by Jen Sacks
She lay without speaking, catching her breath for a while, and not looking at me. I said nothing, allowing her to relax into sleep. I lay and thought for some time. But after a couple of hours, I began on her again. This time, she grabbed onto me. Throughout, she tasted and touched me when I let her. This time, I approached her from many different angles. I will never forget her expression one time when she reached orgasm, her eyes reflecting back my own, I inside her—and the look on her face immediately afterward, as if coming back to her senses, almost startled to realize where she had just been, what had just happened. I did not leave her until very early in the morning. For a change, I wanted nothing more than to wake up next to the woman I had taken to bed. But that would have to wait.
I silently dressed and left her apartment as she slept, locking the door behind me. I used the lock pick a very different man had used to enter.
23
Grace
David had been my safety school. Because I had him, I wasn't pressured by sex to get involved with someone. That's the wrong reason. And I knew him, liked him, and trusted him. He was a buddy. And while for me the sex was tinged with naughtiness, without which so little is worth doing, over time that special little charge faded. If you're having sex without love, I theorize, then there's got to be something beyond quality to keep it exciting. Novelty of some sort, maybe. I don't know. I know that as I wanted it less and less, that was enough to keep him inspired. But for me, unless we started some serious S-M or something, the amount of excitement that I could generate for the act was dwindling.
But even when I was thrilled to be having sex with him, he almost never stayed the night. That was my doing really. The last time he did, I had an allergic reaction.
We had fooled around late into the evening after watching a couple of late-night sitcoms, which we loved to do together (sometimes just over the phone). And afterward, he fell asleep, with his hand resting heavily on my thigh. He fell asleep. I lay there. I started to feel strange. Antsy. I felt crowded. As if I were going to jump out of my skin. I felt like a prisoner. Why does he still have to be here? I thought miserably. Why won't he go? Leave me alone.
That's when I concluded that I am an opposite polarity. Like those magnets. When one comes close to me—physically, not emotionally—I have to jump back on a little tuft of air.
I slipped out of bed and curled up on my couch. I felt much better. But he must have awoken a little. He reached out for me, and I wasn't there. So he lifted his head and spotted me on the couch.
"What are you doing?" he called out quietly, puzzled.
"I couldn't sleep. What's the matter?"
"Are you really gonna sleep there?" he asked.
"I kind of want to. Why?"
"It's creepy." He sounded a little hurt. "You're going to stay over there?"
"Go to sleep, honey. You won't even notice."
"Don't 'honey' me," he yawned. I heard a little more muttering, but then he quieted down. And left me in peace. But by mutual agreement, he didn't stay over again. He pleaded to, sometimes. He believed that I should not have a problem sleeping with someone else in the bed. I didn't say it was him. I don't think that it was. As things have worked out in my life, it's relatively rare for the people that I sleep with to stay overnight. That sort of thing happens more often with serious couples, which I am not (half of one). I don't always have this reaction. On some occasions, one simply passes out, and it doesn't matter who's there. But it's happened more than a few times.
I'm a lot like a man, I think. I like to fall right asleep after I've gotten mine. I like to read at the table. I don't like to feel trapped.
David thinks I just don't drink enough.
The loveliest thing Sam did for me that night when he did so many lovely things was not to be there in the morning.
24
Sam
"Who the hell am I?" she asked.
"What a question," I laughed.
"I'm a different person when I'm with you."
"I do not think so," I said.
"Very funny. And how would you know?"
We were at a little corner diner near her home. I actually thought passingly of what an excellent location her neighborhood was for someone like me to live—nobody I knew would ever consider living there or even passing through, yet it was not such a dangerous area when you were in it. But as in most poorer neighborhoods, the grocery stores left a lot to be desired.
It was the night of the following day, so to speak. While I did not want to burden her with a confusing, alien presence that morning, I had stopped by her place that evening to check on her status—that is, to look at her again, in person.
I found myself truly enjoying being with her, even when she was irritable, as she was then. Perhaps especially when she was irritable—much more of her personality came out. And she seemed to like to try to irritate me.
She was working on a chocolate ice cream soda. I was nursing a scotch. One of her hands was holding her glass; I reached across the table and took it in mine. She pulled it away.
"I thought that is what you wanted," I said softly.
"Jesus, I don't know what I want. What are you doing with me?"
"Just lucky, I suppose."
"I don't have that kind of luck. I mean, I don't have standard good luck."
"You have managed to get away clean with three murders," I said very quietly.
"Not entirely clean," she said, looking up at me from her favorite spot, the table.
"Now, why would you want to hurt my feelings?" I asked.
That is when she laughed. I thought how. lovely it was to sit there, teasing her and being laughed at. Very few people have ever done that to me. But when the right person does, you know. And she knew, as well; she just did not like it.
"Why do I act this way with you?"
"It seems to me you are just being yourself."
