The Escape Diaries (36 page)

 
          
“Wait,”
I said.

           
“What?”
He was standing behind me, unfastening the hooks he’d just done up. “Oh,
right.” He started frantically going through his dresser drawers. “Where did I
put them?”

           
“You
mean condoms?”

           
“Isn’t
that what
you
meant?”

           
“I’m
on the pill,” I said. “To regulate my periods.”
Twenty-one days on; seven
off.
Today was the seventh day. I was pressing my luck here; I was
committing the birth control equivalent of jumping out of a barn. My pills were
back at Taycheedah. How was I going to get a new prescription without being
turned in by a pharmacist?

           
 
A smile spread over Labeck’s face. “And
I’ve been a good boy,” he whispered. “So no worries.”

           
“I
mean wait, we shouldn’t do this.” This was the good girl side of me, making a
last-ditch effort, warning me that all men were the same. They didn’t respect
you the next day.

There’s not
going to be a next day, you moron,
sneered my bad girl.
Last chance.
Offer expires at midnight.

Labeck took a
deep, ragged breath. He stroked my back, kissed my neck. “Don’t you want to?”

“I don’t
know.”
   

He kissed the
spot between my neck and collarbone.

“Mmm-m-maybe.”

He kissed more
spots. His hands were everywhere, caressing, stroking, awakening.

This was probably
the only chance I’d ever have to be with a gorgeous male, I reminded myself as every
corpuscle of blood drained from my brain to my tingly parts. Was I going to
fling away this last opportunity for rapture? All I knew was that I desperately
wanted Ben Labeck and was going to die if he didn’t make love to me.

“I should shave
my legs.”

Labeck laughed
deep in his throat. More growl than laugh. “I’ll take my chances with bristle
burn.”

Oh, so will I,
hot stuff, bet on it.

We kissed again.
He kicked off his shoes. He unzipped his zipper and stepped out of his jeans.
He pulled off his shorts. He stood there fully sprung and vibrating like a
tuning fork and he made me forget to fret. It all came back, the incredible
sensation of bare skin on bare skin, the urgency. It came back, better than I’d
ever imagined it could be. There was nothing but him and me and the feeling of
him being in me. We acclimated to each other, we found our rhythm. He murmured dirty
words in French, which were an amazing turn-on—not that I needed to be
any more turned on—and when I came I screamed and Labeck came at the same
time and yelled and Muffin started barking outside the door.

           
After
what seemed like a long time our breathing slowed. We were sprawled sideways at
the foot of Labeck’s bed. His chest was shining with sweat, his lips were
swollen from kissing, and he looked so incredibly sexy I wanted to grab him and
do it all over again.

           
He
traced the curves of my face, my lips, touched his sweaty forehead to mine. “I
don’t think I could have held out much longer,” he said, smiling into my eyes.
“Last night when you ran your fingers over my palm—I thought I’d explode.
When you’d bend to pick up Muffin, I almost—it got to be painful to
walk.”

           
“Why
didn’t you say something?”

           
“I
didn’t know what to say. I’m not the romantic type. Plus, I thought there was a
good chance you’d punch me.”

           
Labeck
may not have considered himself romantic, but he wasn’t a roll-over-and-fall-asleep
guy by any means. He left the room for a minute and when he came back he was
modeling his tuxedo. Well, part of it anyway—just the cummerbund, wrapped
dashingly around his waist so he looked like a cross between a buccaneer and a
porn star. He was holding a bottle of wine, two glasses, and an opener. “It’s
just El Cheapo sparkling,” he apologized. “If I’d known I was going to get
lucky I’d have had Cristal Brut on hand.”

Get lucky?

I’d just had the
most fabulous sex of my life with a man who could have repeated the Gettysburg
Address in French and made it sound like pornography. I ought to be feeling as
bubbly as that champagne. Instead I felt as though splinters of brassiere
boning were jabbing through my veins.

