David Wiltse - Bone Deep

For a moment he thought he would surely fall, but he managed to lean to the side and then to drag them both away from the edge.

"I'll tell her! I'll tell your wife about us," Mrs. Leigh said.

Tee reacted as if she had slapped him. "No you won't," he said.

"You don't leave me," she spit. "You don't leave me. I'll tell you when it's over."

"You won't say a fucking word to my wife. Not now. Not ever."

"I will if I have to," she said. "First I'll tell your wife, then I'll tell the rest of the town."

'No."

"Oh, yes, oh, yes."

He stared at her, his arms trembling at his sides. Her face was twisted and ugly with vengeful triumph.

'No," he repeated, looking away from her, down at her feet, then out over the cliff to the glistening water of the reservoir. Once again a hawk was riding the morning thermals, up and up in its search for prey.

"We don't have to get to that," she said, her tone changing. But it was too late to mollify him. Tee grabbed her under the armpits. The adrenaline that coursed through his body turned to rage. He held her at arm's length and thought of hurling her over the cliff. It would be a solution of sorts. -He knew it would bring him a kind of peace, at least in one area of his life. Tee shook her hard, feeling her body quiver as her feet dangled over the void.

It took him a moment to comprehend that she was whimpering, pleading with him now, promising him whatever he wanted and begging for her life.

He realized with amazement what he was doing and snatched her back, pulling her into him.

"Oh God," he moaned, "I would never, I would never…" But in his heart he knew that he could, that he almost had. He held her fast to his body, not wanting her to see the confusion in his eyes, the fear mixed with a strange elation. It had been so close, he had but to open his fingers and she was gone. Tee was not certain if the significant fact was that he had come so close to killing her, or that he had not done it.

"I can't let you hurt my wife," he said at last, as if that explained his actions.

"I wouldn't," she said quickly. "I never would do that, Tee. I was just so hurt, I didn't know what I was saying. I didn't want to lose you."

Tee heard the same fulsome sincerity that came from every apprehended felon. Frightened, desperate people did not lie convincingly.

When he released her she hurried away from him, scampering down the hillside path like a frightened deer. Tee sat for a long time alone, shaken by the experience. He did not think that he had been that angry.

He was annoyed by her attitude, and still shaken, still frightened, as a result of nearly toppling over the edge himself, but neither of those factors accounted for what he had done. I must have been bluffing, he thought, I must have known all along that I wouldn't do it. But he had no visceral memory of anything like that. He could recall only the spontaneous impulse to grab her, to thrust her over the void, and then the nearly irresistible urge to let her fall. Nearly irresistible, for he had ultimately resisted. And that was the difference, he told himself. That was the difference between himself and Johnny Appleseed.

That was even the difference between himself and John Becker. They all had the opportunity to kill, the other two did and Tee did not… But if it happened again, he wondered. If it had been safer, if it had been legal-if it had been someone else in his grasp… He remembered the trembling of his muscles, the urge to let her go and watch her tumbling, cart-wheeling into space, to see the final flicker of terror in her eyes before she plummeted away from him… Had it really been just to see it? His rage was not that compelling, her threat to him surely not great enough to warrant death. Had it really been just the power to do it that had made him shake with temptation? He did not know if he believed that of himself, but then he had to believe what he had just done. In the past half hour he had done two things he would not have thought likely: first the astonishing, bravura sex, casting aside all sense of propriety and caution, and then the near homicide. It was one hell of an age to start discovering what he was capable of, Tee thought. He was not at all sure that he wanted to know any more.

When he reached the bottom of the hill at last he walked past his car and kept going until he reached the bank of the reservoir. Scarcely bothering to look to see if he was observed, he took off his clothes for the second time that day and walked into the water until it was up to his neck, feeling as if some other power were driving him, as if he were no longer responsible for his actions, not even to himself.

He could hear cars driving past on the other side of the screen of trees, even hear when some of them automatically slowed at the sight of a police car, but his eyes and his mind were out over the water, away from civilization, skimming the surface of the water; sailing up to the heavens as birds caught his eye; flitting to the forest on the far shore, where he could barely discern the movements of muskrats puttering around the edge of the lake and then pushing off at last into the water, their furry heads breaking the surface and leaving a long, serpentine wake behind them as they swam slowly in his direction. His mind drifted, trying to calm itself, trying to focus on the innocence of nature's diurnal life, wincing and recoiling when it looked back on the past hour's work, yearning to soar as concentrated but thoughtless as the hawk, which still wheeled over the reservoir.

When he had regained enough composure to feel thormughly silly standing neck-deep in a lake, he rose at last from the reservoir, scraped the water from himself with the side of his hand as if cleaning a windshield, dressed, and drove slowly to work.

For a man accustomed to suspicion by profession, jealousy had hit Becker with a surprising force. He would have thought himself to be inured to such doubts about his own wife, but that was only because he had loved her with such confidence. Their marriage, he had come to believe, was something special, a relationship immune to common failings because of their long exposure to the single life. Before their marriage they had both tasted what pleasures there were outside of monogamy, and both had found them ultimately lacking. Novelty for its own sake was no longer new for either of them and they had come to each other with a sense not only of mutual love but of relief that they were freed from the strictures and demands of the single life. They exchanged breadth of experience for depth of understanding and it was a trade they made knowingly and gladly. They had talked about it as they talked about everything in their lives, and they had luxuriated in the shared serenity of their love. Which was not to say that they took each other for granted. Both of them proceeded as if living together were part of an extended courtship, and both still made the extra effort to do and say the things that most pleased the other. They were mature enough to appreciate what they had in each other. They were actively in love. Or so Becker had thought. Now he was forced to recon sider everything.

Karen had lied about her relationship with Kom and she was a woman who would never lie without very good reason. There were probably alternate explanations to the obvious one, but Becker could think of none of them.

He was in the paradoxical position of the jilted lover-the only one who could ease his pain was the one who had caused it. And he dared not ask Karen directly because he feared that she would lie to him again-and he was desperate enough to believe her. He would turn from wronged husband to fool, from innocent victim to the classic deserving cuckold. Not only his love had been assaulted but his pride as well.