"Mixed feelings, then, huh?"
"Why are you asking me all this?" She frowned.
"Well, you're not married and I sort of wondered why."
"I'm not the marrying kind," she said.
"I bet there are about a zillion guys out there who would like to argue about that," he said.
"You're not asking me to marry you," she said firmly. "You don't even know who you are, really. And we've known each other for only a few months."
"All true," he said. "But you make me think about the concept of marriage. I don't think I ever did that before. Not seriously, anyway. It feels too new in my head." He blinked. "At the same time, by your own admission, you don't just tumble into bed with every guy you meet. This has to mean something to you."
"I love you," she said simply.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Do you love me?" she asked, instead of answering his question.
"Yes," he said. "I don't know how I know that, but I feel it."
"There's your answer," she said. "I feel differently about you than other men. I love you, and I know I love you. That's all that matters to me." She smiled. "Well, the fact that you love me too has something to do with that. And the fact that I own your life. Let's not forget that."
"Oh yes," he said. "You saved it and now you own it."
"That's right," she said. "And right now, what I want your life to have is me in it." She kissed him again. "And what my girly part wants is to have your boy part in it. Until I met you, my rabbit was my best friend."
"Rabbit?"
"Vibrator," she explained.
"It's called a rabbit?"
"Yup. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's because when I first got it, it made me want to do it like bunny ... you know ... all the time."
"And that's changed?" He grinned.
"Not at all," she said with dignity. "I just have a new toy now, that's all." She lowered her lashes and looked through them at him and squeezed his penis. "A better toy! Mmmmm, my toy is ready to go again. Goody!"
"You're going to break your toy if you keep playing with it too much," he said, smiling.
"No I'm not," she argued, pushing him onto his back. She scrambled up on top of him, socketed the tip of his member into her sex and sat down hard.
"Oooof!" he said, overdramatically.
She squeezed him with her internal muscles. "Giddyap, horsey!"
Kris bucked his hips upwards and she started laughing as she raised one arm in the air and waved it back and forth, like she was riding a bucking bronco.
"Come on!" she taunted. "You can do better than that. This is an easy eight second ride!"
She was prepared for him to buck harder. What she wasn't prepared for was for him to sit up and throw his legs sideways off the bed. Suddenly he was standing, holding her onto him by grabbing her ass. She had to reach for his neck to keep from falling backwards. He whirled and she was the one who went "Oooof!" as he fell forward, pinning her to the bed with his feet on the floor. He began lunging into her, pounding her hard enough to make the bed scrape sideways across the floor.
"You got on a horse," he panted, "but ended up on a bull." He gave an extra hard punch into her.
"Ooooo," she said breathlessly. "Now I'm all scared and stuff. What a big horn you have mister bull! You're goring me with it! Oh owww, oh help, help!" She couldn't keep it up, though, and started laughing as she spread her legs and let him slam into her.
"Harder!" she squealed. "I love you!"
To her surprise he stopped, instead of being egged on. He pushed deep and started rubbing her with the skin that covered his pubic bone. He kissed her and kept kissing her as she couldn't ignore the thrills he was causing. She whined into his mouth and writhed as she orgasmed, but he still didn't let her rest. He kept rubbing and added his fingers between them, gripping her nipples and pulling at them. All his weight was on her where they were joined and he was holding his upper torso up by the strength of his back muscles alone as he extended her orgasm by almost a full minute.
"Stop!" she screamed. "I ... can't ... breathe!"
"I thought you wanted a ride," he panted, teasing her.
"Pleeease!" she gasped. "I ... really ... can't ... breathe!"
"Will you be nice to me?" he insisted, still rubbing. He let go of her nipples and supported some of his weight with his hands on the bed beside her.
"Oh fuck," she moaned, dragging in huge breaths.
"I am," he said, leaning down to kiss her chin and then her nose. He licked her open mouth.
She wailed. "Make me pregnant!"
Her words did it. His groin tensed. "Ohhhh Lulu," he moaned. His love jetted into her and he slowly came to a stop, still deep in her. His head hung and sweat dripped off his chin onto her upper chest.
"I thought you didn't want any more babies," he panted.
"I don't," she panted back. "It was the only way I could think of to get you to stop. I was going to fly into pieces if you didn't stop. I knew if I said that, that you'd finish."
"You're a horrible, ungrateful woman, Lou Anne Rowan," he panted. "There I was a horse, and then a bull, trying to compete with a rabbit, and you tricked me!"
"You won," she sighed. "I'll take you over the rabbit any day. You just have to learn how to stop when you're driving me crazy."
"I'm getting hard again," he said, grinning at her.