In the old days,
with Kip, I’d have swallowed down my hurt. I didn’t like fighting. I didn’t
want to be a drama queen. I’d just simmer in quiet resentment for days, afraid
to explain why I was upset. But over the past few days I’d outfought rapists,
outfoxed killers, and outsmarted politicians. I was a lot tougher than I’d
dreamed. I’d earned the right to say I was mad when I was mad. I’d flung my
heart at this Canuck clod and he was talking about getting lucky? Suddenly I
was well and truly steamed.

I heaved myself
upright. I stood up on the bed. I was naked, and I didn’t care. “Getting lucky
is talking a woman into going home with you ten minutes before the bar closes,”
I yelled. “Or banking in a shot in a stupid hockey game. Getting lucky is
scoring
.
Is that what this was about—scoring?”

Labeck’s Adam’s
apple bobbed up, down, up. The dark eyes blazed into mine, and I had to resist
the urge to flinch away from that flame. “Getting lucky,” Ben Labeck said in a
quiet voice, “is finally making love to the woman I’ve been crazy about for four
years.”

I folded my arms
across my chest. “We’ve only known each other four days.”

He approached the
bed, keeping a wary eye on my foot, which was within striking distance of his
most vulnerable parts. “I guess we should have had this conversation
before
you
jumped me and dragged me off to—”

“
Dragged you?
You were the one who—” I was getting mad all over again, and then I noted
the glint of pure devilment in Labeck’s eyes.

“Sorry,” he said,
trying to clamp down on a grin. “I can never resist teasing you. Are you done
yelling yet?”

“No.”

He did that rubbing the back of
the neck thing guys do when they’re embarrassed.

“You’re going to make me say it,
aren’t you?”

“Say what? This
better not be the part where you tell me you’ve got a wife in Quebec.”

He shook his
head. He turned his attention to the wine, trying to shimmy the cork out of the
bottle with a corkscrew that didn’t work any better than a paper clip. “You
know I was there, filming your trial, right? Of course you didn’t notice me;
you had a lot more serious things on your mind. I remember the day the jury
came back with the guilty verdict. You didn’t cry. You stood there with your
chin up, like you were facing a firing squad, like you were going to ask for a
last cigarette and yell
Vive la France
!
And I just sort of . . .”

He thumped a hand
over his heart. “I wanted to go up to you, wrap my arms around you, tell you
everything was going to be okay. But of course, it wasn’t okay.”

I shook my head.
Definitely not okay.

“I’ve never been
able to let the thing go. I felt that you hadn’t been given a fair shake. I got
a copy of your trial transcript and went over it word by word, trying to
pinpoint what was wrong. It’s bothered me ever since. I used to wonder what it
was like for you in prison. This is going to sound kind of
stalkerazzi,
but I once even wrote you a letter. You never wrote back.”

“I threw away
most of my mail. Too many crazies.”

“When I heard
you’d escaped from prison, I asked to be assigned to the crew that was covering
the story.”

“Really?” I was
starting to soften, but then I remembered how Labeck had treated me that first
night. “Then why were you so mean?”

“Mean? I saved
your skin!”

“You manhandled
me, forced me to take a bath, made me think you were a sociopathic killer—”

“Self-defense,
baby. You scared the hell out of me.”

“Oh, please!”

“At that point I
was only half-convinced you were innocent. And I had to keep my guard up
because you were going to wriggle away if I so much as blinked. Then you’d have
been caught and thrown back behind bars.”

He came closer.
Standing atop the bed, I was taller than him for once. My emotions were a
jumbled mess, my eyes were hot with incipient tears, and my voice came out raw.
I forced back the tears. “I just . . . I thought . . . what just happened between
us . . . was because I was here, conveniently available—”

He put his arms
around me, held me close, laid his head against my heart, spoke against my
breastbone. “Nothing about this whole thing has been convenient, Mazie. My life
has been turned upside down since the day you stowed away in my van.”

“I’m sorry.” I
looked up at the ceiling so my tears wouldn’t drip down my cheeks.

“But convenience
is very overrated.”

For a
not-romantic guy, this was not bad stuff.

“Okay, I just
handed you my heart on a plate. Aren’t you supposed to say something nice
back?”

