Judith Krantz (34 page)

“Well …”he mumbled, looking away from her.

“My God. I’ll bet you do. Women going apeshit every time they see you. I can see it now. If there had been more women at Traffic School—it makes perfect sense … they haven’t seen anything like you in generations.”

“I hate it,” he said simply. “Come on, let’s have lunch. We deserve it after four hours of Muffet.” He handed Jazz into the limo.

“Where can we go? We have to be back in about a half hour, and there’s nothing around here but a Polio Loco and a McDonald’s.”

“All taken care of.” Sam Butler opened a big wicker picnic basket that was lying on the floor of the limo, and revealed a large array of plastic containers and flat parcels wrapped in aluminum foil.

“I told them to order a little of everything from Nate n’ Al’s deli—good tucker there—and we’ve got lashings of Australian white wine to start with.” He pulled off his false mustache, took off his crew hat and dark glasses, and shook his head in relief.

“Wine, please,” Jazz said, stretching her cramped muscles and lying back on the cushions of the limo. “Wine, strong wine, and lots of it. Were you expecting a guest, or did you order all this for yourself?”

“Just for me. I hated the thought of Traffic School so much that I thought it might be a good idea to drink my way through it, but that wouldn’t go down well with Muffet, would it?”

“Don’t say his name,” Jazz begged. “With only a half hour, let’s not spoil it. I smell pastrami … oh, Sam Butler, for a simple country boy from Perth, you learn quickly.”

There were two bottles of wine, pastrami, corned beef, bagels, rye bread, mustard, pickles, French dressing, smoked salmon, cream cheese, sliced turkey, rare roast beef, and even a container of chopped chicken liver, which they both agreed should be saved for dessert because the cheesecake that the studio had ordered was fattening and they’d each had three sandwiches and almost all the wine.

Never in their lives had they needed food and drink so much. They ate in greedy, hasty silence except for moans of delight with each new sandwich combination, and when they were absolutely full they rolled down the limo windows to get some fresh air before the second half of Traffic School.

“I’m not going,” Sam Butler suddenly announced.

“Not going where? Where are we, anyway?” Jazz said, oddly disoriented.

“Back. I’m not going back to that room. I can’t stand it. We don’t have bloody Traffic School in Australia. I’m not even an American citizen. What can they do to me? I’ll go home to Perth. They can’t extradite me, and no jury in Australia would convict me.”

“But this morning won’t count if you don’t go back. You’ll have to do it all over,” Jazz objected sleepily.

“That’s O.K., but I’m not going back now. This morning was a small price to pay.”

“Pay for what?”

“You. I’d do two weeks of Traffic School to meet you again. Three. Four. A fucking year of bloody Traffic School just for you, cobber.”

“You could have phoned, if it meant that much.” Jazz giggled at his histrionics.

“I was afraid you’d hang up on me. Would you have?”

“Probably. What’s a cobber?”

“A friend … a buddy.”

“How sweet, how very sweet,” she said sentimentally. “Sooooo sweet—but I think I’ve got to go—don’t I?—go back to school or whatever? Could you tell the driver?”

“Driver, back to the school, please,” Sam said.

“We’ve been parked in front of it for more than fifteen minutes,” the driver answered.

“NOT POSSIBLE!” Jazz screeched. She looked at her watch. She ran up the stairs with Sam following. The door was locked. They pounded on it, and the only response was Muffet’s sadistic shout. “I warned you two, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Oh SHIT!” Jazz almost burst into tears.

“It’s all my fault.”

“Damn right it is!”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?” she demanded. “Just tell me one way you can make up four wasted hours of Traffic School!”

“I can’t make it up to you,” Sam muttered,
abashed. “Not ever, not if I tried for the rest of my life.”

Jazz looked at his face, set in lines of genuine and total dismay. His eyes were screwed up with self-reproach, every bone in his body expressed his honest distress.

“Cheer up,” she said, “I forgive you. It’s not the worst thing a man ever did to me.”

“If it isn’t, I’d like to meet the bloody bastard who did.”

“Are we a little drunk, Sam?”

“Not possible on Australian white. That never gets to me. I’m no two-pot screamer. But it’s not a bad idea. Want to go drown our sorrows?”

“In the afternoon?”

“Right. Much too early. Let’s go to that old-fashioned circus. You know, in that tent on the beach … I’ve been wanting to go ever since they got here—fire eaters, sword swallowers, jugglers—how about it?”