"Nooooooo," she moaned. "Too soon!"
"I'm not, actually," he said, his grin widening. "Getting hard again, I mean. I just played a trick on you. Now you know what it's like."
She pushed at him hard, so hard that he thought he might have crossed a line and made her angry. He pulled away from her and stood up. But she wasn't frowning. She pushed him onto the bed, on his back, and climbed on top of him to lie down.
"Love me forever, Kris," she sighed, laying her head on his chest.
"It would be my pleasure," he murmured into her hair.
"I'm leaking. You always make a mess," she said. "Maybe the rabbit is better after all." He stiffened and she lifted her head to look into his eyes. "No ... it's not. I shouldn't tease you about that. I'll throw it away if you love me forever. I won't ever need it again."
"Keep it," he said, pulling her head back down to his chest. "I have a feeling there will be times when I'm down for the count. You're the most sex-crazed woman I ever met."
"Oh? Tell me about the others I'm more sex-crazed than."
"I can't. I can't remember them."
"Then how do you know I'm the most sex-crazed?"
"Because if there were any who were more nymphomaniacal than you are, they'd be in the Guinness Book of World Records ... and they're not. I checked."
"Awwww, you say the sweetest things," she giggled.
Chapter Twenty-three
Kris looked up when he saw movement in his peripheral vision. He was at work. He'd never locked the front doors of the station while he worked. He'd never even thought about it. He saw Mitch wave, through the glass wall of the broadcast booth. He was writing while another of the endless supply of pre-recorded tapes wound through the pickups and sent music, like magic, through the air outside. He got up and opened the door.
"Surprised to see you here," he commented.
"Haven't seen you around for a day or two," said Mitch.
Mitch had decided to deliver Harper's request for interview in a slightly different way than he would have it if had involved a "normal" citizen of Pembroke. He wanted to use this opportunity to shake Kris' tree a little bit, just to see if anything fell out of it.
"I need you to come down to the station tomorrow, after lunch," he said.
"Oh?"
"A detective from New York City called me. He wants to talk to you."
He let it lie there, watching for any signs Kris might display. He was not disappointed. There was obvious angst, almost immediately.
"Why?"
"You don't know?"
Kris opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Finally he said, "Is he going to arrest me?"
"Does he need to arrest you for something?"
Somehow, this wasn't as much fun as Mitch had thought it would be. He wondered why that was, and realized that he liked this man. Then He wondered why he liked him.
"You're still suspicious of me," said Kris. He frowned.
Mitch quit playing games. He wanted to keep probing, but, as far as he could tell, Kris was a decent sort of guy. Whatever was bothering him would come to light sooner or later. It always worked that way.
"Your apartment was broken into," Mitch said. "He needs to interview you."
"My apartment?" Kris looked obviously curious. "I have an apartment?"
"You live in New York City," said Connel. "Everybody there has an apartment."
"And he didn't say I did anything ... wrong?"
"Are you sure you don't want to talk to me about whatever it is that's eating at you?" asked Mitch. It wasn't his interrogator's voice he was using. It was just one man asking another man if he wanted to get something off his chest.
"It's complicated," said Kris. He thought about Lulu and how well things were going with her. "There are other people involved now. I don't want to mess things up."
"You mean Lulu?"
"How'd you know?" asked Kris.
"Jessica is about to bust at the seams with a secret she knows that Lulu won't let her talk about. It seemed to involve you. I see how you look at her and I see how she looks at you. I'm surprised the betting hasn't started yet."
"Betting?"
"On whether you'll come out of this with your whole skin or not. Nobody's ever seen Lulu interested in a man before. Not like you. Some people think she's a dyke. There've been bets made about that too."
"You're shitting me," said Kris. "Does she know?"
"She knows they all talk about her and she knows about some of the bets they make in the diner," said Mitch. "I don't think she knows about all the bets. If she did, there'd be a lot more spilled coffee around there than there has been. Lulu is not the most patient person in the world when it comes to someone impugning her reputation."
It was quiet for a few seconds.
"So, does this complexity you were talking about involve her?"
"Indirectly," said Kris. "I don't want to hurt her. I'm almost happy that I can't remember things. What if I started to remember things and it turned out I'm a bad person? That would fuck up everything."
"I don't think you're a bad person," said Mitch. "You might have made some kind of bad mistake, or gotten involved with the wrong people, maybe, but your personality isn't that of a predator."
"How do you know?" asked Kris.
"I told you I was going to keep an eye on you," said Mitch carelessly. "I have."
"So ... this guy from New York is coming here to talk to me."
"Yeah. He's going to interview you as a victim, as far as I know."
