Jeff Lindsay - Dexter's Final Cut

“Dexter,” Jackie said softly, and I jerked around to face her. For a moment, lost in my unpleasant thoughts, I had forgotten she was there. “What will happen?” she said. “To Deborah? And to you.”

I shook my head. “Too soon to say,” I said.

“But it might be bad?”

“Maybe,” I said, and she looked down at her knees. They were very nice knees, but I could see no overwhelming reason for her to look at them. I watched her, but she didn’t do anything else interesting, and after a moment a huge yawn took me over and I realized that I was very tired. It was, after all, still the middle of the night, and pretending to be eternally vigilant really does take a lot of energy. Suddenly I wanted nothing in the world more than just to lay me down and sleep-and Jackie was sitting on my bed, which would make stretching out and going to sleep a little awkward, or at least very crowded. I had just composed a polite way to ask Jackie to move off the couch so I could lie down and sleep when she blurted out, still staring at her knees, “He’ll come back, won’t he.”

At first I didn’t know what she meant, and then I wasn’t sure what to say. After a few seconds of puzzled silence she finally looked up at me and said, “The killer. Patrick. He’s going to come back and try again.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

“He will,” she said. “I know he will. And next time …”

Jackie shuddered, but she didn’t say anything more, so I went back to my prepared remarks on the subject of slumber. “Anyway,” I said, “tomorrow is a long day.” I went over to the couch and stood above her, looking down longingly at my place of rest. “We should try to get some sleep,” I told her.

She stood up abruptly, and in trying to get out of her way I almost fell onto the coffee table. She grabbed at my arm and steadied me, but when I straightened up she didn’t let go. Instead, she pulled herself closer and looked up at me, and her violet eyes were huge and seemed to go on forever.

“He will come back,” she said. “I know he will.” She took a deep and uneven breath. “He could even be here in the hotel right now.”

She was much closer to me than she needed to be to tell me that, but I didn’t complain. I just swallowed and answered her with a mouth that was suddenly very dry for some reason. “Well, maybe,” I said, and somehow she found a way to move even closer.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “Not tonight. I’m … scared.” She raised her face up to mine with her eyes wide and wild, and I felt myself falling forward into an endless violet sea.

I didn’t get very much sleep that night, but I didn’t really mind. It turned out I wasn’t nearly as tired as I’d thought.

I woke up in the night and for almost a full minute I lay drowsing, eyes closed, with no idea where I was. That didn’t seem worrisome for some reason. A soft and fragrant sheet covered me from the waist down, and a feeling of half-ecstatic numbness covered the rest of me, and I lay there between sleep and waking and wondered how I got wherever I was and why it should make me feel so good.

And then something rustled beside me and my eyes opened wide at the sound. I turned to my left and looked.

Jackie Forrest, TV star, adored by millions and pursued by Greek arms dealers, lay there next to me, naked. Her golden hair was tousled and spread unevenly across the pillow, and one hand was clenched beside her face. The sheet was pulled halfway down; I could see the faint spray of freckles that ran across her shoulders, down her chest, and over her breasts-her perfect, amazing breasts.

I had never before understood the male obsession with this female feature; breasts are, after all, no more than a functional, even utilitarian article of equipment. They were originally a necessary survival tool for raising healthy offspring, rendered slightly obsolete by bottles and modern baby formula, and to fall into a vacuous trance at the mere sight of them had always seemed to me the height of human stupidity.

But as I looked at Jackie Forrest’s breasts, I understood the madness for the first time. Jackie’s breasts were a thing apart from humanity; they stood alone on the plane of avatars, beautiful, perfect, iconic things, the very embodiment of all that the ideal female breast should be, so far beyond anything I had ever seen before that I could only stare at them and marvel. So this was what all the fuss was about.…

I couldn’t help myself; I reached a hand out and touched the closest breast. The feel of it was soft, incredibly smooth, and invited a closer and more thorough examination. I covered it with my hand and was rewarded with a feeling of satisfaction I had never before experienced, or even believed was possible. The perfect pink nipple rubbed against the palm of my hand, and it grew harder-and that, too, was amazingly, implausibly satisfying.

Jackie moved slightly, a small shifting of hips and shoulders, and one eyelid fluttered. I took my hand away, and then, still not at all sure what I was doing or why, I moved my mouth down to her breast and rubbed my lips on it.

Jackie stirred again, and then her hand slid softly over my cheek and around to the back of my neck, and I sat up to look at her face.

Her eyes were half open and her tongue slid over her lower lip and then her mouth curved into a sleepy smile. “Again …?” she said in a husky half whisper. She reached a hand up and pulled my face down onto hers, and we again’d.

Somewhere far away, in a fog of perfect bliss, an annoying buzz began to worm its way into the ethereal cloud of euphoria where Dexter floated undreaming. I tried to push it away and rise back up onto my cloud, but the sound got louder and more insistent, and the cloud began to break up, wisps of sheer happiness fading into the dull, grainy-eyed numbness of returning consciousness. I heard a rustling beside me and opened one eye as Jackie slapped at the alarm clock, and then lurched out of bed and scurried for the bathroom.

I watched her go, stupid from lack of sleep, but awake enough to marvel at what had happened to me. I was lying in a Real Star’s bed, and I had spent the night doing improbable things with her-things I had never before thought about doing, but somehow I had done them quite naturally with Jackie. And I thought again about the crowds that followed her with such slack-jawed adoration, and how any one of them would have given everything they owned to be me right now-or at any rate, a few hours ago. But there was only one me, and I was it, and I had spent the night in bed with Jackie Forrest.

I heard the water start up in the bathroom, and Jackie began to splash around under the shower. I stretched and lay there for a moment, very pleased with myself. I had done a remarkable thing, and I felt quite good about it. But beyond that, I realized I was also hungry, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, I had burned quite a few calories in the night, and my body was never shy about asking for a refill.

I got out of bed and stared dopily around, looking for my shorts. I was pretty sure they had made it into the room, but not at all certain about just how far. I finally found them at the foot of the bed, under the crumpled bedspread. I pulled them on and padded out to the living room, site of my former bed, the elegant leather couch. Lovely to look at, delightful for lounging, but not at all the ideal spot for sleeping, and I would have been glad to move off it for a much smaller reason. But to move right off the couch and into Jackie’s bed was the best of all possible worlds.

But as I caught myself sinking into a bog of fatuous self-congratulation, a nasty little thought dove in beside me. Why should I assume the move meant anything? Last night Jackie had been upset, scared, desperately in need of comfort and company. That was no guarantee that she would feel that way again tonight, or the next night, or ever. I am hugely ignorant of human sexual and emotional matters, but I knew enough to know that almost nothing in that area is ever certain. Everyone is different, everyone has different expectations, and no two humans ever have the same experience, even when they have it together. From what I can tell, the whole thing is like two people speaking different languages that have the same words; it all sounds the same, but the words have different meanings in each language. For one person love means sex, and for the other it means forever-two completely different meanings, and yet even the pronunciation of the syllable is the same.