Thomas Perry: Dead Aim

He stepped onto the shower mat, took a towel from the rack, and wrapped it around his waist. “What are you doing?” he asked disapprovingly.

“Trying to get you into the bathtub with me,” she replied. “What does it take?”

“You know what I mean,” said Mallon. “Do you think you have to do this out of gratitude, or something?”

She smiled disparagingly and said, “I don’t believe in that. If you were drowning, I think I would have to try to save you. I don’t think I’m obligated to fuck you. It’s just something I feel like doing.”

He said carefully, “You’re very pretty, but-”

“Thank you,” she interjected. Her body gave a slight bow, and the movement dipped her breasts into the water for an instant, then out again.

“But,” he continued, “I’m twice your age.”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s always been a great deterrent to men in the past.”

“It has to me.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite. There are female items in one of the master bedroom drawers, and they’re not your size. Women visit you and pretend to forget their underwear so you’ll remember them.”

He bristled. “They’re a lot older than you are, and they know what they’re doing. What were you searching my room for?”

“The condoms. I found them, too. A couple of big boxes, Bobby, and half are missing. All the evidence shows you’re a naughty man, so don’t get all huffy and waste a perfectly good naked woman.” She raised an eyebrow and pointed at the water in front of her belly. “You’ve been down there before. A lot. Haven’t you?”

He caught himself in the beginning of a smile, but smothered it and raised his eyes to stare into hers, willing himself to ignore her nakedness. “Look, I would feel as though I were taking advantage of you. Whether you feel some misguided sense of reciprocity or have a morbid impulse to see what it’s like to sleep with a man who’s way too old for you doesn’t much matter. You’ve just been through a difficult experience, and you’re not thinking clearly right now.”

“Of course I’m thinking clearly,” she insisted. “I knew this was going to strike you as oddly timed, but I didn’t expect to beg and plead. We’re both single, and having sex is a perfectly normal thing to do if we want.”

“I don’t think I should have sex with you.”

“Why? Because I’m not a happy enough person to meet your standard? Then make me happier.”

“I don’t even know your name,” he said. “What is it?”

She pursed her lips and stared at the ceiling for a second, then said, “I don’t think I want to say, at least right now. But there are just two of us here, so if you speak, I’ll know I’m the one you mean. We don’t need names for sex, anyway. Come on. I watched you staring at my bare behind, and even now you can’t keep from checking out my breasts every few seconds. The reason you’re leaning on the counter that way is that you think it hides your erection. Let me tell you, it doesn’t, and looking at it is making me crazy. I solemnly swear, the reason I’m doing this is because I feel like it and there’s no reason not to.” She paused. “Besides, I read someplace that old guys are a good experience because they can hold out longer, and they know more about women. So drop the towel and get in.”

She had a sense of humor, he silently conceded. She seemed perfectly calm and in control of herself. What she was saying was not insane.

While he was considering, she sighed and shook her head at him in amusement. She stood up and stepped out of the tub at his end, and embraced him, her wet body pressed against his. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not rewarding you or punishing myself, and I’m not going to be turned down.” She unexpectedly snatched away his towel, took his hand, laughing, and stepped into the tub. She tugged on his hand, to draw him in after her. He stepped over the side into the water so she wouldn’t keep tugging. “What’s wrong now?” she asked.

He said, “I’m trying to be sure I’m not rationalizing this, telling myself that it’s all right for you to do this, just because I want to.”

She sank into the water, still holding his hand so he would go down with her. “Amazing,” she said. “He finally admits he wants to.”

Mallon sat down and she moved to meet him, pulling his legs around her and placing her legs over his. They kissed softly, their lips barely touching at first. The tentative brush of the lips became firmer, more sustained. Mallon became aware of the silence, the only sounds the rippling drips of water from their arms as they embraced, but the silence was pleasant, part of the gentleness of the moment. Then the touches changed, and there were sounds that grew in time. After a few minutes they left the water and dried each other with thick, soft towels on the way into Mallon’s bedroom.

Mallon concentrated on being very attentive, very gentle and patient, but she seemed rapidly to lose all inhibition, all shyness. When Mallon turned or moved his hand, she would be there waiting to meet him, opening to him. If he lingered for a long time in one position, she would wriggle or writhe to move them into another. The positions were clearly experiments for her, and with each new one she would whisper, “Interesting, but not my favorite,” and change immediately, or “Ooh, that’s nice,” and stay at it for a longer time before trying something different. Mallon could sense that she had given herself permission to do anything that entered her mind, to be unfettered, even reckless. For a time, he worried that her attitude might have ominous implications, but then he decided that it could as easily be a promising sign. A few hours ago she had been trying to kill herself, but now what she was doing was grasping for life, gripping it, taking in as much as she could. Maybe she was acting out some magical oscillation between the poles, bounding away from death, leaping from one extreme to the other with the intention of ending somewhere in the middle so she could go on with her existence.

Her urge to have sex now seemed, if not perfectly rational, at least positive, but his selection as partner continued to worry him. She could not have decided to bestow her favors on Robert Mallon because of some sudden crush. He was simply the nearest unattached male, and he was unthreatening to her. He had been the lone witness to the lowest point in her life, so the big barriers that always stood between two strangers had already come down. But he could not quite surmount the feeling that she must have decided to give him a reward for helping her. For a time he grappled with the thought, feeling injured pride at being given such an offer and guilt for having accepted it. But then he saw it differently. She wanted to forget practicality and self-absorption for one night, and he was allowing her to do that without risk. And if she was trying to get her own sense of value back by doing him the biggest favor she had in her power, he would have been wrong to refuse it. He reminded himself that the decision had been made a half hour ago. The question was not whether he would do it, but how.

Her mood induced in him a strong need to make the experience singular for her. He did his best to sense the direction of each of her whims, then use his knowledge and experience to push her impulse into reality and make it a source of pleasant sensations she had not felt before. He would coax her to excitement, then nurture and feed the excitement like a fire, consciously bringing her to a higher pitch moment by moment. Each time he succeeded she would go limp in his arms for a few seconds, catching her breath and trembling. He would hold her there, giving her the illusion of relaxing the tension, but not enough time to calm down. Then he would slowly begin again, awakening her feelings once more, finding a different way to arouse her. He knew that her sensations were cumulative, so that each time he began, she was still reverberating from the last time, and from the time before that, all the way to the first. It was like climbing to a height, step by step.