Chapter 7
"You can't mean that, Anna! You don't know what you're saying! Jake Ralston is an animal! How could you even think such a thing!"
Anna Melton was none too certain herself why she had said what she did. Was it green-eyed jealousy at hearing of Leonard's sordid affair? Or hatred because he had cheated on her and she wanted revenge? Or was it something else ... a hungering, perhaps, of her own that even now after countless sleepless nights she did not want to face.
Leonard had come in ashen-faced and trembling with rage and anxiety. At first she had thought he was sick, his face was so drained of color and his hands were shaking as if he were feverish. But then the story had simply poured out ... all of it, in lurid technicolor and detail. Connie's trampish seduction. Jake's discovery somehow of his wife's unfaithfulness. And finally his boss's lewd proposition, an obscene notion that Leonard dismissed out of hand. But Anna had astonished him as well as herself with her level-headed reply-she was willing to go along with it to save Leonard's job and their future.
"Darling, think of what you're saying! How could I live with the thought of you ... and Jake Ralston. Anna, it's too ugly for words!"
"You didn't think about that when you were screwing his wife," she said coolly.
"Anna, please, I told you how it happened!"
"Sure, she held a gun to your head and made you do it, right?"
"It's the truth, honey, I swear it is!"
Anna felt a glow of something that might have been jealousy, hate or forbidden excitement in the pit of her belly. She spoke clearly and rationally, with no show of emotion. "Make the call, Leonard. You need that job and we all need to eat. Some things have to be done that none of us like. You got us into this ... and I guess it's up to me to get us out."
"Anna, I won't let you!"
"Please, Leonard, make the call ... before I change my mind."