Randy White - Shark River

As I held her, I glanced at my watch: 1:45 A.M., nearly moonset over the Gulf. Two more days until the new moon. “What will the deputies do if they check your bed and you’re gone.”

“I left a note just in case, told them I went out for a walk. This’d be the last place they’d think of checking.”

“Ten minutes and no more,” I told here. “But the couch in there isn’t very comfortable.”

When I awoke, the porch screen was a black scrim of drooping palms and stars, no moon. Lindsey was cupped against me, back to stomach, like a spoon, air whistling softly through her nose when she breathed.

Somehow, my left hand had slipped up under her T-shirt, my fingers spread to hold the warm weight of her left breast.

I told myself I should take my hand away, but I didn’t.

Then I told myself it was alright not to remove my hand because my left arm was finally comfortable, no longer throbbing, and it was medically permissible not to move my hand as long as I held her in a friendly, nonsexual way.

I lie to myself so often and so successfully that I’m amazed that I even bother to continue to try to live up to my own flawed values.

I lifted the palm of my hand away from her skin, leaving only my fingertips to touch her softly, feeling heat and perspiration on the heavy underside of her breast. Then my thumb and middle finger found her nipple, first tracing the denser skin of the aureole, before rolling the nipple gently, feeling it react, the tip of it growing, becoming erect and slowly heated in my hand.

I felt Lindsey stir, then press her hips back into mine, rotating slowly and pushing, exploring me with her buttocks.

Thus I knew she was awake.

Heard the little-girl voice say, “Hey, buster. You’re no carpenter, so what you doing with a hammer in your pocket?” She had a furry, sleepy laugh.

I removed my hand from under her shirt immediately, got up on my good elbow and said, “Sorry. I was being stupid there for a minute. Which means you need to get off this couch right now because-” She flopped over to face me and pressed her hand to my lips before I could finish. “You think too much, Doc. Know that? Shut off your brain for a little while. Put it on autopilot. Your body knows what it wants to do. Stop being such a nerdy pain in the ass.”

Then she put her hand behind my head and pulled my face to hers, touching my lips with her tongue, moistening them, searching, as her free hand moved downward over chest and abdominal muscles. Her fingers found the elastic of my shorts, then they found me, moving to explore, her fingers spreading as wide as they could to hold me, her thumb moving in slow rotary massage.

“Do you like this?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not hurting your arm?”

“My arm? I’m not thinking about my arm right now. No, you’re not hurting my arm.”

“What about this? You like this?”

“Oh yeah.”

She stood suddenly in the gray light. I watched her step out of her shorts, then strip the T-shirt over her head. She was ivory-colored in the darkness, sculpted white and hard, skinny-hipped with ski-slope breasts and very long nipples. She shook her yellow hair free as she leaned to help me shimmy out of my shorts, then used her left hand to hold me erect and perpendicular as she mounted me, sliding slowly down onto me, wincing as her body stretched to fit itself.

She sighed, shuddered, eyes closed, her hair long and breasts hanging down as she began to lift and roll, her pubic bone moist and hard, seeking friction with mine. I heard her whisper, “The astronaut position. I like this.”

“Huh? Astro-what?”

“You’re the astronaut, laying back in your seat. You get to reach up and play with all the knobs and buttons you can find.”

More than an hour later, in the master bedroom by now, the sheets soaked with sweat, when we both thought we’d done everything possible to one another and given everything twice over, the girl, whose feet were beside my head on the pillow, removed her mouth from me, poked her head up with prairie-dog surprise and said, “Houston, this is Apollo. We’ve got liftoff again. ”

I haven’t had much experience with the morning-after awkwardness of a one-night stand for the very simple reason that I rarely, rarely do one-night stands. Fortunately, though, there was very little awkwardness. Not between Lindsey and me, anyway.

I walked her home in the silver, predawn dusk amid tittering birds and the seawind rustling of morning palms. We hadn’t gotten much sleep, but she was energized, full of fun. Seemed to be completely at ease. She kept her voice low, chatting about the modern ceremony we had to complete: exchanging phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses.

Guava Key’s paths are illuminated by moon-globe lamps that create little islands of light along the paths. In the light of one, she allowed me to see her theatrical expression of shock when I told her I didn’t have a cell phone. “My God! When you’re shopping, or cruising the malls, how can you make calls?” and shook her own cell phone at me.

She had that unusual gift for satire and self-deprecation. “Know something, Doc? Yesterday was a hell of a complicated day, but I feel better than I’ve felt in a long, long time. I’m not sure why. I’m glad we met, that much I can tell you. Not just because you saved our asses, either.”

I told her, “Why do I have to keep reminding you? I didn’t save anybody. That’s your official response, okay?”

Her laughter was a whispered sound and private.

“Whatever you say, Ford. But I’m glad you did.”

I was feeling much better myself. Our lovemaking had been unexpectedly comfortable; a mix of tenderness and passion that left us both panting, then laughing. Usually, when I do something that breaches my own code of behavior, I get a niggling case of the guilts. Not now, though. I felt energized and content. The gray, residual depression caused by my run-in with the kidnappers had been swept away.

I wrapped my arm around her, steering her down the dark path. For some reason, something she said came back; I remembered her telling me, Maybe you’ve got to experience your own death to realize how much you want to live.

Oddly, as if prompted by my own thought chemistry, Lindsey told me, “The reason I feel the way I do-it’s a kinda fresh start feeling, like nothing I’ve experienced before. I really could have died yesterday, but I didn’t, so this is like the beginning of my new life. Used to be, I always had this urge in me. Destructive, you know? It was like an itch, something I had to scratch or just go nuts. But I don’t feel it now. That weird urge to piss people off and fuck up my life. Anger, I guess. Contempt for everything, but now it’s gone. Like it was never there.

“Then being with you in bed, it was like, wow! Not because you were great-don’t get me wrong, you were just fine-but because it was like my first time, only better. What I felt, all those sensations, I really appreciated them, you know? They meant something. It was fun. ”

“I’m happy to play even a small role,” I said wryly.

She gave me a slap on the butt. “You did more than just play a role, come on. In fact, you may be a big part of the reason I feel so good. It’s more than knowing I coulda been killed. What it may be? It may be because I’ve had lots of lovers, and I’ve had a few really close guy friends. But I’ve never been with a guy who was both. I think that maybe, just maybe, you’re going to be the first.”

I thanked her, but was thinking, Slow down, lady. Slow down.

I got a couple hours’ sleep before the phone beside my bed rang. I picked it up to hear Lindsey say, “Hey, Ford? They’re making me leave already. Shit! We just figure out what parts go where, that they make a nice fit, and we’ve already got to say good-bye. I’d ask you to come along, but they won’t even say where they’re taking me. Bastards!”