Being the Steel Drummer - a Maggie Gale Mystery

by Liz Bradbury

  She made that purring noise that punctuates her most provocative sentences. “Mmmm, I wanted to see you up close, to find out what you were like. I hoped you’d remember me.”

  She was circling me, fading in and out of my line of vision like a panther in the night, slipping from shadow to shadow.

  “But what did you hope would happen? Did you hope you could talk me up into your parlor? Spider v. Fly fashion? Thirty-two, thirty-one.”

  “No, no,” she sputtered in surprise.

  “Not a convincing protest, querida. I bet you had a whole series of possible plans. Didn’t you?” I laughed. “Really, what did you want to happen that night?” Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one.

  “Walking and talking with you in the park so late that night was better than I could have imagined.

  “I’d like to know more about your erotic imagination, Kathryn. Will you tell me some time? Tell me now... eighteen...”

  Kathryn walked over to the weight machine, looking at the accessories hanging on pegs on the wall. She said, “What if I started a weight lifting program? May I use your equipment?”

  “Sure,” I said, “anytime.”

  “What are these for?”

  I looked up to see her fingering some bars and velcro cuffs.

  I said, “You clip the bar on to that lower chain and pull on it with both hands while you’re sitting, like rowing a boat. The cuffs go around your ankles to increase resistance, for leg lifts and kicks.”

  Kathryn came closer and stood at the edge of the mat. She was quiet for a time. She whispered, “So you didn’t stalk me?”

  “Of course I did. I went right home and ran your name through every system I have. I know your entire history. I know you got a speeding ticket when you were in your twenties. I even know your credit score.”

  She laughed deep in her throat. “I’m not sure if I should be flattered.”

  “You better get used to it. I snoop for a living. It’s in my genes.” She took a step closer, watching me count down the last ten push-ups. “Would you still be able to do that if I sat on your shoulders?”

  I laughed. “Probably not. Might have at the beginning.” She’d totally avoided the subject of her sexual fantasies. Talking about sex seemed to make her shy, though she certainly wasn’t shy about doing it.

  “Shall we try it and see what happens?” she suggested curiously.

  “OK, but....”

  She stepped over me, and when I dipped down to the mat she dropped to her knees before I could begin to push up again. Soft blue denim rested heavily just below my shoulders. Her added weight held me down.

  I grunted and strained, “Arrgh. Nope, can’t do it.” I tried once more, straining to push both my body and hers off the floor and then gave up.

  “So, then I have you? You’re pinned down?” she teased, gripping the backs of my upper arms to hold me firmly.

  She was straddling me, her knees and shins flat on the mat. “Have I finally captured you?” She made that low humming sound again. She trailed her fingers up over my shoulders and traced down the straps of my sports bra to the clasp at the back and undid it, spreading it open slowly. She lightly tickled the back of my neck with the tips of her fingers, then shifted again to find more responsive places to tease.

  “Other than lust, do you have some symbolic reason for doing this?”

  “Are you helpless now?” she asked with just a hint of growl.

  “No, I’m not.” I twisted a little, drawing my arm up, reaching over my shoulder to grab her wrist in one quick movement. Then I pulled her arm under me as I held her leg against my body with my other arm, keeping her off balance. I pushed her on her back. It happened so fast she didn’t have time to do more than squirm. My body was now pinning hers to the mat. The sweat from my chest made a damp place on her shirt. She shrieked at the speed of it and then laughed.

  “How do you always do this to me?” she said in exasperation. “One minute I have you pinned down and the next... I don’t even know what happened!”

  “See what I mean about the element of surprise? You can’t beat me at this game, Kathryn, and I’m not always doing this to you. I’m just teaching you a lesson. Controlling me isn’t that simple.” She was wriggling, trying to get some kind of footing.

  “At least I have your attention now. Oh, mmm.” My mouth pressed against hers and she began to put her arms around me but stopped. “You are all sweaty!” she complained.

  “Quien con bebés se acuesta, cagado amanece levantarse,” I said.

  “And that means?”

  “If you play in the barnyard, querida, you’re going to get dirty,” I said, sitting back on my heels.

  “It means that literally?”

  “It’s something my stepmother Juana says, and it more literally means one who lies down with babies, rises covered with shit. But I always thought that verged on pervy, so I prefer the barnyard analogy.”

  “Because there is nothing pervy about barnyards?” she laughed. “I’m sorry about the way I acted. I had a long talk with myself and I’m over it now. Really, I don’t suspect you.”

  “Would you like to have some more attention right here on the floor or shall we go downstairs and pay attention in the nice soft bed?” I leaned down and kissed her again, holding her head in place with both my hands. I traced the contour of her mouth with my tongue.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” she whispered after the long kiss. Then she said pointedly, “And you can take a shower.”

  *******

  On the way I’d suggested to Kathryn that we could both take a shower, but she said she’d taken one right after I’d gone upstairs.

  “I needed to think about things and I seem to think very well in the shower... I love that shower,” she had said.

  It really was a wonderful shower. A large tiled space with multiple jets and a hand-held shower head with enough water pressure to make any woman happy. But I was banking that Kathryn would take the edge off my ardor herself, so I passed on dialing to pulse and hurried to dry off and get back to her.

