Star Time (5 page)

"Look, I know this is short notice, but if you don't have any plans for tonight, maybe we could get together." Greg suddenly grew apprehensive. "I've had an idea for a story—maybe even stretch it over several nights—about the influences on the election races shaping up in California this year. I thought we could talk about it over dinner."

"I'd love to." Her answer was swift, her tone elated.

"Great."

"The only thing is
,
I'm supposed to hang around here till nine in case another story breaks or my piece is recut for the eleven-o'clock and I have to record new narration."

"Tell the assignment desk you'll keep calling in. We'll have dinner nearby just in case. Pick you up outside the station at seven."

"Seven.
My turn to treat."

Greg hung up and returned to the table. He fabricated an excuse to his date about a critical story suddenly breaking and his need to get to the newsroom.

"Can you meet us later?" she asked, trying to sound understanding.

"Doesn't look like it."

"You and I haven't seen each other in over a week," she reminded him.

"I'll call you in a couple of days."

He strode quickly toward the locker room to strip off his tennis clothes and take a shower. His skin felt as if it were on fire.

During dinner neither Greg nor Chris kept up the pretense that they were meeting to discuss work. Both were gripped by an intense attraction. The crumbling of Greg's resolve seemed to confirm to both that its force was irresistible. When nine o'clock passed with no phone call from the newsroom, he suggested they drive to the ocean, which Chris had never seen. She had never even seen sand.

"It's near my apartment," he said.

The moon, round and luminous as an electric coil, seemed to blow white heat at them across the water. She stood straight, he noticed, even
in the sand, where she might be expected to flex her body against the unfamiliar unsteadiness; it occurred to him that she was a woman who did not appear to recognize compromise.

She gazed at the vastness for a long time. She had never seen water extend all the way to the sky and glanced at him to share her wonder. A silver sheen rolled down her cheek and along her neck into the hollow of her throat. It ended abruptly where the curve of her breast ducked behind her blouse.

The thought of her breasts, cool and concealed beneath the fabric, stirred him. He leaned forward and kissed her, then took her into his arms. He was hard almost at once, insistent and uncomfortable against her leg. She surprised him with her boldness: opening her mouth to taste his tongue and shifting her body to meet his.

When he drew away to stare into her eyes, black disks now with a thin blue circumference, they met his forthrightly, not masking her desire. His hand slid from the small of her back and around her ribs until it cupped a breast. Her breasts were small and high, needing no bra. He rolled her nipple gently through the blouse. Her eyes closed, and her lips parted.

"Let's go to my place," he said.

Wordlessly, each with an arm around the other's waist, they trudged back over the uncertain footing to the street and across to his apartment house.

He undressed her slowly on the bed, wanting to see and touch each part of her body as it was revealed. He liked her naturalness about her nakedness and about sex, the pleasure she took in her own pleasure and his. When his finger dipped into the wetness folded between her thighs, her hips rose to meet it.

He started to open his night table drawer.

“You don’t need one,” she told him.

He moved to place himself above her, watching her face in the stripe of light across the pillow. Her thighs gripped his hips as he filled her and found a slow, rolling rhythm.

Perfect," she sighed.

He did not reply, but he sensed something supernatural and glorious dancing out of the dark corners of the room and into the hidden places in their bodies, something that turned nerve endings into fuses burning toward a culmination that eventually shook through them, first her and then him, and obliterated thought.

For Greg and Chris nothing would ever be the same.

2

Greg gazed at Chris's naked profile supine beside him in the moonlight. The rise and fall of her breasts appeared too rapid for sleep.

"Are you awake?" he asked.

"Yes."

"What are you thinking?"

"That you felt good inside me."

"You sound like you didn't expect me to."

"I was a little afraid you'd be, well, unemotional." She rolled toward him, reaching up to brush a stray lock of hair away from his face. "Sometimes you seem sweet and giving. Other times you're purposely impenetrable."

Greg's expression was impassive, but inwardly he was disconcerted by how accurately she had read him. Once in a while he envisioned himself as being two separate people: the outer one larger, impregnable, from which the inner peered out like the Wizard of Oz manipulating the other’s actions; the outer Greg was the sentinel: careful, premeditated, censoring words of the too spontaneous inner man that provided no advantage in revealing.

Chris was staring into his eyes. She frowned and quickly sat up on her side of the bed.

"You look as if you won't feel safe until I'm out of here. I'm going."

An odd word, but accurate, he realized.
"Where to?"

"My hotel."

"It's"—he looked at the clock radio—"three forty-two in the morning."

"I don't want to overstay my welcome." She had followed behind him here in her rented car.

He reached out for her arm. "If I thought you were, I'd tell you."

She swung around to peer into his eyes again. "No, you might not. You might make me feel ill at ease, so I'd leave on my own and you wouldn't feel responsible."

Greg was discomfited. "You always say what you're thinking?"

"I try to. You don’t?"

"No," he admitted, "not always. Sometimes, it can be hurtful . . . or counterproductive."

He pulled her gently back down to the bed. She did not resist him. He kissed her.

"I’m truly not trying to be impenetrable now." His smile bent into seductive invitation.
"How about you?"

"That's the last thing I want to be right now."

The next kiss swiftly deepened into arousal that swept them away once more.

They stayed in bed making love, conversing, regretfully dozing, until well into Sunday afternoon. Greg was astonished at the zeal of her lovemaking. As a lover she was as intensely passionate as about everything else she cared about. Her ardor foreclosed a retreat to vigilance or a resort to calculated finesse.

