Prototype (8 page)

And what wide, strong feet they were, too. Adrienne couldn't help but stare, fascinated by the sturdy bone structure, the power in the high arch, the light tracery of veins, then the sudden thought of every place they must have carried this woman throughout her life. She was possessed of an abrupt desire to touch them, stroke them. The woman caught her staring, and Adrienne tried to look away, but too little, too late.

"At my day job," said the dark-haired woman, leaning in, very deadpan, "I tread on grapes."

"Oh." Adrienne was brought up horribly short, never before at such a loss for words. Shouldn't she say
something
, at least? "I shrink heads."

She'd blurted it out before she realized it, and red could not even
begin
to describe the color blooming across her cheeks.

The woman smiled, wide and delighted; Adrienne next caught herself staring at her full lower lip, as moist and ripe as some enticing fruit.

"A genuine modern primitive," the woman said, reaching out to shake Adrienne's hand. "I never would have guessed."

The lecture ended as, if not a total loss for Adrienne, then near enough, an hour and forty minutes of concentration shattered. The amplified voice wafted past her like a breeze she was only fitfully aware of, while instead consumed by every aspect of the woman she was to later know as Sarah Lynn McGuire. The sound of her breathing, the etching of her pen across page after page of notebook paper. No movement, from a shift in her chair to a sweeping of hair from her eyes, was too minute to escape notice. Adrienne felt progressively warmer throughout this exercise in torture, bathed in an imagined cloud of pheromones, while the object of a desire she'd not even realized she had was less than three tantalizing feet away.

Now
this
was going to take some introspection.

She had long acknowledged herself to be bisexual, if latent these days. It had been years since she'd had any kind of sexual relationship with another woman, and even those had been fleeting, sandwiched between lengthier affairs with boyfriends. First had come a handful of tentative high school encounters, more confusing than anything, wherein offbeat flirtation had led to hesitant kisses and experimental touches in the cars or bedrooms of friends, after which she would retreat to the solitude of her own room in the middle class fortress of her parents' home, and sit without moving, aware of the fearful throb between her legs, as insistent as an accusation. It never quite felt wrong enough to frighten her away from a next time.

With college came greater assurance, and the consummation of what had previously been mere sex-play. She possessed her own life there, as did the women she occasionally met who wanted to be more than friends, and they had all the time needed to explore. It was no longer experimentation, this she recognized right away. The light touch of a nipple beneath her fingertips, the grinding undulation of a gently swelling belly against her own, the musky taste of
petaled
labia and budlike clitoris upon her tongue … she took to these as naturally as she had taken to men and their rougher, more singularly directed passions. Neither seemed to possess a clear advantage over the other. She was either neatly divided into halves, or, conversely, unified into a perfect whole. Omnisexual? It had an intriguing connotation.

Still, there had been no one of like gender in her life since graduate school, and she had come to think of her lack of sexual differentiation in lovers as a phase she'd outgrown. In eighteen months of preliminaries and seven years of marriage, Neal had never even realized she was bi. Although after his philandering and their divorce, she'd thought of sending him a card —
Guess what, I like pussy too
— but it seemed a childish and spiteful thing to do.

Not to mention no longer applicable.

Or so she had believed, apparently erroneously. Her reinvention of self in Tempe had apparently brought the past. Adrienne credited the desert, naturally. Those winds and infrequent rains, no telling what buried treasures might wink anew in the dawning sun after a night's erosion.

What greater proof did she need? For there she was, trapped in a lecture hall with her sweat and her hunger and a stranger. Going on thirty-two years old and her heart pounding as if fifteen, while she had no way of knowing if the woman seated within her reach shared even a remotely similar orientation.

Fortunately, Sarah had taken pity on her, had made the first overture. Perhaps she smelled the frightful conflict that must have exuded from Adrienne's every pore and left her terrified to initiate further talk — but not too paralyzed to accept Sarah's invitation to go to The Coffee Plantation for lattes.

And within a week Adrienne had reaffirmed for herself that which archaeologists have always known: buried treasures are far more beautiful and valued the second lifetime in which they see the sun.

*

The apple slices were gone and Sarah had drunk the wine from the bowl by the time the sun was down, nothing but a defiant rose-red rime thinned across the horizon. The party was coasting, mellow, and Adrienne wondered if they would ever get around to singing "Happy Birthday" to Jayne.

"Remember the code blue I told you about, from a couple of weeks ago?" Adrienne asked.

"How could I forget a wandering desert madman?" Sarah ran a finger in the bowl and licked the traces of wine from the tip. "Such a classic, and it had to be you. You had to remind me, didn't you?"

Adrienne frowned. "You wouldn't have been feeling privileged if you'd seen him brought in. It would've almost made you sick. He'd beaten his hands to splinters, don't forget."

"Sorry." Sarah's face of contrition. "It was just so vivid, you know?"

"I know, I know. There
is
something about it, isn't there? But there's something about
him
…" Adrienne sighed and waved her hand in frustration. "On one level I'm completely baffled by this guy. He doesn't act quite as he should."

She was breaching all manner of ethical considerations in discussing Clay Palmer. Still, there wasn't a doctor or nurse she knew who adhered to expectations of patient confidentiality to the letter of the unwritten law. They all blabbed when they got home, and rationalized it by citing their discretion: What's a little sacrifice of confidentiality between bedmates?

