Nikki (14 page)

“Sorry,” he said, stiffly. He swung away, and she sensed that the tight lines of her resistance must have looked like anger or revulsion. He tilted his glass and finished off the drink. “Hadn’t you better start packing?”

She shook her head distractedly, took the glass from his hand, set it down. “Jim, you misunderstood.” She tilted her pale, lovely face up to him, the faint long hollows under her cheekbones looking drawn, her dramatic green eyes piercingly intense.

“I adored it. You thrilled me. Too much. See?” She put her slender hands on his chest and stroked slowly upward, her long fingers outspread. “I can’t ever forget what happened at your wedding. We could lose our heads.” She glided her fingers up over his collar onto the skin of his neck, and stroked him, her lips softly apart.

He bent to her and kissed her lips, then looked at her and kissed her cheeks and her forehead. He took a deep breath and sighed. “Oh, my God, Nikki, you’re so beautiful!” He looked at her with an expression verging on pain, then fastened his mouth over hers and kissed her fervently.

Her lips pushed toward his, puckered but tight shut, and he began with rising intensity to thrust at them with his tongue.

One hand circled her body and moved agitatedly up and down her slender back, and down over the rounding of her buttocks. He began to move his hand in a slow circular motion over her buttocks while he moved forward until she could feel the heat and faint friction of his clothing. Her stomach muscles tensed and sucked in for an instant, then relaxed, and she let herself be drawn tighter in against him.

She opened her lips to the thrust of his tongue and answered his kiss with stabbing little motions of her own small hot tongue. Then they broke, panting for breath, and she mashed her cheek against his chest, feeling feverish. He continued to stroke her hips and buttocks, and abruptly she locked her arms around him and mashed her body hard against his with a fierce little cry of pleasure.

She lifted her face, her lips open and trembling. He began to kiss her again, and then his knee was shifting, prying in between her thighs. In a dumb, blind, mindless ecstasy she stepped her feet apart and she could feel his hand at his trousers. Almost as though by prearranged signal they both stopped, Nikki suddenly furious at the arrogance of the man to imagine she was
that
damned easy to get.

For a full two minutes, neither said a word. Aside from taking a couple of paces away from each other, they didn’t move, just stood, throbbing and cooling and looking away from each other. Finally he lit a cigarette, started to puff it, then handed it to her and lit another for himself.

“I could use another drink.”

“Fine,” she said, grateful for the distraction. She turned, walked out to the kitchen, Jim coming more slowly after her.

He stood watching her get out ice, mixer, and whiskey. Finally he said, “What a heel I am. The way Dolores loves me … to do a thing like this to her …”

“You didn’t do me a damned bit of good either, if you want to know. This minute, I could fill my lungs and scream till there wasn’t a bit of air left in me. Scream, scream, scream!” She clenched her fists, looked at him blazingly, then drew a long breath and sighed it out. Calmly she finished making the drink, handed it to him. “I’ll go pack if …” Her eyes became flighty. She bit her underlip. “Oh, how can I go there now?” Her mouth began to tremble. She spun, covered her face with her hands.

“Nikki!” She felt his hands on her shoulders. She wrenched free, faced him, dry-eyed.

“Don’t touch me! You
know
this cuts me off from her. I can’t face her. I can’t go there. Oh, please go away from me, please. I can’t stand it.”

“Never again. I promise. Nikki, I won’t spoil anything. So help me God, you’ll never have to worry.”

“You won’t be able to keep your hands off me. I’ve let you know I want you, and you’ll make it hell. You’ll be looking at me in that way you do, and Dolores will see it and it’ll make her unhappy. Jim, let’s face it; I can’t come there unless you can be stronger than that.”

“I can. I guarantee it. I’ve had my chances, plenty of them, and some of them almost as tempting as you, but I’ve never cheated on her.”

“Except for a teensy once or twice or so.”

“I mean never. I never went too far. If it’ll make you feel better to know I love her that much, to know I’m strong enough to resist any woman … well …”

She thought for an angry instant that he needn’t get so damned challenging about whether he
could
be seduced. Then she said, relieved, “Well, I
am
glad to hear that. So this just didn’t happen. Right?” She extended one hand, and he shook it. She gave him a comradely grin.

