The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [34]
He touched himself. He was still partially tumescent, and his groin throbbed with need. He thought of his wife. She would be in bed now. If there was a late movie that she liked, she’d be watching it, propped up with pillows. Or she’d be asleep, smelling jointly of Shalimar and her own warm musk. She always wore Shalimar to bed, and nothing else. She had said so not long before the wedding, and the line had charmed him. Later he found that a movie star had said it twenty years ago, that some flack wrote the line for the star, and that the extent of Melanie’s originality had been to change the name of the perfume from Chanel to her own brand.
He could smell her now, could remember the way her skin felt against his.
He started for the door, stopped abruptly, turned and walked down the hallway. He stopped before a door and put his head against the panel. No voices, just soft music. And a light was on; he could see it under the bottom of the door.
He knocked.
“Who’s there?”
“Me. Sully.”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want to go across the Atlantic in a rowboat.”
“Not tonight.”
“Oh?”
“I got company.”
She might have had company, or she might have been alone. There was no way of knowing. The relationship he had with her was such that he felt free to knock on her door whenever he felt like it, while she in turn was just as free to turn him down. She had not turned him down often, and on those few occasions she had always made an excuse—that she was with someone, that she was feeling sick, that she was washing her hair.
He walked to the Barge Inn parking lot and picked up his car. He drove home and used his key in the door. The bedroom light was out, but he saw her in bed, illuminated in the glow of the television set.
She smiled. “Missed you,” she said.
“Long night.”
“Busy?”
“Fairly busy. What are you watching?”
“Nothing sensational. You could turn it off, I was just looking at it until I fell asleep.”
He tuned off the set, undressed in the darkness and got into bed beside her. He breathed her smell and put a hand on her and she turned to him and pressed against him. He ran his hands over her and felt the texture of her skin and kissed her.
“Oh, I missed you,” she said.
He kissed her and stroked her, telling himself how perfect her breasts were, how warm she was, how desirable. He focused his mind on the urgency of his desire and how much he wanted her. He made love to her with expert hands and she made small noises and caught at the hair on his back and shoulders.
“Oh God don’t make me wait—”
Nothing. Nothing at all. He could get a hard-on talking to a dime-a-dozen nobody who wished he would drop dead, and now he was with a beautiful woman who was dying for him and he didn’t have enough cock to fill a thimble.
“Sully—”
He kicked the bedclothes back, kissed her breasts, then moved downward. Not her fault so why leave her hanging? His mouth found her and she sighed luxuriously with pleasure, told him over and over how good it was.
He performed skillfully, hating her and hating himself all the while. For a while he thought she was never going to make it, but she got there with a near scream and collapsed gasping on her pillow.
He pulled up the covers and got under them, lying on his back.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
“Baby.”
“Can I be good to you?”
“Not tonight.”
“Nothing I could do?”
There was nothing she could do because there was nothing that would work. He could not stay married for more than five years because he could never find a woman he could go on wanting for more than two or three years. It didn’t seem to matter how young she was or how beautiful, or how much she did or didn’t love him, or what she did or didn’t like to do in bed. Any other girl in the world right now and he’d be a bull, a prize stallion with the mare’s fee paid, but here he was with the most attractive woman in the world and there was nothing she