Tropical Freeze (15 page)

“The point’s to catch the whale, right?” Thorn said. “All that other stuff, the philosophical stuff, that’s just what you do while you wait for the fish to get caught.”

“Come on in,” she said. “Take a load off your wit.”

Thorn noticed her ears today. He noticed her wrists and forearms. The razor line on her thighs where she stopped shaving. Her neck, the way she cocked her head. The way she walked to the refrigerator, a kind of lazy sureness as if she might break into a pirouette at any moment. He noticed the back of her neck, the wisps of red hair there.

They sat at the green dinette. She put a Budweiser down in front of him and popped one for herself. His started to sweat immediately. Thorn watching it puddle around the base of the can. The humidity in the eighties.

“Balmy,” Thorn said, touching a finger to the condensation.

“Maybe,” she said. “But let’s work up to it gradually.”

“Huh?” Then he caught it. He squinted at her. She was smiling, but she might’ve been serious. “You’re pretty quick,” he said.

“So’d you come for another kiss, or what?” she said. She took a swig. Watching him the whole time, her eyes smiling as she swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”

“Well, you’re going to have to earn this one. You can’t keep stumbling into me, pretending to be drunk every time you want a little affection.”

“You’re pretty cocky, too,” he said.

“I’m not touching that one.”

“We could go on like this,” Thorn said. “Or we could talk.”

“You got a topic in mind?” She was enjoying this, sipping her beer, her Walkman lying on the table, fizzing out its tiny static. That grin in her eyes, saying, I knew it, I knew it. Someday this was going to happen.

“Where’s Gaeton?”

“I’m not sure. It’s hard to keep up with him,” she said. “What? You worried he’ll walk in, find us like this?”

“Maybe,” Thorn said.

“Well, he’s not here. Porsche’s gone. He does this, goes off for a few days. It’s what he does now.”

Thorn said, “Benny Cousins offered me a job. Can you believe that? Being his personal fish guide.”

Her smile dissolved.

“And?”

“I dropped him in his Jacuzzi.”

“Good.” Her face softened, but she was still displeased.

“He said if I came on with them, I could do whatever I wanted. Grow six-inch fingernails.”

“That appeal to you?”

Thorn said, “And I could shoot elk in Montana. All kinds of benefits.”

“Well, that about cinches it then,” Darcy said. “You always had something against elk, haven’t you?”

“No, I like big animals. I got a soft spot for them.” Thorn took another sip of beer, said, “It’s hard to see how Gaeton puts up with the guy. A first-class dork. He says he wants to be a major player in the Keys. Makes it sound like a hobby. And Gaeton, he’s helping him. Doing what, do you know?”

“Helping Benny meet people,” Darcy said. “Introducing him around. I don’t know exactly what else. Maybe he’s giving him elocution lessons, teaching him to speak like a Conch.” The impishness was gone from her voice. Her eyes heavy.

“This is bothering you, isn’t it?” Thorn said.

“Benny’s into something seriously illegal, Thorn. I’m not positive yet about all of it, but I’m working on it.”

“You are?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I am.” It seemed to startle her, saying it and hearing it out loud.

Someone switched on Glenn Miller next door. “Chattanooga Choo-choo.” It rattled the silverware for a moment, till the guy brought the volume down. Thorn looked out the small kitchen window at the purple bougainvillaea vines, a croton hedge. He watched the big band buff come outside, sit on his porch rocker with a bottle of beer and a girlie magazine. Wearing an undershirt and pajama bottoms. Ah, retirement.

“I’ve taken my three-week annual leave from work,” Darcy said. “I’ll stay out longer if I have to. Because I’m going to find out what’s going on, Thorn. I am.”

A cluster of creases had appeared in her forehead; her eyes were hard and set. She reached out and snapped the Walkman off.

He took another sip of beer. Her eyes were elsewhere now, all the light leaking out of them. She was somewhere that seemed to frighten her a little.

She lifted her head and said, “Gaeton hates guys like that. Arrogant bastards, coming down here, trying to bosom-buddy up to everybody. He hates them. He always has, but with Benny, he’s playing along, pretending he respects the guy.”

Thorn was quiet, drawing squiggles with the condensation.