"Well, I'm sorry, but if I start to care about your feelings, I won't be. I never am."
"Then do not give a thought to my feelings. I seldom do," I said.
"This is too weird."
"Nonsense. This is simply what you would term chemistry," I assured her, ignoring a trail of dead bodies, her work and mine, that bound us together, in my humble opinion, more solidly than any random set of pheromones.
"Why aren't you more shaken up by this? You're clearly the stone-killer type, calm and collected and 'I work alone.'"
"Where do you get those expressions?"
"I watch a lot of movies."
I paused. "I am… shaken. But if there is one thing I have learned how to do, it is to improvise. And accept good luck when it comes my way."
She took a long breath. "I can't sleep with you again."
"Why is that?"
"I have to think. I have to figure this out."
"Ah, yes, thinking. You seem to set great store by that, as I recall. But you are better when you forgo it." I meant that, by the way; it was not just desperation.
"I once knew some people who would disagree with you on that," she said. Then she blurted out, "Am I free, or are you gonna blackmail me?"
"Do not be absurd. Is that what you think I have done?"
"I think you took advantage of a situation," she said, again not looking at me.
"That is what I do. But you are not looking beneath my surface here. If you knew me better, you would realize…" Realize what? My God. "You would realize that this situation has taken advantage of me."
"Well, maybe I should get to know you a little better," she said slowly, finally looking up.
"Well, why not?"
"I'm afraid."
"I will not hurt you."
She rolled her eyes and noisily slurped the remaining traces of her soda from the bottom of the glass with her straw. "Maybe I'm afraid for you."
"I am actually pretty tough, not at all like my deceptively delicate appearance."
"What?" She looked at me, puzzled.
"Oh, sorry, not me. I m
ust have meant you."
She pursed her lips a little in thought.
"I can take no for an answer, if that is what you want," I said seriously.
"I don't know," she whined.
"Well, shall we just find out, then?"
A minute or two of silent whining preceded her decision. "Okay… but no sex." Damn. And allow me to recapitulate. Damn.
"You are the boss," I smiled.
A little tentatively, she put her hand, frosty-cold from the soda, across the table. I took it. And we just sat there together for a while, not saying anything.
25
Grace
So we started to date. We went to see Cats, and I loved it. Really. Also The Phantom of the Opera. Then Sam insisted on going to the real opera, thinking I would rebel. But I didn't. It was fantastic. We saw Dido and Aeneas at Lincoln Center. I got to dress up, and he wore a tux—just for the hell of it.
As we left the building after the show, we decided to walk a bit in the night before getting in his car. It was crisp out, but I didn't care. There's magic in opera, there really is. It's so larger than life and spectacular, literally. He asked me what I was thinking, so I told him. It was a rhyme I knew from childhood, when I used to read Bullfinch's Mythology over and over. "I'm not sure if I remember it exactly," I warned, "but pretty close." Then I recited it:
"Unhappy Dido was thy fate,
In first and second married state.
Thy flight the first one caused by dying.
Thy death the second caused by flying."
We walked a little more.
"Amazing," Sam said. "I am unfamiliar with that one."
"See, you don't know everything."
"I never said I did."
"It's implied," I said.
"Why do you think that poem stayed with you for so long?" he asked.
"Do you mean does it have special meaning to me? I don't know," I tried to answer my own question. "Maybe it does, when you think about it."
"Now let us analyze. Would I be the one whose death results in your flight?"
"No," I said very quickly. "I was thinking of you as the second, possibly… If I grow too attached to you."
"Then who was the first?"
I didn't answer. I just walked on, and he seemed to forget after a few minutes. We found the car eventually, and he began the drive back downtown. I kept stealing glances at him as he watched the road. It was quiet; we didn't have the radio on because, really, after opera, what's the point?
He looked a very cool customer. His face had quite a few lines in it. I've always liked that. It's not cool to admit it, but I grew up on Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, men who hid their feelings behind squinting eyes and chiseled faces, and I've always loved that look. Sam's weren't age lines so much as character markings. His dark eyes were fairly deep-set, and his nose was, well, I think you'd call it aristocratic. He was straight and tall, a little on the thin side. I could visualize his bare chest as I sat there, the ropy muscles in his arms, his lean form on top of me. I stopped myself because it was a bad idea.
I watched him drive. He did it well and a tad on the impatient side. He drove a stick. Of course. He moved pretty damn decisively in traffic, and it was when he was executing some complicated maneuver that I would get a glimpse of the side of him I only saw openly that horrible night with Ben. A sort of naked, unapologetic ruthlessness. Sometimes I saw him look around that way in a crowd. Hyperaware, coldly, competently vigilant. Not nice.
