The Lost (25 page)

“Shit. It’s locked.” She walked around and tried the passenger side. “Shit!”

Anybody in the lot could have heard her. He all of a sudden felt very exposed. The night air felt too damn thick and too damn warm.

“I don’t suppose you know how to
break into
a car?”

“Jesus, Kath! What the hell are you doing?”

She looked around again and then walked over to a big red Caddy in the corner of the lot and tried all four doors on that one. The Caddy was locked too. Thank god.

“Oh, well. Fuck it. The rest of these junkers aren’t worth the trouble. What the hell. It was an idea.”

She marched back over to his Chevy and smiled like nothing unusual had happened here so he unlocked the passenger side for her, which was about all he could think to do and she opened the door and got in. She tossed the teddy bears in the backseat and then propped them up next to each other.

The hostages were passengers now. He slid behind the wheel.

Was this lady strange or
what?

He couldn’t tell if she was just testing him again or if she’d really have gotten him involved in an auto theft.

Grand theft auto? Jesus!

“Let’s go,” she said.

They rounded the corner up the hill, the dirt road winding through the thick stands of trees and when he stopped he was glad to see there were no other cars or campers anywhere. They’d be alone. He’d had a feeling that they would be. Since the night he’d done the two girls locals tended to avoid the place. Even though Turner’s Pool below was a whole lot better than Alpine across the mountain. Tourists came by every now and then but even some of them got spooked away by what the locals said. As though the place were cursed or something. It was stupid.

He didn’t know why he’d thought to take her here except it felt right. In a way it was his turf. And he had the feeling that they’d be alone here.

She was staring at a blackened campfire site in the headlights.

“What. We’re going camping?”

“Nah. Swimming. There’s a real neat pool down there. You’ll see.”

“You want to swim?”

“It’s a warm night, sure.”

“No swimsuits, Ray.”

“You always use a swimsuit?”

Saying that like maybe
she
was the one who was chicken.

“No towels either.”

“So? We air-dry.”

She looked across the clearing and into the woods beyond and then back. Her smile was complicated again.

“You better have a flashlight.”

“In the glove compartment. Same as with the church key.”

She opened it and took it out.

“Okay. Swimming.”

She turned on the flashlight and got out of the car and he pointed her toward the path leading down to the pool and then they were moving through the thick tangled woods and down over the rocks and she was giving him hardly any slack at all, using the flashlight in front of her and only rarely sweeping it back to him but he knew this path almost as well as he knew his own apartment. He and Tim had been coming here forever. Only once did he lose his footing and there was a tree beside him to grab on to so she never even knew it had happened.

At the narrow pebble shoreline she stood there letting the light play over the black expanse of water. It sounded like a thousand frogs were out there in the darkness hidden from the beam.

“Leeches,” she said.

“It’s possible. That bother you?”

“Not if it doesn’t bother you. I mean, the thought of a leech on your dick.”

“My dick will have to take its chances.”

She kicked off her tennis shoes and stepped into the water.

“Chilly.”

“That should keep down the leeches.”

“Enough with the leeches, Ray.”

He laughed. He could tell the idea bothered her. Maybe not scared her exactly but bothered her. Close enough. He felt a slight shift in the balance of power. If you managed to scare somebody you always had the advantage. For the first time all night long and maybe both nights together he felt he had one up on her.

So push it
, he thought.

“Twenty bucks says you haven’t got the guts to go in first without me. Face all those nasty leeches all by yourself. Maybe even a snake or two. Who knows?”

“I thought this was your idea. Cool in the pool.”

“I’ll be right in after you. Twenty bucks.”

“You want to watch me get naked. Right?”

He gave her the smile. “Who, me? No interest at all.”

“Make it thirty and you even get to hold the flashlight. How’s that for a deal?”

“Okay, thirty’s fine. You want it now or later?”

“Later. I’ll trust you.”

She hesitated a moment and then handed him the flashlight and he turned it on her, right into her eyes to see how she’d take it but she didn’t hardly blink, just pulled the sweater off over her head and dropped it onto the sand and already he had a raging hard-on. She was staring directly into the light. She unzipped the miniskirt and stepped out of it and dropped it on top of the sweater and then reached around to unhook the bra and slipped it off her shoulders and tossed it down, hooked the panties with her thumbs and skidded them down over her hips and stood there.

“Go ahead, Ray. Move the flashlight around a little. Have a good look. Have fun. You can see my face anytime, right?”

He held it on her a moment more and then moved it down. He took his time. When he got back to her face again she said, “Think I’ll take that swim now.”

She turned and waded into the water and he followed her with the light until she was in up to her shoulders, he was hardly able to look away from her, from her ass disappearing in front of him into darkness and the dimples in the small of her back and then he scrambled out of his own clothes and naked, plunged in after her. The water was like ice cubes on his stiff prick and had the effect of melting it but that was okay too and he swam fast and hard watching her own slow measured strokes ahead of him and soon he caught up with her.

She turned and they were only a few feet apart treading water face-to-face. He was warmer now.

The frogs had gone silent. He heard them tentatively start in again.

“Now what?”

He reached for her through the water and she pushed his hand away. She was smiling.

