The English professor gaped at him, and rather rudely asked, “So you’re an expert on poetry as well as uranium, Joe?”
Hawk considered. “I guess I can tell a good poet from a bad one. Meg Dunwoodie was a good one. She wrote with a kind of clarity that made everybody think that they already knew what she knew.” The professor raised an eyebrow, and Hawk shrugged. “Long ago I was an English major at Yale. I happen to have a weakness for good poetry. I’m a damn fool for The Faerie Queene.”
Tom was loving this. As a high school teacher married to a famous scholar, he was familiar with the superior attitude snooty college professors adopted toward those they considered lower on the intellectual food chain. “Maybe we should change the name of our city basketball team to ‘The Faerie Queenes,’” he told Hawk. “There are quite a few team members who enjoy poetry.”
“I bet we could get away with some cheap fouls.” Hawk beamed. “A name like that could really intimidate our opponents.”
“You guys aren’t working up to some grand homophobic punchline, are you?” Edna warned.
“Naw, sweetie, we’re just talking epic poetry.” Tom smiled at her, and turned to the English professor. “In what you might call layman’s terms, of course.”
“I have no objection to laymen,” Sally added, gazing at Hawk, “as long as they know the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’”
“As a former English major,” Hawk told her, with a clear look that had some kind of edge to it, “I’ve made it a point to practice good grammar.”
She was a dolt. She was a complete, unadulterated idiot. That dumb bit about “lie” and “lay.” It had to have reminded him of a time when Sally Alder hadn’t been that clear on the distinction. That was the chardonnay talking.
The allusion, of course, hadn’t escaped Hawk. But in the interest of getting her out of that appealing dress, he decided to let it pass.
When Edna stifled a yawn, Sally decided it was time to split. “I’d better get going,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about climbing Medicine Bow Peak tomorrow, and I want to try to get at least an hour of sleep. Fantastic dinner, Ed and Tom.”
“Yeah, I’d better get going, too. School starts this week and I have to get my act together,” said Hawk. Hugs, thanks, promises of future lunches and dinners were offered all around. Hawk followed Sally out the door, and Edna and Tom exchanged a meaningful glance.
Chapter 12
Something Old, Something New
Something vibrated between them, twanging like a steel string. Hawk jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans, realized he was holding his breath. Sally exhaled at the same moment. When she turned left at the sidewalk, he turned left, too. They walked three blocks without a word.
“Walk you home?” he asked her.
“Sure, Joe.” She gave the name a good twist of sarcasm. “Go ahead. I mean, if it’s on your way.” She was near exploding.
He laughed at her. “Actually, it’s out of my way. I’m just being courteous.”
“Kind of you,” she said primly, and then cracked up and gave him a shove that almost sent him sprawling. “Fuck you, Hawk!”
“At your service, Sally.” Cackling, he got his footing by putting an arm around her shoulder and pulling her to him. “Any time in particular?”
She thought of several responses, but decided that the best was to throw her arms around him and give him a kiss so complete and so long overdue that it would have compounded kiss-interest, sort of like a checked-out library book. But he was way ahead of her. By the time she figured out what to do, he was halfway down her throat and halfway up her leg and they were struggling to unlock Meg Dunwoodie’s front door while still keeping two hands on each other.
Evidently, you could teach an old Hawk new tricks. Long ago, when he’d been a graduate student in Arizona, he’d met a home-wrecking redheaded paleontologist who’d told him she was conducting an experiment to find out all the beneficial uses to which the human mouth could be put. She had asked if he would care to participate in her fieldwork, and he had generously agreed, in the interest of science.
The paleontologist had moved on to other projects, and Hawk, being a genial and curious creature with a large cerebral cortex, had sought to apply the field experience in other contexts. He reasoned that if the mouth could be so flexible a tool, it was worth wondering about the other parts of the body. More than a dozen years of fruitful research ensued.
