She was naked, her hair tousled by sleep. She moved back toward the couch, shaking her head. Her nipple areas were exceptionally large, dark, almost a plum red, making the breasts themselves look smaller than they were. Weaving of flat muscles over the curve of hip. Deep and powerful slope of the belly down to a pubic thatch like a patch of gunmetal-colored smoke through which gleamed the pale plump weight of the pudenda framed between the round and solid pallor of the thighs.
She sat on the couch and said, “Geez, my knees are like water. Touch you to wake you up and you blow up like a rocket or something.”
I leaned against the desk. “Did you have something on your mind?”
With the automatic exasperation of the person who has been startled she said, “What does it look like I had on my mind anyway? Maybe I came mousing in here in the dark so you could teach me chess, hah?”
She sighed and leaned back slightly, relaxing, sprawled and straddled, putting one hand behind her neck, elbow akimbo. Her body had too specific a look. It seemed too earthily illustrative of function, in the way that some of the larger flower blossoms have such a fleshy look of process one cannot see them from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.
I reached to the nearby chair, picked up my T-shirt and tossed it to her. She caught it and looked at me and said, “You’re giving me some kind of a message?” She shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t what anybody’d call a great start, buddy.” She pulled it on over her head, hitched herself up to snug it under her seat. It came to mid-thigh. She patted her tumbled hair and crossed elegant legs. “What I had in mind, McGee, I couldn’t get back to sleep once I woke up, and I had this lousy little impulse, maybe a way of saying hello, or saying thanks. Or a way to make it easier to get back to sleep. What you should know, I wasn’t going to peddle it.”
I sat astride the desk chair, forearm along the top of the back, chin on my forearm. “I didn’t think you were.”
She scowled. “But it could get confusing, because I am going to try to hit you for a loan. And you maybe wouldn’t understand it would be a loan, really and truly. Two hundred bucks?”
“Okay.”
She gave me a little of the expression she had used when posing for Meyer and deepened her voice. “So there’s two good reasons to say thanks, Trav.”
“Saying it is enough, Vangie.”
She studied me. “Listen, I know that there are a lot of guys who get chilled off if they know a girl’s been a hooker. But I wasn’t going to try to pay you back with some kind of faked-up trick, Trav, honest. I’d want to make out for real, and that’s something I’ve never peddled except sometimes by accident practically. Maybe it wouldn’t be the greatest blast in the world, but you won’t forget it in a hurry, and you can believe it.”
“Vangie, stop putting me on the spot, will you? You’re all girl, and I’m not a prude, and I appreciate the gesture, but you are not in my debt and.
“And thanks but no thanks? Sure.” She yawned. “No hard feelings, Trav. I guess all these things, they depend on what you’re used to. For some little spook working behind a big desk the last twenty years, he’d think I was coming on with the greatest thing since the wheel, but I guess a man who looks like you and has a boat like this can score just about whenever and wherever he gets the wants.” She got up, winked at me, sauntered over to the table and lighted a cigarette, shook the match out. “We’re still friends, Mister. Maybe… I don’t know… better friends this way. Funny to have a man friend. Men are either trade or they’re in for a cut of the gross. You and Meyer. Funny, crazy bastards. I get the feeling… oh; skip it.”
“What feeling?”
She came closer, stood in front of my chair. “It’s silly. A feeling that you two like me. I was in that big bed thinking bout that. You know all the garbage about me I told you. and you’re still nice.” Abruptly her amber eyes filled with tears. Her mouth twisted and she turned and walked away, keeping her back to me.