The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [32]
He reached over and tugged at the band of adhesive tape that held the intravenous line in place on his right forearm. Several hairs popped free from his skin and he hissed a curse at the I.V. nurse who had neglected to shave the area clean.
“I.V. tape—complain to Drs. Hosp. Admin.,” he scribbled on a pad, tearing the note off and stuffing it in a drawer that was rapidly filling with other, similar reminders.
He flipped up the small mirror in his Formica hospital tray and took stock of himself. Even with the scratches Curtis’s instruments had made on the corners of his mouth, he liked what he saw. Deep blue eyes, tanned skin just leathery enough, square jaw, perfect teeth. He looked the way most other men of forty-eight could only dream of looking. The women saw it, too—even the young ones. They fought for the chance to spend a few hours with him in the suite he kept at the Ritz. They all went home satisfied, too.
What a perfect idea it had been to start the rumor around the singles bars that each year the girl who gave him the best lay would get a free Porsche courtesy of Perry’s Foreign Motors. He might actually do it too, if the day ever came when his looks gave out on him.
Bored and uncomfortable on the sweaty sheets, he flipped on the television, then just as quickly turned it off. Nothing but the eleven o’clock news starting on every channel. He massaged the front of his blue silk pajama pants and felt the stirrings of an erection. No, not yet, he decided. Wait until you’re really ready to go to sleep, then have at it.
At that moment a nurse stepped into his room, closing the door carefully behind her. She was the same one who had sat on his bed and talked to him the night before the operation. A little old, maybe forty, he thought, but with a body that just wouldn’t quit. Perry felt an immediate surge in the limp organ beneath his hand and again began massaging himself under the sheets, picturing the shapely nurse lying nude on his hotel suite bed, waiting for him.
“How are you doing, Mr. Perry?” she asked softly. She was standing less than a foot from him. Inviting him, he just knew it.
For a moment Perry was torn by the dilemma of having to release himself in order to write a note. Finally, he scribbled. “Fine, sweetheart, how’re you?”
“Is there anything I can get for you before I call it quits for the night?” she asked, moving an inch closer.
Perry checked her left hand for a wedding ring. There was none, but that added little to his already mushroomed fantasy. “That depends …”he wrote.
“On what?”
Teasing him, tantalizing—that’s what she was doing. He decided to chance it. “Whether we make it now or after I get out!”
He debated writing about the free Porsche, but rejected the notion as unnecessary.
“Do we do it alone or invite your wife along with us?”
His new, giddy abstraction had her legs stretched upward, heels resting on the wall over his bed. “Wife doesn’t understand me,” he wrote, playing along and adding a little smile face to the bottom of the page.
“Well, we’ll see about everything when you’re a little better,” she said. “I’ll admit that the idea of spending some nice time with you had crossed my mind.” She toyed with the top button of her uniform and for a moment Perry thought she actually might undo it for him.
“You say when,” he scribbled, slipping his free hand around her thigh.
“Soon.” She smiled and stepped out of his grasp. “First, I have two presents for you. One is from your doctor and one is from me. Which do you want first?”
Perry deliberated, then wrote “Yours.”
The woman left the room and returned holding something behind her back. Perry inhaled sharply at the way her uniform pulled tightly across her breasts. A C for sure, he thought. Absolutely. Thirty-four C. He looked up at her