Spare Parts: A Ted Mitchell Detective Novel (Ted Mitchell Detective Novels Book 4)

by Jeffrey Kinghorn

  “In addition,” I said, “they could have killed you had they wanted to do that.”

  Adrienne thought about it and then asked, “Why would they not want to?”

  “Killing you would have been another message for me,” I said. “Scaring you makes the message yours.”

  She said, “I’m leaving.”

  “Figured something like that,” I said.

  Traffic was thick in the Fannin corridor along hospital row. My mind drifted back to Reznikov and the paradox that was his behavior, at once invisible and ruthless, yet filled with a need for at least one person to know and understand his story. Primordial dilemma: I was here! We’re all desperate to belong somewhere.

  Adrienne said, “I feel like I’m abandoning Allison again.”

  “In fact you are not,” I said.

  “No argument from my mind,” she said. “It’s what’s going on in my gut that won’t leave me alone.” I remained silent, as I’d had my own experience with that kind of turmoil. Words meant nothing in the face of such a wrenching. “Allison is gone,” she said. “I’ll do anything to protect Grace.”

  I said, “That include taking up again with a man who once thought you an insult to God and to life?”

  Her turn to be silent. We were headed north on Montrose, having left hospitals behind. It was now all about museums.

  “I want to ask you something,” said Adrienne.

  “All ears,” I said.

  “Once I end up wherever I end up with Grace,” she said, “and after I figure out a way to get word to you about where we are…” I had a feeling about what was coming. “Would you entertain the notion about coming and raising her with me?”

  I said, “How do you mean raising her with me?”

  “As partners,” she said.

  “Partners in what?” I said.

  “Partners in parenthood,” Adrienne said.

  Though it was what I’d anticipated, I was floored and heard myself say, “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because of the way you look at Grace whenever she’s in your arms,” said Adrienne. I pulled off of Montrose into a coffee shop parking lot. We sat there as would a long-married couple, separated by a treacherous no man’s land neither of us wanted to breach in order to get to the other. After another moment, I cut the engine. “You love her,” said Adrienne. “I don’t think even you know how much.” She had touched a place in me so deep that I was immediately filled with terror and panic. She had to see the tremor roll through me, feel it, even, though our seats were separated by a console. “You would have complete freedom,” she said. “I would ask nothing from you except for the part of you that loves her the way you do.” I saw Grace in my mind’s eye, looking over Reed Thomas’s shoulder as they moved through airport security and out of my sight for a last time. I had done a lousy job in the moment of convincing myself to feel nothing. The recalling of that moment betrayed me now. “If you wanted more,” said Adrienne, “I would not object. I would do whatever. Your call. Your rules. Anything.”

  “So,” I said, “what you’re suggesting is that I give up my life, my work here, go to wherever you end up, live together with you under the same roof, satisfy our needs with discretion on the side, and present as a family for Grace?”

  “Like I said,” Adrienne offered, “if you wanted something more that would be okay too.”

  I said, “Something more?”

  “Between us,” she said. “Sex. A relationship.”

  “A relationship,” I said. “We have a relationship.”

  She said, “I’m talking about love.”

  “Love?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I said, “Are you saying that you are in love with me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. I whistled. It faded low and slow. “I’ve thought about it,” she said. “Haven’t you, ever?” I had to look and see if I had. “Obviously not,” she said. She gave that to the window on her side of the car. I was still looking. “Just an idea,” she said.

  “We’ve never even kissed,” I said, “or touched each other with that behind it.”

  “I’ve wanted to,” she said.

  This was coming down too hard, too fast. I pulled breath through my teeth. “Sure kept it to yourself,” I said.

  “I never thought you wanted it,” she said.

  “The miracle of our friendship,” I said, “has been the freedom from that, what, complication? Contamination?”

  She repeated, “Contamination?”

  I said, “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I’ve felt liberated by that too.”

  I had to get out of the car. I stepped to the rear of it, leaned on the trunk and stared across Montrose Boulevard to a vine-covered building on the campus of the University of Saint Thomas. We regrouped separately for some time, after which Adrienne got out of the car and joined me in my vacant gazing across four lanes of Montrose traffic. She leaned against the trunk, put her arm through mine, and allowed her chin to rest on my shoulder. I felt her breath on my neck. Part of me wanted to melt. Another part wanted to run. We remained like that for some time, neither of us willing to initiate a next move.

  Where up until that moment I had been clear that we were headed for an end-run to our friendship, I now no longer knew my own mind. Did I want this? Had I wanted it all along while not allowing myself the conscious desire for it? The most surprising thing of all was why had I not immediately rejected the idea? “Are we going to trust this?” I said.

  “I have no way of answering that,” she said.

  “We have never touched or kissed in any other way than in friendship,” I said.

  Adrienne used her left hand against my right cheek and tried to direct my head toward her. I was not willing to be so manipulated, and resisted her physical encouragement. She withdrew her hand from the side of my face and her chin from my shoulder. We sat quietly some more.

