The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [18]
But those exchanges had been either in public or before Mel. The two of them hadn’t been slippery with sweat, half drunk, and in Nancy’s case, thoroughly worked up by both her earlier sexual encounter with Mel and the odd experience she’d just been through with that vibrating machine gun.
Ellis pulled back slightly, poured more water on her, and watched as it soaked her top.
At that, they reacted simultaneously. As she lifted her head off the truck’s gunwale to kiss him fully and passionately, he slipped his free hand up inside her tank top and took her bare breast in his palm. She gasped at his touch and reached out for him, pulling him close and grinding up against him, her leg sliding up the outside of his thigh, and her foot hooking behind the back of his knee to bring him closer. Their hands skimmed across each other as if seeking cover, exploring, learning the topography. It was as if the only time they had available would be gone in a moment.
Which was exactly right.
Ellis broke off first, being the more cautious. Nancy had just slipped her hand down the front of his pants when he straightened and pulled back, his hand on her wrist, stunned and pleased by her eagerness but terrified of its consequences.
“Wait, wait,” he panted, nervously looking over the hood of the truck at Mel’s recumbent shape. “Not here.”
“Where?” she asked, breathing like a runner. “I want to do this.”
Though gratified, he wasn’t surprised by her comment, even if he was by its timing. He knew of her background, after all, and of her particular appetites. That was in part what had fueled his own desire. He was already Mel’s sidekick when they’d first met Nancy at a biker bar outside Albany. Both men had Harleys, criminal records, and generally poor attitudes, although only Mel really worked at the bad-boy stereotype. Mel would engage in the male rituals that some of his brighter companions were beginning to see as old news, while Ellis headed straight into the anesthesia of cheap beer, loud noise, and a fog of cigarette smoke.
Nancy took to Mel right away that night, responding to his challenge of her date like a doe might to a dominant stag. Ellis had almost laughed at the lack of subtlety, except that he, too, had been captivated by her youth, looks, and open sexuality. It was with mixed emotions that he’d seen his friend eventually translate this particular mating encounter into a walk up to the altar.
Nancy followed Ellis’s glance toward her husband, who’d rolled slightly onto his side to face the other way.
“He might as well be dead. We could do it right here.” She rubbed the front of his fly with her open hand, kissing his neck as he averted his face, trying to think clearly. “Shit, you’re so big.”
She suddenly unsnapped her shorts and tried unzipping them before he stopped her.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “He sleeps like that for hours, right?”
She kissed him again. “Like a dead man.”
“Then we can take him home and you can drive me to my place. We’ve done that before.”
Which they had, with him longing for exactly what was about to unfold. In fact, it had been at such a recent drop-off that she’d first told him of her unhappiness with Mel, much to his private delight. Not that Ellis had been surprised. The marriage’s troubles had been clear for quite a while.
It was all she needed to hear. She rebuttoned her shorts. “Let’s get him in the truck.”
The whole trip back, Ellis worked to maintain the mental fog he trusted to cloud his better judgment. He had practice at this—even considered himself an expert. The countless bars he could no longer recall, the times in Mel’s company, as at the armory, when he’d known he should be elsewhere.
And Nancy did her best to undermine his failing self-preservation. As he drove toward Bennington on ever-improving roads,