Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"It's hard to know. How about you? If you needed somebody to make fun of, would it still be me?"

She stared at him for a moment. "I don't know. I guess we should talk about it sometime when we're not exhausted and the bottle's still corked." She flopped onto the bed on her stomach with her arms bent and her hands under her chin. "Right now I need an old friend who's willing to rub my sore back."

He sat on the bed beside her, lifted the sweatshirt a few inches, poured a little of the oil in his hand, and then slowly and gently rubbed it into the small of her back in a circular motion.

"Ooh," she sighed. "That's good."

He worked patiently, his strong hands softly kneading the sore muscles in exactly the right spots, working up higher on her back now, to the shoulder blades. She could feel the tight, hard knots of muscle relaxing under his touch. The hands kept moving inward toward the tender muscles along the spine. When he stopped to pour more oil into his palm, Jane pulled the sweatshirt up almost to her shoulders, hesitated, then slipped it up over her head and set it beside her. She was naked to the waist now, but it had seemed that making him work under a shirt was idiotic. If Carey saw her breasts, he saw her breasts.

His hands were on her shoulders, and then the connecting muscles to her neck and then along the back of her neck to her scalp. She felt goose bumps and shivered, then relaxed again. She was so loose and at ease now that all the muscles on the top half of her body were on the edge of some kind of sleep, a paralysis of laziness, so happy not moving that they didn't quite belong to her anymore. They were just there waiting for him to touch them again.

Carey said, "How's it going so far?"

"I'm ready to die now," she announced. "Just give me more champagne and keep rubbing, and you can tell them to pull the trigger whenever."

He worked back down her spine, and she began to imagine that she could see him clearly from the position of his hands on her skin. She remembered telling Timmy about him. She had said he was special, and he was. Without warning, the word angel appeared in her mind, and she laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing," she answered with the smile still in her voice. "You're being an angel."

"How about your legs?"

"What about them?"

"Do they hurt?"

She considered the implications. He couldn't rub oil on her through a pair of blue jeans. He knew that. "Not at the moment." When she had said it she felt a sense of loss that she didn't have the time to analyze if she was going to fix it. "You can't be too careful, though." She reached under her stomach to unbutton the jeans and give a tug on the zipper.

He slipped the jeans down her legs and off her ankles, and she felt tension in her throat. Then his hands were on the soles of her feet, squeezing them with tiny circular movements, until she began to imagine she was feeling him sending messages up the nerves to her shoulders and neck. The tension didn't go away, but it wasn't unpleasant anymore. He worked up the Achilles tendon, the calves, and very softly the backs of her knees, and then slowly and carefully up the hamstrings. She was calm and happy, and she wasn't thinking at all anymore, just following his touch. But then the circular movement of his hand passed for a moment between her thighs and she caught herself arching her back to spread them apart the tiniest bit.

He kept working on her legs and back, but she could feel that the hands weren't alternating anymore, so he was undressing with the other. Then she felt the panties being peeled off, and he turned her over to gently kiss her bruised face, and they slowly joined in the embrace that she had always known would come.

Everything began with a slow inevitability, a luxurious ease and simplicity that made her feel warm, then eager, and then glad. But the feeling didn't fade. It built and intensified. After that, every second, every heartbeat expanded into a moment of its own. Suddenly she became aware that she was hearing a woman's voice, and she wondered how long she had been doing that, moaning and making little cries that she couldn't have silenced if she tried. Then she went beyond thinking into a place where every sensation seemed to go up one notch on the scale to the highest frequency - colors, sounds, movements. She was almost afraid when the intensity kept building, and the word angel came back to her, but this time she didn't laugh, because everything was bright and fever-clear and immediate, with no distance left at all, no will inside her but his.

The whole night passed without her knowing the time, because she had the sense that she would have to give up something in order to think. They would pause and let their heartbeats slow, lying together still clasped in the same embrace but not the same now, somehow friends simply passing together into sleep. But then one of them would stir, and the other would silently say yes, each time the question and the answer completely different, because every time the last time had not faded or gone away, so it was like going up another step on a stairway.

At dawn they were lying on the bed, eyes closed, when he said, "What do you think about getting married?"

Jane's breath caught in her throat. Have beautiful tall children. Live here - not in this house, but at least close by, in the big old stone one in Amherst with him. Maybe that was where all of this had been taking her, leading her away from death the way she had taken other people. She would never have to tell him what a guide was because it would all be over - already was over when you started losing.

"No answer?" he asked.

"Every girl's fondest wish," she said. "Think the guy who owns the Buffalo Bills might be interested in marrying me? Maybe the one who fathered those quintuplets. There's a guy who knows his way around a diaper."

"I mean it," said Carey. "We should get married."

Jane sat up, then leaned over and kissed him, letting her hair hang down on both sides of their faces like a curtain. She lay back down. "Thank you," she said. "I guess we ought to have a serious talk about it sometime."

"Does that mean yes? That's what you said last night."

"Don't be an idiot."

"Meaning?"

"I've always loved everything I knew about you."

"So why are you saying no?"

"I didn't say no." She sat up again and ran her fingers through her hair to find imaginary tangles. "I said we should have a serious talk sometime. I'll start any time you want to, but I'm not going to say yes right now."

He sat up too. "I can do that."

She sighed. "When was the last time you had sex, Carey?"

He pursed his lips and said reluctantly, "The other night."

"You mean the night before last night. The last time you came off a shift."

"It was a colleague. It wasn't a routine procedure. She's a terrific diagnostician, a person of the highest - "

"I don't want to know."

"What is this? You pry and then pretend you're not interested?"

"You'd make a lousy husband."

"Jane, this thing with my colleague. It's not anything to get jealous about. It was a single, isolated event. Two patients died at the end of the shift after we did everything we could. I think we were just comforting each other. There's something buried deep in the cerebral cortex that gets triggered when you lose a life, some primitive forgotten instinct that says 'Fuck while you can, because one of these times that is going to be you.' It's the practical animal reaction that evolved to keep the species alive after prehistoric kill-offs. She's probably mystified that we did it. Next time we do a shift together we'll be perfectly professional."

"I'm sure you will. You're a good doctor, and you'd know if she weren't. But I assure you, if you had her in the sack, she's not going to let herself get too mystified. She's probably waiting on your doorstep. If she isn't, it doesn't matter, because there will be another along shortly. There is, in fact, isn't there? Me. The world is full of women - an endless supply - and every last one of them has something about her: a little smile that makes you want to smile too, or breasts like two perfect grapefruits. Remember her? That's probably why she hung around your supermarket - so you could make the comparison."