Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

The transition from the innocence of public sunlight to the siesta silence of the apartment had to be made at precisely the right time. To wait too long would spoil the chance. The rum would have become a depressant instead of a stimulant, and all her sense of fun and joy and holiday would have dulled into sleepiness. Had he taken her upstairs too quickly, the privacy and shadowy intimacy of the apartment would have triggered all her warning systems, made her too conscious of all the lovely bikinied flesh exposed, made her constrained and formal and inaccessible. He felt as if he had watched her the way, in the old submarine movies, the captain would watch the depth gauge and level the vessel at the precise reading he wanted.

So when he had unlocked the apartment and taken her in, she brought with her the leggy, careless insouciance, her gigglings, music of the ice in the tall strong drink. He had closed the door and gone striding ahead through the living room into the big bedroom, taken the roll of maps and drawings out of the comer of the closet, rolled the rubber bands off, unrolled them, and carried them over to the broad bed and spread them out on the bed.

“This is going to be your husband’s project, all the way, but don’t give him a clue yet. Come here and hold this side down, Liz.”

She came from the doorway and held the left side of the drawings, one knee on the bed, drink in her right hand. “What is it, Aldo?”

“A joint venture with a Uruguayan named Roberto Perez, on one hell of a great piece of beach twenty miles up the coast from Montevideo. I shouldn’t be telling you this, Liz. Maybe you can’t keep a secret from Lee worth a damn.”

“Pooh! I can so. Gee, it looks big in the drawing.”

“Three times the size of this deal. You two will be living down there quite a while, honey. How’s your Spanish?”

“Like nada.” She laughed in excitement “Wow! It’s fantastic, Aldo.”

“Let me get this top drawing off and show you the map.” He tried to point out detail on the map but had to release his end, and it kept rolling up. As he had hoped, she said, “Here. Let me free up another hand.” She finished her drink, leaned, and put the glass on a night stand. He pushed the sheaf deeper onto the bed, so that she could then stretch out prone, braced on her elbows, and hold the sheaf of drawings and maps flat against the bedspread. He leaned close, his sun-warm flesh against hers, shoulders touching, as he reached in front of her to show her detail on the map.

He casually put his left arm across her back, big hand on her left shoulder. Slowly, slowly, during the eight months he had known her, he had conditioned her to the casual, meaningless, friendly touch, the quick kiss of greeting and parting, affectionate. He had developed the relationship of mutual liking. She was the helpmeet. She and the marvelous boss helped guide the destiny of the splendid young husband. He had deliberately created a flavor of conspiracy. Little ways she could help Lee improve his performance, suggestions that could come more easily from her than from the boss.

“Here’s the secret I don’t think you can keep, woman.”

She turned and looked at him through a tousle of hair, their faces close, her eyes happy and mocking. “You say! Come on, Mister B. Secret like what?”

“Two secrets. On the operating budget I worked out with Perez, my resident representative — the guy who will do the pushing — is in there for about five thou more than Lee gets right now. Not quite five. Forty-seven hundred.”

“Hey! Hey, now!”

“Wait. That’s only part of it. We set up the joint operating structure on a bonus-and-profit-sharing basis. Perez and I get the king-size slices, but Lee would be on the eligible list for seven percent.”

“Of what?”

“Shrewd question. If he goofs, seven percent of nothing is nothing. If he brings it in on schedule, and the payout goes the way Perez’s study indicates, it could be seven percent of three mil.”

She frowned. “Twenty-one thousand dollars!”

“You are a very pretty lady and you are a rotten mathematician. It would be two hundred and ten thousand.”

Her eyes went wide wide wide. “Holy Maloney,” she whispered. He changed the pressure of his hand on her far shoulder very very slightly. It was essential that she not notice it, yet the slight pull had to suggest to her an impulsive response. One does not as quickly terminate an act one has begun. She had to lift her right shoulder out of the way to give him the kiss of gratitude and excitement. That meant taking her right hand off the roll of drawings and maps. They rolled up into a loose cylinder, and in the kiss he settled onto his side, bringing her down too, so that they lay in each other’s arms, face to face on the bed. As soon as he felt her mouth tighten and change, rather than continuing the pressure, he broke his mouth away from hers and said, “You won’t be able to stand it, you know. You’ll tell him. You’ll hint around until he pries it out of you.”

“I won’t so!”

“You will.”

“Won’t!”

“You will, you will, you will. Shouldn’t have told you.”

So, as he had hoped, in an instinctive effort to affirm her reliability, her trustworthiness, her gratitude, she kissed him again, and he shifted quickly to hold her more strongly, to adjust his body to hers, flesh in contact from knees to lips, right arm under her neck and around her, forearm clamped across her back, left hand in the small of her back, pulling her close.

The crucial question now was whether he could move her quickly enough through the period of alarm, realization, fright. Her whole body had tautened with the sudden and surprising awareness that somehow she was in a man’s apartment, on a man’s bed, nearly naked and locked in close embrace, a mouth hungry and demanding pressing against her lips. He had to maintain the embrace long enough to get the deep engine of her healthy sensuality started, fueled by the rum and sun and swimming, primed by his cautious and indirect conditioning over eight months. Her hesitation would be caused by her guilty realization that she had initiated the first kiss, and the second also.

When she tore her mouth free and craned her head back, he kissed her throat. “No,” she said. “Oh no. Please. Please don’t.” There was an edge of panic in her voice. He found her mouth again and she let it continue for two long seconds before she pulled away again. “Stop now,” she said. “Please stop, Aldo. Please don’t.” But the edges of the words were slightly blurred and softened, her voice huskier, and it was easier to find her lips again and hold them longer. She pushed at him with less emphasis, almost sleepily.

At the proper time, in proper sequence, he moved his left hand down from the small of her back, up the mounded hip and buttock, and little finger first, worked the edge of his hand under the taut upper edge of the bikini bottom. When he rolled his hand, it forced the narrow clinging band of fabric downward an inch or so.

She stiffened again and clapped her right hand onto his, hooked her fingers around his wrist, and pulled his hand away. “We can’t,” she said in a groaning voice. “Oh please don’t any more.”

He put his hand back on the small of her back. It all comes down to this, he thought. Eight months. All the processes of friendship, creating trust, taking Lee Rountree under his wing, improvising the trip to Miami, plying her with drinks, bringing her up here at the right time and working her into the right position, it all came down to whether or not a couple of ounces of coral fabric could be moved far enough to become loose, to encircle a narrower dimension of her young ripe body. After the long stalk, the prey was now in perfect range, motionless in the sights, and the task was to pull the trigger by slowly squeezing the whole hand. Because once it was done she was lost, and she knew it. And it would be done only if she wanted to lose — not in the brain, in the loyalty, or in the heart, but only in the yearning body.