Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

She learned to feign sleep. She’d lie awake, and at last her door would ease open and he’d be in her room, and he’d stand there while she pretended to be asleep, then get into bed with her. He’d hold her and pet her, and his presence would somehow give her permission to fall genuinely asleep.

Then, when she was thirteen, when her body had begun to change, there was a night when he came to her bed and slipped beneath the covers. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I know you’re awake.” And he held her and touched her and kissed her.

The holding and touching and kissing was different that night, and she recognized it as such immediately, and somehow knew that it would be a secret, that she could never tell anybody. And yet no enormous barriers were crossed that night. He was very gentle with her, always gentle, and his seduction of her was infinitely gradual. She had since read how the Plains Indians took wild horses and domesticated them, not by breaking their spirits but by slowly, slowly winning them over, and the description resonated with her immediately, because that was precisely how her father had turned her from a child who sat so innocently on his lap into an eager and spirited sexual partner.

He never broke her spirit. What he did was awaken it.

He came to her every night for months, and by the time he took her virginity she had long since lost her innocence, because he had schooled her quite thoroughly in the sexual arts. There was no pain on the night he led her across the last divide. She had been well prepared, and was entirely ready.

Away from her bed, they were the same as they’d always been.

“Nothing can show,” he’d explained. “No one would understand the way you and I love each other. So we must not let them know. If your mother knew—”

He hadn’t needed to finish that sentence.

“Someday,” he’d told her, “you and I will get in the car, and we’ll drive to some city where no one knows us. We’ll both be older then, and the difference in our ages won’t be that remarkable, especially when we’ve tacked on a few years to you and shaved them off of me. And we’ll live together, and we’ll get married, and no one will be the wiser.”

She tried to imagine that. Sometimes it seemed like something that could actually happen, something that would indeed come about in the course of time. And other times it seemed like a story an adult might tell a child, right up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

“But for now,” he’d said more than once, “for now we have to be soldiers. You’re my little soldier, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

“I get to New York now and then,” Doug Pratter said.

“I suppose you and your wife fly in,” she said. “Stay at a nice hotel, see a couple of shows.”

“She doesn’t like to fly.”

“Well, who does? What they make you go through these days, all in the name of security. And it just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it? First they started giving you plastic utensils with your in-flight meal, because there’s nothing as dangerous as a terrorist with a metal fork. Then they stopped giving you a meal altogether, so you couldn’t complain about the plastic utensils.”

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? But it’s a short flight. I don’t mind it that much. I just open up a book, and the next thing I know I’m in New York.”

“By yourself.”

“On business,” he said. “Not that frequently, but every once in a while. Actually, I could get there more often, if I had a reason to go.”

“Oh?”

“But lately I’ve been turning down chances,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers now. “Because, see, when my business is done for the day I don’t know what to do with myself. It would be different if I knew anybody there, but I don’t.”

“You know me,” she said.

“That’s right,” he agreed, his eyes finding hers again. “That’s right. I do, don’t I?”

Over the years, she’d read a lot about incest. She didn’t think her interest was compulsive, or morbidly obsessive, and in fact it seemed to her as if it would be more pathological if she were not interested in reading about it.

One case imprinted itself strongly upon her. A man had three daughters, and he had sexual relations with two of them. He was not the artful Daughter Whisperer that her own father had been, but a good deal closer to the Drunken Brute end of the spectrum. A widower, he told the two older daughters that it was their duty to take their mother’s place. They felt it was wrong, but they also felt it was something they had to do, and so they did it.

And, predictably enough, they were both psychologically scarred by the experience. Almost every incest victim seemed to be, one way or the other.

But it was their younger sister who wound up being the most damaged of the three. Because Daddy never touched her, she figured there was something wrong with her. Was she ugly? Was she insufficiently feminine? Was there something disgusting about her?

Jeepers, what was the matter with her, anyway? Why didn’t he want her?

After the dishes were cleared, Doug suggested a brandy. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t usually drink this much early in the day.”

“Actually, neither do I. I guess there’s something about the occasion that feels like a celebration.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Some coffee? Because I’m in no hurry for this to end.”

She agreed that coffee sounded like a good idea. And it was pretty good coffee, and a fitting conclusion to a pretty good meal. Better than a person might expect to find on the outskirts of Toledo.

How did he know the place? Did he come here with his wife? She somehow doubted it. Had he brought other women here? She doubted that as well. Maybe it was something he’d picked up at the office water cooler. “So I took her to this Eye-tie place on Detroit Avenue, and then we just popped into the Comfort Inn down the block, and I mean to tell you that girl was good to go.”

Something like that.

“I don’t want to go back to the office,” he was saying. “All these years, and then you walk back into my life, and I’m not ready for you to walk out of it again.”

You were the one who walked, she thought. Clear to Bowling Green.

But what she said was, “We could go to my hotel room, but a downtown hotel right in the middle of the city—”

“Actually,” he said, “there’s a nice place right across the street.”

“Oh?”

“A Holiday Inn, actually.”

“Do you think they’d have a room at this hour?”

He managed to look embarrassed and pleased with himself, all at the same time. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a reservation.”

She was four months shy of her eighteenth birthday when everything changed.

What she came to realize, although she hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, was that things had already been changing for some time. Her father came a little less frequently to her bed, sometimes telling her he was tired from a hard day’s work, sometimes explaining that he had to stay up late with work he’d brought home, sometimes not bothering with an explanation of any sort.

Then one afternoon he invited her to come for a ride. Sometimes rides in the family car would end at a motel, and she thought that was what he planned on this occasion. In anticipation, no sooner had he backed the car out of the driveway than she’d dropped her hand into his lap, stroking him, awaiting his response.

He pushed her hand away.

She wondered why, but didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything, either, not for ten minutes of suburban streets. Then abruptly he pulled into a strip mall, parked opposite a shuttered bowling alley, and said, “You’re my little soldier, aren’t you?”