Captain Quad (21 page)

But it was time to get some sleep.

Kelly climbed out of bed, freezing when Will stirred in reaction, then felt her way to the upstairs bathroom. On the top shelf of the medicine cabinet she found a dusty bottle of muscle relaxants a doctor had prescribed for her two years ago for a stitch she'd developed in her back. She'd taken only a few of them because they'd made her too dozy to function.

That was what she wanted now, something that would knock her flat, at least until the alarm went off; otherwise she'd be a wreck all day tomorrow, and Friday was her busiest day. She popped one of the tiny yellow pills, sent it highballing down with a gulp of cold water, then padded back into her room. Resisting the temptation to waken him, she snuggled in next to Will.

And drifted peacefully into slumber.

One of the really great things about leaving his body, Peter had discovered, was that he never seemed to need any sleep. While he was out of it, his body got all the rest it needed. The only time he suffered was when he ignored the signals his body sent to him. If he strayed too far or for too long—as he had on his first real flight, when he'd played bucking bronco with the fighter jet—his soulstring would fray, or a jabbing pain would develop in the front of his head. These, he'd come to realize, were warnings that it was time to turn back to his body. If he ignored these signals it would sometimes take days to achieve separation again. On one notable occasion—he'd decided to arrow straight up into the heavens and keep going until something radical happened—he ignored an ax-blow pain in his head and found himself suddenly. . . dissipating, wafting apart like a thin puff of smoke. His return that time had been terrifying, a twisting, scattering free-fall for what seemed like hours, and the suffocating fear that he was lost, that he would never get back to his body. He'd realized then how badly he needed his physical self. No matter how decrepit, it was his way station, the place he went for refueling. Without it. . . well, he hated to think. When he finally found his way back that day, he opened his eyes to see Dr. Lowe and a nurse hovering over him. The nurse, he was told later, had called Lowe in to pronounce him dead.

It had taken him a while tonight to get free. He had wanted to go back and see Kelly, watch her move, watch her sleep, but something in the wanting had thwarted him. He'd had to totally erase his thoughts before he could even begin to slip free. Before, his greatest fear had been of dying; now it was of never being able to escape his body again. Each time he tried, that fear lay on him like a stone.

He approached Kelly's place from the lake, riding the brisk north wind. November snow lay on the roof and surrounding fir trees in cheerful white heaps, which in the moonlight were luminescent. Her bedroom window faced east, and as he banked toward it, Peter saw a truck parked next to Kelly's red Subaru.

A cold suspicion stalled him in mid-flight, and for a moment Peter feared that jagged emotion might send him hurtling back to his body. But he steadied himself, deciding the truck was probably Marti's. It would be just like that cowgirl to own a four-by-four. It was coming on to Christmas, and Peter guessed they'd gotten drinking or something, perhaps while decorating the house—Kelly was a nut for Christmas baubles—and had lost track of time. Yeah, that was it. Marti was sleeping over.

He slipped through Kelly's bedroom window.

And when he saw the stranger in bed with her, one limp forearm draped over Kelly's naked hip, rage of such volcanic proportions slammed into him that for an instant he forgot his insubstantial form and flung himself at Will's sleeping shape, a jealous husband come home unexpectedly to discover the wife he had trusted in bed with another man. Fury twisted his unseen hands into killer's claws. He was going to stomp this fucker to death, gore out his guts, twist off his head and piss down his neck. . .

Then a curious thing happened. Darkness enveloped him—and he was back in his body, eyes closed, head heavy on the pillow. . . but now he could feel the bed beneath him, the warmth of the sheets against his skin.

And he could feel something else, something. . . asleep beside him. No, inside him.

He opened his eyes and then he understood.

He was in the stranger's body now, his own essence keenly alert, achieving through its presence some rudimentary degree of control. He could feel Will's sleeping psyche right next to him, a faintly pulsing warmth, and understood instinctively that if he trod lightly, did not jar his slumbering host. . .