“I’m too sleepy. I need a nap.”

“Poor cobber, you’re not used to Australian wine,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

“What about my car? I can’t drive it like this, I’m a teeny-weeny bit smashed, I do believe.”

“I’ll have it taken care of, just give me your keys.”

Limply, Jazz let Sam help her back in the limo. She fell asleep immediately from the combined effects of four hours of Traffic School, a huge lunch, a bottle of wine and all the emotions of the morning.

When she woke up, on top of a strange bed, under a strange quilt, Jazz could tell from the darkness outside that it must be night. She lay very still, certain that if she tried she would be able to remember where she was and how she had come here. There was a small lamp on in the room, and she could make out a window with trees beyond it. What little she could see of the room looked as if it were located in the Yukon, about a hundred years ago. She smelled a wood fire burning and the sounds of a man’s footsteps
quietly crossing another room. She closed her eyes again and tried to free-associate. Yukon, wood fire, quilt, trees, nothing. She ran her hands over her body. Jeans, work shirt, Girl Friday, Mel Botvinick, Pete di Constanza, Dazzle, automobiles, Traffic School. Bingo.

Jazz threw off the quilt and realized that she felt as refreshed as if she’d just had the best night’s rest of her life. She padded across the dim, wood-paneled room and discovered a bathroom. She splashed her face for a long time with ice-cold water, used a new toothbrush that she found there, and inspected herself in the mirror.

She couldn’t help smiling. She looked, to her critical and habitually appraising eye, at least eighteen. It was probably the deep sleep, the fact that she hadn’t put on any makeup this morning, or the anarchic disorder of her hair, but she recognized a girl she hadn’t seen since she’d worked on her first-year lighting assignments at Graphics Central. Her eyes were untroubled, her cheeks flamed pink, she looked like the girl she’d been before she met Gabe. Better yet, she felt like her.

Her sneakers had disappeared, Jazz discovered, back in the bedroom, but she was still wearing her socks. She cracked open the door of the bedroom and stood there without making a sound, peeping through the slit she’d made and surveying the empty living room where a fire was burning low, providing the only illumination.

Sam Butler came through a door at the far end of the room, carrying an armload of logs. She watched him renew the fire as quietly as possible and sit down patiently in front of it, obviously waiting for her to wake. From the way he sat, from the severe look on his face, Jazz knew that he’d stay there all night if need be. He’d been guarding her while she slept the afternoon away in this mountain retreat or wherever it was.

“Good evening, Sam,” she said sedately.

Sam Butler started violently. He’d been some-where
else, Jazz realized, and her sudden words had jerked him out of a dream.

“Jazz!” His expression changed from severity to happiness as he looked at her. “I was getting worried. You passed out, I couldn’t wake you up.”

“I don’t usually drink a bottle of wine before lunch. Also, I don’t normally get kidnapped.”

“I didn’t know where you lived, or I’d have taken you home.”

“Why didn’t you look at my driver’s license?”

“I didn’t want to look in your handbag without your permission,” he said gravely. “It didn’t seem polite.”

“That was very … delicate of you. Is this your place?”

“Right. I found it a few months ago.”

“Where are we?”

“Way far up in the Hollywood Hills. This place was built about eighty years ago. I have deer in my backyard.”

“What time is it?”

Sam Butler looked at his watch. “It’s almost seven-thirty and it’s Saturday night—I’m sure you have to be somewhere … you’re probably late already. I’ll take you home right away.”

Jazz sat down in front of the fire. “I don’t have a date, but I’ll bet you do. Why don’t you just call me a cab?”

“I was planning to stay home alone tonight, it’s been a busy week.” He folded his arms resolutely, a man with nothing to do but look into a fire and think idle thoughts.

“Then I’ll get out of your hair,” Jazz offered.

“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I—I could make you a drink.”

“That you could,” Jazz said thoughtfully.

“Or I could broil you a steak.”

“You could do that too,” she agreed.

“I can’t put on telly. My set’s broken.”

“That’s fine,” she said equably. “No telly tonight.”

“But I could put on some music.”

“Music’s fine. I’ve always liked music.”

“That’s about all I can do to entertain you.”

“Can’t you think of anything else?”

“Not at this late date. We’re not dressed to go out.”

“Nothing at all? Not one single other thing?”

“Nope … I don’t have any imagination,” he said with a flicker of mischief in his eyes.

