“Not do. I don’t do anything. It’s more like it’s done to me.”
Marty leaned back in the chair, flummoxed.
“It’s as though everything gets sticky. I can’t shake it off. I hear people talking without them moving their lips. Most of it’s meaningless: just rubbish.”
“And it’s what they’re thinking?”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t find much to say in response, except that he doubted her, and that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She’d come for reassurance, hadn’t she?
“That’s not all,” she said. “I see shapes sometimes, around people’s bodies. Vague shapes . . . like a kind of light.”
Marty thought of the man at the fence; of how he’d bled light, or seemed to. He didn’t interrupt her, however.
“The point is, I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it. And the last few weeks I’ve felt something in the house. I get odd thoughts in my head, out of nowhere; I dream . . . horrible things.” She halted, aware that her description was getting vaguer, and she risked what little credibility this monologue had if she went on.
“The lights you see?” Marty said, backtracking.
“Yes.”
“I saw something like them.”
She leaned forward.
“When?”
“The man who broke in. I thought I saw light coming from him. From his wounds, I suppose, and his eyes and his mouth.” Even as he finished the sentence he was shrugging it off as if fearful of contagion. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was drunk.”
“But you saw something.”
“-Yes,” he conceded, without pleasure.
She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them. As she stared out across the lawn-Marty never drew the curtains-he had ample opportunity to look at her.
“Something . . .” she said, “. . . something.”
The grace of her crooked leg, the displaced weight of her buttocks; her face, reflected in the cold glass, so intent on this mystery: all enthralled him.
“That’s why he doesn’t talk to me any longer,” she said.
“Papa?”
“He knows I can feel what he’s thinking: and he’s frightened.”
The observation was a cul-de-sac: she started tapping her foot with irritation, her breath ghosting the window intermittently. Then, out of the blue, she said:
“Did you know you had a breast fixation?”
“What?”
“You look at them all the time.”
“Do I Hell!”
“And you’re a liar.”
He stood up, not knowing what he intended to do or say until the words were out. At last, smothered in confusion, only the truth seemed appropriate.
“I like looking at you.”
He touched her shoulder. At this point, if they chose, the game could stop; tenderness was a breath away. They could take the opportunity or let it be: resume the repartee, or discard it. The moment lay between them, awaiting instructions.
“Babe,” she said. “Don’t shake.”
He moved a half-step closer and kissed the back of her neck. She turned and returned the kiss, her hand moving up his spine to cup the back of his head, as if to sense the weight of his skull.
“At last,” she said, when they broke. “I was beginning to think you were too much of a gentleman.” They tumbled onto the bed, and she rolled over to straddle his hips. Without hesitation she reached to fumble with the belt of his bathrobe. He was half-hard beneath her, and uncomfortably trapped. Self-conscious, too. She pulled the bathrobe open, and ran her palms across his chest. His body was solid without being heavy; silk hair spread out from his sternum and down the central groove of his abdomen, coarsening as it descended. She sat up a little to release the robe from his groin. His cock, freed, flipped from four to noon. She stroked its underside: it responded in gulps.
“Pretty,” she said.
He was getting used to her approbation now. Her calm was infectious. He half-sat up, perching on his elbows to get a better look at her poised above him. She was intent on his erection, putting her index finger into her mouth and transferring a film of saliva to his cock, running fingertips up and down in fluid, lazy motions. He squirmed with pleasure. A rash of heat had appeared on his chest, further signal,, if any were needed, of his arousal. His cheeks burned too.