He was very controlled in aspect, like me in a crisis, only all the time. There was a certain authority to his movements, and an economy. No wasted motion. And he didn't walk like an American. There is a difference. I'm sort of a connoisseur of walks. My first and only boyfriend was a European; he didn't carry himself like a carefree, leaden-footed American boy. He almost danced, touching down lightly with his feet, sort of smoothly gliding. Sam walked more certainly than that, but not heavily, not glumly, not casually. Dignified. Unconsciously conscious of himself. Not theatrical, not self-effacing. Just confident.
It seemed to match his European background. I got a sort of old-world impression from him; he carried European civilization with him in this land of barbarians. That sort of thing. Except sometimes when he spoke to me, it was with a bluntness I've always associated with us, not them.
He was very much a gentleman (except possibly in his line of work, of which I still knew little but suspected much). One of my colleagues at the magazine was a boy from the South; that's how I recognized it. He let other people go first. He held doors and chairs for me. When we arrived at my apartment that night, he turned off the motor and got out of his side of the car, then came around to mine to let me out. Normally, he wouldn't have gotten the chance, but I was still lost in thought.
He walked me through the outside doors—he let me unlock them, so I didn't see how he had broken in on earlier occasions— and then saw me to the door of my apartment. He wasn't making this easy. But he just took my hand and kissed it—appropriate, given how we were dressed—and said good night, looking at me seriously even though his mouth was smiling.
"Thank you for coming out with me tonight," he said. "Would you happen to be free on Friday?"
"Yes, I guess so," I muttered.
"Perhaps you would consider going dancing," she asked with a grin.
"I don't think so. Not a good idea." He had to be kidding.
"Someday I will insist upon it." He shrugged his shoulders. "For the time being, we can watch others. The ballet. Better?"
"Much."
"I should be hurt."
"No, you shouldn't be. You know why."
He grinned again and blew me a kiss as he walked away down the hall. My breathing began to slow down a bit. He's good, I thought. I may be kind of an idiot, but I knew he wanted to sleep with me again. I really wanted to, too.
So why wasn't I? Only fear can overpower electricity. It killed me to feel him so near me.
When he touched me, I got that electric sensation I remember having when I was sixteen with my first and only boyfriend. I remember lying on a sofa with my head in his lap. He was stroking my hair, and I felt every single strand that he touched. When we kissed, just kissed, I felt it all through my body. Sam was like that, something I thought I'd never feel again. My breath speeded up when he was near, sometimes when he just looked at me. I felt completely taken, out of control, that night when we had sex. Every time he'd touched me, I'd felt a charge flowing through. God, he literally made me quiver that night, and shake, and… I don't want this! I mean, I do and I don't. Nothing feels like this. Nothing feels as good as this, feeling revved up just by someone's raw nearness to me. His physicality overwhelmed me that night. His breathing, his arms, his hands—they all felt so much bigger than me.
Stop it. Be sensible, Grace, he's not perfect. He's far from perfect. In fact, there's something really, really wrong with him.
But there is with me, too. It's not like I can forget that. Would he be so interested in me if I hadn't killed three men? Well, actually, since I've yet to determine how he found out about me in the first place, I can't know the answer to that. See? That's so like me. The danger is that all I'll think about is what he thinks of me. But what do I think of him? Huh, how about that?
He's a mystery to me, as I must be to him. I'm more than a little afraid of the solution. I have a feeling this is going to be a very grown-up version of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Neither one of us bears close examination.
26
Sam
I was given the necessary information, per the usual arrangement: the target's name, age, occupation, residence, habits, acquaintances. Country: Argentina. Objective: elimination, while communicating a threat to the target's colleagues.
I could not allow my feelings for Grace to interfere with my work; to prove this, I had accepted the assignment. But, unfortunately, feelings are not quite so easy to control as I would have wished.
It was not
just that when I thought of Buenos Aires, I visualized the pleasures that I could share with her there, the food, the nightclubs, trips outside the city. I wanted to teach her to dance the tango; I was sure I could talk her into it.
That was natural. What was less natural was that I was more curious than usual about the target. Perhaps it was understandable. It was a woman, about the same age as Grace, a reporter, although she was operating in the journalistic jungle of political and financial dealings in Latin America. She would not be the first to die for that. Apparently she had successfully gotten the goods on a corrupt politician. Sometimes I wonder why they try. Why they never stop trying. Her death will clearly be a murder, and the obvious lessons will be drawn. Yet I could predict with near certainty that the particular politico behind it would someday be caught in his own web. But enough philosophy.
My employer would have hired one of his local boys but, to achieve maximum psychological impact, this hit was to take place within the well-secured confines of the woman's newspaper office. Nervous at the rising toll the Fourth Estate was paying in the region, the newspaper had invested in a high-tech security system, replete with alarms, voiceprint and smart-card identification, bulletproof glass, the works. I could not walk in and shoot her, not because of the security—I was sure I could outwit that, if need be—but because no identifiable individual was to be connected with the killing. Death was to come—solely to her—almost as if from God, not man: from outside this bastion into the very heart of the news-gathering machine, with no obvious middleman.