“Thirty bucks bought you a look, Ray. Not a feel.”

“Shit, what am I gonna have to pay for a kiss?”

“You already did kiss me and it was free. But it’s not a kiss you want, is it.”

“It’d do for starters.”

She looked at him a long moment.

“Tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll have a little race to shore. You beat me, you can fuck me. How’s that.”

“What?”

“You having a hearing problem? You can fuck me.”

She’d had his dick’s complete attention ever since they’d started treading water and now it was close to painful. He nodded toward the shoreline.

“You mean right now?”

“If you want we can wait a couple of weeks. Yeah, right now.”

“You’re not just messing with me?”

“Bet’s a bet.”

“And if you beat me? I mean it won’t happen. I’m just saying, if.”

She thought about it.

“I can’t think which you’re more fond of Ray, your car or your boots. Suppose we say you give me your boots.”

He laughed. “You sure do like your games, don’t you.”

“As much as you like yours.”

“This one, though. You can’t lose.”

“Either way I win?”

“Either way.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. You ready? We go on three. One, two,
three. “

And it wasn’t just the prospect of fucking her that propelled him through the water though god knows that was the main thing but it was also the boots and what was stuffed
inside
the boots too, she wasn’t going to get a peek inside those babies if he could help it and get a laugh at Ray Pye’s expense
plus
the boots cost a fortune
plus
there was the matter of his pride so he swam like every leech and snake in Sussex County was after him, catching a glimpse of her only just slightly behind to the side graceful and barely cutting the water and gaining on him steadily for chrissake while he pounded at the water like the water was the enemy and kicked at it like it was some kid he was kicking the shit out of in a schoolyard and soon he stumbled gasping onto shore and fell to his back to the pebble beach and she fell right beside him.

“You won,” she panted.

He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or not. He knew
he
was. She’d scared hell out of him back there, coming up on him like that.

She wasn’t as winded as he was but still she was breathing hard, she had her arms up over her head, looking straight up at the stars. He watched her breasts rise and fall, beads of water rolling down, water in the hollow of her belly, hair plastered back so that for the first time he could fully see her ears and the shape of them, to his eyes perfect like the all rest of her, looking back to her breasts and the long dark nipples, looking down to the glistening pubic hair, the proximity of what he was seeing making him start to rise again.

“You gonna cop out on me?” he said.

She still didn’t look at him.

“No.”

And with just that single word breathed quietly and without emotion into the still night air he went fully erect and rolled onto her.

Her skin was cool and wet like his, her mouth hot but the kiss didn’t last, she turned away from the kiss and he thought in a moment of panic that something must be wrong, his breath or something until he looked into her eyes and saw that things were fine. She reached down between his legs and put him inside her and began rolling her hips and moving up and down beneath him. She closed her eyes and turned her head offering him her neck, and he kissed and bit the water-sweet flesh and went suddenly to some place beyond himself, beyond sheer sensation, overriding his senses somehow,
it was like watching himself in a movie, only not like any movie he’d ever seen, he could see himself take her breast in hand and turn the nipple, see his ass pumping his back straining as though from a great height, as though he were outside himself watching. She was silent and he was moaning and he heard this too as though these were two other people not Ray and Katherine and then suddenly he was coming and that was far too real and not part of the movie not part of the plan because it was
far too early,
he’d only just begun, he’d only just gotten a taste of her but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop, and he groaned his disappointment and shuddered his pleasure, both
.

When it was over he lay on top of her awhile feeling himself shrink inside her and then slowly rolled away. He felt the sweat drying along his chest and hips. He was aware of his heart still racing, moving slowly from gallop to down to canter.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“That was a little fast.”

“I’ve had faster. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.” She gave the tip of his dick a flick with her forefinger. “Either head.”

But he couldn’t help but worry. First Jennifer couldn’t get him hard and now this.

With the one girl he needed.

He realized that actually was the word for it. It surprised him.

Needed
.

He didn’t know how or when that had happened or how it had happened so fast but right now the thought of not having her, of losing her to some other guy and maybe just because of this stupid fast fuck by the pool was unthinkable, impossible to consider. There was no goddamn way he was going to let that happen. If he did he was just another loser and probably she had a pretty long list of losers in her past, a girl like her. It was just not going to happen. Not to him. No fucking way. He had to find a way to grab her and hold her. He’d do just about anything, say just about anything to hold her.

He had to put his mark on her.

One way or another.

He had to piss on her tree.

“I never should have brought you down here,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

He looked away from her down along the dark narrow beach.

“Remember last night you asked me what was the worst thing I ever did? And I told you about trashing the house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was a lie.”

“Trashing the house?”

“No. We trashed the house, all right. But that wasn’t the worst thing I ever did.”

And then he told her.

Later driving back to her place he didn’t know exactly
why
he told her. It had come crashing down into his brain all at once, the telling and the aftermath of the telling, like a movie where you already knew the ending from the first few minutes of the story. He didn’t know why he told her, only knew that it had been the right thing to do. Of that he was absolutely certain now. He’d
felt
its lightness. He knew that telling her had set him apart from every other guy she’d ever met. Whether she believed him or not.