Lawrence Block - No Score

“Oh. Virgo.”

“My name’s Hallie.”

“Mine’s Chip.”

“That’s very together. I like that.” She sipped her coffee and made a face.

“It’s pretty bad coffee,” I said.

“The worst. But everybody’s closed at this hour. Do you work or what?”

“Over at the car wash. They wash and I dry.”

“That sounds fair enough.”

“I don’t love it, but it’s a job.”

“I think that’s where I may have seen you. And you know, walking around.”

I looked at her again. “I’ve seen you, too. I think. With a sort of stocky guy? With shoulders?”

“My brother.”

“Oh.”

“He’s in the Service. The Infantry.”

“Oh.”

“He enlisted to get it over with and now he’s sorry. He hates it.”

“I can imagine.”

“He thought it would get better after basic training, but he says it’s the same shuck all around, and now he thinks they’re going to send him overseas.”

“Rough.”

“You know it.”

I looked at her again. She was damned attractive, although it was the kind of goodlookingness that you didn’t notice right off. It didn’t wave and shout at you, but after you saw it a few times you began to appreciate it. She looked very clean and cool and casual, and she talked with her whole face. I mean, she didn’t keep throwing smiles and winks at you and do things with her eyebrows, nothing like that. But the expression on her face always went along with what she was saying. A lot of the time a person’s mouth will go off in one direction while their mind is somewhere else.

We didn’t talk about anything very important. I told her about some of the apple knockers I had met, and she talked about spending summers on her uncle’s farm when she was a kid. I hadn’t really talked to a girl this way in I don’t know how long. I used to talk to Aileen in Chicago, but that was all screwed up by the fact that I was all hung up on her sexually. With Hallie, sex didn’t have anything to do with it. Not that she wouldn’t have appealed to me, but that I had gone through some real changes and I wasn’t the same horny kid I had been a couple of hours ago.

She had a second cup of the terrible coffee, and I kept her company and had a fourth. When she finished hers I said I thought I would probably go for a walk, and she said maybe some fresh air would do her good, help her get to sleep. We each paid for our own coffee and went outside together.

We walked two or three blocks without talking. But it was an easy silence, not one of those uncomfortable ones where you try to think of something to say and keep running different sentences through your mind. It was completely relaxed. I didn’t even get lost in my own thoughts. I just walked along, hardly thinking of anything.

Then she said, “Chip?” I looked at her and for a second her eyes seemed so deep that I could see for miles into them. Then she lowered them and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

She said, “I live at home with my folks.”

“I know.”

“We could go to your place.”

“If you’re tired of walking, sure.”

“I mean if you wanted to ball or anything. Not to come on strong, but like I have to go to college tomorrow so there’s no time to let things just happen. I think they would happen because I sort of dig you and everything, and even our signs are compatible, Virgo and Capricorn, or at least I think they are, but I don’t really know much about it. Astrology.”

“Neither do I.”

“So if you don’t want to, just say so.” Her teeth attacked her lower lip. “Whatever you say.”

“I live upstairs of Bruno’s Barbershop. On the next block.”

“I know where it is.”

“There’s no door to my room. It got broken and I had to take it off, but there’s nobody else in the place at night so it doesn’t matter if there’s a door or not.”

“How did the door get broken?”

“A guy kicked it in. If you don’t mind about there not being a door—”

“Well, it wouldn’t matter if we’re the only ones in the building, would it?”

“No.”

“So,” she said.

I took hold of her hand. It felt much smaller in mine than you would have expected. We walked to the corner, turned, went to my place, and climbed the stairs. I put a light on and apologized for the mess. She said it didn’t matter. She said it looked romantic, with the slanting roof and the exposed rafters. “Like a garret,” she said. “You’ll be a great but unknown artist dying of tuberculosis and I’ll be your mistress and model, and you’ll get drunk and cough and spit blood and beat me.”

I kissed her. She kissed in the same fresh open way she talked, holding nothing back. We stood there kissing for a long time.

Then she took her sweatshirt off and turned around so that I could unhook her bra for her. She kicked off her sandals and stepped out of her dungarees and threw all her clothes in the corner. She stood watching eagerly as I got my clothes off and tossed them after hers. She put out her hand and touched me, and we floated down onto the bed like falling leaves.

“Oh, wow,” she said. She burrowed close to me, her head tucked under my arm. “That was—”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like unbelievable.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s never been this good for me before.” She rolled over on her back and folded her hands together just below her breasts. I looked at her. She said, “I wish they were bigger.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Tiny.”

“So?”

“So I can never be an actress in Italian movies.”

“I can’t play basketball.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing important.”

She sat up, looked down at me. “That’s the cutest thing,” she said.

“I’m sort of attached to it.”

“So am I, but in another way. It’s so beautiful. Do you think it would get all embarrassed if I gave it a kiss?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

She curled into a ball and nestled her head in my lap. Her hair was clean and silky all over my legs.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

I closed them, but then I cheated and opened them again. It was so beautiful to watch her. She had her eyes shut and her face glowed with contentment. She looked like a baby nursing.

She stopped to say, “What a funny taste!”

“That’s you.”

“It is? I guess it must be. Funny.”

She came up for air again to say, “It must like me. Look how big it got.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I really groove on sucking you. Is that terribly perverted of me?”

“Only of you don’t do anything else.”

“What else should I do?”

I stretched her out on her back and showed her.

Later on she was dozing lightly. I put my hand on her arm and her eyes opened.

“I don’t want to scare you or anything, Hallie, but did I hurt you before?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, look.” I pointed to the stain. “That must have come from one of us, and I wouldn’t say anything, but if I did hurt you or anything—”

“Oh,” she said.

“I just thought—”

“I guess I bled a little. I didn’t realize.”

“Is that common? I mean, oh, do you usually?”

She turned away. “Well, see—”

“What?”

“I should have told you, I guess. But we had such a good thing going and I didn’t want anything to get in the way.” Her eyes met mine. “I’m a virgin. I mean I was. Until just now. Chip? What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“It’s not important.” I put my hands on her. “Look, when do you have to get up in the morning? What I’m getting at is how much longer can you stay?”