She Wakes (5 page)

    “Come here,” she whispered. “What is it?”

    “Honestly, nothing.” He smiled again. “Crazy with the heat.”

    She looked at him. Her proximity was dizzying. The pale blue eyes were wide. Then he guessed she decided to believe him. The eyes seemed to flicker and he sensed there was laughter in them. Was she laughing at him?

    No. Her gaze was steady now. The pressure of her arm on his shoulder gentle but firm.

    It was very strange. It was probably remembering Margot. But for just a second or so he’d felt…

    …trapped.

    She pulled him closer.

    “Good. I’m glad you’re all right.”

    She glanced from his eyes to his mouth and back again.

    “Tell me,” she whispered, “so I’ll know.”

    “Tell you what?”

    “Just tell me.”

    He laughed and glanced at Danny and Michelle. They were whispering too, oblivious. “Okay, sure. Only what?”

    She moved closer. The pressure across his shoulder grew greater. He could feel her breast warm and soft against his arm.

    ‘Tell me everything you’d like to do to me, Dodgson.”

    And now he did feel dizzy. The light musky smell of her still-damp hair, the delicate spice of perfume.

    “Tell me everything. And then we’ll do it. I promise.”

    
I promise,
he thought.
Margot.

    
I didn’t do it. It’s not my fault.

    
Get off me.

    
I promise.
It rang a very nasty bell deep within him for a moment and then he thought, impossible, forget that.

    
You heard what she said. Everything.

    He told her.

    

    

    She had taken one look at him on the beach and thought, oh, you are just fine. a

    She pulled a cigarette from her pack and walked to where he sat with the other two, the man and the girl, and stood over him naked so he had to look up at everything she had and she asked him for a light. And he was impressed all right, she could see that, but all the same he moved with a control that she liked-he was no child, no boy, and it didn’t matter that it was the oldest trick in the book because he lit her cigarette and smiled politely and she didn’t try to take it any further than that, though she knew he was watching as she walked away. And she wondered if he’d find some pretext to come and join her but she did not look back at him again, it was up to him now and when he did come over it was without any pretext at all. He simply said May I join you? and she said of course and that was that.

    If he’d asked her she’d have fucked him right there on the beach.

    But he didn’t.

    He wasn’t shy. It wasn’t that. He was not a man who was shy with women. She looked at his face and read pain and a reluctance to face more of it or even to bother-a kind of weariness there and knew that even though he was interested he was basically just going through the motions with her so that she would have to sink the hook fast and deep, and she did not wonder how or why he had come to be in pain but only how she could escape its consequences in him and have him now, because he was a beautiful thing and halfway hers already-and he did not even know what pain was. Not really.

    

    

    The taverna overlooking the bay was operating on Greek time so the food was late. The first bottle of wine was gone by the time they ordered. The second disappeared with dinner and half the third as well. When that was gone they ordered a fourth out of sheer bravado and nursed the stuff.

    The night was young.

    From Danny’s and Michelle’s comer there was laughter and maneuverings under the table. From theirs a quiet heat. The wine augmented both. It was a rule of thumb in Greece that the wine did not depress. It elevated. Why that should be so nobody knew. Dodgson had heard it attributed to the heat, the food, the light, even to bouzouki music. His own theory was that if any place was depression-proof it was Greece. Even his own had relented-somewhat.

    When finally ten o’clock rolled around the town’s sole surviving disco was open so they walked there and ordered cognac. Dodgson and Lelia watched and talked while the others danced. He thought Danny was a lousy dancer. When the cognacs were gone she squeezed his hand and they quietly slipped away.

    They walked to the beach.

    The night was warm, the moon waning but very nearly full. They were both a little drunk. It was impossible to fall in step together.

    The beach at Matala was shaped like a horseshoe and on the left prong of the shoe was town, on the right the limestone caves high up in the cliffs that had been crypts in ancient times and then during the sixties makeshift homes for globe-trotting hippies. Behind them lay the campground. They could still hear music from town so they walked away toward the cliffs. They took off their shoes and followed the tideline.

    When they were far enough away from the noise and town he turned and kissed her.

    Her mouth was wonderful.

    There was art there and fire in something like equal measure and even as he felt himself rising he knew that they had this in common- that neither would wholly let go just yet. That was why the art was there. It banked the fires with illusion. It teased, promised much, intimated what full abandon would be like between them. He opened his eyes and saw that hers were open too, staring not at him but at the caves, shadowed holes in the blonde moonlit rock.

    Their bodies ground together. He tasted cognac. He didn't mind.

    She stepped away. The heavy lips smiled.

    “Do you swim?”

    She walked a few steps up the beach and dropped her shoes in the sand. She turned to face him, moonlight drowning the pale irises so that for a moment her eyes held no color at all. Pinpricks of ice pointed at him.

    “Sure I do.”

    Linen hissed once longingly against flesh. Under the dress she was naked. He’d known she would be. She dropped it on the sand. Then she waited for him.

    He undressed. He went to her and they walked side by side into the water, not touching, and he felt the cold glide of waves across his thighs, the air warm, the water cold, her pale nipples tight and darker now, small gnomic pyramids crowning the gently swaying flesh. His head felt clearer. By the time the water reached his waist he was ready for her, the heat of his erection strangely alien in the drifting chill.

    She turned and wrapped her strong thin arms around his waist. They moved sideways together until the water was chest-high. She slid her hands down to his buttocks, caressing him and pressing him forward, capturing him suddenly between her legs and then moving gently back and forth.

