Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

“You would have been disappointed.”

Dent looked over at Bellamy where she sat in the right-hand co-pilot’s seat. She had been quiet throughout most of the flight, and he’d left her to her own thoughts. He figured she was reflecting on her dad’s declining condition and how his death would impact her.

But obviously he’d somehow factored into her thoughts, and they were compelling enough for her to have put on the headphones so she could share them with him now.

“Disappointed?”

“If we’d gone through with it last night, you would have been in for a letdown.”

“I was let down.”

“Yes, but not like you would have been if we’d continued.” She faced forward again, but he knew that her mind wasn’t on the view through the cockpit window. “When I described my marriage to you, you remarked on how boring it sounded.”

“I was being a smart-ass.”

“Of course you were. But you were right. Except for one thing. My husband wasn’t to blame, I was. Through no fault of his own, he became bored with me.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why did he get bored with you?”

“I have issues with intimacy.”

“With fucking.”

She winced. “That’s an aspect of it.”

“What’s the other aspect?”

She didn’t answer, leading him to believe there was no other aspect, but even if there was, this was the one that had caused her marriage to fail, the one that had caused her to freak out on him last night, so this was the aspect that interested him.

“What kind of issues?” he asked. “Other than the use of the word. You don’t like it. A lot of people find it offensive, but they still do the deed. So what sent you into orbit last night? I had bad breath? My feet stank?”

“It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. I’m to blame. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“No, let’s not.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“To tell you again that I’m sorry it happened.”

“Apology accepted. Now tell me why I would have been disappointed. Which I think is total bull crap, by the way. But what makes you think I would have been?”

“Now’s not the time to talk about it.”

“It’s the perfect time. I’ve got to fly the airplane. So no matter what my reaction is, I can’t act on it. You’re safe to say anything.”

She wrestled with indecision for nearly half a minute, then said, “When Susan—”

“Aw, jeez. I had a feeling this was going to come back to her.”

“Everything comes back to her.”

“Only because you let it.”

“We’re discussing this at your insistence. Do you want to continue or not?”

He motioned for her to continue.

“The manner in which Susan died left a lot of people thinking that she had it coming. Even if they didn’t say so out loud, it was implied. By the media. The same with close friends. Condolences were sometimes tinged with a reap-what-you-sow undertone. We all sensed it. Daddy, Olivia, Steven, and me.

“One day during the trial, Allen Strickland’s defense lawyer came right out and stated that if Susan hadn’t been sexually promiscuous, she would still be alive. Rupe Collier objected. He and the defense lawyer got into a shouting match. The judge sternly reprimanded the lawyer, ordered that the comment be stricken from the record, and instructed the jury to disregard it. But the damage had been done.

“Up till then it had only been an insinuation which we—the family—had publicly ignored. But once it was put into actual words, we could no longer pretend that each of us hadn’t entertained similar thoughts.

“And owning up to such disloyalty toward Susan was painful for all of us. Olivia broke down and sobbed for hours. Daddy drank heavily that night, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him overindulge. Steven withdrew to his room without saying a word to anyone.

“And I…” She paused and took a deep breath. “I also locked myself in my room where, after hours of tearful contemplation, I concluded that the source of all this grief was Susan’s sexuality.

“She didn’t deserve to die because of it, but none of us would be suffering as we were if she hadn’t given in to sexual impulses. Ergo, they had to be bad. Dirty. Destructive. That’s the conclusion I reached.”

She smiled wryly. “This at a time when I was going through puberty and beginning to experience the kinds of mysterious and uncontrollable yearnings that had cost Susan her life. I thought I would be destined to end like her if I surrendered to them. Instead I resolved to deny them. I pledged not to become like my sister.”

A dozen different responses instantly came to his mind, but all were crude, inappropriate, and insulting to Susan. He chose the safer option and kept them to himself.

“During high school, I developed mad crushes on a few boys and did my fair share of dating, but—to counter Susan and her reputation—I kept my virginity. Through college and young adulthood, I slept with the occasional guy, but I didn’t let myself have fun in bed, so my partners rarely did. As I got older, I got better at the pretense, but men must sense when a woman isn’t really into it.”

She glanced at him, but, again, he prudently said nothing.

“My husband never questioned my reserve, before or after we married, although he felt it. I never turned him down, but I wasn’t, hmm, adventurous. Maybe he hoped he could eventually overcome whatever hang-ups were keeping me from enjoying him as I should. But it never happened, and I suppose he tired of trying to force it. Losing our baby was just the last of his disappointments in me.”

A few seconds elapsed, then she looked over at him. “There. Now that you know, you should feel better about last night. It had nothing to do with you or your technique.”

He waited until he was certain that she was finished, then he said, “Let me get this straight. At twelve years old, you made this stupid pledge to deny your own sexuality, and you’ve spent the past eighteen years trying to uphold that vow?”

“No, Dent,” she said sadly. “I’ve spent eighteen years trying to break it.”

By turns, Ray was enraged and nervous.

The man at the airfield had made a fool of him.

He must’ve looked real stupid to the old codger, when he’d thought he was being so clever.

He was aware of his limitations. In high school, he’d been told he read below a second-grade level. That was okay. He could live with that. But it stung deep to be exposed as a complete imbecile.

By now Dent and Bellamy would have heard the story of how he’d walked—charged—right into the carefully laid trap. Ray imagined the old man wiping tears from his eyes, slapping his knee with hilarity as he told them, “He came running in here and stabbed a slab of rubber. What a jackass.”

They would have had a good laugh at his expense. Instead of being scared of him, they’d regard him as a clumsy buffoon. The thought of that infuriated him. Mostly, though, he was mad at himself. He hadn’t done Allen proud.

He needed to fix that.

And that was what made him nervous, because he wasn’t sure what he should do next.

Once he’d put some distance between him and the airfield, he’d switched his truck’s license plates with those of another pickup he found at a twenty-four-hour Walmart. He’d put on a straw cowboy hat so that his near-bald head wouldn’t be so noticeable. He’d swapped out his leather vest for a shirt with long sleeves that would cover up his snake tattoo. The old man couldn’t have seen it because it had been too dark inside the hangar, but Dent Carter might have noticed it when he jumped him at the IHOP. It made Ray easily identifiable.