Shark River Read online

  Another warning flag—and unexpected, despite the gradual and increasing hand and eye contact between the two of us. She was a patter and a toucher. I was surprised that I’d misjudged her intent.

  I stood and said, “I think I’ll get another beer. You ready?”

  Her eyes hadn’t wavered from mine. “Yeah. I’m ready. That was my point. But somehow I just offended you.”

  “Nope. Just surprised. And thirsty.”

  I came back with a Diet Coke but didn’t sit. I said to her, “I think it’s late, and it’s been a very tough day for both of us, so it’s time you headed home. Grab your stuff, and I’ll walk you back.”

  She reached and took my right wrist in her hand, stopping me, swinging hair out of her face, eyes tilted upward, looking out from beneath pale eyebrows, “Mind if we spend the next couple of minutes talking like adults?”

  I said, “That’s what we were doing until just a moment ago, Lindsey. I’m curious. I was enjoying the conversation. You’ve got a good brain; a quirky, funny sense of humor. Why’d you decide to make such an obvious pass? Is it some kind of test?”

  She was still holding my wrist. “I’m too obvious? Maybe you don’t like it when the woman is the aggressor. Some men don’t. Is that the problem, Doc? Or maybe you’re hung up on the age thing.”

  “Nope. The body ages a hell of a lot faster than the brain, so it’s neither one. Problem is, we don’t know each other and we don’t have a relationship. So there’s nothing to be aggressive about.”

  She nodded and said, “Ahh-h-h-h,” releasing my hand. “The moral, prudish type. I don’t meet many of you.”

  “Lindsey, my friend, suddenly, we’re both doing a very bad job of reading one another. And we were getting along so well.”

  “So maybe you just don’t find me attractive.”

  “Let’s see, you’re five-seven, five-eight, great body, great face. So what’s not to find attractive? I’ll tell you the problem if you want.”

  She sat back and gave a pouty sigh. “I don’t have anything else to do. Go ahead.”

  “Okay, it’s simple. When I meet a man or woman whose behavior crosses normal boundaries, it scares me a little. I start asking myself, Why? So what I do is stop, take a step back and analyze. Slightly more than six hours ago, a man in a ski mask took a shot at a woman who was standing right beside you. Could be he was taking a shot at you; who knows? Maybe you’re still in shock. Maybe you feel like you owe me something. After what you went through this evening, there are so many valid reasons for you to be vulnerable, fragile, and not yourself that I’m not going to risk imposing.”

  “Imposing on me. Right.”

  “Sorry, but it’s the truth. Not for your benefit, it’s for mine. I’ve got rules and I try to follow them. I need to be selfish that way.” I thought for a moment, and took a sip of Diet Coke before I added, “My conscience has more than its share of scars, Lindsey. It can’t tolerate many more. I like you. You’ve made me smile a couple of times. But I’m not interested. Not now. Probably not ever. And do us both a favor—don’t push it, please.”

  She sat in her chair, looking out through the screen, drink in hand. She turned her head toward me briefly, and in her little-girl voice said, “You’re serious. You really are.”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid I am. I’m flattered. You’ve got all the great genetics, all the soft and interesting parts in the right places. I look at you sitting there, your hair, the way you look in that white shirt, and it’s . . . well, let’s just say that you have an impact. The way you look, I mean. I can feel it in my stomach.”

  “A Boy Scout,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m no Boy Scout. Believe me. Anything but.”

  Once again she reached out and touched her fingers to the back of my hand. I’d already noticed that her nails were short, no polish. “It’s not like I’m bragging, but I’ve never had any guy say no to me in my life. Ever.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a moment.”

  “Want me to tell you what the attraction is? To you, I mean. And you’ve absolutely fucked it up, by the way. You have zero chance as of now.”

  “Sorry to hear that, but I’m still interested. Why?”

  I could feel her fingernails moving over my skin, but then they stopped and clawed down, her brief punishment. “This afternoon, when we’d finished our run, Gale and me, out there on the dock, uh, I’ve had such an absolutely shitty year. The only times my father came to see me was twice back when I was in rehab, and that was because someone overheard me talking about committing suicide. Not that I was really thinking of it. I wasn’t. It was just talk, you know?

  “But these four weeks on the island, I really think it was starting to change me. Maybe the discipline. Running, lifting weights, working my ass off every day. Eating right, getting in shape, talking to my shrink on the phone every single night. I started to feel some pride in what I was doing. Some confidence, too. Things were starting to seem okay to be me. Like I’m not such a goofball fuckup after all.”