    She laughed, thin music on the still night air. She released him, grasped his shoulders and lifted herself smoothly onto him. She was warm inside and soft. He gasped at her sudden heat. Her eyes flashed at the sound and she stopped it with her mouth, tongue driving deep, lips crushing his until he thought he would taste her blood.

    Inside her something tightened as she drew back over him and then slid forward again, sinking him deep, then lifted away and pumped at him, opening wide this time, pumping hard, and he met her strokes while a bright delicious fog fell over him so that all art was gone in the drugged heat of bodies and cold water and swirling white waves around them, the slide growing smoother and smoother, the woman suspended in his arms raking his shoulders with blunt hard nails-until finally her head snapped back and he felt the sudden flush of her skin and the slide go wide and soft and she grunted once, twice, mouth frozen for a moment in a wide unspoken scream that drew the lips back over her teeth and rolled the eyes while convulsions siezed her. Drawing out of her completely he plunged back in again and flooded her with sperm and seawater and then he shuddered too.

    He rested. His erection would not subside.

    She pressed her cheek to his shoulder and held him tight. He closed his eyes.

    For a moment they were almost tender.

    When they drew away they were trembling, gooseflesh covering their bodies. He saw faint blue veins in her temple and in her breasts. They walked slowly from the water. He handed her his shirt and watched her use it to pat herself dry.

    She put on the linen dress. He put on his pants and shirt. They sat in the sand and soon they were lying there staring at the moon and stars. Her head rested lightly on his shoulder. The sand was fine and soft beneath him.

    He felt the liquor again. A good sensation. An exhausted drifting. He fell asleep.

    

    

    And the last thing he remembered was that she turned to him, the eyes their own true color now this close to him and said,
you’ll pay for this, you know
.

    He smiled and said
yes
.

    
Yes I know. Yes I will.

    

    

    When he woke up she was gone.

    So was the moon. It was colder, getting on to dawn.

    He called her as loudly as he dared without waking the campers on the hill. He got no answer. With the clouds drifting over the moon it was hard to see. The beach was a gray thin streak along a glittering black sea. He walked slowly, looking first to the town and then back to the cliffs.

    He couldn’t find her.

    He felt the beginnings of a headache.

    
Okay,
he thought.
We fell asleep. At least I did. But what about her?
He thought that yes. she’d probably slept too. He could still feel some stiffness in his shoulder where she’d been lying. She must have stayed awhile.

    He wondered what time it was.

    No matter how he thought about it, it made no sense. If she’d gotten cold she could have told him. He’d have gone too. Why not wake him? Why just disappear?

    It was damn disorienting. As though he’d dreamed the whole thing-the walk along the beach, making love, everything. He wasn’t angry-just puzzled.

    He walked back to the Romantica, turning it over in his mind.
What the hell?

    He opened the door to his room and there was Danny asleep with Michelle in the far bed, the sheets twisted around them like snakes. He moved silently into the bathroom and took off his clothes and hung his shirt over the door to dry. He walked across the floor to his bed and slipped beneath the covers. He rolled over and slept a second time that night.

    He slept late.

    

    

    It was noon before he was out the door. By that time all the questions were merely amusing. He knew it wasn’t anything he’d done or said that had made her go. So he wondered what she was up to. Lelia? What’s the story, Lelia?

    He found Danny and Michelle drinking sweet Greek coffee in the square, sitting with a pair of German girls he knew vaguely from the beach. To Dodgson it looked like Danny was into some serious flirting but Michelle didn’t seem to mind. Confident of him, he guessed.

    They waved him over.

    “Hey, Sparky. I hear you were a bitch last night.”

    “You do?"

    “Sure. Lelia was by.”

    “Uh-huh. And?”

    “She’s one angry lady, man. Says the two of you fell out on the beach a while. Then she woke up and you weren’t there. You’d skipped on her. How come?”

    “Me?”

    He couldn’t believe it.

    “I’d skipped on her?”

    Michelle smiled. She shook her head. “I don’t expect this of you, Robert. Him, maybe. Him of course. But…”

    Danny poked her.

    “This is too weird. I didn’t leave her. It was the other way around. I woke up and she was gone.”

    “Oh yeah?”

    He rolled his eyes as though Dodgson were slipping and everybody laughed. Everybody but Dodgson.

    “She really told you that?”

    “Sure. Stood right there and said you’d deserted her. Am I right, ladies? Am I lying?”

    The German girls nodded.

    “And you say she was pissed? Really angry?”

    “I’d say she’d like to stuff you in a blender, make up some Skippy coladas. A woman scorned, y’know?”

    “Jesus.”

    “You going to the beach?”

    “I was planning to.”

    He nodded. “Man of Steel. Actually, I’d think about hanging around down here with us if I were you.”

    He needed a cup of coffee. The headache was back. It really was too early in the morning for this shit.

    “Danny, how drunk was I last night?”

    He shrugged. “Light to medium. I’ve seen you worse. It really didn’t go down that way? You’re sure?”

    “I swear it.”

    “That’s a pretty strange lady, then. You better have some coffee. Maybe a beer or two.”

    He thought about it.

    “No, I think I’ll go to the beach. See what I didn’t do last night. You’re positive she wasn’t putting you on.”

    “She was serious,” said Michelle.

    “Sure looked serious. She has nice flary nostrils, know that?”

    He turned to go. “See you later,” he said.

    He started walking, then heard Danny shout behind him. “Hey, Skippy. Don't worry. She’ll forgive you!” Then there was laughter.

    “I forgive you," she said.

    He looked at her.

    “You’re kidding.”

    “No. I do.”

    “For what?”

    “For leaving.”

    “I didn’t leave, Lelia.”