"Okay, I'll be there. What time?"
"He should be here around noon."
"See you then," said Kris.
* * *
Kris didn't really know what to expect, so he tried not to think about it. When he saw the man waiting to talk to him, though, he felt his stomach begin to roil. The man smiled, though, and his face looked more open than Kris had expected a New York City detective to look. Mitch stood off to one side, arms folded. He had apparently either asked if he could watch or just assumed it would be all right.
Introductions were made and Harper waved at a chair, across a table from him in the office. There was a tape recorder on the table, too, and he said the interview would be recorded, if that was all right with Kris. Kris had no problem with it. Harper turned it on and, for the record, stated his name and Kris', the date and the location of the interview, followed by a swearing in routine before he started asking questions.
Kris felt lost immediately. The detective asked him all kinds of questions to which he had no answers. As it turned out, he only had one answer, and that one didn't seem to help that much.
Yes, he did have a girlfriend named Lola, but didn't know if her last name was Henderson or not.
"You don't seem to remember much," commented Harper, who was already frustrated.
"I was in an accident," said Kris. "I lost almost all of my memory. The only reason I know my name is Kristoff Farmingham is because my picture is on the driver's license Officer Connel returned to me."
"Did you tell Lola Henderson she could break into your apartment if she needed to?" Jim waited.
"I don't think so," said Kris.
"Don't think so?"
"The few memories I have of her suggest I don't actually like her very much," said Kris, feeling like he was kicking a dog. "I can't imagine I'd tell anybody they could break into my apartment. If I'd wanted her in there, don't you think I would have just given her a key?"
"I don't know, Mister Farmingham," said the detective. "I just know she was found in your apartment, having gained entrance through a window, which she broke, and that she claims she had your permission to be there."
"I'm sorry I can't be of much help," said Kris.
Harper said the interview was at an end, stated the time and date, and turned the recorder off. He looked at Mitch, who shrugged his shoulders.
"Can I ask you a couple of questions ... off the record?" asked Harper.
"Sure ... I guess."
"How'd you get that bullet wound?" Harper's eyes flicked to Kris' left temple, where there was a long red weal. It had been stitched, but there would still be a scar there for the rest of his life.
"I don't know," said Kris. He glanced at Mitch. "They said I had it when they found me ... after the accident."
"And what do you remember about the accident?"
"Nothing," said Kris. "Well, I remember breaking glass, but that's all."
"You know, with what you gave me, there's no way the DA will press charges against Miss Henderson."
"I swore to tell the truth," said Kris. "I don't even know where my apartment is. I can't remember what's in it. If somebody broke in and cleaned the place out, I couldn't describe anything except the couch."
"The couch?" Jim's eyes glittered.
"It's brown. I had a sort of vision of it once, while I was in the hospital." His face darkened as blood rushed into it. "And the toilet. I remember what the toilet looks like, for some reason."
Harper opened the folder that had been lying on the table and flipped through it. He extracted a photograph and slid it across the table. Kris looked at what was obviously his living room. The couch he remembered was there. His eyes searched the photograph hungrily, looking at other furniture, the walls, hoping he might recognize something. There was something on a shelf that clicked in his memory.
"Right there," he pointed. "On that shelf. That's a toad, or a frog or something, that's been stuffed. It's riding a little wooden motorcycle. I got that in Mexico."
Harper took the picture back and squinted at it. He couldn't tell whether the thing in the photograph was what Farmingham had said it was or not. Then again, he couldn't imagine the man lying about something like that.
"So you remember Mexico?" he asked.
"No. When I saw that in the picture, I just suddenly knew what it was and where I got it."
"Anything else?"
Kris took the picture back and stared at it for a long time. He leaned back, shaking his head.
"Can I ask you some questions now?" he asked.
Harper's eyes flicked to Connel again and he nodded tightly.
"What part of town is this in?" He pointed to the photograph.
"It's on Long Island," said Harper.
"Did you talk to anybody else that knows me? Friends? My publisher?"
"Who is your publisher?" asked Harper.
"I don't know," moaned Kris. "You know more about me than I do. Did this Lola woman say anything about me writing a book? Did she say what the book is about?"
Now it was Harper's turn to say he couldn't r
eally answer many of Kris' questions. He had some idea, during that process, of how frustrated Farmingham must be.
Kris' last question was "Is that it?"
It was obvious to both lawmen that the man expected something more. Harper looked at Connel again, who ran the blade of his hand across his throat and back, in the universal sign for "Cut it off." Harper thanked Kris for his cooperation and they watched him leave. Harper turned to Connel.
For Want of a Memory Page 27