His mind reeled.

Skin against skin, oh, it was like the sweetest intoxicant, the wine of the gods, and he could feel it, Kelly's warm hip beneath his pirated forearm, he could feel it all. . .

Joy and a fierce arousal doused Peter's rage like floodwaters rushing over a candle flame. Straining to recall the neural messages, he commanded the arm to pull back, to bring its fingers into range—and the stranger's left leg jerked an inch off the bed. After a moment, he tried again. . .

And now the arm moved, glorious motion, and he stroked Kelly's hip with his fingertips, the sensation reaching him through borrowed nerve endings. An almost painful engorgement made itself known to him, not as a faraway ache but as a throbbing scream of need, and with his free hand he reached down to feel, actually feel, the rigid spike of his arousal.

Inside him something stirred. . . It was him, whoever this heart-thieving bastard was, and Peter clubbed him with the full force of his initial fury, battered him beyond sleep into unconsciousness. The beating diminished the stranger somehow, shrinking his hold on his own body, and now Peter assumed total control.

He reached for Kelly again, snuggling closer. With a phantom touch he kissed the nape of her neck, but this time he felt it, too. Kelly moaned, stirred a little—and Peter lay still. He didn't want to waken her. Not yet. When she settled, his fingers found the waiting folds of her vulva; they were already moist, that single brush of his lips against her neck arousing her even in sleep. With a gentleness belying his desire, he stroked her center until it became as engorged as his own. . .

In a half-lit recess of her drugged and sleeping mind, Kelly Wheeler began to dream. It was the day of the accident. . . but the accident itself was still far away, a nightmare as yet undreamed. They were in her bedroom and Peter was touching her, awakening feelings that were frightening in their raw intensity. In the dream she rolled onto her back, as she had all those lonesome years ago, and drew Peter down on top of her, murmuring his name, slipping off on a warm erotic tide.

Peter could feel her responding, but with her eyes still closed and her muscles slack with sleep. She reached out limply to embrace him, slurred his name, and Peter shifted his pilfered body over hers, sliding its penis home. Kelly moaned, but still she did not awaken. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, smelling her sweetness, and began moving in a dreamy rhythm.

"Peter," she breathed in a drugged whisper. "Oh, God, Peter. . .”

Peter felt a climax already building and he slowed, wanting to savor it, unwilling to lose it all in a fevered adolescent rush. Balanced on an elbow, he took one of Kelly's breasts in his hand, circled the nipple with his tongue. . .

The sun streamed across them in warm parallel bars, a dream sun beaming through dream venetians, and she clutched his muscular back, drew him in as deep as her parts would allow. Her head tossed from side to side, and an insane kind of laughter built inside of her, the laughter of ecstasies unimagined, of a love so potent it threatened to fracture the mind.

(Peter. . . )

She was surfacing now, as restraint abandoned him, and he thrust with renewed vigor. Slick with sweat beneath him, Kelly thrust back. The heat between them flourished, geysered toward flashpoint. . . and as their juices mingled, Kelly opened her eyes.

And screamed, shrill and long, the force of her release converted to the lethal explosive of terror. She awoke crying Peter's name—and found a stranger on top of her, hips bruising hers, alien eyes rolled back in the perverse delight of rape. She screamed and flung him off and he landed in a heap on the floor, his head cracking hard against the windowsill, splitting the scalp and bringing blood.

In his hospital bed five miles away, Peter awoke in his twisted body, bewildered, exhilarated, afraid. He lifted his head and in the moonlight saw a spreading wet stain on his bedsheet. The thrill of release still rippled the muscles of his jaw.

The voice of reason immediately tried to insinuate itself—You've been having some pretty hi-tech dreams lately, pal, but that's all they are, don't kid yourself, they're only dreams—but the voice was weak, its conviction foundering.

You were alive, a new, firmer voice told him. For a few incredible minutes that fucker's body was yours, and you were alive!