All this had happened in the many years since he’d been with Sally. Long ago, they had been hot as hell for each other, but they had been, after all, young. Young people tended to be desperate and impatient about sex, even though they usually had more time and energy for it than their elders. Tonight, Hawk and Sally had both time and energy and the benefit of years of hands-on experience. They each fancied that they might be in for pleasant surprises.
“Hmmmm,” she said, as he demonstrated several combined hand-mouth techniques, rubbing his body along hers as she tried to get her key in the lock, “I don’t remember you doing that before.”
“I don’t recall taking a vow of celibacy,” he explained, bending down to try another mouth thing between her shoulder blades. He could feel the goose bumps rise under his tongue.
She was trembling and breathless and could not get the damn door open, and all she wanted to do was turn around and have at him.
“Let me get that door,” he said, wrapping her up in his arms and putting his hands over hers to turn the key in the lock. “If I have to leave it to you, we’ll end up fucking our brains out on Meg Dunwoodie’s doorstep.”
They stumbled inside. Neither noticed the dark green 1969 Pontiac Catalina parked across the street, or the bald guy sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking, doing nothing in particular. As they crashed, tangled, into the hallway, the dark car drove away.
So the bitch had a boyfriend. Some kind of candy-ass hippie. Disgusting.
Shane had watched her go out earlier, all dolled up. When she was out of sight, he’d done a little business with her Mustang and then gone down to the Torch to have a couple drinks. Had come back just in time to see her and that guy come down the street and start going at each other. Too bad they got the door unlocked. He could have gotten off on watching them do it on the lawn.
Fuck her. He looked again at the soiled Boomerang clipping in his lap, rage building. Fucking bitch got what was his. Well, he’d put a little scare into her, at least. Maybe something more. He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the street and headed on back to the Torch Tavern.
Sally and Hawk made it as far as the bottom of the stairs, but they had to stop and kiss for a long time. Her legs got so shaky that he was forced to support her by putting his hands under her bottom. When she returned the favor and kept on kissing, he knew it was time to find a place to lie down. They hauled each other up the steps, so mixed into each other’s bodies that the past and the future and even the present fell away. Sally pulled him into the bedroom, down on the bed. He fell on top of her, and they pressed into each other, dress and jeans and shirt like steam over all that bone and flesh.
Sally was dizzy and aching, but she couldn’t help . . . asking. She had always thought she was a feckless hedonist, and she had surely done her share of indefensible things, but it had turned out that she believed in, felt somehow obliged to, moral reckoning. He was sucking her fingers and squeezing her thigh, and she was just about ready to beg him to take her clothes off. She was, of course, a moron for risking this moment of wonderful searing desire, but she couldn’t help herself any more than she could help pulling his shirttail out and running her hands up his back as she pulled her lips away, got a breath, and said, “Hawk. I just have to know.”
Deprived for the moment of her mouth, he switched to her neck. Found the crease of her collarbone with the edges of his teeth. Moving on down.
“I mean it, Hawk,” she said weakly, now really wanting her dress gone. “Listen to me a minute.”
He raised his
head and looked her in the eye. He was still wearing his glasses, but his eyes were glazed. “What?” he asked hoarsely, rubbing his palms over her ribs, over her hipbones. “What could you possibly need to know right now?”
It sounded incomprehensibly silly, she realized, and stunningly masochistic. “I need to know if you forgive me.”
His hands stopped what they were doing, for a fraction of a second. The glazed look of lust gave way to something more serious. He was not accustomed to earnest talk at such moments, and he was certainly not prepared to have this particular discussion. They did, after all, have some things to say. “Come on,” he said, hoping the conversation could be postponed.
“No.” Then she kissed him very carefully, caressing the muscles of his back, grinding up with her hips, wanting him to know that she hadn’t entirely forgotten what they happened to be doing. “Tell me.”
She felt so good. Hawk kept holding on to her, kissed her hair. He had spent way too much time figuring out that you might want to hold on to what felt good. “I don’t know, exactly. I knew you were back. I knew I’d see you. I didn’t think that when I did, my first reaction would be to jump your bones. But it was. And the second, and the third. That must mean something.” His hands moved higher under her skirt.