  A crackling fire burning in the bedroom fireplace made everything warm and inviting. Kathryn was already under the covers. Clearly desire had trumped lack of sleep. Her bare shoulders told me that ardor release was on her to-do list as well. The near misses we’d had earlier that day sparked a tension that rushed back to me with a roar. She added to my rising lust with a carnal smile that stoked me like a coal furnace. She put her arms over her head and stretched like an agile cat in the sunlight, straining her muscles in an all consuming way.

  “That was a sex stretch!”

  “What’s that?” she said provocatively, flipping the covers open.

  I slipped out of my robe and slid in beside her. She rolled on top of me. Her lovely body pressed against mine.

  “One of those fully involved stretches fueled by sexual desire.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “Maggie, I do want to explain why I’m wary, but don’t you think it’s a little early in our relationship to bare all our past angst?”

  She was running her fingers lightly over my throat, caressing my shoulders, working her way toward my breasts with both hands. I grasped her wrists and held her hands away, making her sit back.

  “It’s important to talk about things if they’re getting in the way.”

  She sighed. “What if I flirted with a woman right in front of you, to hurt you? How would that make you feel?” She waited for my answer.

  “If you flirted with someone to hurt me? To hurt me on purpose? That’s not what happened.”

  “I know that’s not what you did. But what if... I did it?”

  “If someone who claims to care about you does something to hurt you on purpose, yes, you have a right to be angry. Would you do that? Hurt me that way?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Has someone done that to you?”

  She sighed and rolled to her side. “Do you really want to hear this?”
>
  I nodded.

  Kathryn paused for several moments.

  Finally she took my hand and looked into my eyes. “I told you before that my last relationship was with a woman who’d been one of my professors in grad school. I became involved with her after I finished my doctorate and was teaching. It’s been a while since we broke up.” She paused, counting the years in her head, but didn’t say how many.

  “I was such a classic case,” she laughed. “I was so impressed by her. Maybe you’ve read her work? Her first name is pronounced Ashling, but it’s spelled A-i-s-l-i-n-g. Aisling Philips-Von Trapp. Ash has written several books and a number of really fascinating papers.”

  Kathryn’s voice held a tiny but unmistakable note of admiration that I was surprised to find made me jealous. I tried not to show it. A green-eyed monster is especially unattractive in someone who actually has green

  eyes.

  I’d heard of Aisling Philipps-Von Trapp. I’d read some of her articles in grad school. I’d found her research excellent but her theories pretentious. Some of the students in my study group who had worked under her at Radcliffe as undergrads found her insufferable as a person. One of my friends referred to her as Ass-sling Filled Up With Crap. This probably wasn’t the best moment to tell Kathryn that though.

  Kathryn went on, “We lived together in Ash’s house during summers and vacations. We took some wonderful trips. We wrote and talked on the phone. During that time I was teaching at Central Western University, on the Colorado campus, and she was in Cambridge.”

  “When were you at Radcliffe?”

  “I researched part of my dissertation there and we met when I helped to teach a course... Her course, in fact. I did all the preliminary research for it. But we didn’t start our relationship until after I’d finished there.”

  I knew Kathryn’s academic credentials were stellar. Smith for her BA, Yale for her doctorate. Heck, she’d even done some time in Oxford, but I hadn’t known she’d rolled around the halls of Harvard as well. Another reason she was able to make it to full professor at such a tender age.

  “I guess I told you before that what ended our relationship was her lack of concern about my fidelity. I was meeting quite a few other young women who were, well... willing.”

  “I bet,” I snorted.

  Kathryn said with mock indignation, “I didn’t stray.”

  “But?”

  “But she did. It wasn’t so much that I found out. I figured it out.” Kathryn rolled onto her back. I could see by the firelight that she was staring at the ceiling. She sighed. “I’ll try to keep this from becoming a histrionic narrative.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Go ahead and tell me.”

  “All right. Well, here it is.”

  One day we went out to lunch. It was during a winter break and I’d gone to Boston. We sat together and I felt happy being with her, though I’d felt uneasy most of the time we were apart.

  Ash glanced around the restaurant, then she said casually, “Have you been seeing anyone?”

  I got that strange feeling, the way your stomach feels when an elevator goes down. I said, “Ash...”

  But before I could say anything else she said, “Because you know, my dear, it would be all right. I know how hard it is to resist beautiful young women, and you’re still very attractive. I’m sure you have all sorts of invitations.”

  So I said to her, “But I wouldn’t be unfaithful to you!”

  And she replied candidly, “Well, Kathryn, we don’t really have that kind of a commitment. You’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

  The world suddenly turned on its side and the room twisted. I couldn’t speak. I just sat there seeing five years spin by and all the times we’d been together, as though I was looking though the wrong end of a telescope. I nearly fainted.

  Aisling seemed very surprised I was taking her simple little comment so theatrically. Meanwhile I was having one of those ‘ah ha’ moments of clarity that comes to you quite easily once all the fog blows away. Suddenly I realized why our relationship had always seemed so tilted.