 
I wasn’t ready to serve up my heart yet.
Not with my track record. So, stall. “
Nice
. Like a compliment, you
mean?”

He laughed. “It’s
a start.”

“Well,” I said.
“It’s good that you turned out not to be a psycho killer.”

He wigwagged his
hand. “Might go psycho on Senator Brenner.”

I took a deep
breath. “And you’re an excellent doctor.”

“Thank you.” He
turned my injured hand over and kissed my palm through the bandages.

“And . . . you’re
really sneaky. The radon guy thing and the way you snuck me into Vanessa’s
house? That was impressive, sneakiness-wise.”

“Thank you.
Nobody’s ever appreciated my sneakiness before.”

Setting his hands
around my waist, he lifted me to the floor. We arranged the pillows we’d
knocked to the floor and drank the El Cheapo after Ben finally managed to open
it. We talked, and it was nearly as good as talking to your best girlfriend. I
told him about growing up on a Wisconsin farm. He told me about growing up in a
town on the Canada-Vermont border, about his dad, who was a cabinetmaker, his
mom, who taught history at a junior college, and his three sisters, whose main
interests in life, according to Ben’s spin on it, were tormenting him. He’d
gone to college in Wisconsin on a hockey scholarship and gotten a part-time job
as a cameraman for the college television station. Eventually this had led to
full-time jobs with commercial stations. He hadn’t wanted to admit to me that
he was Canadian because he’d neglected to reapply for his visa extension and
was currently a resident alien.

The Canadians
among us. They talk like us. They look like us. They’re undetectable, like
radon.

           
“What
about that name?” I asked. “Bonaparte?”

He groaned. “I’m
going to punch Magenta in his big fat mouth.”

           
“Come
on. You know all
my
secrets.”

           
“It’s
a family name.”

           
“It
could be worse.”

           
“Like
what—Mussolini?”

           
“
My
real name is Margarita. Pretty lame.”

           
“I
like it. It’s sexy. It doesn’t go with Maguire though. That’s Irish, right?”

           
“Uh-huh.”

           
“You
Catholic?”

           
“Not
exactly.” I explained how I pictured God as Atticus Finch.

           
“Let
me get this straight.” Labeck rose up on his elbow and leaned over me. “You
think God is a dead white movie actor?”

           
“Hey,
freedom of religion.”

“God is that
black woman on the
Law and Order
reruns. The one with the funny name.”

           
“S.
Epatha Merkerson?” We watched a lot of
Law & Order
in the can.

           
“That’s
the one. She’s tough but fair. You can tell she’s seen it all. She wouldn’t be
allowing any holocausts to happen, no sir. You wouldn’t want to mess with
Her
.”

           
“Well,
I’m hoping S. Epatha
and
Atticus are on our side tomorrow night.” I
rolled over, yawning. “Any wine left?”

           
He
upended the bottle. A couple of drops dribbled out. “Gone.” His eyes had
changed from Hershey’s Kisses brown to dark, decadent chocolate, the kind with 80
percent cocoa. He ran a finger from my neck hollow to the valley between my
breasts and spoke in tones that sent tremors of lust sizzling along my nerves.
“But
I’m
back.”

Escape tip #31:

Look like a lady,

fight like a fiend.

As I unwound
myself from the limousine’s backseat, the driver blatantly ogled my boobs, levered
to gravity-defying heights by my dominatrix-delight bustier. I was wearing the
clingy silver floor-length gown with the plunging neckline, tummy control panty
hose, and killer heels. My faux-blond hair was twisted up in a chignon with
strands wisping down to partially conceal my face. I wore the centipede lashes
and carried a beaded purse the size of a gumball.

           
After
a week of perfect weather, the skies had opened and it was spitting rain. The
limo driver held an umbrella over my head as I tottered forward on my
torture-device spike heels. Labeck shambled behind, rained on and unnoticed,
mere scenery as far as the driver was concerned. All around, important people
were alighting from their Mercedes-Benzes and Audis and old-fart Oldsmobiles
and ascending the museum steps to the site of the BodyWorks Ball.