Greg Iles - Sleep No More

The next day, when he took the portfolio from his desk drawer to look at Mallory’s picture, his eyes settled on the unopened bundle of her letters. That he had not yet opened this forced him to realize how badly he wanted to experience a reincarnation of Mallory without exhuming the darker remains of her personality. But that was as impossible now as it had been twenty years ago. Ominous flashes of her instability had already broken through the bright facade Eve worked so carefully to maintain.

More and more during their time together, she brought up Lily’s name. She questioned him endlessly about her. What had initially drawn him to her? Why had he married her? Was Annelise more like her father or mother? Eve asked these questions as though the answers were of only passing interest, but whenever he said anything even mildly complimentary about Lily, Eve’s face tightened in a way that sent a chill through him. More disturbing, as the days passed, she wanted him to stay later and later at the house. Twice he drove out of the narrow driveway after dark, distressed by the knowledge that Lily and Annelise were waiting for him at home. At first, Eve kept him late by increasing the intensity of the sex as evening approached. But when Waters tore himself away in spite of this, she reversed strategy and drew out the foreplay, so that he stayed late in order to find the release that days before had come in the first hour after his arrival. Beneath Eve’s subtle games he sensed a battle beginning with Lily, and in this Eve truly bore out Mallory’s shadow side. For the Grendel that lived in the dark cave of Mallory’s mind was jealousy, an unthinking possessiveness that could swallow a man whole and not be sated. The fact that Lily did not even know she was in a war began to work on Waters’s conscience in a way that simple sexual betrayal had not. Yet still he returned to Eve, diving ever deeper into the well of her passion, and leaving farther behind all that he deemed precious.

One night, as dusk fell outside the half-moon window on the third floor, he was trying to find a graceful way to make his exit. Sensing his mood, Eve shook her head and began to caress him. He had thought himself spent, but with patient ministrations, Eve brought him back to a state of arousal greater than that in which he’d begun the afternoon. They started with him above, but as he tired, she rolled him over and sat astride, taking control of their movements. Waters hovered in a purgatory between ecstasy and exhaustion, striving for release but unable to achieve it. With tireless rhythm Eve brought him to a point of exquisite torture, a tightrope in the dark, with pain on one side and pleasure on the other. As he strained against her, feeling as though he might faint, her mantra began again.

“Say my name, Johnny…”

He shut his eyes and tried to lose himself within her. Her teeth bit into his neck.

“Say it, Johnny…say it and you’ll be there. It’s so easy. It’s your magic word…”

Blood pounded like drums in his ears, and his muscles burned, but still he could not find release. Panting for oxygen, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the place of their joining. The crosshatched pattern of scars on Eve’s inner thighs had grown red and prominent with her arousal, scars he hadn’t seen for twenty years.

“Say it, Johnny,” she begged, not even slowing her motion. “ Say my name….”

As she repeated her eternal demand, he heard another voice answer hers. Three whispered syllables filled the room as completely as the screamed confession of a heretic.

“Mallory.”

Eve froze above him, her eyes locked onto his. Then she gave a moan riven from the depths of her being.

“Mallory,” he said again.

She gripped his head between her hands. “Say it again! Say it! Save me!”

“Mallory? Mallory, Mallory, Mallory…”

Tears poured from her eyes like rivers of grief and joy. She sat down with all her weight, the tears dropping onto his face, into his mouth, not warm but cold against his superheated flesh. And though she was not moving, something suddenly broke loose in him, and the point he had struggled so hard to reach came without effort, leaving him shivering beneath her like a malaria patient. Eve lay prone atop him, breathing shallowly.

“Do you love me, Johnny?”

Before that day she had often said, “I love you,” but she’d never insisted that he do the same. At those times he’d sensed a careful vigilance over her emotions, as though she knew that moving too fast could ruin everything. Now she had thrown caution to the wind.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I honestly don’t know.”

“I do,” she said. “I know you do.”

As Waters drove up to his house that night, he felt like a man on the verge of madness. Eve had not demanded that he call her Mallory again before leaving, but neither had he called her Eve. And having surrendered this ground to her, he sensed that only one moral redoubt remained: the renunciation of his love for Lily.

The next morning, Cole walked into Waters’s office, sat down in the chair opposite his desk, and asked if he had the new maps ready.

Waters looked blank.

“You said you had a prospect in West Feliciana Parish,” Cole reminded him. “A close-in deal. You said you’d have it ready in a week.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Can I see it?”

“The mapping’s going to take a little longer than I thought.”

Cole gave him a hard look. “What the fuck are you up to, John?”

Waters shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Nothing but banging the bejesus out of Eve Sumner. Which would be fine by me, except you ain’t doing any work. ”

A flash of temper covered Waters’s shock. “I do more than my share of work around here, and you know it.”

Cole’s face reddened. “And you make more money.”

Waters dismissed this with a flick of his hand. He should have known Cole would be on to him. It wasn’t hard to figure out. For no apparent reason the partners had suddenly swapped lifestyles. Cole, usually absent from the office during the odd hours he catted around town, was coming in early every day, making phone calls, evaluating producing wells for possible purchase and workover. Waters, the obsessive workaholic, arrived at nine but usually left by ten, and sometimes didn’t return until four. When he was in the office, he locked his door and took no calls.

“Come to think of it,” Cole said, leaning back and crossing his legs, “your banging Evie isn’t fine by me for another reason. ’Cause you’re breaking rule number one.”

“What would that be?”

“Don’t lose your perspective. That gets you in big trouble. And you have a lot on the line, John Boy.”

“I should take advice from you?”

“In this case, yes. That chick ain’t worth it.”

Waters stiffened. “What do you know about Eve?”

Cole looked incredulous. “What do I know about her? I fucked her, remember? I know plenty. Evie’s hot to trot, and you’re just the latest in a very long line.”

The words stung Waters like the lash of a whip. The knowledge that Cole had been inside Eve nauseated him. He knew how ridiculous he must look. He was like a young soldier in love with a whore, defending her honor to a laughing village. But he couldn’t control his feelings.

“She’s not the same woman you slept with,” he said quietly.

“No?” Cole’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Cole shook his head, his eyes filled with amazement. “Holy shit. At first I thought you meant she’d reformed or something. Changed her ways. Got born again. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”

Waters looked away, not sure just what he had meant.