"He sounded pretty distraught to me," Sarah said. "How's he supposed to act?"

"Anybody who's that problematic with aggression is going to resist counseling to some degree, if not exhibit outright hostility. I've never treated anybody like that who was very cooperative. Never."

"And he's not fitting that pattern?"

"No. He's not. But he should. His background is textbook. I had him pegged as growing up in an authoritarian home, and I couldn't have been more right. The poor kid's father was an ex-Marine, and used to make him run drills when he was five and six. When he had a paper route, the father wouldn't even break down and take over for him when he was sick — he'd
follow
him to make sure he still did the job, but he wouldn't help. That was the father's way of instilling a sense of responsibility."

Sarah's face soured. "Sounds like a real bastard."

Adrienne nodded. "It goes on and on like that. A lot of the patterns are the same from case to case, but it never seems to screw up any two people in the exact same way."

"But this one's different even beyond the variations?"

"I think so. It's odd — in spite of all my expectations to the contrary, he's been surprisingly cooperative. That's not to say he made it easy all along. He started out digging at me with a few barbs. Our first session he suckered me into one of the more cleverly segued propositions I've gotten."

She caught a tiny pinching between Sarah's eyebrows; perhaps she shouldn't have mentioned that. She had overlooked the subtle associations that might trigger in Sarah, the kind of thing she was usually sensitive enough to avoid. While Adrienne was as happy with her as she’d ever been with anyone, she knew that Sarah held deep worries that could not be easily soothed, for they were not entirely groundless. While everyone worries to some degree about their mate leaving them for someone else, here it was compounded by Adrienne's ability to vacillate between either sex. This Sarah could not do, and while she hid her anxieties well, still Adrienne understood that she held a clear advantage. Should she decide to return to a more traditional relationship someday, there was little Sarah could do to fight it. There were times this lay between them like a silent threat, barely acknowledged but biding its time.

Adrienne stroked the backs of her fingers along Sarah's leg and went on. "All along, I felt he really wanted my help but would be too proud or too threatened to admit it, even if he didn't have to come right out and say so. But he proved me wrong there, too. 'Help me.' Those were his exact words."

As she drew in closer to Sarah's side, she remembered the apprehension that washed over her just before those words had left Clay's lips. She had watched him going through his emotional contortions, and there had surfaced within him a killing rage that thickened the air in the office. Every muscle had tensed and every doubt had surfaced: She had been wrong to trust him, been wrong to believe Ferris Mendenhall competent to prescribe an adequate dosage of lithium. She saw the wreckage that Clay could make of her office, and her. She saw her own obituary.

And as his seizure passed, there had swept through her an exhilaration she'd thought must surely be reserved for daredevil feats. Skydiving, ski jumping … anything where survival was left to fate.

This, more than anything, had taught her the addict's rush.

"There's something I'm not seeing yet in this guy," Adrienne murmured. "There's something in him that I'm missing."

"Then you'd better find it before long. You won't have all the time in the world with him."

"Tell me about it."

It was her one great fear in this case: Soon, word would come down to her that Clay Palmer was well enough to be discharged. He need not sit around until his hands healed and the casts were removed. While obligated to provide a certain measure of care, the hospital would fund the costs of a transient assault victim for only so long without squawking and demanding his release. He had insurance, a group employee policy, but the claim was being contested because, in leaving Denver, he had walked away from his job.

Of course, she had a certain measure of control, as well. His physical evaluation was out of her hands, but his psychological well-being
was
her responsibility. As long as she said he wasn't ready to be released, that might be enough to keep him around.

"What I'm most worried about," said Adrienne, "is if he decides he wants to go back home. There's no way I can justify any follow-up then."

"Have you thought about…?" said Sarah, almost teasing, dangling a possibility like tantalizing bait.

"What?" Adrienne met her eyes. "Come on, what?"

"Now think." Sarah nestled in closer as a chilled breeze began to blow in off the darkening desert. Adrienne curled one arm up around her shoulders and slowly ran her splayed hand through Sarah's tousled mane.

"Ow," Sarah said. "Your fingers are sticky and you're pulling my hair."

"Good." A cruel smile played over Adrienne's lips and she drummed her wine-tacked fingers. "What are you getting at?"

Sarah twisted her head around until she could bite Adrienne's hand, bearing down lightly with a grin until the hand relented.

"Don't tell me I haven't caught a little jealous pining in your eyes whenever the subject of my thesis comes up."

Adrienne pinched Sarah's nose. "If you'd decided on a subject, you mean."

"You know what I'm talking about. You love independent research, and the fact that it's going to consume my life before long digs at you, doesn't it?" She demonstrated by gouging her fingers into Adrienne's ribs, her most ticklish spot. "Right?"

"So what if it does? You're a presumptuous little bitch, you know that?" As she was running out of bodily places to torment, name-calling seemed a viable alternative.

Sarah grabbed both of Adrienne's hands and held them tight. "Then do something about it. What, the great healing motivator in my life can't see the obvious? If you're that intrigued by what makes him tick, run an end sweep around the hospital, go to the university psych department, and put in for some grant money so you can treat him as your first research subject."

"And what makes you think I haven't already moved in that direction?"

Sarah flashed her sweetest smile. "Because if you had, you wouldn't have been so insufferably mopey about him five minutes ago. You would've been bursting." She arched her eyebrows, smug and satisfied, and leaned in nose-to-nose. "Right?"