki was acutely conscious of the beat of her heart, fast, but steadily fast, as if her whole system was geared higher, rushing her more swiftly to the end of her life span. She paced through the house and up and down almost ceaselessly. For the fifth time she went upstairs, crept into the peaceful darkness of the children’s room, and absorbed the peace into herself, but in a minute she was gone, pacing again.

Repeatedly she tried sitting down, and she would succeed in a physical relaxation for the space of a dozen breaths. Then the pressure would build again and she would be up, moving, trying to ease the nervous tension. She heard the whine of a climbing car. She stopped, listened. Headlights washed across the window. Seconds later she saw it was Dolores’s car. A shallow wave-like roll of muscular tension ran upward from her pelvis to her diaphragm.

She walked swiftly to the rear entrance, a sense of swirling, volatile forces gathering within her. She watched through the door glass, feeling like Dolores’s old name for her, the Storm Front.

Dolores saw that Jim’s car was gone and she came hurrying toward the house. She came in, an anxious, flustered expression on her babyish face. Her eyes swung to Nikki and she seemed to feel the muted force of some powerful, unrelieved charge in her. For an instant the pale blue eyes were as round and blank as a doll’s.

She blinked once, then she shaped her soft lips into a kiss, saying, “Where’s—”

“Gone, that’s where. For the night. And I’m to tell you any damned thing I please!” Whether it was the words or the sharp cutting tone of her voice, Nikki saw Dolores’s sensitive pretty little face wince. A little of the blood seemed to pull from her cheeks and there was a visible quickening of her breathing.

“He didn’t say where? Or why?”

“Me, I’m why. I drove him out.”

Dolores was pulling off her gloves, wadding them into her coat pockets. She looked down, a frown puckering between her brows. She started to move and Nikki took a lithe, dancing sidestep and blocked her.

“Can’t you look at me?”

They stood challengingly face to face, Nikki’s green eyes staring with a high brilliance into the paler blue eyes.

“Yes, I can look at you,” Dolores said, a nervous little edge of fright in her voice. She took an uncertain half-step backward, turning her head to glance around. Her fluffy blonde hair swung a little, and suddenly Nikki caught a fistful of it. She tugged lightly, pulling Dolores’s head around.

Dolores’s eyes came to the corners and she whispered, “Don’t, Nikki. You don’t want to hurt me.”

She let her head be turned. She lifted her hand, wrapped it around Nikki’s, trying to pry her fingers loose. Nikki held. Dolores’s purse fell to the floor as she put her other hand on Nikki’s cheek, the fingers spread and curved, her nails pressing lightly into the flesh.

“Let go, Nikki!” she said huskily. “Please, let’s not fight.”

Nikki thrust her weight forward against Dolores’s body and, bumping and driving, she backed her against the wall and pinioned her. “So you’d claw me!”

They stood pressed together, their faces inches apart. Dolores let her hand glide limply away and her eyes moved sadly over Nikki’s face; then she dropped her gaze. “You know I couldn’t bear doing anything to your face. Please let me go, Nikki. I want to look in on the children.”

Nikki released her hair and Dolores moved quickly to the front of the hall, swinging out of her short coat. Nikki followed and said, as Dolores hung up the coat, “I’ve got plenty to say to you, so come right back down!”

Dolores nodded, mute.

Nikki stood waiting for Dolores in the middle of the living room, her feet apart, her fists on her hips, her dramatic, lovely face pushed forward toward the entrance, her green eyes sparkling with anticipation.

Dolores entered with a hurrying timidity and stopped a few feet away. She waited, her arms dropped defenselessly, and looked at Nikki as though struck by the vividness of her face, the brilliance of her bright blue jumper and yellow blouse, and most of all by the aggressiveness of her stance. Nikki’s high tension was suddenly free of pain and she had a rushed, tingling sense of excitement.

She lashed out, “You think you’re so genteel and secure!” She tossed her head scornfully. “All you’ve got here is a tranquilized jungle!” She made a wide-sweeping motion, the thin material of her blouse fluttering against her slender arm. She saw Dolores’s eyes follow the motion as though entranced. “A tranquilized jungle!”

Nikki strutted forward, ran her eye sneeringly up and down Dolores, then walked in a complete circle around her and faced her again. “All these nice lady-and-gentlemen grasses and flowers would be strangled and swallowed in two months by the really fit-to-survive tough brush and weeds if you stopped the yard maintenance. You know why? Because your pretty little plants are as unnatural and fake as your whole way of life.”