  I said to her, “You’ve been seeing another woman all along, haven’t you?”

  Aisling said to me, “This isn’t something I felt the two of us needed to discuss. I was apprehensive that it would make you uneasy.”

  I remember jumping up and sputtering out something like, “Apprehensive? Uneasy?”

  And then I had another sudden insight. I said, “It wasn’t just one, was it. How many?... No, don’t tell me.”

  She just sat there innocently. I walked out of the restaurant, back as fast as I could to her place, grabbed my suitcase, flung it into my car and drove all the way back to Denver without stopping.

  Kathryn looked back at me. She said, “I only cried for about 300 miles and then I began to go over every moment of the previous five years. That took me about 700 miles. I couldn’t help noticing she’d said, You’re still attractive. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I was nearing thirty then and obviously that was too old for her. She was at least twenty years older than I, by the way. I realized everything had been wrong about that relationship, no real commitment, no communication, no honesty, and...” She paused in mid rant.

  “And what?” I asked gently.

  Kathryn smiled. “And, no passion.”

  “In the bedroom?” I asked with my eyebrows raised.

  “Yes, and in general too. Well, that little forty-eight hour drive of mine gave me a long time to think. I made some decisions about my future.”

  “You decided to swear off women?”

  “No, I decided to swear off bad relationships. I’m gun shy and a bit reactionary. You know, what you said about hurting someone intentionally? Aisling surely had done this to other women, once they too had aged-out of her interest zone. She dumped me by making me leave her. So calculating. So hurtful. And it’s left me with a suspicion I find hard to ignore sometimes.”

  “Were you angry at her for a long time?”

  “I felt relief more than anything. I remember sleeping for hours and finally waking up and feeling lighter than I had in years. I was most angry with myself for asking so little of a relationship. She never said explicitly that we were exclusive.” Kathryn paused.

  I took the hint. “Kathryn, it’s my understanding that we are in an exclusive relationship. And only until we may mutually express otherwise. That means that neither of us will be sleeping with, kissing, holding hands with, or, as the Andrews Sisters so eloquently sang, sitting under the apple tree with anyone else but each other. OK?”

  She smiled that lovely half-smile and looked deeply into my eyes. “OK,” she said.

  We kissed. I could feel Kathryn’s mouth curve into a smile. It was a deal-sealing kiss. She gently touched my face when we drew apart. And then we hugged and held each other again for several minutes in an unspoken conversation that said a thousand words.

  “Do you ever think about Aisling?” I said when we finally parted.

  “Every now and then I wonder just how many young women have shared Ash’s bed, and I feel a little sorry for them,” she said.

  “Because she cheated on them, too?”

  “No.” Kathryn laughed. “Because I know what a dull time they were having!”

  “So that’s my cue. No pressure, huh?”

  “I like a certain amount of pressure!” said Kathryn, rolling back on top of me. We kissed hotly and then she sat back.

  I caressed her thighs, then urged her up the bed until I could reach her with my mouth. She stretched out and steadied herself by grasping the top edge of the headboard. I looked up at her as I found her with my tongue, then slipped my hands under and behind her to hold her tightly to me as I explored and then found my mark. She let go of the headboard, arching her back. It all happened very fast. She let the pleasure wash over her like a swollen creek swirling over rough stones. She moaned deeply in satisfaction.

  Then she moved to kiss her way down my body. Soon, sh
e was at the foot of the bed working me into the frenzy I’d been holding back since right after the brunch. She reached up to tease my breasts at the same time. She brought me to climax swiftly, realizing just what I needed.

  As the moments of perfect pleasure flooded through my body, they chased a fleeting thought that this was a very intimate way to communicate. Kathryn seemed to agree, because after allowing me a few minutes to recharge she found me with her tongue again and brought me to another lovely climax. Slower this time, with more attention to detail. She had a way of watching as she did it that made me want to keep my eyes open.

  When I was sated, I moved to satisfy her again. She responded to slow rousing strokes until she came with a long shuddering moan that surprised me with its primitive tones.

  “Lordy,” she groaned into my shoulder, “how can you manage to do this to me when we’re both so tired? Neither of us had had more than four hours sleep.”

  “You have a point. Next time we should just let the trained seals do all the work.” I yawned.

  She laughed and put her arms around me.

  As we fell asleep, I parsed our earlier discussions. Control, trust, fidelity, commitment. How do we prove ourselves? Where do we find the steel drum to drown out our insecurities and doubts.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning I awoke before Kathryn and slipped out of bed to shower and dress before she’d even stirred. When I came back into the bedroom she turned and smiled at me, then reached her arms over her head in a feline way and groaned.

  “I see what you mean about stretching,” she murmured as she opened her arms to me and I went to kiss her good morning. “You did wonderful things to me last night.”

  “I’m flattered you think it was all me, but it takes two for a tango like that, querida.”

  She stretched and then swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “If I can make an appointment around lunch time, would you be able to go to the museum with me? I’d like to take my alleged Victoria Willomere Snow sculptures over there to get that woman’s opinion. What was her name?”