Chapter 6
M aria meant it. For the first time in all those bleak, never-ending years, she had the real thing again. She felt the hard-rising pressure of his body against her thighs. He was hot, hot all over, and she wanted him. She reached down. The slick woven wool of his grey suit slid under her hands, and she forced herself not to go down to him too soon. His fingers slid over her spine and pressed into the hollows between each bump.
She felt the magic of his hands undoing her clothes, and she was breathing so hard she heard nothing else. She wanted to rip herself free of all restraint. She wanted to be naked. She wanted to crush herself against him with all her softness, she wanted to feel his hardness.
"Jim..."
She felt his fingers fumbling with her bra, and he couldn't work the fastener loose. His fingernails scratched her, and she wanted to feel him. She slid her hands around and tugged at it, but she was fumbling as much as he was. Through her dress, covering all other sensation, she felt his insistent, demanding pressure. His mouth worked, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, against hers, and his tongue slicked in and out through her lips like a warm, wet eel.
She drew away from him just long enough to push his shoulders back, to hold him, to look at him. She couldn't believe that he was back, and a moment's fear swept across her.
"What if she comes?"
Jim didn't stop pressing his hand in, making her softness wetter, slipperier. But he was struck by her question, he had to answer it. He turned his face away. He seem to stare a-cross her room to where it was filled with dense shadows. Neon lights danced in strange red explosions through them. Red light streaked in, went crashing out. Everything went hard, red, and the bright pulse of light drove her crazy inside.
"To hell with her, Maria! We've got to show her we don't care."
"But Jim, I'm scared."
"Don't be scared, baby." His head, his mouth, his lips worked down along her neck. His tongue would not stay still long enough from titillating her naked breasts, from making wide wet circles around her erect nipples.
She pressed his head in, muttered in his ear, "She's so vicious, Jim. She's like a spider... Oh, Jim, darling, don't stop... She's like a sex-spider... Jim!"
She twisted, wallowed, writhed in full deep response to his movements. She was ready, waiting. A thin layer of perspiration covered her body, and she felt like a hot damp, jungle creature. She watched his lips move up, hang over her. His eyes seemed half closed. She thrust her mouth up to his, she tugged roughly at his belt, at his slacks... she had to have him free, ready, waiting, as she was.
His lips caught hers, and she felt the pulse of his breath and smelled the man smell of it, and she exploded into a running brush fire that could never be put out by water. Flame raced through her body, exploded in her head. She remembered seeing, in some otherwise forgotten city, a teen-age punk toss a match into a wet slick of gasoline. There had been an instant whooshing noise and an explosion. She exploded the same way. Her body leaped, burned into an intense, never-ending heat. She threw herself into it and felt hot flames engulf them both.
Flames lifted them. They were fighting, but not the flames. She hurled herself against him, she felt him rising tall above her. She flung herself on his hardness, and fingered it into position. He quivered, groaned at the sensation.
"Maria, not that way. I want you!
"Quick!"
She sank to her knees on the soft rug and pulled him down to her. She searched with her lips, pulling at him. Hot flames of passion made him whip back and forth as if his spine would break. Under her fingers, her mouth, her hands he whipped himself into a frenzy.
"Maria, let me get at you."
His lips, his tongue, his mouth leaped at her, and she stroked his face with her fingertips, and the rough satisfaction of his beard dug hard into her soft thighs.
She trembled, groaned. She felt an enormous ready quivering run through him, and she had to be ready to whip around to receive him. She moaned eagerly at the feeling of her body pushing out such enormous warmth. Sudden fluids flowed inside her, and she couldn't keep from thrashing her hips in eager torment. She was ready, ready. She held herself open.
"Oh, Jim, come on, take me. Here, take me. Here, dammit, here...!"
"Maria! Yes, I'm going to make us forget everything. To hell with Arlene!"
"I'm ready."
"Yes."
She watched impatiently as his head came up, came around. His face made an erect, dark pattern against the incoming flood of red light. His lips closed hard over hers. She tasted him, and moisture dribbled through between his lips, and she couldn't see him. She only knew the red throbbing light, and the red hard feeling of hope for satisfaction.
He was too close to her. Her eyes were open, but Jim's features disappeared in the wild fury of their continuing kiss. She felt the raging fire of his body. She felt him moving closer. She opened herself to him. His fingers inserted. She felt them digging wildly. "Yes!" she whispered, unable to keep still, her breathing went hard with excitement. "There-right there, Jim!"
She felt the hard impact of his body. He had not grown soft physically, at least, and she yearned for all of it. Night air blew suddenly across her face, and she demanded, insisted upon their coming victory over everything evil in the world. Cool wind touched her naked skin. She felt air along her knees, and a sudden chill fingered her spine. It lasted only a second, and then his hot naked skin comforted her. Sweat dripped between them, and his warmth and hard motion shut off all knowing.
"Oh, Jim!" she muttered out of deep depths of passion. "We can do it. We can win!" She kissed out her words as if they were erotic pieces of candy.
"Come on, Jim." She felt how rough, how urgent, how far gone they were, and the pressure of her emotions surprised her. She had never been so caught up in her feeling of love, never even back then. Jim heard her, but he didn't answer with words. He answered her with his hard, driving body, and she felt him. She felt him...