She jabbed a stiff forefinger into the softness of Dolores’s abdomen, making her backstep. “Down there in your belly are the natural instincts, the tough, unpretty
real
you. And without a constant suppression of the truth about yourself the fake, tidy little surface you live on would be just like that yard out there without a service crew. One little breath of the real thing in the way of true, primitive emotion, and down falls your house around your ears.”

“Yes!” Dolores’s cheeks had grown pink and she was blinking very rapidly. “I’ve found that out! Let a pure animal loose in the house and she tries her damnedest …”

Nikki cut her off. “You and every other woman are would-be bitches, and do you know what you owe all your goodness to? You’re scared!”

Dolores took a pack of cigarettes out shakily. She lit one. “Yes, thanks!” Nikki said, snatching it.

“You’re welcome!” Dolores cried shrilly. She lit another smoke for herself. “I’m going to my room; I won’t listen to any more of your viciousness.”

“You’ll listen,” Nikki said in a low, warning voice.

“If I’d turn, you’d leap on my back, you horrid animal!”

Nikki spun, strode to the far end of the room. Dolores hadn’t moved to escape. The flavor of this clash was right; a naked, blaring, full-trumpeted realization of their sweet, softly muted college relationship … Nikki intense and dominant, Dolores submissive, gripped fascinatedly by her drive.

Nikki approached her again, saying, “I always knew you’d never be anything but a child. I’ve seen every day how you try to take on the characteristics of Val. Do you think you can hold your man
that
way?” She thought how sweetly vulnerable Dolores looked, how right was that frill-front pink blouse with its dainty pearl buttons. She pincered out suddenly with thumb and forefinger, twisted one of the pearls off.

“Oh-h-h!” Dolores clasped the empty place and looked ready to cry. “You’ve ruined my new blouse. You belong in a cage!” she suddenly screamed.

“Sh-h-h-h!” Nikki hushed her, pointed upward. “You’ll wake the kids!”

They paused a moment as though mutually agreed that nothing must intrude on the private conflict. Dolores looked guiltily around, then wet her lips and glared back at Nikki.

“I don’t know why I ever invited a creature like you into my home.”

“Because you’re not too damned bright, and because you have no will. You can’t say no, you can’t be offensive. That would take character!”

Dolores stopped, lifted her cigarette shakily to her mouth, and took a long drag. “You’re cruel,” she said. “How can you think of such dreadful, such cutting things. No one in the world can cut like you can, Nikki.”

“Run and bury your pretty little face in your pillow, and cry and kick your little feet about what a bad bad world this is.”

“Oh, I wish I’d never laid eyes on you.”

“Ditto!”

They glared at each other and walked away, turning their heads as though unable to let each other out of their vision. It was a game, exciting them both, and their words were like the detached noises of spectators who had no knowledge of the deep, deep satisfaction they felt in each other.

“I used to idolize you. You were so beautiful, so strong and full of character. And now I hate you.”

“I remember how I used to look forward to coming back to the rooms where you spread that sticky sweetness of yours. But I liked it. Now it merely gags me. I hate you too!”

Suddenly the Taffy Head covered her face with her pretty, flowerlike little hands, and her shoulders heaved with muffled sobs. Nikki swiftly took Dolores’s and her own cigarettes and jabbed them out, and then the tears were streaming down her own cheeks and her throat and heart ached and the two women were suddenly clinging together, holding each other with a fierce necessity, babbling brokenly.

“Nikki, I didn’t mean it.”

“Taffy Head, I wish I could cut my tongue out.”

“How could he resist you? How could any man? He’d be crazy and a nothing-man if he could resist my wonderful, beautiful …”

Crying and petting each other and moving blindly in each others’ arms, they stumbled against the sofa. They let themselves fall, holding to each other, and lay down there together.

“Always, Dolores, you’ve been the best, and no man, no man who could know your goodness and sweet, submissive feminine beauty could ever, ever fail to love you more than anyone in the world. The moment I laid eyes on you I wanted to do this.”

Nikki kissed Dolores’s face all over, stroked her hair. Their bodies were stretched out and pressed together, Nikki on top, Dolores wedged beneath her into the angle of the sofa’s seat and back. Nikki stared down with such intense possessiveness that Dolores shied her eyes away.

“Look at me!” Nikki whispered fiercely.

“We’re getting mussed, Nikki,” Dolores said uneasily. “We’d better get up.”

Nikki hoisted herself on one arm, twisted and stretched the other arm to the lamp on the table in back of the sofa. She turned off the light. Dolores began an uncertain movement as though to sit up. Nikki let her own weight drop back onto her, flattening her with an abrupt force that almost knocked the wind out of Dolores.