Andrew Shaw - $20 Lust

“He knows me.”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“Craig does.”

I thought that one over, then shrugged. “That’s a chance,” I said. “One we can afford to take. I’m gambling that they won’t be ready for anything. If they are, it’s going to be harder.”

That was an understatement. We had one gun, the one I had taken away from Baron. They would have an arsenal. If all four of them were at the place we could throw in the sponge. But that wasn’t the way I figured it. Reed and Baron would show the next evening or the morning after, maybe later.

Maybe.

There were too many things to figure. Maybe nobody bothered to write down the method of bleaching ones and turning them into twenties. Maybe there was no ink around, maybe we wouldn’t be able to find the plates, a lot of maybes. I didn’t want to think about them.

I couldn’t afford to think about them.

I put them out of my mind.

There was still Cindy, nervous in spite of herself, nervous if not exactly scared. There was still me, alive with nervous energy, all that energy that had to be dissipated one way or another.

There was still the bed.

It was different that night. It was a frenetic passion, a passion used to chase away fear, passion born of tension and worry and gentle fear. It blazed and it sizzled and it burned like fire.

It was good because it had to be good, because we needed it so desperately, because it was, for the moment, the only thing in the world we could have.

And for another reason.

Because there might be no more chances. Because we might both be dead before we were together in bed again, because the next bed we shared might be a grave or a river bottom or a cold stone slab.

We were naked together, naked in the bed, and when I felt the sweet warm softness of her beside me my mind went blank and my brain started to swim. She made a little moaning sound deep in her throat; then she was in my arms. Her lips opened under mine and I tasted her mouth in a deep, long kiss.

Then our bodies were pressed taut together, straining, and I felt her firm breasts press hard against my chest. She writhed in my arms, and when I kissed her I tasted the salty tang of silent tears.

It all made sense to me now. We’d gone out on a limb, far out on a limb, and now we were going to saw the limb off and leave ourselves hanging in the middle of the air. We weren’t going to work deals now, and we weren’t going to keep on running, and we weren’t going to roll over and play dead like nice little doggies doing nice little tricks. We were taking the bull by the horns and the bit in our teeth, and we stood a damned good chance of winding up holding the tiger by the tail.

“Ted—”

She drew away from me and my hands found her breasts. I looked at her face. Her eyes were shining, glowing with a mixture of love and passion, and her mouth was curled in a sexy smile.

I reached out a finger and touched her lips. She kissed the finger. Then I ran that finger down over her chin and throat, down to her breast. I traced ever-diminishing concentric circles around her breast, with the circles getting smaller and smaller until I was touching her nipple and driving her wild.

The change in her was dramatic. Now she was a creature on fire, basic woman incarnate, a thrashing melody of hips and thighs and rampant breasts.

“Ted—”

We were on our way to the gang’s hideout, on our way to outfox the foxes. We were kiddies playing cops and robbers, with a big payoff for the winners and a shallow grave for the losers.

But now this didn’t matter. Not now.

Not for the time being.

Because now she was in my arms, soft and warm and willing, and now she was the only thing in the world that mattered. I was kissing her breasts now. She was churning spasmodically and the earth was in the grip of a cyclone that could pick us up and whirl us away to the land of Oz.

My lips bathed the silken skin. Then I moved lower, coaxing her into delicious peals of torment, kissing the smooth sleek satiny flatness of her body. She wound her fingers in my hair and I thought for a moment she was going to snatch me bald-headed.

I wouldn’t have noticed if she had. I was too busy.

We were going to be criminals, but crime and punishment were a million miles away by now. We were going to be thieves in the night, but now we were naked in the night and the night was a handful of stars in the palm of an angry goddess.

“Ted, I love you! Don’t stop, Ted. Don’t ever stop. Do it forever!”

She didn’t have to say a word. I was not going to stop, not now and not ever. I was giving her the ultimate kiss, the kiss that would seal all bargains until the end of time. Nothing else mattered.

Nothing at all.

And then I was giving her that kiss.

Her whole body was twitching and shaking and heaving, and the heat she was generating would have melted the polar ice cap and vaporized the ensuing water. The passion was a contagious sort of thing and the room was the scene of an epidemic in no time at all.

I needed her, had to have her, and now the kiss was not enough, just as nothing could be enough. It was time. And then it began.

I’ve already said it was good, and that’s about all I can say. It was the beginning and the end of the world. It was a pair of bodies drawn to one another like magnets, clutching and clinging, working rapidly and relentlessly, making moves and seeing stars and breaking records.

“Ted, I love it. Ted, I love it I love you I love everything!”

I loved everything, too.

And it got better and better and better, and it got faster and faster and faster, until it had to stop or it would almost certainly have killed us both.

Then the explosion came. The earth began to tremble and shake, and guns went off and rockets shot up and satellites went into orbit.

And so did we.

Then, after a fashion there was calmness. Then I was holding her in my arms saying meaningless things to her. And then I knew that we were going to go through with it, going to go through with everything, going to take on Reed and Baron and the rest of the mob and come out smelling like a rose.

Nothing could go wrong for us.

Not now.

Not after that.

We lay together, and we touched each other, and we spoke very few words because no words were needed. Finally we drifted into a lazy, desperate sleep.

Morning came too quickly. There should have been a slow period of awakening, a gentle touching of bodies drugged by sleep, of lovemaking that was all sweetness and animalism and warmth and love.

That’s not how it was. It was morning, and sunlight flooded the room, and we made the transference from sleep to consciousness in the shadow of an instant, woke up and blinked once and left the safety of our bed. “It’s time,” I said.

We dressed quickly. I shaved, we showered, we put on our clothes and checked out of the hotel. We had breakfast in a diner around the corner, a greasy spoon something like the place where I had slung hash in New York. Grace’s Lunch on Columbus Avenue. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? Years? It was hard to tell, impossible to believe. It was way back, buried somewhere, over and done with.

I don’t remember what I ate that morning. I don’t even remember that I ate, but I must have. Eggs, probably. But it’s only a guess. Whatever it was, I didn’t taste it. I got through with it and Cindy finished whatever in hell she had ordered, and we got out of there.

It was a cool gray sort of morning. The streets were relatively empty, the sky overcast, the temperature more than bearable. A good day for watching a football game, something like that.

I wondered whether it would be a good day for murder.

We walked around a corner, walked a block, turned another corner and kept going. I caught sight of the house, the big frame house where everything was going to happen. The money shop.