"Don't stop!"
She talked to him. She told him, and her words would not be silent.
"Jim, hurry up!"
His body quivered, and he had stopped. She couldn't believe it, and when he twisted away from her, it seemed like a nightmare.
"Jim!"
She struggled to get her head up. It seemed then as if the whole dark room were pressing her down to him. He panted with sudden, peculiar sounds. She seized his shoulders, shook him, and then he felt cold to her. The chill stopped her own raw, flaming motions.
"Jim, what is it?"
His strangled agony frightened her. She wanted to scream at him, tear at him. She wanted him back where he belonged, between her legs.
"Jim, tell me."
His voice croaked out a feeble halting sound in the night. "I think I heard something."
Maria forced her head up higher. She had to see, but she couldn't see. The room looked the same, but even as she stared into those red, and black shadows, something moved. She stared past the dark mass of Jim's head and shoulders, and she looked out of the protective warmth and isolation of their lovemaking straight into a vision from hell.
A thing oozed slowly out of the corner near the window. It stopped, stayed still, was half-red, half-black, but then that sharp strange shadow, which struck through all her perception, picked up speed and flowed along the wall. It stepped towards the living-room light-switch. Maria's breathing stopped, and she couldn't stand the pressure pounding in her stomach. She hardly noticed it when Jim rolled away, easing himself over slowly onto the rug.
She knew what it was then. The thing was human, and Jim had felt its presence. It had stopped him from taking her, from satisfying her, and then she knew who it was. Maria's throat throbbed with a sudden itch, and she waited for Arlene to speak, and when Arlene spoke, Arlene's words grated in slow sequence across the room, each more sarcastic than the other.
"Okay, if I turn on the lights, kids? Now that you've started playing your old house game? Now that you've had some of your fun?"
Maria wanted to scream, but her lips were glued shut. She couldn't say anything. She felt too surprised and too hurt. She wanted to kill something. She wanted to exterminate that insect. Like the black spider she had seen earlier that day, Arlene crawled out of nowhere at them.
Arlene had stopped them from doing something good and decent, and Maria watched her happiness escaping. It had hung on such a high, slender thread, and now one raw, naked blade was slicing through it.
She needed help. She wanted Jim to act, but he didn't do anything. He didn't say anything. He lay there like a white lump on the carpet, and she lay alone, far from him, coiled into a monstrous, human cinnamon bun.
"Come on, Jim," she pleaded, "Jesus, Jim, come on... I'm ready!" She had to yell at him, tell him, call him to her, and she heard her own voice screaming in thin, hard sounds, and she couldn't stop the noise.
She saw him move. She heard him speak, but his words were no help. "Arlene, don't do it."
"Why not? You sure won't stop me, lover boy!" For one second only, the room held its depth of red-and-black mystery, and then Arlene flipped the switch. The noise clicked through Maria's brain, and she found herself lying in a flood of raw white light. She stared at Jim, as he lay hunched on his elbows, white, naked, his eyes directed at the rug. He seemed to see nothing, know nothing, and the skin of his face looked whiter than a clean paper napkin on a dirty back street.
"Jesus, Jim, please, please, please...!" She couldn't even cover herself. Her hips, her legs, her knees were weak, soft, vulnerable. She couldn't even drag herself away from Arlene's devouring eyes, and Arlene took her time in inspecting every wet stain on her body.
Arlene's lips moved sarcastically: "Got you a little worked up, didn't he? Too bad he couldn't have made it."
Maria couldn't bear that voice, that look. She read only too well the hot desire peering out of Arlene's eyes. Arlene wanted to be the cause of those wet stains, the source of that hard-throbbing passion. Maria saw it all, and she whipped around suddenly and made her fingers into claws. She dug them into Jim, she tried to get him to react, but he lay there. He didn't even move when she ripped bloody lines along his arms and hips, and his body looked small and ugly in defeat.
She hated to see him like that and turned away, but Arlene had watched her too closely.
"Not very pretty, is he? Arlene s voice whispered down at her, and Maria watched Arlene's long legs stepping close to her. "But you see, my dear, that's the way he always is. He can't do it. He's not what you need, my dear."
Maria watched Arlene lift her dress slightly, then kneel slowly down beside her. Arlene's voice alternated between suggestive softness and demanding urgency. "What you need, my dear, is something with fire and heat in it. You want to burn up with it... How about it, Maria? How about those times on the cliff? How about them? Or how about me and him in bed, and you..."
The suggestion dropped off, and Jim half-sat up. "Shut up, goddamn you!"
He said it, then fell back down again. Maria felt her guts heave sickly. She stared at Arlene's black head of hair as she had stared at the black blob by the dead spider. She wanted to throw up. She wanted Jim, but he seemed dead, inside and out. True, he had spoken to Arlene, but the effort had been too much. He lay there, deader than ever, and Arlene smiled down at him softly, as if she could never get mad at him.
Fascinated, Maria watched Arlene stand up. She stepped over Jim and placed her hands on her hips and kept smiling her thin, knowing smile.