  She scratched her check absently, thinking about it, looking outward but staring inward, processing the experience. “For the first time since I was a little girl, the world was starting to seem like a pretty good place. A safe place. When Gale and I were standing there watching the sunset, that’s exactly what was going through my mind. The world really is a cool place.”

  I said, “Then all of a sudden, you look up and see two men in ski masks, one of them carrying a weapon.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. The world didn’t seem so safe anymore.”

  She went on. “What I felt was so weird. Like fear so strong it was almost . . . umm, like getting an electrical shock, but slower with the feel of the electricity moving through my spine. Or like someone’d squirted ether up my nose. I was frozen, couldn’t move. You know those terrible nightmares where you try to run but can’t? Same thing. I wanted to run but couldn’t, wanted to scream but couldn’t, and then the guy shoots at Gale and I felt my bladder go. Standing right there, I pissed my own pants. That really . . . really—” She stopped momentarily, her voice breaking, sighed heavily, looking away from me so I couldn’t see her face. “It really did something to me. For the first time in my life, I felt like a piece of meat. Something that could be . . . I don’t know, it was like those news videos you see after a flood. All the dead and dying animals. Like I could be killed and left to bloat in the sun. I was no longer the eccentric daughter of the great man. I was a female animal and about to die—and that’s when . . . that’s when . . .”

  She stood and stepped to me, weeping softly now. Placed her hand on my shoulder as she said, “That’s when I saw you, Doc. Looked and saw you charging like one of those football players on TV. You had this expression on your face, complete focus, and it was like I was looking down from way up high, totally in slow motion, and that’s when I stopped being scared. I had urine dripping down my leg, but I knew everything was going to be okay. I don’t have a clue why, but that’s the way I felt. You looked a hell of a lot bigger and meaner than the guys with the masks, but it was more than that. Like I told you, I noticed you right away, your face, big and safe-looking, and I knew you were going to save us. I just knew it and I was right.”

  Her hand had moved to the back on my neck, massaging it, and I let her. In her small voice, she said, “So you want to know my motives? Real simple. I came here to thank you in the best way I know how. I wanted to take you to bed and do absolutely anything you want me to do, then put you to sleep with my body still on you. You saved my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again. Maybe you’ve got to experience your own death to realize how much you really do want to live. For all that, I figured I owed you a big favor. Figured that now it was your turn to feel safe and protected.”

  I stood slowly, feeling her fingers slide down my back to my hips and stop there. I took her by the shoulders, squeezed, leaned, and kissed her on top of the head. She was still weeping, her body spasm
ing softly, and she fell comfortably against my chest, my right hand patting her rhythmically between shoulder blades. I said, “A generous offer, lady, but a bad idea. You need to go home, get some sleep.”

  She buried her nose and face against me, then into me. I listened to a muffled question. “You sure? Last offer. They’re flying me out tomorrow first thing. They haven’t even told me where.”

  My fingers were still drumming on her back. “Sorry, yeah, I’m sure. I may kick myself in the morning, but I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “You know, they say that the way you’re patting me right now? It reminds us of our mother’s heartbeat back in the womb, so it comforts us when we’re scared. If I promise to be good, and if I promise not to hurt your bad arm, you think we could lie down on the couch for maybe ten minutes? I could use some comforting. Something important happened to me today, and I’m not sure what. It’s maybe the only way I’m going to be able to sleep tonight.”

  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 pla
y 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!”

  She sounded disappointed but not surprised. Like that sort of thing had been a part of her life before. She told me the whole operation, chopper and all, had been arranged by her father, and would I mind meeting her at the helipad because the cops weren’t going to let her out of their sight even for a few minutes.

  While I was brushing my teeth, the phone rang again. It was Tomlinson. It must have been a good night for him, too, because there was renewed energy in his voice. “Marion, holy moley! that sister of yours is something. Has an absolutely fabulous spirit, man, lots of heavy mojo vibes. No sex; didn’t even try. But she has a real godliness about her, plus she is built like a brick shit house! We got in the hot tub. She brought this little, tiny, tiny bikini, and we stayed up talking until five. Smoked a couple fatties, drank some wine—you know, really getting to know each other, exploring each other’s heads. That woman is smart, she’s funny, she’s unspoiled—got what we Zen folks call ‘the crazy wisdom.’ ”

  I said, “Crazy, huh? Then at least the two of you have something in common. And Tomlinson? Please don’t refer to her as my sister.”

  He hooted. “Lighten up, Doc! We need to get together so you can go over these papers Tucker left her. I’ve read through them a couple of times. Kind of interesting, really. Old Florida stuff, from back in the cowboy and rumrunner days. The feel of it I’m talking about. Hey, Doc, I don’t remember—when the old man died, did he leave a will?”