“What does it mean?” she asked, shivering, holding him tight.
“It means we were young, and made dumb mistakes. We’re older now, and I really have to get you naked. We’ll have lots of time to talk. Lots to talk about. We can talk over breakfast. Now can you shut up and take your clothes off? I want to see your old lady underwear,” he said, licking at her ear, his fingers tracing up and down the backs of her legs, inside her thighs.
She rolled over him and sat up, straddling him. Her skirt was bunched up between her legs, between the two of them. She rose on her knees and tugged it free. Then she pulled her dress over her head. Lord have mercy, this old lady was wearing black lace underwear, and her body, all in all, was holding up nicely. The blood drained out of most of his extremities.
“Now you do something for me, Jody,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt. She took off his glasses, put them on the bedside table, because she wanted to see his beautiful, dark brown eyes. She pulled the elastic out of his ponytail, because she wanted to feel his soft, dark hair trailing all over her body. She leaned down and pressed into him and kissed him a good one, then took off his shirt while he unsnapped her bra, peeled it away, made her breasts ache with his hard palms and long fingers and sensitive thumbs. His hands full of her, he was wound tight with longing to be inside her, and it hurt exquisitely to slow the desire.
“You’re bustin’ your britches.” She laughed.
“Been bustin’ ’em all night,” he replied. “Could have been really embarrassing.”
She went to work on the buttons of his jeans, aroused to see that he evidently still believed underwear to be unnecessary. He relieved her of her own and oh, she was slippery and soft and warm. Dragging his pants off him, she climbed on top of him again, her mind flooding into her body, wanting the flavor of him, and whispered, “Show me something old and something new.”
He showed her.
They probably got more than one hour of sleep. More like three, but not all at one time. They kept dozing and fondling and tasting each other awake for one more drowsy, delicious, increasingly languorous, finally nearly comatose entertainment. They screwed each other silly and sore. Neither had had sex like that in years, and they were delighted and exhausted as the dawn broke, and they lay in each other’s arms. Sally had her head on Hawk’s firm, warm chest, and the sound of his heartbeat and the first birdsong of the day made her pulse thump, but she was too beat to do anything but smile and lapse into unconsciousness.
Later, he woke first. He could hardly believe where he was, who he was with. One part of his mind told him he was the biggest fool in the world, that he couldn’t trust her, that he was begging for the kind of danger he hadn’t put himself in for a long time. A smart man would put on his pants and walk out the door and stay gone.
Another part of him asked what he was willing to risk, just to wake up holding her sweet body. It wasn’t as if it was a chore to make conversation with her, either. They had always had plenty to say to each other. In so many ways, they had delighted each other. It was barely possible that twenty years before, they’d both run into the best thing that would ever happen to either of them, but they hadn ’t known enough to know it. They were different people now, but maybe there was still something there that was better than anything else that might ever happen.
Maybe it was time they found out. Or maybe he was a complete sucker. He kept his options open.
Chapter 13
Up a Slippery Slope
He was starving. He rolled her over. “Wake up, love. Do you want ...”
“Oh, honey,” she murmured, her face against his neck. “I think I’d split in half.”
“No. Later, I mean. Er, what I mean is, do you want breakfast?”
“That’d be good.” She sighed, trying to go back to sleep. “I’ve got coffee. Some great banana bread.”
“No eggs?”
“Huh?”
“No potatoes? Bacon?”
“Nope.”
“Make you a deal. You get up and make some coffee and I’ll run to the store and come back and cook you breakfast.”
“Most important meal of the day,” she mumbled, an old inside joke from when Hawk had been trying to found a cult of breakfast as a miracle diet. “Take my car. Keys on the dresser.”
He hadn’t noticed the car. Very cherry ’64 Mus-TANG. He tried to act like it was no big deal, but it was a sweet machine. Somebody had restored this baby to a fine hum, and he appreciated Sally ever the more for having put it in his hands. Brakes were pulling a little, though. She probably ought to get it into the shop.
