"Raise up," she whispered, and he did.
It took less than a minute. He cried aloud with the strength of his climax, unable to help himself. It was as if someone had touched a match to a whole network of nerves just under his skin, nerves that plunged deep to form the living webwork of his groin. He could understand why so many of the writers made that connection between orgasm and death.
Then he lay back in the dimness, his head against the sofa, his chest heaving, his mouth open. He was afraid to look down. He felt that quarts of se**n must have splattered all over everything.
Young feller, we've struck oil!
He looked at her shamefacedly, embarrassed at the hair-trigger way he had gone off. But she was only smiling at him with those calm, dark eyes that seemed to know everything, the eyes of a very young girl in a Victorian painting. A girl who knows too much, perhaps, about her father.
"I'm sorry," he muttered.
"Why? For what?" Her eyes never left his face.
"You didn't get much out of that."
"Au contraire, I got a great deal of satisfaction." But he didn't think that was exactly what he had meant. Before he had a chance to consider this, she went on: "You're young. We can go as many times as you want to."
He looked at her without speaking, unable to speak.
"But you must know one thing." She put a hand lightly on him. "What you told me about being a virgin? Well, I am, too."
"You - " His expression of astonishment must have been comical, because she threw back her head and laughed.
"Is there no room for virginity in your philosophy, Horatio?"
"No... yes... but - "
"I'm a virgin. And I'm going to stay that way. Because it's for someone else to... to make me not a virgin anymore."
"Who?"
"You know who."
He stared at her, suddenly cold all over. She looked back calmly.
"Him? "
She half turned away and nodded.
"But I can show you things," she said, still not looking at him. "We can do things. Things you've never even... no, I take that back. Maybe you have dreamed of them, but you never dreamed you'd do them. We can play. We can make ourselves drunk with it. We can wallow in it. We can..." She trailed off, and then did look at him, a look so sly and sensual that he felt himself stirring again. "We can do anything - everything - but that one little thing. And that one thing really isn't so important, is it?"
Images whirled giddily in his mind. Silk scarves... boots... leather... rubber. Oh Jesus. Fantasies of a Schoolboy. A weird kind of sexual solitaire. But it was all a kind of dream, wasn't it? A fantasy begotten of fantasy, child of a dark dream. He wanted all those things, wanted her, but he also wanted more.
The question was, how much would he settle for?
"You can tell me everything," she said. "I'll be your mother, or your sister, or your whore, or your slave. All you have to do is tell me, Harold."
How that echoed in his mind! How that intoxicated him!
He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was as tuneless as the chiming of a cracked bell. "But for a price. Isn't that right? For a price. Because nothing is for free. Not even now, when everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up."
"I want what you want," she said. "I know what's in your heart."
"No one knows that."
"What's in your heart is in your ledger. I could read it there - I know where it is - but I don't need to."
He started and looked at her with a wild guilt.
"It used to be under that loose stone there," she said, pointing to the hearth, "but you moved it. Now it's behind the insulation in the attic."
"How do you know that? How do you know? "
"I know because he told me. He... you could say that he wrote me a letter. And what's more important, he told me about you, Harold. How the cowboy took your woman and then kept you off the Free Zone Committee. He wants us to be together, Harold. And he's generous. From now until when we leave here, it's recess for you and me."
She touched him and smiled.
"From now until then it's playtime. Do you understand?"
"I - "
"No," she answered, "you don't. Not yet. But you will, Harold. You will."
Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.
"And later, Nadine? What does he want later?"
"What you want. And what I want. What you almost did to Redman on the first night you went out hunting for the old woman... but on a much larger scale. And when that's done, we can go to him, Harold. We can be with him. We can stay with him." Her eyes slipped half-closed in a kind of rapture. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that she loved the other but would give herself to him - might actually enjoy it - brought his desire up again, hot and close.
"What if I say no?" His lips felt cold, ashy.