"Don't. Touch. Me." And then, in a nearly poetic rush: "Fucking Hollywood ass**le!"
"Believe me, if I didn't have to, I wouldn't. And I plan to wash my hands just as soon as I get the chance."
He looks up at Sophie and sees all the Judy in her. All the beauty in her. "I love you," he says.
Before she can reply, he seizes Wendell's hand, closes his eyes, and flips.
22
THIS TIME THERE'S something that isn't quite silence: a lovely white rushing he has heard once before. In the summer of 1997, Jack went up way north to Vacaville with an LAPD skydiving club called the P.F. Flyers. It was a dare, one of those stupid things you got yourself into as a result of too many beers too late at night and then couldn't get yourself out of again. Not with any grace. Which was to say, not without looking like a chickenshit. He expected to be frightened; instead, he was exalted. Yet he had never done it again, and now he knows why: he had come too close to remembering, and some frightened part of him must have known it. It was the sound before you pulled the ripcord — that lonely white rushing of the wind past your ears. Nothing else to hear but the soft, rapid beat of your heart and — maybe — the click in your ears as you swallowed saliva that was in free fall, just like the rest of you.
Pull the ripcord, Jack, he thinks. Time to pull the ripcord, or the landing's going to be awfully damn hard.
Now there's a new sound, low at first but quickly swelling to a tooth-rattling bray. Fire alarm, he thinks, and then: No, it's a symphony of fire alarms. At the same moment, Wendell Green's hand is snatched out of his grip. He hears a faint, squawking cry as his fellow sky diver is swept away, and then there's a smell —
Honeysuckle —
No, it's her hair —
— and Jack gasps against a weight on his chest and his diaphragm, a feeling that the wind has been knocked out of him. There are hands on him, one on his shoulder, the other at the small of his back. Hair tickling his cheek. The sound of alarms. The sound of people yelling in confusion. Running footfalls that clack and echo.
"jack jack jack are you all right"
"Ask a queen for a date, get knocked into the middle of next week," he mutters. Why is it so dark? Has he been blinded? Is he ready for that intellectually rewarding and financially remunerative job as an ump at Miller Park?
"Jack!" A palm smacks his cheek. Hard.
No, not blind. His eyes are just shut. He pops them open and Judy is bending over him, her face inches from his. Without thinking, he closes his left hand in the hair at the nape of her neck, brings her face down to his, and kisses her. She exhales into his mouth — a surprised reverse gasp that inflates his lungs with her electricity — and then kisses him back. He has never been kissed with such intensity in his entire life. His hand goes to the breast beneath her nightdress, and he feels the frenzied gallop of her heart — If she were to run faster, she'd catch her feet and fall, Jack thinks — beneath its firm rise. At the same moment her hand slips inside his shirt, which has somehow come unbuttoned, and tweaks his nipple. It's as hard and hot as the slap. As she does it, her tongue darts into his mouth in one quick plunge, there and gone, like a bee into a flower. He tightens his grip on the nape of her neck and God knows what would have happened next, but at that moment something falls over in the corridor with a huge crash of glass and someone screams. The voice is high and almost sexless with panic, but Jack believes it's Ethan Evans, the sullen young person from the hall. "Get back here! Stop running, goldarnit!" Of course it's Ethan; only a graduate of Mount Hebron Lutheran Sunday school would use goldarnit, even in extremis.
Jack pulls away from Judy. She pulls away from him. They are on the floor. Judy's nightdress is all the way up to her waist, exposing plain white nylon underwear. Jack's shirt is open, and so are his pants. His shoes are still on, but on the wrong feet, from the feel of them. Nearby, the glass-topped coffee table is overturned and the journals that were on it are scattered. Some seem to have been literally blown out of their bindings.
More screams from the corridor, plus a few cackles and mad ululations. Ethan Evans continues to yell at stampeding mental patients, and now a woman is yelling as well — Head Nurse Rack, perhaps. The alarms bray on and on.