At the Albertson’s checkout, he ran into Delice, who was buying donuts. The Langhams were famous in Laramie for their love of donuts. It was known that Delice liked cream-filled, Jerry Jeff liked chocolate frosted, Mary liked jelly, Josh liked plain, Dwayne liked crullers, Nattie pretended not to eat them, but considered glazed donuts a diet variety of the species. Dickie adored every kind of donut, as was apparent from his burgeoning gut. Hawk noticed that Delice had bought some of that overpriced fat-free Entenmann’s blueberry squiggle coffee cake. Maybe she was trying to reform her brother. Hawk’s own cart was obviously full of more breakfast than one skinny man was liable to eat.
“Hey Hawk,” Delice said, “what’s shakin’?”
“Not much,” he said, looking at her stuff on the conveyor belt. “Lotta donuts.”
“Health food brunch at Dickie and Mary’s,” she explained. “Looks like you’re still trying to start that breakfast cult,” she remarked, eying his eggs and bacon and juice and potatoes and tortillas and a bottle of tabasco sauce.
“I tell you, Delice, it’s scientifically proven that if you eat a good breakfast every morning, you burn more calories all day because it puts the system to work. I call it the Eat Bacon and Grow Thin Diet.”
“I know, Hawk. You’ve been flogging the bacon a long time.” She smiled sweetly. “So how the hell are you?”
“Can’t complain,” he said, trying to suppress a shiteating grin.
But Delice had her radar on. “Seen Sally?” she asked.
“You’d better pay the lady, Dee,” he stalled. “Or they’ll arrest you for shoplifting.”
“You’d better lose the grin, Hawk,” she countered, collecting her change, picking up her bag, and clearly logging the conversation for discussion as soon as she got to Dickie and Mary’s. “Or they’ll arrest you for something else.”
“Damn,” said Delice as she walked to her car. She and Mary had a bet going on the Sally–Hawk reunion. Delice had bet on a replay of the Cold War. Mary, however, had bet on something like the expression on his face now. Dickie’s wife, of course, understood that time made some things easier. “I’m
out twenty bucks,” Delice snarled, tossing the bag of donuts on the seat, climbing in, and putting the key in the ignition. And then she began to chuckle.
Hawk paid, got the stuff, walked out to the Mustang and got in. Delice was just pulling her Explorer out of the parking lot, and she gave him a wave and a shit-eating grin of her own. He bet that before the day was out, Sally’s phone would be ringing, and Delice would be trying to find some casual way of finding out whether history was repeating itself. As the Mustang’s engine thrummed alive, he could almost hear the gears of the Laramie rumor mill grinding into action.
Sally said that she still wanted to climb the Peak, especially once she had such a good breakfast in her. Hawk decided he wanted to go along. She was wearing hiking shorts, and he thought it would be fun to walk behind her and watch her legs work on the steep spots.
And he knew they needed time, in a pretty place, on the first day of their next thing. They had demonstrated adequately that they were still attracted to each other. They still had a hell of a lot of past to account for and considerable present to feel out. To be honest, they didn’t really know each other any more. Long ago, she’d been terrific, and put him through hell, and vindicated his notion that ultimately, you couldn’t trust anyone. He wished they could get by on sex and breakfast.
They packed up the banana bread, apples, cheese, and water . They kept touching each other and smiling. Sally let Hawk drive. He was grateful. Hawk was a skilled and careful driver, and she was a maniac who had terrorized him every time he’d been her unfortunate passenger. They stopped off at his house to get boots and clothes. She told him what a pretty house it was. For the first time, it struck him as odd that he had no furniture whatsoever.
They gassed up at the Diamond Shamrock, went inside to pay and buy candy and Coca-Cola, and ran into Dwayne Langham, who was picking up a box of Little Debbie cakes and a quart of milk to take to that brunch at Dickie’s. He might have gotten rich as a banker, but Dwayne still thought like a musician. That rumor mill was going to be cranking full steam by tomorrow.
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