At four in the afternoon, she borrowed a shirt and rolled up the bottom of a pair of his jeans, and they went for a walk along the beach. She's precisely who she is, he realized as he glanced at her striding along beside him. A Westerner: candid, skeptical, self-reliant, no-nonsense. And beneath that: unexpectedly, deeply passionate.

He realized that all the time he had been with her he had been precisely who
he
was: singular, unified, instinctive,
natural
. He had been truly open to her and to the turbulent emotions she evoked. Words had been on his tongue before they had been weighed by his mind.

On the way back to his apartment, Greg bought fried chicken and beer at a take-out restaurant. Just inside his building's doorway, he impulsively kissed her, provoking anew in both of them appetites that stifled physical hunger.

The food lay uneaten for hours.
When they finally discovered that she liked white meat and he dark but that both liked to sip their beer from the bottle, in a silly way the rightness of their pairing seemed to be confirmed.
She also insisted on handing him exactly one-half what the food had cost; she was not yet ready for the assumptions implicit in taking more than she gave.

Neither had ever been in love, and neither—for different reasons—was prepared to admit that love had seized them. Chris wisely wanted time to know Greg better and comprehend what was happening to her before dismissing the caution within. She instinctively suspected any kind of exaggeration or excess, and what she was feeling was exorbitant, luxuriant, blinding. For his part Greg was unwilling to believe that an accidental liaison, completely unprepared for, could rout a lifetime's careful planning.

Chris had fallen so quickly and so hard for Greg because he had thoroughly disoriented her. Having no emotional ties in Wichita and wanting none here, wanting only to work hard and succeed, she had been confronted on her very first day with a man she had found disturbingly
attractive, whose strength, intelligence, and apparently character matched her own. His rejection of her at that first dinner had embarrassed her, despite the humor with which she had coated the moment. For all her frankness Chris was a woman who wounded easily and rarely risked exposing her inner feelings to the possibility of hurt. Consequently, the impact of Greg's return to her was magnified. Her rampantly sexual response overwhelmed them both.

For as long as she could remember, Christine
Paskins
had fought to be taken seriously. Watching her father teach her older brothers to fish and play ball and pushing them to achieve in school, Chris was galled to be ignored in the guise of being cherished. To her parents' horror she insisted on boys for playmates and gave no quarter in the roughest of games, parading her skinned knees home like badges. Her parents might punish her disobedience, but she refused to capitulate. She slaved over her homework in private and then dared them not to be proud of her when she excelled.

Chris sensed her mother's discontent at being solely a wife and mother. She saw a larger world for herself. As a result she grew up both angry at those who might block her from her rightful place in the larger world and craving recognition. In her adolescent fantasies she always played the champion of everyone not granted a fair chance in life.

One evening, during the summer before Chris was to go off to the University of Wyoming, Sam
Paskins
came home with a copy of that week's edition of his paper just off the press. Chris had written the cover story, a searching analysis of the effect federal land policies were having on the area's ranchers. He did not notice his daughter at the kitchen table, clipping off the ends of the string beans they would eat for dinner.

"Molly," he exclaimed to his wife, "I want you to read this. That girl's got the stuff to make it in newspapers."

"I've already told you,” Chris said, without looking up. I'm going to be a TV reporter."

"But you're good enough for newspapers."

She was beaming, but
unswayed
. Fearing she might grow swelled-headed with the praise, he immediately lessened it.

"Or might be after you get some experience."

No reduction in the compliment could steal back the approval he had bestowed. She did not argue with him. She simply shook her head. Everyone in the family had long since learned that when Chris shook her head, bulldozers could not budge her resolve.

Molly
Paskins
laughed at her husband's exasperation. "You're too late by years, Sam."

"But my God, Molly,
television!"
He said it as if his daughter were considering a career in prostitution.

"She's a woman, Sam. When we women have news for the neighbors, we can't be bothered waiting for printing presses to roll it out and trucks to deliver it and people to get around to reading it. We want them to hear it right now and from us." Her glance at her daughter was full of pride. "And Chris won't let anyone stop her when she has something she wants to say."

Among the qualities that attracted Chris to Greg was that he really listened to her. He really liked women, and he really listened. She felt her feelings might be safe with a man like that.

On Monday, Greg drove Chris to her hotel for fresh clothing and then to the television station in the tower on the FBS lot. Along the way they decided that discretion about their new relationship was the wisest course—the only course, really. If he learned about their romance, Stew would certainly fire her to forestall staff jealousies and divisions. Her termination would separate the lovers, block Chris's career, and lessen Stew's faith in Greg.

All that first Monday morning, it took a lot of willpower for Chris's face not to register delight when her eyes happened to meet his or to keep a happy exclamation from spilling out of Greg when he happened to encounter her. The strain was especially hard on her, who had never acquired his habit of self-protective concealment.

At an editorial staff meeting, they took care to sit on opposite sides of the room as Stew made some announcements. Secrecy bound them.

In the days that followed, dissimulation in public became a habit to which both adjusted. Occasionally, Chris went out to cover stories that Greg supervised as producer, but their paths usually crossed only in passing and in the afternoon, when they were back in the building readying pieces for the broadcast; they were both then too intent on their work to exchange more than a quick smile and a sentence or two. But even in those brief moments, joy at the unexpected encounter would leap within them like a puppy at the door.
Whenever they were alone together, the passion that both had expected gradually to abate continued to overwhelm them.
Increasingly, the realization became inescapable that they were in love.