John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

“Pike?”

“While his wife was in the hospital for a couple of days of observation after she emptied the pill bottle. It was in the office while she was waiting for Dr. Sherman to come back from an emergency. There was nothing crude about the pass, you understand. Tom Pike is a very tasty and very careful guy. And I felt so darn sorry for him, and I respect him so much for the way he’s handling the whole mess with Maureen… I almost got involved just out of pity.”

“When was all that?”

“March, I guess. Maybe April. One thing, I knew he’d be very careful and cautious and secretive and he wouldn’t go around bragging about his loving little nurse friend. I guess he’d have been a good thing, because then I wouldn’t have gotten messed up with Rick.”

“Think he found some other recruit?”

“I sort of hope so. Somebody sweet and nice and loving. But who would know? Somehow Mr. Pike gets to know everything about everybody, and nobody finds out much about him. It’s probably even more important he should have found a friend now that Mrs. Trescot is dead.”

“Why?”

“Now there’s just the three of them, and kid sister has a terrible yen for him, and nobody could really blame him for giving her some very long second looks, either. And that would be as messy a triangle as you could find.”

She yawned and sighed. ” `Night, sweetheart,” she said.

I slid almost back into sleep and stopped on the dreaming edge of it. Little by little I became ever more aware of every single place where flesh touched flesh. She had achieved such a honeyed and luxuriant completion that in some bewitched way it seemed to mark the spent flesh with a kind of sensuous continuity, as though it had not ended at all but was still continuing in some hidden manner. I was increasingly aware of the resting engines of our bodies, our slow thump of hearts, blood pulse, suck and sag of the bellows of four lungs, breathing commingled in the cozy bed, all the incredible complexity of cells and nourishments and energy transformation and secretions and heat balance going on and on. I wondered if she slept, but at my first tentative and stealthy caress she took a deep, quick breath that caught and she arched and stretched herself, made a purr of acceptance and luxurious anticipations.

So into the tempos and climates of it again, bodies familiarized now. Fragments. Like things glimpsed at night from a moving train, Dragging whisper-sound of palm on flesh. Deep, deep, slow-thick into the clench of honey, clovery oils, nipples pebbled, lift-clamp of thigh, arythmic flesh-clap fading into tempo reattained, held long and longer and longest, then beginning quivorous hesitation at the end of deepening, richening beat, a shifting of her, mouth agape, furnace breath, tongue curl, grit of tooth against tooth, hands then cup and pull the rubberous buttocky pumping, her bellows breath whistling exploding the words against my mouth-“Love you. Love you. Love you.” Then somehow opening more, taking deeper, pulling, demanding, a final grinding moaning agony of her, requiring me to drive, batter, cleave without mercy. Then slow toppling. The long slope. Hearts trying to leap from chests. Gagging gasps from the long run up the far side. Tumbling into the meadow. Tall grass. Clover and grass. Sag into sleep, still coupled, fall into sleep while still feeling in her depths the gentle residual claspings, small infrequent tightenings like that of a small sleeping hand when the brain dreams.

Then in the morning, as I lay watching her get dressed and knowing that soon I had to stir myself too, she looked so frowning-thoughtful, I asked her if she was still working at that lousy-person syndrome of hers.

She put her arms into the sleeves of the white dress after she had stepped into it and pulled it up. “You didn’t get to me all the way, Travis, because you’re some kind of fantastic lover.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I mean, you know, none of that sort of tricky stuff.”

She came over and turned around to be zipped. I sat up and swung my legs out and, before zipping her, kissed the crease of her back about two inches south of her bra strap.

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