He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes.
What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing.
She had smiled. You've got a free hand, don't you? So do I.
So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things - although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten.
Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let's see if you can finish what you started. If you can't, I'll likely tear you apart.
He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn't been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent.
Well, she's had lovers, of course.
This had excited him again, and he woke her up.
And so it had been until they had found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you're way ahead.
Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and-yellow gelatine capsules that were known as "yellowjackets" on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she'd probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened.
And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren't. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her... sometime.
But now...
Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park... the main reason, really. There's no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn't even watch out for himself? He'd shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn't been shy about pointing it out, either.
"No," he told her, "I'm not angry. It's just that... you know, I'm not your boss. If you don't feel like eating, just say so."
"I told you... I said I didn't think I could - "
"The f**k you did," he snapped, startled and angry.
She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing because he wouldn't like that. For a moment it made him angrier than ever and he almost shouted: I'm not your father or your fat-cat husband! I'm not going to take care of you! You've got thirty years on me, for Christ's sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an insensitive bastard."
"No you're not," she said, and sniffled. "It's just that... all of this is starting to catch up with me. It... yesterday, that poor man in the park... I thought: no one is ever going to catch the people who did that to him, and put them in jail. They'll just go on and do it again and again. Like animals in the jungle. And it all began to seem very real. Do you understand, Larry? Can you see what I mean?" She turned her tear-wet eyes up to him.
"Yes," he said, but he was still impatient with her, and just a trifle contemptuous. It was a real situation, how could it not be? They were in the middle of it and had watched it develop this far. His own mother was dead; he had watched her die, and was she trying to say that she was somehow more sensitive to all this than he was? He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around, but somehow her loss was supposed to be the greater. Well, that was bullshit. Just bullshit.
"Try not to be angry with me," she said. "I'll do better."
I hope so. I sure do hope so.
"You're fine," he said, and helped her to her feet. "Come on, now. What do you say? We've got a lot to do. Feel up to it?"
"Yes," she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.
"When we get out of the city, you'll feel better."
She looked at him nakedly. "Will I?"
"Sure," Larry said heartily. "Sure you will."