The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3)
Page 33
33
Shortly after midnight a week later, Calvin and Tiffany lay naked together in his bed, relaxing in post-coital bliss. They’d engaged in quite a lot of coition that day. They had been hungry to consummate their relationship all week, but given Calvin’s injured legs they felt it best to wait. Now, though, the thunderhead-colored bruises of a week ago had faded to barely visible patches of watery yellow, and the soreness in his thighs was finally gone. Sort of. Actually, his thighs were sore right now, as was virtually every other muscle in his body, but it was a different, pleasanter kind of soreness.
When Tiffany had come over today and Calvin had announced that he felt well enough to finally do it, they lost no time at all, flinging off their clothes and screwing right there on the green leather couch. And then they did it again twenty minutes later on the parlor carpet. And half an hour after that in the library. And twenty minutes later on the spiral staircase, which had been interesting but rather uncomfortable. And so on. All told, they’d had sex fourteen times in seven different rooms in the last ten hours. Now that the dam of Tiffany’s virginity had burst, her libido was pouring forth in an unquenchable torrent that was sweeping a surprised but wholly unresistant Calvin right along with it.
Now as they lay there in his rumpled bed, their naked, sweat-slick bodies snuggled tight, he shook his head with a smile.
“I think I’ve created a monster,” he said.
Tiffany raised her head and looked at him, unsure of his meaning; in their line of work, after all, any reference to monsters could be literal. But when she grasped what he meant, she grinned and playfully nipped at his earlobe with a monster-like growl.
“Nope,” she said. “I’m not from some workshop of filthy procreation. I’m a natural-born sex-fiend. Gosh, I can remember times when I masturbated ten, fifteen times in one day.”
Calvin gawped at her.
She laughed, a little self-consciously.
“Those were just, you know, extreme cases,” she said. “Usually it’s just once or twice.”
“Once or twice a day?”
“Yeah.”
Calvin shook his head. “And here I thought I was oversexed, masturbating once or twice a week.”
“Got you beat in the beating off department.”
“Women don’t ‘beat off,’ do they?”
“I don’t know. Can you suggest a better euphemism?”
“They rub one out?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not a Mafioso.”
He pondered a moment, then said, “Oh, I know. I have a better term for it.”
“What’s that?”
“‘That thing you’re not gonna be doing anymore cuz I’ll be too busy banging your brains out.’”
“Ooh! I like that one!”
They lay in cozy silence for a time, then Tiffany said, “You could hire somebody to do it, you know.”
He stared at her in shock. “What?”
She stared back, confused by his reaction. Then she understood and burst into laughter.
“I don’t mean banging my brains out. I mean safe-cracking.” She nodded at the painting of Anna May on the wall. “You could hire a locksmith to open it.”
“Oh,” he said, relieved. “Don’t freak me out like that.”
“I apologize for the non-sequitur. Although I have to say, your face is an adorable shade of red right now.”
“No, I thought about hiring someone to open it, but I decided not to.”
“Why?”
“Partly because there might be something in there I don’t want anyone else to see, but more importantly because…I don’t know, I just feel like it’s something I should do myself.”
“A point of pride.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s a challenge. And I’m certain Mr. May left a clue somewhere, if only to jog his own memory should it prove necessary. He was too careful a person not to.”
She rested her cheek on his chest and began to idly play with one of his nipples, rubbing the tip of her index finger over it and watching it wobble back and forth.
“So where do you plan on putting Scooby-Doo once he’s been well and duly popsicled?” she asked.
“I was thinking the south room on the third floor. That’s where Mr. May put most of the freestanding items, and I figure I might as well continue that tradition.”
“What, you’re not going to put it in the parlor where visitors can see it? You’re not going to give a place of honor to your first big success?”
“Definitely not. I don’t want the cable guy or the meter reader seeing it. I want to keep what we do under the radar as much as possible.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to wind up living in the middle of a media circus, which is what’ll happen if what we do ever becomes public. We’ll wind up with tabloids doing stories about ‘The X-Files of May, Ohio,’ and crowds of weirdoes in tinfoil hats camping out in the woods, and stuff like that.”
“I respectfully disagree.”
“What?” he said, surprised.
“Well, I’m sure it would happen a little bit, but I think it would be a flea circus instead of a three-ringer.” She shook her head. “I just don’t think you should be hiding your magic lantern under a bushel. I think if more people knew what you did, you’d wind up with an embarrassing wealth of strange phenomena to explore. You wouldn’t have to keep digging through police blotters for things to investigate.”
“We did okay,” he said, a little defensively. “We got the leucrota in the end. And nobody got eaten.”
“True,” she said. “And at least now we know it’s not me.”
“What’s not you?”
“The thing with the alley. It’s clear now that my extreme reaction to what happened in the alley wasn’t because I’m peculiarly hypersensitive to strange phenomena. Because if that were the case, I would’ve reacted equally badly to the leucrota. Which I didn’t. Which suggests there was some specific quality to the alley incident that engendered my response.”
Calvin nodded. “Whatever happened in the alley that night is something else we’ll have to investigate. I still wonder if Mr. May learned of it somehow and it had something to do with why he added you to his will. In fact, just yesterday I started going through his file cabinets more thoroughly in search of anything that might explain the bequests he made. I haven’t found anything yet, but there’re still a lot more drawers to go through.”
“Or maybe the answer’s hidden in there.” She pointed at the painting of Anna May.
“Yeah. I’d better see what I can do about getting that thing open.”
“Worry about it later.” She snuggled closer and tongued his nipple. “You have something more important to open right now.”
“Again?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not up for it?” Her hand glided down to his cock and started stroking it. It responded immediately, swelling and rising to fill her palm. “Feels to me like you’re up for it.”
He sighed. But it was a mock sigh. His body was already revving up for more sex.
“Okay,” he said. “Once more and that’s it, though.”
Grinning, she straddled his waist and slid herself over him like a sheath.
He gasped, then added, “At least that’s it for the next hour.”
And so they made love once more, more slowly this time, making it last, savoring each other’s bodies, the touch of their skin, the way they moved, the noises they made when they came. And when they were done, they just lay there in contented silence, two happy, healthy young lovers, the world magical and at peace and theirs for the asking.