“I was just going to get up and put on a jacket—what about you, Christa? You cold?”
But then Adam was talking, a miracle, as if a stone had cracked open and become fluent. “Colter wasn’t cold. Colter was butt-ass naked when they chased him—and that river he jumped into? That river was like ice.”
Christabel was just staring, running her eyes all over him, and she had that little smirk on her face. “Uh-uh,” she said, “I’m not cold,” and then, to Adam: “So you’re a nudist, huh? Sara never told me or I wouldn’t have bothered with all these clothes myself. Here,” she said, and she actually reached down, arched her back and worked the spandex top up and over her shoulders, pausing there a moment before pulling it over her head and balling it up on the table in front of her. She was wearing a black lace brassiere underneath and she was all gooseflesh too.
“Oh, come on, grow up, the two of you.” Sara was sitting there clinging to her wine glass, not upset, not yet, but maybe something less than amused. A whole lot less.
“You said you wanted to show me off,” Adam said in an even voice, and then he was rising from the chair so you could see all of him, cock, balls, pubic hair, everything. “Isn’t that right, Sara?”
All she could think to say was “Not at the table” and she was going to add that his mother must not have taught him any manners at all, making a joke of it, but checked herself—she didn’t want to provoke him because you never could tell what he was going to do next.
It wouldn’t have mattered because in the next moment Adam was gone—present, but gone, veering off into one of his reveries or spells or whatever you wanted to call it—his gaze focused on a point over Christabel’s head, on nothing, and his voice took on a weird metallic timbre as if there were a microphone stuck in his throat: “Party on down,” he said, echoing her, mocking her. “How about a threesome? You ladies up for a threesome?”
That seized her up, all right. She was no prude, but this was just him pushing her buttons to see how far he could go. He was still posed there, staring off into space, but now he was getting hard by degrees, click, click, click, and she couldn’t have that, not in front of Christabel, so she did the first thing that came to mind—she took up one of the grandmother’s antique-gold linen napkins and snapped it at him, right there, right where it hurt most, and what did Christabel do? She just burst out with a laugh.
Okay. Fine. But Adam got the message, both hands shooting to his groin, and then he sat down, wrapped the towel back around him, and without another word put his head down and began to eat. Christabel watched him a minute—fork to mouth, his jaws grinding—then let out a hoot and said, “What fun!”, shook out her top and pulled it back over her head, though it didn’t do her sprayed-up hair any good. And herself? She laughed too, couldn’t help it, and in the next moment, as the sky pulled down and the bats shot out of the trees to explode overhead, they were all three of them laughing to beat the band, and when they were done with dinner they went on into the house and built a fire and sat around it, watching the flames leap up the chimney and holding tight to their wine glasses until at some point, Adam, still wrapped in the towel, got up and slipped out the door and into the night.
17.
IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the second week when she began to wake up to reality, at least that portion of it that had to do with money and earning a living. She’d had two jobs the week before, one all the way up in Redwood Valley, which would have been no problem if she’d been at home because that was practically in the neighborhood, and the other down in Navarro, at the winery there, where she saw to the owners’ horses on a regular basis, but that meant burning up gas and since she didn’t want to use her credit card—they could trace it—she had to use cash and her cash was running low. Most of her income, the lion’s share (or horse’s share, actually), came from her trade and the connections she’d made over the years, but she relied on subbing to supplement it and school was still out for the summer. And even if it wasn’t, how could they call her if she wasn’t home?