She said, “I’m sorry, Thorn. I shouldn’t be dumping this on you. You just came over for a nice friendly whatever, and I’m dumping my toxic wastes on you.”

Thorn said it was OK.

“Let’s talk about kissing some more,” she said. “Let’s talk about G-spots.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m game.”

She finished her beer, went to the refrigerator, and got two more. When she bent to see what else was in there, Thorn looked at the back of her thighs. The red running shorts were riding up, her hamstrings standing out. At her hairline a slick trail of sweat ran down her neck, into her gray shirt.

“I hope you’re not hungry,” she said, turning, catching him in his tour of her. Not seeming to mind. “All he has is peanut butter and a carton of tofu. My weird brother.”

She came back to the table, bringing two frozen glass stains. She poured her beer and didn’t wait for the head to die. Foam on her nose.

Thorn wondered how he’d missed her for so long. She’d been right there, on the edge of his life since childhood. But he was just seeing her. Those sharp green eyes, that straight, almost too narrow nose. The half dozen freckles spattering her forehead and cheeks. The way one reddish eyebrow arched up and the other ran flat. A small scar curled at the corner of her eye, the shape of a small fishhook.

“So,” she said, “you want to begin, or should I?” Her eyes were full of tricks.

He said, “We can’t just sit on the couch, let things take care of themselves?”

“There’s two ways to go here, Thorn. That’s one of them, but I haven’t had much luck lately letting things take care of themselves. I like to get the deck cleared right up front, do a values check, how you feel about this and that, then, you know, if we wind up on the couch or anywhere else, it’s with a clear head. Like making a prebliss agreement.”

“You want to know my religious preference?” Thorn said. “My politics? If I like children, dogs better than cats? My favorite color. That sort of thing?”

“It’d be a start,” she said.

“Well, wait a minute,” Thorn said. “I have a thought. A compromise.”

“I’m listening,” she said, with a wary smile.

“We go over to the couch, for ten, fifteen minutes. See how it goes. If it looks good for us, things are percolating, then we go on and fill out the rest of your questionnaire.”

“You think you’re that good a kisser?”

“It’s worth a try,” he said.

She said, “You don’t mind getting involved with somebody who might be totally wrong for you? A very troublesome woman.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think maybe troublesome women have a higher wriggle factor. The ones with the seething look and things to hide. The ones your questionnaire would say to steer clear of, those’re the ones that make my heart roar.”

“You got questionable values, Thorn.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“It’s very immature,” she said, “confusing love with drama. Thinking unless it’s risky, it’s not passion. That’s for adrenaline freaks, Thorn.”

He said, “We have these conversations. I wind up thinking about them, playing them back.”

“Yeah? Is that bad?”

She smiled at him, her hands laced together, chin propped on them. He took another sip of his beer, stalling.

“Talk’s too easy,” he said. “Talk is what you do while you’re waiting for the action.”

She unlaced her hands, stood up and walked over to the couch, and stood there while Thorn looked back over his shoulder at her. Her lips came apart with a soft snap. She put her weight on one leg, a subtle shift of her hips. Thorn stood.

They kissed for ten minutes on the couch. And Thorn knew immediately that not even Bettina Daugherty at seventeen when Thorn was fourteen could compare. The two of them had kissed behind the dolphin pool her parents kept to supply local tourist shows. The dolphins rolling and blatting and clicking as Thorn kissed this girl who wanted to try everything related to kissing. She’d wanted to use him to expand her oral frontiers. But still, even that, that hot, amazing flush, was nothing next to Darcy.

Darcy had sat close beside him, smiling. And that smile had come forward into his face and it became his smile and something in her opened to him, an oceanic calm. And her lips parted, her feathery tongue slid into his mouth and circled his tongue, brought his into her mouth. Leisurely and strong. And then, it was as though the two of them had cracked through the earth’s crust, and they were sipping together from a vast pure aquifer.

The light had weakened when Thorn had to rise from the couch to make a stop in the bathroom. When he came out, she wasn’t waiting for him on the couch. He stood in the living room for a minute, listening to the lawn mowers, Glenn Miller’s boys still swinging and swaying next door. Then he walked down the narrow hallway to her bedroom.