“You certainly don’t,” Jazz said, shaking her head in commiseration. She crawled forward, turned around and lay back across his lap, looking up at him, her head resting on his folded arms, her lips tilted toward his chin.

“How about a kiss, cobber?” She put up her arms and pulled his head down. “That’s what people used to do for entertainment before there was television.”

“Oh, Jazz,” Sam said, resisting the pull of her arms, “I want to so much.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“I want to start all over again with you. And I don’t want to go barmy and swarm all over you like I did the first time, and I don’t want to act like a bloody nitwit who thinks he’s a hotshot movie star.”

“Is that what’s stopping you from kissing me?”

“Yeah.”

“You think too much,” Jazz said, and pushed herself up far enough so that she could plant a hasty kiss on his mouth. “Now I’m the official aggressor. You can make the next move and it won’t count against you.”

Sam held her at arm’s length and studied her face intently in the firelight.

“That doesn’t count,” he decided, finally. “That was just a little quick peck. Where I come from, that’s the way you kiss your brother.”

Jazz launched herself at him, wrapping herself around him, giving him a long, warm kiss that could never be considered sisterly.

“No, sorry, but that just won’t do,” he panted. “That’s the way you kiss your cousin.”

“Don’t say you didn’t ask for it,” Jazz warned him in a tyrannical whisper. So he was a game player. And good at it too. Well, so was she, if the game was worth the candle. She pushed Sam down on the rug and bent over him. He lay quietly, watchfully, questioningly looking up at her as if he were taking her measure. Jazz realized, in this spell of consideration that held her motionless, that never before had she been so aware of the shape of her mouth. Kisses were something she was used to being given, not something she had ever had to take.

As she watched Sam seeming to wait so patiently for the touch of her mouth, she visualized what he was seeing, she saw her own sudden birth of sensuousness, the ardent fullness, the promise of warmth, and she felt her lips parting in response to the genuinely reined-in desire she saw in his eyes. Jazz brought her mouth down on him like a gift, gently, tenderly, with a steadily increasing pressure until she couldn’t wait any longer to learn his mouth with the firm tip of her tongue. She thrust it slightly between his lips and stopped, waiting for the answering thrust she expected. When it didn’t come she searched for it in an exquisitely invasive rush, until she had captured his tongue firmly between her teeth, and had abandoned herself to a long discovery of its wonderfully sensitive surface.

Sam was kissing her back now, kissing her back powerfully, but still he was not advancing beyond the boundaries she established, Jazz understood in a flame of delicious, incredulous impatience. She could just go on kissing him like this—or she could stop, which was the silliest idea she’d had in a long time—or she could do whatever she wanted to do to this big, beautiful, tricky creature who claimed that he wanted so badly to start out all over again with her. But she had to show him what she wanted to do, or he would restrain himself. He’d make good his threat, or was it a promise? A matter of national pride, no doubt.

Jazz leisurely unbuttoned Sam’s shirt all the way to the waist and started to kiss her way with agonizing
deliberation down the warm, good-smelling, good-tasting flesh of his throat and his chest. From time to time she stopped, as if she had decided to go no farther, testing him, and then, as if she were almost reluctant, she continued, until she reached his nipples. With a teasing lack of haste she fastened her mouth on one of the points and took the other gently between the first three fingers of her left hand, rolling her fingers around the tiny, sensitive bit of tissue that was almost lost in the blond hair on his chest. Instantly they both became stiff, and as she sucked on his right nipple, he gave a great groan, which only made her fasten herself on him more closely, playing with him, flicking hard with her tongue, withdrawing it, then attacking again, meanwhile never letting up the growing pressure of her rolling fingers, which she had moistened in her mouth.

Jazz felt Sam’s whole long body pull together, every muscle tensed as he held himself resolutely still under her aggression. He didn’t permit himself another sound, but he couldn’t control the mad pace of his heart or the wild sound of his breathing. She felt her whole body trembling with this new experience of making a man
take
more pleasure, controllingly, unrelentingly, than he should be able to endure without moving. She felt herself swelling and growing wetter, as she realized again that he was there for her to plunder as she willed; she grew even more purposeful as her curiosity leapt ahead of her actions and she wondered, in a bewilderment of anticipation, if he was ready for her, if it was difficult for him to contain himself, if it was hurting him to lie there so rigidly, if this was a game he had invented or if someone had taught it to him.