Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [31]
Her hands sought, found. Megan sat with her and said her name in a small voice while she worked snaps and buttons to open Megan’s clothing. Her hands found Megan’s breasts and held them, hurried up Megan’s thighs to secret flesh.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand…
Bodies brushing together as they walked neatly nude over deep carpet to the bedroom. A light turned off, a light turned on. A sheet drawn down, a bedspring sigh of acceptance.
…eternity in an hour…
There was a moment which would stay with her forever, snatched out of time as if by a camera’s instantaneous eye. Megan lying upon the bed on her back, hand resting upon the rise of a thigh, the other arm stretched out across the bed. Breasts pointed proudly upward. Legs a little apart, one foot some inches over the edge of the bed. Blonde hair wild upon a pillow. Eyes closed, mouth just open.
Light from the hall played across Megan’s body. The whole scene could have been packaged and framed, a virtuoso performance by an airbrush painter. Shadows, curves, subtle flesh tones.
Then Megan said, “Why do we hurt each other.” The words made a question but were not spoken that way; there was no question mark in Megan’s voice. The six words hung in space.
Until Rhoda found her, joined her, pressed flesh to flesh, seeking sweet mystery with a hungry mouth, finding heaven that was partly pain.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Monday, Megan picked her up after work and hurried her off to dinner. “I’ve only got an hour,” she said. “I have an appointment with a Third Avenue dealer at six-thirty and then I have to look at some draperies on East Sixty-Eighth Street. A swank little shop run by two very chic guys. Gay guys, of course.”
“Sometimes I think everybody is gay.”
“Everybody is, kitten.”
They had chicken and rice at the Picador on West Tenth. Their waiter was an olive-skinned Mexican who hovered over them constantly and flirted with them passionately. They ate in a hurry. Megan kept up a running stream of chatter about her work—the pieces she had seen, her plans for the apartment, what fee she could expect, on and on and on. Rhoda tried to stay interested but it was impossible. She didn’t have the background for it, couldn’t visualize what Megan described, couldn’t appreciate any of the detail. It was Megan’s work and she was glad Megan was able to throw herself into it so feverishly, but her own interest was limited.
Then they were outside. “I’d better jump in a cab,” Megan was saying. “Can I drop you off?”
“I’ll walk.”
“It wouldn’t be out of the way—”
But it was a nice night and she walked. She drifted over to Washington Square first but the park was too crowded with tight knots of people forming and re-forming. She could feel an undercurrent of tension in the air. There had been trouble in the park lately, friction between the Village element and the local Italians, friction between neighborhood whites and Harlem Negroes off the A-train. She cut across the park, stopped to watch two men play chess, drank from the drinking fountain, then drifted across town to the apartment on Cornelia.
The apartment was lonely. She waited for Megan to come home, and Megan didn’t get back until a quarter to eleven. She had been running around all night, she told Rhoda, and she was so exhausted that all she wanted to do was get some sleep.
Tuesday was more of the same. That night she didn’t even see Megan at dinner. She didn’t want to cook just for herself, so she had a hamburger around the corner from the apartment and spent the evening trying to get interested in a scholarly hardbound work on female homosexuality. Megan had a fairly extensive library on the subject. The book kept boring her and