“A bargain,” he said, and she was sure she could trust him.

“Give me a hand with the packing,” she said, starting for her bedroom, “and don’t let me forget the gifts I have for Val and Jimmy and of course the Taffy Head.” She grinned back over her shoulder teasingly. “You had yours. And I
do
mean past tense.”

Next morning, when Dolores suggested that she forget about competitions for a while, Nikki cancelled her program with the tennis pro and formally withdrew from the upcoming tournament. Immediately her spirits soared as if freed of a great weight. But she woke sweating in the middle of the night, wondering if she hadn’t actually stripped off an armor. She told herself that was nonsense, and dropped back to sleep.

The next day was unusually pleasant. For an hour she functioned as assistant-mother-in-charge; she met two pleasant women friends of Dolores’s informally in their homes; when a touring vice-president from the Chicago offices of Jim’s firm appeared unexpectedly in town with his wife and accepted Jim’s dinner invitation, Nikki definitely helped make the evening.

The man in question revealed an unexpectedly lively side, but more remarkably, his wife, who arrived in a formally gracious mood and cloaked in an invisible veil of status, began to thaw and presently to melt entirely under Nikki’s bombardment of attention. When the guests had gone Jim and Dolores were as impressed and as proud of her as if they were her parents.

“Oh, well,” Nikki dismissed their praise with at least a pretense of modesty. “I got her number right off. She’d rather be young and pretty, and all that demand for respect that she looks like she’s making is compensation. A woman that age is never really sure of herself any more, so I kept paying extra attention to her and sort of laughing at her as if I could see right through her and it was all right and she could just come off the pretending. She got sort of tickled with herself and had to admit, in a sort of way, that she was like the rest of us … pure damn fool at heart. After all, nobody
likes
to be dignified and respectable.”

Dolores moved close and petted Nikki’s cheeks with both hands, smiling at her. “The time’ll never come when I can’t learn from the Storm Front, will it?”

“Don’t be silly, silly,” Nikki said, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to sound like a lecture at all; honest I didn’t.”

“I really mean I learned something. I was handling her all wrong. I sensed that her stuffiness was defensive, but my solution was to sort of act
pitying
. Nobody likes that.”

“Listen,” Nikki said anxiously. “Both of you have been giving me all the credit, as if … Well, it’s just not so! Because, without the background, the warm feel of acceptance and welcome that
you
created, honey …”

“Oh, fer crissakes!” Jim laughed. “While the two of you are pinning medals on each other, you know what’ll really come of it? The vice-president will feel guilty because he had such a good time, so he’ll report that Jim Thelton lives too high to be considered stable; you couldn’t trust such a man with any greater responsibilities.”

Dolores and Nikki laughingly began to help Jim down the imaginary ladder into the gutter. “He’ll report that you maintain a harem.” “… that you’re embezzlement-prone.” “You’ll be demoted.” “… fired and imprisoned.”

Just before going up to bed Jim had put an arm around them both and kissed them on the foreheads. Nikki went to bed feeling useful and happy, expecting to sleep soundly.

She woke abruptly with a swift, terrifying impression that she was in a skidding car. Her eyes flew open and she knew she was in bed, but the bed seemed to be settling as if it had been in motion. She searched the right wall for the familiar pair of windows. They weren’t there. Her bed had been turned around on its rollers. The instant she thought it she knew its absurdity, knew where she was, knew this bed had no rollers. She hadn’t slept in such a bed since she was four or five years old.

She tried laughing at herself, but she could feel the frightened pulse in her throat and stared compulsively into the dark for signs of movement among the obscure patterns of shadow and dim light. This house was secure, the road patrolled by private police, and the chances of burglary were made even more remote by an alarm system in the house itself. Nonetheless, she finally reached out and switched on a lamp. Of course there was no one in the room. She eyed the doors of the bathroom and closet, wondering if it would be neurotic to check. She checked.