  Across the street students of every stripe moved about the part of their campus we could see with their attention buried in cellphones. Many were typing treatises with their thumbs as they walked. Amazing how they were able to steer clear of colliding with one another without ever looking up.

  Adrienne had to feel rejected upon my unwillingness to turn into what I presumed was going to be her test-drive kiss. I did want to taste and feel of her lips. I wanted to kiss her. I did not want to be kissed by her in desperation of her wanting to convince me of something in service to anything other than the kiss itself. She still had her arm through mine. There was a new electrical charge to it. I stood up and turned to face her.

  She remained leaning against the trunk of the car. In her eyes, a tentativeness, curiosity, yielding, hope, confusion, fear, mystery, willingness. How macabre, I thought, dog meat and the surgically-abused. Quite a pair. I studied her lips. They were smooth, defined, slightly parted, moist. I caressed her face with my right hand and slid it around to the back of her neck and slowly brought her to me as I bent to meet her. We hesitated before connecting, eyes open, each searching through to behind the gaze of the other.

  I closed my eyes and allowed my lips to find hers. They were soft and warm. Her breath neither sweet nor sour; it too was warm. We held there in a press that was noticeable but was non-committal. I released her and looked down into her eyes. Everything there before remained with the addition of something else now. Desire. I let my eyes migrate down to those lips of hers and felt a stirring and a desire of my own.

  We found each other again, more urgently, mouths slightly parted, creating the cleavage of wanting more. Our tongues became part of the kiss. Adrienne stood up away from the car. I drew her to me and pressed myself against her and embraced her with both arms, turning her slightly so that she yielded into the support of them. My left hand felt at home on the firm muscles of her lower back. I felt spine and ribs; her breasts against my chest; my press against her pelvis that, at the first, was always a thrilling sensation. It was
a good kiss. Unrushed. The kind that could lead to other things. Neither of us broke out of it first. It was more that we had spent it of its first wave of fuel, had crested the moment of fullness and had parted on the promise of something bigger than it was.

  I became aware of the surgical dressing on her abdomen. “I’m sorry,” I said, “your incision.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I don’t know where to touch you. All these wounds.”

  “I don’t feel a thing,” I said. “Discomfort, I mean. That was very nice.”

  “For me too,” she said.

  I took a step back and raised both arms, palms up, in a gesture of query that begged what’s going on here? Adrienne sat back against the trunk of the Chrysler, both hands resting against it at her sides. It seemed pretty clear that we had both benefited from our slow tentative approach, the fullness of our kiss, and the excitement of pressing our bodies together from top to bottom. She had to have felt the dramatic alteration in my groin against her abdomen.

  I turned away from her to give myself a moment to come down from that place of spiked physical urgency. When I completed the revolve back toward her, she was looking off to the side and down, as if the freshly sealed asphalt of the parking lot might offer something tangible where what we had just experienced would not. “It was better than nice,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “What kind of trouble are we getting into?”

  “The hungry kind,” she said.

  I said, “You want more?”

  “I’m soaking wet,” she said.

  I looked down at my own insistence, as did she, and then our eyes raised to meet each other’s again. “This is not us,” I said.

  “The last man I kissed,” she said, “was Reed Thomas. It was never like that.” More than in service to my ego, I made myself try to see the moment through her eyes. She said, “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She said, “Me neither.”

  Again we were becalmed and avoided looking at each other. “We use our heads,” I said. “We’re not a couple of kids like them over there.” I had indicated the UST students across the street, oblivious, or seemingly so.

  “That was as good as it ever was with a woman,” she said.

  I shook off the skewed logic of her comment and acknowledged it as a compliment without saying anything. It was not, after all, that she implied I kissed like a woman. I tried to find some guidance or surety in the study of her from head to toe as she remained against the back of the car. She was the same Adrienne I had known these many years, had helped, who had helped me, who had challenged me regarding myself in ways that no other individual ever had. Fear descended that revealed itself as a retreat into old behavior; it screamed: She knows too much about you. Do not let her in. Close the door. Now! “There’s no time for this,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I tried to force myself to think.

  “I’m going to say no to it,” I said. “It cannot happen.” Her head moved slowly up and down, an endless nod of agreement. It washed through her, taking time to sink in. Or not. “Let’s get you home,” I said. She did not move. I was forced to wait. “Adrienne,” I said. She looked up at me. “I said, no.” More with the head from her. Dull resignation. No place to go. Nothing to do. I added, “It’s just not possible.”

  “Right,” she said, “that’s that then.”

  We were so close to being finished with each other. This, from left field. No, I concluded again. No. “I’m taking you home,” I said, as I went around to the passenger side and held the door for her. I had never done that before. To have done so would have seemed impertinent. Why was I doing it now? She rolled off the back of the car and forced a smile onto her face as she approached and slid into the seat. As I walked back around the car to the driver’s side the sensation that had me in its grip was what I thought others might have meant whenever they engaged the term heartache.

