Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [31]
Anyway, he seemed to think that was enough to start a conversation. Before long, he was talking to her in a very persistent way. He wanted to go to the store to get a six-pack of beer and kept bugging her to go with him. She kept shaking her head. Sue and she had been getting ready to leave and she didn't want to go to the store with this man now. He was too strange. There wasn't any sense to it any way since the store was just a little down the road.
What worked in his favor, however, was that Sue didn't look ready to leave yet. She was just beginning to get off on talking to Sterling, and obviously wouldn't mind being alone with the guy for a little while. So Nicole said, Okay, and took Jeremy for protection. Sunny was asleep by then.
When they got to the store, it was closed. They continued down town. Nicole didn't even get out of the car. She stayed while the tall dude went in and got a six-pack or two of beer, and brought back a banana for Jeremy. That was his idea.
It was odd, but he had a Mustang just like hers, same model, same year. Just the color was different. So she felt comfortable in it.
When he returned with the beer, she was leaning against the door, and he put the six-pack on her knee. She joked and said, Oh, that hurts. He started rubbing her knee. He did it decently; not too personal, but it felt pretty good in a nice simple way, and they went on home. When they got to the end of Sterling's driveway, before she got out of the car, he turned around and looked at her and asked if she would kiss him. She didn't say anything for a minute, then said, Yes. He reached across and gave her a kiss and it didn't do any harm at all to what she thought about him. In fact, to her surprise, she felt like crying. A long time later, she would remember that first kiss. Then they went back to the house.
Now Nicole didn't ignore him quite so much, although she still made a point of sitting across the room. Sue obviously couldn't stand the fellow, and was paying even less attention in his direction. In fact Nicole was surprised how indifferent he seemed that Sue disliked him. Sue might be obviously pregnant now, but in Nicole's opinion she was a beautiful-looking blond. Maybe even the more spectacular of the two of them. Yet he didn't care, seemed ready to sit by himself. Sterling was also quiet. After a while, it began to seem as if the evening would all go nowhere.
With the down drift, Nicole and Sue started talking to each other. Nicole often had the feeling that Sue, when things were all right with Rikki, didn't think too good of her because of all the guys she dated, in fact Sue and Rikki told on her when she took a dude into bed once at her great-grandmother's house, and she never trusted Sue completely after that. She certainly didn't want Sue to think she was still that easy. So Nicole got a little stiff when just as she was getting ready to take the kids home, Gary said he wanted her phone number. She certainly felt funny about looking so available in front of her sister-in-law, after all the remarks she'd made tonight about living a new kind of life, so she told him that he couldn't have it. He was amazed.
He said, It just doesn't make any sense for you to walk out of here and never see you again. It would be a waste of a good thing, he said. He even got a little mad when she kept saying no. Sat there and looked at her. She stared into his blue eyes and told him she wouldn't give it to him, and then what with the kids, and Sue saying goodbye to Sterling, it took a while to leave. By the time they were out of the house, Nicole felt like screaming, she had wanted to give him that phone number so bad.
She didn't even have a phone. All she could have given was her address, or the next-door neighbor's number.
On the ride, Nicole didn't like the way she was feeling at all. She took Sue home, drove all the way out to Spanish Fork, pulled up to the house, and didn't move from the car. Then she said, To hell with it, and started back to Sterling's after all. On