Off Season - Jack Ketchum [32]
She slipped into bed beside him and smiled. He returned the smile, listening to Carla’s voice on the other side of the wall. You gotta stop this, he thought. This is bullshit. But he continued listening. Laura would want to make love. He knew better than to even try while he lay there listening to Carla. Down that road lay Limp City.
He wondered why he’d agreed to come up here in the first place. Hadn’t he anticipated something like this? He had not. But why not? He damn well ought to have. I thought we’d talked all that away, he thought, long ago. He couldn’t even remember the guy’s name she’d been seeing at the time. He only remembered the feeling.
Laura rolled over and kissed him. “I got ten dollars says you can’t go fifteen minutes after driving all day,” she said.
He kissed her back without passion. “Let me go piss first,” he said.
He disengaged himself from her and padded over to his bathrobe, slipped it on, and walked through the kitchen to the bathroom. He saw a light burning behind Dan and Marjie’s door.
He purposely did not glance in the other direction, toward the living room. He stood in front of the toilet and flipped open his bathrobe and aimed into the bowl.
For a moment he heard something move outside near the woodshed, a light scraping sound. Carla had told them about the mouse in the kitchen. But it sounded as if she had something bigger than field mice out there. Raccoons, maybe.
He heard Marjie laughing through the wall. Marjie. It had really been Marjie who had continued to cement their relationship together. In some ways his feelings for her were firmer and more durable, he guessed, than for her sister.
There had never been anything sexual between them for the simple reason that she and Carla were very close, and it would have been unthinkable for Marjie to make it with Carla’s man. Unthinkable for Carla and Marjie, that is. He had thought about it. Marjie was very attractive. He had thought about it particularly after the breakup with Carla. But by then the basis of their relationship had already been established. He and Marjie enjoyed many of the same things and people. They went to bars together now and then, and when they’d loosened up sufficiently each went his own way, cruising. They went to horror films together—nobody else would accompany them—and she would clutch his arm during the nasty stuff.
But nothing romantic. Perhaps he suspected that some of Marjie’s eccentricities—her fear of the dark, of closed-in spaces, of fast cars, and even of cheap food, her tendency to grow moody and distant for no observable reason at all—would irritate him in a lover while they only amused him in a friend. Maybe that was why he’d never made a move on her. Perhaps it was that they both knew a good thing when they saw it. Neither had many friends of the opposite sex who were not either former or potential lovers, and minus any real sexual tension, their pleasure in each other’s company was special and unique. And then of course there was always the shadow of Carla.
How was Carla. What was Carla doing. It had been slow ending. And that, like most of the rest, was his fault.
Their love had broken down into a war of nerves. Carla was on the ascendant in life, with a good new job at good money. Nick, on the other hand, was faltering. He had quit a perfectly okay job in order to write and he wasn’t writing. Now, a year or so later, he was making more money writing than he’d been making nine to five, but in his last days with Carla his ego needed constant attention—or rather, his cock did.
It was strange how, when there was nothing else in your life, sex was everything. Suddenly he wanted Carla twenty-four hours a day, and she of course was too busy. Probably she knew exactly what the problem was, that he was using sexual potency to compensate for another kind of impotence, and probably he was