She came back into the room, stood poised on the balls of her feet, staring at the door into the hall. She never locked it; to accept a man’s hospitality and protection and lock a door against him would be unthinkable. She returned to bed and switched off the light. Resolutely she closed her eyes.

The bond between Jim and Dolores was strong in
every
department. Indestructible. She eased off gradually. Its strength, she thought, just before sleeping, didn’t at all challenge her.

She had timed her breakfast arrivals late to give them all time together as a family unit, arriving just as Jim was leaving. She lingered the following morning until she heard him go, then affected a groggy air as though she’d overslept, not wanting Dolores to sense any avoidance of Jim, any self-consciousness or guilt.

The kids sat with Nikki for a while as she ate breakfast, then Dolores came and had coffee with her, making cheery suggestions for the day. Nikki agreed readily to everything. She kept remembering what Dolores had said on the reception line the night of the banquet: Dolores and Jim had to live in their world and face consequences, unlike Nikki, who could hit and run. What Nikki had to do if she wanted to stay in Dolores’s world was to yield her own sovereignty, in a way, suspend her own personality … or rather, quit asserting it.

Even that success last night had been a mistake; where the hell had she got off, stepping forth into the spotlight as though
she
were the hostess? She resolved to understand and accept this world of Dolores’s just as it was, to resist every critical impulse, to deny herself every temptation to change or disrupt things. She must do nothing, say nothing,
think
nothing Nikki-like.

True to his word, Jim brought John Barket out for dinner, and there had been a warm and lovely evening … until John got Nikki alone. Then he seemed to remember her with raw clarity and to freeze with self-consciousness.

He made one more try, taking her to the beach for an afternoon, and maybe because he felt safer in the sunlight he’d made word-love to her … with the wrong words.

She told him, “But I’m not a precious doll; I couldn’t be passive and sweet if I wanted to. Why don’t we just face it and quit trying? It’s just never going to be right between us.”

“I suppose you’re right. Something in me is always going to be … well,
scared
… scared you’ll suddenly claw out and disembowel me.”

“I wouldn’t. I could almost promise. But … well, take me home and let’s break clean.”

And that had been that.

During the next several days Nikki took a tight clutch on Dolores’s apron strings and went where she was led. She kept her place as “friend of a friend,” moving cautiously along the edge of things. She lagged in discussions until she had discovered Dolores’s precise viewpoint and then, if invited, expressed it as her own. With no sense of conflict at all, Nikki found herself liking, much or little or not at all, whatever Dolores did. On the other hand, she kept herself ready to step forth and shine when Dolores seemed to want to show her off, and she maintained an air of muted alertness and receptive interest so that no one should imagine she was either dull or bored.

She began to run across people for the second and third time in various homes or at the shopping center or playground or at the club pool. Coming out from an appointment in the locally favored beauty salon without either Dolores or the kids to give her an in, two mothers and three children stopped to engage in friendly, unhurried chit-chat.

When a little later they all met Dolores in the drugstore, one of the women chided Dolores for “hiding” her “lovely little friend.” Meaning that Dolores didn’t realize that, on its own, this overshadowed little personality of Nikki had wonderful potentials. This had almost broken Dolores down, but she had gravely accepted the possibility that she might be too close to Nikki to really “see” her, and she would watch her tendency to crush this shy flower.

“You’re being discovered,” Dolores said gleefully when they were alone. “You fake!”

Nikki gave her a wide-eyed innocent look. “Please don’t be cruel to me just because you know I’m defenseless.”

She came downstairs dressed for the dance that night to find Dolores telling Jim the whole story. Nikki pushed out her underlip poutily, lowered her lashes, and swayed her bare shoulders from side to side.

“I’m sweet and lovable, and she tries to hide it from people.”

Jim laughed with great enjoyment. “Dolores, you just quit intimidating this poor little thing. And incidentally,
where
did you get that dress!”

“Where Dolores told me to. She says its the proper style.” It was a trapeze, pink and fluffy, and it hung, hipless, to a point just below her knees. “It’s sexless.” She looked down at herself and stepped her pink satin pumps up and down daintily. “Or is it?”

“Frankly?” He grinned at her. “No.”