T. Parker - Little Saigon

Cristobel frowned, then laughed again. “Sounds like my dad. They always want you to do what you want to do, as long as it’s what they want you to do. They try. Mine was extra hard on Mike, my brother. So when Mike was shot down over there, it tore Dad up.”

“Your folks still alive?”

She shook her head. “Just me now. Don’t say you’re sorry. I hate those words. Just put your hand on my face again, like you did.”

Frye touched her. He scooted closer, but not too close. She smelled so good. She kept looking at him. For a long time he just held his face close to hers, smelling her breath and the richness of her skin. What do I smell like, he wondered, seawater? When he moved his lips to hers, she turned away. He kissed her ear instead. She pressed up close to him. She was shaking. “Something’s starting. I don’t want anything to start. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But just hold on to me awhile, Chuck. Kind of light, like. I’m... I’m so damned glad you’re alive and here with me.”

He did, a long while, until his lower shoulder was asleep and the hand that stroked her head was heavy and tired. Twice he started to tell her about the tunnels and what he had found there, but he stopped, unwilling to bring that horror into Cristobel’s sunlit living room. The rays rushed the window and made her hair warm. Blaster, his head still resting on the small of Cristobel’s waist, looked up at Frye, yawned, and closed his eyes again. Frye could hear the surf pounding outside, and through the corner of window he could see the lanky palms of Heisler Park drooping far in the distance. The sun hovered, an orange disc. For the first time in two days he felt warm. He was glad to be alive too, and to be here with her. Some things, he thought, are so good and simple.

Then she was kissing him, lightly at first, then deeper. She moved closer. A hand touched his neck.

Inside, Frye shrieked with delight.

She sat up, cross-legged now. Frye sat in front of her, legs apart, scooting close. “I hope you don’t hate me for this someday,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t. You really don’t.”

He slipped the straps of her top away and kissed her round dark shoulders. Her breasts were soft under his hands. When he pulled away the halter she breathed deeply and her nipples stood up and he took one between his teeth. She leaned back, hands braced behind her. She lifted her butt as he slid her shorts down, then tossed them onto the couch. Frye looked down at her nakedness, her lovely round body, the plain of tan on her stomach, the narrow white section of hip, then the dark wedge between smooth strong thighs. Blaster gave him a concerned look. Then Cristobel moved forward and put a hand up his leg, all the way to the sandy lining of his swimsuit. He helped her get it off. Their mouths locked and she moaned. She pulled away. “I don’t know if I can do this.” She touched him gently. “I see that you can.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Be slow.”

Frye lowered her on her side and guided her hips toward him. The kiss got deeper and deeper, and he could feel the sunlight on his hand as he moved it across her shoulders and back, her butt and legs, down the outside, up the inside where, to Frye’s mild astonishment, she was very much ready for this. “Oooh, God,” she said.

He found her mouth again. He rolled her over and braced himself on his hands and knees.

Then she pulled away. “No.”

“Yes.”

When he tried to take her, her legs suddenly clenched, a corded flex that felt like steel. He tried to get a knee inside. “It’s okay,” he said. “Okay, sweet woman, okay.”

Her head was tilted back. Tears ran up her face, into her ears and hair. “This is wrong,” she whispered.

“This is right.”

He could sense her will taking over. Her legs opened, her stomach quivered. The moment he touched her, Cristobel grabbed his arms and pushed off him, wriggling away. She worked herself up with the unsteadiness of a foal. She stood there in the sunlight, trying to cover her breasts. She looked down at Frye with her hair a disaster and tears rolling off her cheeks. “I hate this,” she said. She turned and disappeared into the bathroom.

He sat there for a moment, his member aiming dolefully up at his own forehead, wondering what you do in a case like this. She was running water in the bathroom. He thought he heard sobs, too.

He went in without knocking and took her in his arms. She had already put on a silk robe. Frye took it off, and it melted to the floor. He held her close and rocked her like Hyla used to rock him, back and forth with his hands spread across her back and her face buried in his neck. “It’s okay, Cris. Forget it. We’ll do it when it’s right. It’s okay.”

“I don’t want to forget it, and it’s never going to be right. I want you.”

“ Oh?”

He led her to the bedroom, a collection of purples and lavenders, a bright, sunny room. They fell onto the bed.

“What I want you to know,” she said, “is that this isn’t at all what I wanted to happen.”

She was stroking him again. The idea struck him that Cristobel was a contradictory animal, but he was soon past the point of ideas altogether. Then she guided him in, slowly, a little shudder as he entered and buried himself deep as he could go, a perfectly tooled connection.

“Oh no,” she said.

“Oh yes.” He let her have the control. She was tentative at first. She lay back her head and closed her eyes, and Frye wondered what visions were exacting themselves on the backs of her eyelids. Her face was dotted with sweat. Her hair was all over the place. Then the ancient rhythm took over and Frye joined her, chasing down that place in her where all the nerves converge, where the detonations begin, where the center explodes and reforms and sends out deltas of pleasure all the way to the fingertips. He could feel it gathering inside her, inside himself. There was nowhere else on Earth he’d rather be. He propped up her head with his hand and kissed her. When it came, she arched her back and cried out, and Frye joined her, shaking, planting everything he had to plant, shuddering while the quakes broke over him, electrocuted on his own nerves. Below him, petals of voltage opened and bloomed, muscles tightened, breathing stopped, sharp fingernails trailed down his back.

They lay there, locked in aftershock.

Then Cristobel took a deep breath, so deep Frye could feel her heart slamming away as her chest rose. She released. Her fingers relaxed. Her legs lowered to the bed.

Cristobel slept while Frye worked himself free and went to the telephone to call Westminster Hospital about visiting hours for Tuy Nha.

He looked at Cristobel sleeping in the bedroom and felt fatherly. He smiled, then stood there, browsing the sundry collection of odds and ends tacked to the bulletin board near the phone.

Funny, he thought, how when you like somebody, even their minor stuff seems important to you: coupons, phone numbers, two Florida postcards with alligators on them, an old photograph, some slick shots of Jim, looking very GQ.

The corner of the newspaper photo caught his eye, because he had seen it so many times before, because he knew exactly what it was.

It was thumbtacked up there, behind a city recreation schedule and a local nightclub listing. Less than an inch of it showed, but he knew what the rest of it looked like. He swung away the other papers and looked at himself, dressed in the ape costume, grinning like a fool, chasing the Mystery Maid toward the hedge of blooming hibiscus.

God, how I hate that thing, he thought.

He looked at Cristobel. And what are you doing with it?