The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [19]
Mel, in the meantime, stayed jammed into the cab’s far corner, snoring, his legs sprawled.
Ellis had to admit that the presence of a man he knew would kill him for what he was thinking, much less what he hoped to be doing in thirty minutes, heightened the excitement to a nearly uncontainable intensity.
But it was a long trip, and it was harder getting Mel into the trailer than it had been hefting him into the truck. Inevitably, he woke up, at least enough to demand what the hell was going on; the enhanced meaning of his question wasn’t lost on his companions. By the time they finally reached their goal, and Nancy, now at the wheel, pulled up beside Ellis’s motorcycle at his apartment across town, they were sitting at opposite ends of the cab, each waiting for the other to pick up the pieces of their passion and see what was left.
Nancy killed the engine, put her hands between her thighs, and let out a deep breath, staring straight out the windshield.
“Fuck.”
He laughed softly. “Right.”
“What do you think?”
“Probably a bad idea.”
She made a face but didn’t turn her head. “Yeah.” It was a sigh, tired and sad, and it touched him in the middle of his chest.
“It’s not for lack of interest.”
She looked at him. “You mean that?”
He caught her meaning. “Ever since me and Mel both met you in that bar, way back when.”
She twisted in her seat, her face bright with a surprised smile. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. From the start. That can’t be news. Every guy I know thinks of you like that.”
She waved her hand dismissively, looking disappointed. “Oh, that stuff. I thought you meant something else.”
But they both knew he did. He confirmed it a long pause later by admitting, “I was the unhappiest man there at your wedding.”
She reached out and touched his hand briefly. “That’s really sweet, Ellis. I don’t guess I was too happy, either.”
“You’re just saying that now,” he told her. “You were in seventh heaven.”
She gazed down at her hands. He barely heard her say, “Yeah. I was.”
There was silence as they thought back across the intervening years from different perspectives—Ellis reflecting how the lusty joy between new husband and wife had eroded to where Mel regularly dismissed it by word and deed, picking up women at bars almost every weekend; and Nancy ruing the death of her dream of kids, a house, and a life of security, paradoxically and illogically hinged on the wild man who’d won her heart.
Each was left wondering at the implications of such thoughts.
“You want to ask me in anyway?” she finally asked. “If only for a cup of coffee?”
He nodded and got out of the truck, digging for his front door keys as he approached one half of a gray, slightly worn building that represented his small part of a ninety-unit affordable-housing complex—a scattering of two-story wooden boxes.
He opened the door and stood back to let her in. In the few years that he’d lived here, after moving out of the trailer to make room for her, he’d never asked her in.
Glancing about in the twilight afforded by the drawn curtains, he was now embarrassed that he had.
“I’m sorry,” he said as she entered. “It’s a mess.”
He closed the door and turned to find her not surveying the shabby view, but standing in the miniature entry hall, staring at him.
There, without another word, they moved into each other’s arms.
The frenzy of an hour ago was gone, its explosiveness replaced by a deeper appreciation for what they’d enjoyed in one another for years but had never openly acknowledged—his tenderness and quiet consideration, her openness and honesty.
This time their hands moved slowly, their earlier eagerness for pure inventory yielding to the pleasure of time and temporary safety.
Stumbling slightly, they moved from the foyer to the small living room and then to the couch facing the blank-faced television, their clothes dropping along the way. By the time he helped her fall back naked against