  We came at the same instant, she for a fourth time, I for the first; it had been an aggressive and vigorous ride, despite the ghoulish appearance of the dressing on her abdomen and my scabby dog-bite lacerations. We eventually ended up in her bed after not even scant restraint during round one on her living room carpet.

  Adrienne straddled me and hunched forward as if the power of her orgasm had throttled her to the extent that what I heard was a death rattle. She used her hands flat against my chest to direct me, with urgency, to cease all movement. I understood and became a granite statue on which she remained skewered as we waited for the tectonic plate-shifting to subside. The flesh inside her slowly released from around me. I made sure to keep my hands clear of the incision at her side.

  What kind of hunger-driven beasts were we that we could not refrain from answering a call to baser instinct on her release from the hospital, having been treated for unintended and gruesome surgery, and having just delivered her to her home for further recuperation? No romance. No passion. Long accumulated hunger, to be sated in all events, bordering on the darkest, most unseemly regions of our carnal appetites, very near to that which might well be characterized as craven. Nasty. Thrilling.

  Upon gaining entry into her house, we went at each other, each of us responding to our own inner promptings that erupted simultaneously. We had tried it with me on top but it was immediately clear that that was not going to work because of the incision on the front of her hip that was still trying to stay closed. The irresistible idiocy that had overtaken us the moment the door had closed was on the order of blood thirst, having dipped our toes in that primordial pool in the coffee shop parking lot on Montrose. Some portals in life should never be opened. Adrienne was a long time in coming down off the intensity of her response. “No, no, don’t move,” she said. “Not yet.”

  Again I became obedient, which required considerable control, as my hips wanted to continue bucking so to fully exhaust a reptilian need to thrust upward into her with all my strength. We were covered in sweat and were both breathing hard. “I have never come like that,” she said. “Ever.” Instant ego gratification was tempered by the recalling of our grappling to the floor, when she had had at me as ferociously as I had had at her, both of us after our own ends without a lot of consideration for the needs or the discomforts of the other. How she came was her own affair. For myself, I was still coming inside of her. Had we kissed at all during our grappling? The word devour seemed more apt.

  When she was able to move again, even a little, I used my hands through her arms, clamped down on the top of her shoulders, to pull her more fully onto me so that I might have the sensation inside of going deeper without having to move against her. “Did you come?” she said.

  “It won’t end,” I said. At which point she pressed down onto me in concert with our desire to be more connected, more a part of each other. One thing…the moment…the beast. And then we kissed. It was as gentle, as considerate, as electrifying as the feeding frenzy of which we had availed ourselves moments before. “You okay?” I said.

  She knew I meant her wound. “Better than the stuff they gave me at the hospital,” she said. “I’ve got to figure out how to carry you around like this.”

  “Any more,” I said, “and I’d be dead.”

  “In that case,” she said, “prepare to die, fella. You’ve got two minutes.”

  Still breathless, I said, “No way.”

  She gave me a growled guttural editorial, “Guess I showed you.”

  “Guess you did,” I said.

  She whispered, “What a pussy.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You heard me,” she said. “And here I am just out of a hospital bed.”

  “You’re the man,” I said.

  “Remember that,” she said.

  “I think it’s finally stopped,” I said.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said, as she lay down on top of me and fitted her head into the crook of my neck. Fatigue overtook us and we remained as one until lo
ng after our hearts stopped pounding against each other and our breathing became more relaxed. We might even have dozed a bit. Nothing eased of the rigid ferocity in the part of me that was still inside of her. More swollen and inflamed than excited. I throbbed. “Doesn’t feel like you want it to stop,” she said.

  “Feels like it’s part of my spine,” I said.

  “Mine too”, she said, “at the moment. I’m kind of rusty on the physics of this hetero stuff.”

  “Could have fooled me,” I said.

  “Guess it’s like riding a bike,” she said.

  “What the hell did we just do?” I said.

  “Fulfillment of one of my fantasies,” she said.

  “Came out of nowhere,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “I think it’s always been there.”

  “For the life of me,” I said, “I don’t see where I’ve been harboring this. A complete broadside.”

  “It’s not been like that for me,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “you sure did a good job of keeping it out of sight.”

  “Ask anyone who is gay,” she said. “Keeping sexual energy undetectable is what we have all learned how to do expertly.”

  “Speaking of fantasies,” I said.

  She said, “Go on.”

  “This mean,” I said, “I’m finally going to be able to be with two women who, in addition to being hot for me, are going to entertain me with some steamy lesbo action?”

  “You bet,” she said. “Right after I get to be with you and the man of your choice with whom you will entertain me with a little homo action.”

  “Well,” I said, “looks like neither of us is going to get that fantasy fulfilled.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  I said, “Don’t you think for that to be hot, a person would first have to want it?”

  She said, “Didn’t I just say I wanted it?”

  I made a fist and lightly pressed a knuckle sandwich against her jaw. “Thing about fantasies,” I said, “they’re often better left as fantasies.”

  “Up until a few minutes ago,” she said, “I might have agreed with you.”