Company - Max Barry [52]
He smiles. “I hope so.” They clink glasses.
Eve nudges the Audi over to the side of the road and takes her hands off the wheel. “Damn. I think you were right. I am too drunk to drive.”
Jones looks around. He has some trouble focusing, but manages to conclude that they have arrived back at his apartment. “Want me to call you a cab?”
“Maybe I should sleep it off.” She doesn't lean so much as slump in his direction. “At your place.” Her lips form a rubbery smile. Jones studies it for a second.
“Okay.”
“That's it? No ‘We have to keep things professional'? No ‘It's better if we're just friends'?” She gestures extravagantly, and whacks the rearview mirror off-kilter. “Ow.”
“You said those things.”
“I did?”
“And I just said you could stay. I didn't invite you to get naked.”
Eve finds the door latch and spills onto the road. “Ha.” She drags herself back into Jones's field of vision. “I don't believe for a second that you don't want to sleep with me.”
Jones levers his body out of the Audi. This sends a rush of blood to his head, where he feels there is far too much of the stuff already. He comes around the car and helps Eve to her feet.
“Everybody does,” she confides. “Every one of them. I don't see why you should be any different.” She pokes him in the chest with her finger.
Jones fumbles to connect his keys with the apartment building's door lock. “Everybody wants to sleep with you? How do you know this?”
“When you do some investigating,” she leans on him heavily as they negotiate the doorway, “you discover the minimum standard of what a man will sleep with is very low.”
“So it's not that you're irresistible. It's just that men are sluts.”
“It's both.” They are in the stairwell now, and Eve abruptly stops. Jones has one arm around her waist, so this requires him to stop, too. “Kiss me, Jones.”
Jones's mind says: It's a trap! The message races out to his lips, which pay no attention because they are in the process of kissing Eve. Her lips are soft and delightful and then they curve under his and she starts giggling. Jones pulls back. Eve starts up the stairs, and Jones has to catch her. “That's not fair. I wasn't ready.”
“Said the slut.”
“Aren't you trying to seduce me? How am I the slut?”
They reach Jones's apartment. He managed to put his keys in the wrong pocket downstairs, so now he has to release Eve to fish them out again. She slumps against the corridor wall. “Because you are lowering yourself. Whereas I,” she begins to slide down the wall, “am already . . . lowered.” Jones catches her. She looks up at him and smiles. But her head keeps moving, gathering pace, and then it flops back, so Jones is blinking at her neck and holding her limp body.
For a few seconds he doesn't move. “Eve?” he whispers, and when that doesn't work, tries it again. He gets one hand under her head and lifts it up. Her mouth hangs open. Her eyes are thin zombielike slits under dark, heavy lids. Eve is out. And, furthermore, this is not the kind of position Jones wants to strike in front of the neighbors, all of whom have peepholes and several of whom are not shy about using them. He struggles to get his door open, then Eve inside without banging some part of her against a wall, which is harder than it sounds because she has gone completely boneless, her arms swinging in big circles. He drags her through his living room and drops her onto his bed. Then he sits down heavily next to her and breathes deeply.
She doesn't move. It suddenly occurs to Jones that she has dropped dead, and he leans forward anxiously. She makes a little snoring sound. Jones carefully arranges her head into a better position. She stops snoring and smacks her lips. A tiny pool of saliva has formed at the corner of her mouth and Jones dabs this away.
He comes back ten minutes later, once he's closed the apartment door, changed out of his suit, and brushed his teeth. Eve is in exactly the same position. Jones hangs in the doorway. He is not sure which items of her clothing it would be a good idea to remove and which would be terrible. In the end,