Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I) (19 page)

             
Mike looked at her face for a moment before he replied.  "So will you go out again?"

             
"I think so."

             
"Will it be boring now that it has happened once, or do you think it will change?"

             
"Well, if you are asking if I could get used to being wined and dined?"  She pursed her lips and looked away.  "I think I could."  She laughed, but continued.  "But I would soon be bored.  No, what I think will happen is more."

             
"More what?" Mike asked.

             
"I don't know." She said almost in a whisper.  "But I have a sense that there is more there.   I just know something is.   And I want to know what it is."  She said with finality.

             
Mike looked at her curiously, but calmly.   "I am sure it will be interesting.   You'll be sure to keep me up to date?"

             
She reached over and gave him a hug.  "You won't miss a thing. I'll tell you everything."

             
Once she had talked things over with Mike, she found herself more at peace with her decisions.   And when the checks came for the Captain Jack Adventures, she was able to schedule some long delayed sheetrock work.   She explained to Steven that she would get some occasional extra commission checks and that she had earmarked them for these tasks that could be done quickly by someone not named Steven.   She was pleased that his only concern was that she allocate for the taxes and not spend all of the checks on home improvement.   She was more than glad to comply and started to hope for some more Captain Jack adventures, if for no other reason than the money.   But she knew it really was not only for the money.   Cat was now on her way to being much less unfulfilled.   The ache, the emptiness that possessed her, started to fade.   So far, she did not know what was the source of her ache, but she seemed to sense the solution to that ache came from her stretching, her adding of layers, her new multi-media sensory system.   And lurking in the back of her mind was a question if there was something she had overlooked.   But it was far enough back that she multi-tasked it away quite easily.   Cat thought of herself as very happy and felt a peace she had not enjoyed often in her life.

             
Of, course, Steven was happy with the new Cat.   Always a thinker, he now found himself enjoying his senses more.   One ex-girlfriend had remarked on his ability to both be aware and unaware at the same time.   Though he had looked like a slob with old beat up clothes, with tears and poor fashion sense, he was always clean and hated disorder.  Though he was always, as Catherine had expressed it, 'Three pages into a math equation,' he was incredibly insightful in his observations of people.   Though he might not dress in the same decade he existed in, he was well aware of the current color emphasis from the fashion world.   In fact, he associated time eras as 'The year of purple,' or 'The time of over-redness.' Since he saw himself as an observer, he never chose to participate in fashion.   It was his role as a fiscally astute chronicler of the world that made him wear things well past their sell-by date, not an unawareness of the right things to wear.

             
So once a wife with not only a fashion sense, but a responsibility to adhere to it was in the picture, it wasn't so hard for him to adjust.   Yes, he still found the task of changing clothes repeatedly nerve-wracking and non-value added, abhorring the fact that clothes of the same reported size were not the same size, and really hating the fact that each manufacturer had different standards from another.   While Cat was easily resigned to the inconsistencies of the system, he seethed at each decision as he posed left and right,' Now turn, no, that will never do.'   Both he and Cat both staggered from the mall, ever so grateful that the onerous task was over for at least another season.   She would praise his patience, meaning it, because she knew him so well, but secretly wishing he would enjoy it more.  However, she also recognized that she, too, did not like the inconsistencies, but with her resignation, put it in that basket of things one had to do just to get by:  Bathing, shaving legs, applying makeup, washing clothes, cleaning house and shopping were all things best left un-thought.

             
But now, Steven found himself actually enjoying clothes.  It was all so different.   Clothes were no longer just a duty, but an experience.   The textures were different, sometimes soft, slick or lacey.   The tightness varied, their air flows completely different.   Colors, the non-drab colors, would catch his eye.   All in all, Steven started to feel himself in the world.  He was forced not to just be on the sideline, but he was on the field in the game of life. 

             
He actually dared to feel sexy.  Up until now, he saw the term sexy as something for women, and the select top ten Hollywood male stars.   The rest of the male kingdom was resigned to the status of being parasites on the land of lovely and sexy women; sexiness was only to be found by associating with a lovely woman.   Now he found himself capable of providing sexiness to a woman, to his Cat.   He wanted to be sexy and he enjoyed the feelings of sexiness reserved, up until now, for the fairer sex:  Colors, textures and cuts of clothes.  It was this that Cat was able to start to observe, accelerate and take advantage of.

             
As she started to take advantages of his newly re-discovered senses, she found that he actually was getting into what she thought was 'sociology-talk,'  theoretical things meant for the women's magazines, but not something to take seriously.   She found him 'getting in touch with his feminine side.'    He was spending time enjoying the soft slow pleasures of kissing.  Soft lips, light touches of tongues became the events they were for young girls, and stopped being the necessary precursors as older men saw them.   She found he enjoying touching and stroking, just for itself.  She noted that he seemed quite content to doing more of the 'women's work' around the house, and on one particular day she caught herself staring at ESPN to catch the end of a ballgame, while he was busy vacuuming the house.   She smiled and realized that six months earlier, the roles would have easily been reversed.

             
Steven loved it.  It was better than opening a sci-fi book and discovering an alternative universe.  He was living an alternative universe, and he thought he couldn't be happier.  But it turned out he could.   Everything Catherine uncovered, she would see if there was still more lying below the surface.   She was far from done, far from manipulating his sensory world, and far from discovering what she could learn about the both of them.