She was lying on the bed. She’d opened the sheets and taken off her shoes. She was neither smiling nor anxious. Looking at him with interest, a hint of curiosity perhaps. The early-afternoon light through the yellow shades was glazing her legs, making her hair more honey than rose.

Thorn came across to her and squatted beside the bed. There was mint on her breath now as she brought her face close to his.

She reached out, and her fingertip strayed lightly across his lips, drew a ticklish line down his throat to his collarbone. Thorn touched her hair at the temples, brushed it from her face.

She took her hands away from him, leaned back on the bed, and ran her hands across her breasts. Her nipples outlined through the fabric. A dreamy current came into her voice.

“It’s been a very long time,” she said.

“Yeah, it has,” he said, but not sure which of the long times she meant.

He stood, and he watched as she sat back up, reached out and unzipped his khaki pants and pulled them down. That part of him which knew nothing but its single simple rule was responding. She drew down his undershorts and reached through his legs and took a cool grip on his balls and brought him a half a foot closer to her, taking him in her mouth, that minty mouth. And he became solid there.

Darcy held him in place, her thumb and one finger circling his balls and one finger stroking the seam of flesh hidden beneath. Thorn closed his eyes and a hot rush of air filled his lungs. His heart staggered. She stayed there, using her hands, her thin, cool fingers, her nails raking lightly across his flesh, finding some new notes, pushing his blood up an octave. Thorn massaged her skull, and watched her as she rode him, sweet, strong, and happy.

In a while she stood and drew off her long-sleeved T-shirt. He rolled her running shorts down across the flare of her hips. He undid his own blue work shirt, watching her stand before him. She was watching him, all of him at once.

When he was naked, too, she stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth, her lips opening, sliding her tongue beneath his tongue. He kissed her back. The mintiness was gone. On her breath all he could taste was himself.

Thorn, up on an elbow, was touching her left nipple, a slippery ruby. He looked at her hair, spread out against the white pillow, and spoke quietly into the half-dark, “Gaeton used to say that having sex is like running a roller coaster ride.” He paused, and she made a humming noise. He said, “You can tell how well you did by how loud they screamed.”

“Yeah?” Darcy said, opening her eyes briefly, closing them. Only a wispy thread connecting her to consciousness. Her voice husky. “How’d we do then?”

“I think we both did good,” Thorn said.

“How do you know?”

“Hear that?”

Four, five dogs yapped and howled around the trailer park.

“We did that?” Eyes still closed.

“They started when we started. An hour ago.”

Halfway down her drowsy drift to sleep, she mumbled, “Is that all it was? One hour.”

He touched her hair. That thick hair, much softer than it looked. And her other hair, even softer, that tangle of rosy gold. It was scented with something, a mild flower. Jasmine? That aroma was on his cheeks, every breath now.

Thorn leaned over the edge of the bed and brought the top sheet back aboard, shook it quietly into place, and tucked it in around her. She dug the side of her face into her pillow, reached for him. He lay down and she brought her head to his chest, adjusted it till she found the right fit.

They were like that when the seashell exploded through the bedroom window. Glass scattered across the sheets. Thorn rolled to the floor, thinking he was on the
Heart Pounder
, that this was August again. Darcy made a strangled scream. He pulled her off the bed and brought her down beside him on the floor. They waited, kneeling in the dark. Dogs were barking everywhere. A cool breeze flooded through the broken window.

Darcy crawled across the floor to her purse on a chair by the dresser. She dug through it and came out with a small flat .25 automatic, a white pearl handle. She crawled back and squatted beside him. They watched the window.

He recognized the pistol. Her dad had kept it in a drawer at the newspaper office, and Thorn and Gaeton had taken it out as boys, held it, aimed it. It was a Browning Baby, intricate scrollwork on its nickel plate. The mother-of-pearl grip also engraved with a pretty filigree. Gaeton’s father had found them with it once, took it out of Thorn’s hand, saying nothing, puffing his pipe, giving them both a long stern look, and putting the pistol away where they never found it again.

Darcy and Thorn stayed in a crouch by the bed, listened some more. Nothing.

Thorn asked her if it was loaded.

“You better believe it is,” she said.

Staying away from the window and the torn paper shade, they both dressed quickly, leaving their underwear behind.