Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [109]
Running my fingers over the silky skin of her hips and stomach, cradling the hint of her belly with my palms, wrapping my hands around her waist, encircling her girth with my hands, I tried to lose myself in the moment. It would be the first time all day I’d stopped thinking about the syndrome.
She began helping me off with my T-shirt, then unbuckled my pants and began wrestling them off. I was so ready to make love, it was embarrassing.
“I can see there’s going to be no mercy here,” she said.
I took her in my arms, rolled over, and kissed her. As we played, I began having flashbacks to all the times I’d made love with Holly. Holly had been more relaxed in life, more uptight in bed, more serious making love, while Stephanie, so solemn in life, took immense delight in every little nuance of our bodies.
Still, I couldn’t shake visions of a naked Holly from my brain.
Holly lay in some dank nursing home, alone and forgotten the same way I would lie alone and forgotten in just a few days. I had treated her terribly, and now I was about to pop her sister. Looking at it in this new light, our tryst seemed wrong in the worst of all possible ways.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I can’t.”
“Oh, it’s pretty obvious you can.”
“I don’t think so.”
Grasping me, she said, “What’s this?”
“Some sick cosmic joke.”
She rolled on top of me.
“Stop.”
“Hey, don’t turn this into a big moral issue.” She hovered over me and stared into my eyes. “Let’s not analyze this. I’m sick to death of analyzing every little thing in my life. It’s the reason I don’t have a life. I think it’s the reason you don’t have one, either.”
Thinking had always been my downfall, and I found I couldn’t stop now. Ironic, because in three days I wouldn’t be able to think. “I feel so bad about my life. The way I—”
“Shush,” she said, her hair tickling my face as she leaned over, her small breasts brushing my chest. “Don’t talk. That’s the secret, big boy. Just lie back and enjoy the night.”
“Did you call me big boy?”
“Okay, medium-to-slightly-above-average boy.”
“Let’s go back to big boy.”
“Sorry. You lose what you question.”
Later, lost inside her, I felt her hot, moist breath on my ear, her legs wrapped around mine, her hands on the back of my neck. It was an animal thing making love, but it was magnificent, too, and I wanted it to be so deliciously slow, we would both explode with desire before it was over.
And then, just for a moment, I thought my heart stopped.
Afterward, twined together, wet and sated and full of warmth we’d each appropriated from the other, I found myself beginning to drift off. I struggled to remain alert but failed. Lately, each time I went to sleep, I was just a little afraid I wouldn’t wake up. Then Stephanie was shaking me, and I was half-awake but still dreaming. A weird sensation.
It seemed forever before I got my eyes open. “I was worried,” she said.
“It was as peaceful as I’ve ever been. Like I was dead.”
She’d turned on a lamp, her hair down around her face as she watched me. I had no idea how long we’d been here: one hour, two, a day? While I was rapidly coming to terms with my fate, I could tell by the deep blue dread in Stephanie’s eyes, she was not. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Making love with Stephanie had been penny fun and pound foolish. Worse, it had been diabolic. After I joined her sister in the mental ether, the pain of Stephanie’s consanguine betrayal would only be that much greater for her.
Ironic. Just as I was recognizing my own unhealthy need to inflict suffering on the women around me, I went out and did it again. The fact that it had been