Chapter 13:   Captain Jack 3

              It was several weeks later and a continent away when next she encountered Captain Jack.   A client in Florida was so happy with their work on a condominium complex, that they flew Catherine and Mike to London to offer a consultation on a design for a reworking on an apartment in Knightsbridge.   England, in fact all of Europe, thinks about time differently than America.  Until an American goes to Europe, they will have a poor sense of time.  And until a European tries to cross a good portion of the North American continent, they will have no sense of distance. 

             
Europeans respect their past, but realize they need to change.   It is that balancing act that makes the visitors to that continent see and marvel at buildings and monuments that pre-date the European occupation of America.   Here is a monument stolen from pre-Christian era Egypt and sporting bullet holes from German planes in World War II.  Over here is a church dating from 1191, three hundred years before Columbus, and it did not even warrant notation on Catherine's walking tour of London map.

             
So the first impression might be that the English are reluctant to change, but that would be all wrong.  First, there always seems to be some construction going on, and there are modern buildings adjacent to ancient cathedrals.   Second, every aged building will not appear aged inside.  Many a grey stone building shaded with Napoleon era soot harbored bright lights, Baltic birch and brushed aluminum decor.

             
Mike had to deal with building codes that had four levels of restoration restrictions.  On one end was the freedom to destroy and rebuild and on the other, amenities such as electricity and running water had to be bolted on the surface of walls so to preserve the integrity of the intra-wall space.  As such things were negotiable, he would need to suffer through seemingly endless meetings of people speaking in a British code of impervious politeness.  He never knew whether it was his inability to read their true intentions, or whether the true intentions weren't known to the Brits themselves.   They always seemed sincere in their promises to a timeline, but he never could find the formula for estimating the actual date from the promises.  Should he add a week to every week promised?  Perhaps 20% longer.  Substitute the word 'week' for every 'day' promised?  Does 'soon' mean 'next to never?'  Or ‘never?'

             
Catherine set about coordinating the desires of the customers to a potential bill of materials, depending on Mike's findings.  Exposed elements such as electrical tubing and water pipes became design elements that would drive other options out of the picture.   But if the lathe and plaster could be replaced with sheetrock, then the walls become blank slates to which she could paint the customer's personalities. 

             
She headed back to her hotel, while Mike was, again, pulled into another endless meeting where dinner was not the ending punctuation mark to the meeting sentence, but merely a comma.  Inside the room was another set of boxes, with a note requesting a return of the dress and shoes, and a command, not a request, to be ready at 2 PM the next day.   She no longer wondered how Captain Jack knew her availability.  She knew money could buy information, spies, or bribes.  She felt less like she was being manipulated, and more like she was being swept along by the flow of something larger than her.  She found herself fascinated with what was next.  In the box was a silk pink coat dress.  The underwear was all black, and the shoes were a black set of straps with high heels and a thick platform sole.  

             
She closed up the boxes and left the Intercontinental and walked down the two blocks to the Spaghetti House and ate dinner alone.  She pondered on the next day.  The dress was lovely, but she hadn't tried anything on.  She almost did not want to know too much.  Rather, she wanted to be willing to be surprised as the events and feelings unfolded.   She even wondered if Captain Jack was trying to play with her mind even more by allowing her to ease into her character for tomorrow.  A pink dress was aimed at making her feel softer, but she felt he might have erred this one time with the black lingerie.   He might have known where she was physically, but he couldn't have known that she loved wearing black lingerie and felt powerful in it.  She would look all ‘girlie’ in her pink dress, but she would know it to be a mere shell.  Below, she knew, she was a very sexy woman who could take a man's breath away, especially in the high heels.  As she ate her dinner, she let her mind drift to seeing her husband on his knees, drinking in her form; a cruel smile danced across her face as she imagined what she could do to a man lusting after her.  Pain or denial, it didn't matter.  Tenderness threatened to be turned into a twist of a nipple or a squeeze of his balls, or perhaps more soft strokes would lift him towards an orgasm she would choke off at the last second.  It didn't matter, she could do anything and he couldn't stop her, and more importantly, he didn't want to stop her.  He wanted to surrender to her, to have her rejoice in her power over him.  She felt the warmth of that thought.   Captain Jack certainly did not know what he had done.  He might have misunderstood the power of color that she knew.  Perhaps he thought of how sexy it would be to see the contrast of black to her skin, how much it would accent the soft swell of her breasts, emphasize the narrow curve of her waist, or show off the length of her legs.  But she knew how powerful she would feel.

             
After dinner, she walked slowly back to the hotel, past the bus stop with people craning necks to catch the destinations of the oncoming buses, through the intersection where she first had to cross at the very brief crossing light, and then down under the street where the beggar quietly whispered, "Spare change?" then with the shake of her head, "have a good night, Miss."  As she walked, she wondered if Captain Jack was playing another game at a level she couldn't comprehend, and now her self confidence in her sexual power was a bit off stride.  She smiled as she entered the lobby of the hotel, one door held by the doorman, the second propped open.  A musician played a jazzy keyboard at the bar as she walked to the elevator lobby.  Women in long gowns and men in tuxedos emerged from the elevators and she went up to her room.  She wanted the night to end quickly.  She wanted tomorrow to come and the next step to be taken.  If there was one thing of which she was certain, the process was going to progress.   She looked forward to seeing what was next.  She more than wanted to know what was next.   There were many things she wanted to know.  Was there another gunman on the grassy knoll?  Why the British say aluminum the way they do?  And since there was no such thing as lifting down, why were things named lifts?  Elevators and escalators went both ways, not just up.  Those were just wants.  No, she
needed
to know what was next.   She fell to a troubled sleep, imagining herself in black underwear in front of a man she couldn't see.