Peter's smile glowed like the snow in the pines outside.

TWENTY-FOUR

They were silent for a long while, as if by unspoken assent. Will, still dazed from the crack his skull had taken on the sill, sat elbows on knees on the toilet seat, while Kelly, sick and ashamed at the way her erotic dream had been transformed into nightmarish reality, drew the wound edges together with a bandage. The cut was long, but not deep enough to require stitches. She was glad of the silence, even at the cost of a shell-shocked boyfriend. It gave her time to think.

Her immediate reaction upon finding Will on top of her had been one of anger and revulsion. True, they had made love earlier that evening, and it had been good, but in no way did that give him the right to take her in her sleep! Split scalp or not, she'd come within an ace of throwing him out of her house. Once she'd flicked on the lights, however, and seen that Will was just as befuddled as she—and worse, that blood was tracking down behind his left ear—she'd realized that her anger was merely a front to disguise her shame. Helping him into the bathroom, wobbly herself from the sedative she'd taken, she had constructed in her mind a version of what had most likely taken place.

She'd awakened Will with the carnal thrashings of her dream—in all probability, she'd unknowingly reached for him as a substitute for Peter—and in a drug-induced stupor had failed to distinguish between dream and reality. Will had not jumped her in her sleep—a thought a tad too necrophilic for Kelly's tastes—she had jumped him. Oh, God, and then she'd tossed him out of bed, split his scalp on the windowsill, and quite possibly given him a concussion. His eyes were still glazed and unfocused. He looked like a boxer who'd just lost the title to a knockout.

"Are you all right?" she said now, breaking the minutes-long silence.

Will made a noise that might have been a word when it was conceived in his brain—"nnngth"—then cleared his throat. "I think so," he said at length. "What in hell happened in there?"

"Don't you remember?"

"Not a thing," Will said, shrugging. "I was having this dream. . . I was in a scrap with some guy, only he wasn't a real guy, he was some kind of a. . . spook, I guess." He chuckled without mirth. "Weird. He really smoked me, sort of snuck up behind me and hammered me senseless. Next thing I knew I was on the floor beside the bed, feeling like I did the one and only time I O.D.'d on tequila." He chuckled again, and winced. "I was seventeen. . . What did happen in there?"

Kelly dabbed the last of the blood from Will's neck with a damp facecloth. "I don't know," she said.

But as the drug fog lifted and the shock tapered off, a devastating truth took shape in Kelly's mind. She was a young, attractive woman, intelligent, self-sufficient, sought after by men, and almost certainly loved by the one she now ministered to—but she was a helpless slave of the past, as tied emotionally to Peter Gardner as Peter was to his bed. She could think of no other way to explain it. She supposed she had known it all along, deep down. It was a truth that had bubbled to the surface before, like swamp gas in the sometimes wretched morass of her heart. But she'd always managed to deny that truth, to veil it behind some new and more brittle fiction: I don't need Peter Gardner. I don't need anyone. I'm going to become a teacher, and a good one at that. Besides, who's got time for dates? I've got to work. I've got to study. And I can take care of the ache by myself. . .

She looked down at Will and knew that she could never sleep with him again. It wouldn't be fair to either of them. God help her, she didn't even know her own feelings any more. A few hours ago she'd believed herself in love with this man, finally freed from her past. . . and now look at her. The first time in six years that she decides to give of herself, really give, and Peter pops up like a ghost and ruins it.

It was a tough decision to make, but as long as she was tied to Peter, she was better off alone. Better to make a clean break with Will. . . and to do it right now.

"How do you feel?" she asked, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead.

"Better," he said, stifling a yawn. "What time is it?" Kelly glanced at her wristwatch. Rose-colored light dappled the frosted glass of the bathroom window. "Quarter to six."

Will moaned. "Should we bag it for another hour?"

"I don't think so, Will," Kelly said, taking his hand. "If you feel up to driving, I think you should leave."

There was a note of finality in Kelly's words that perplexed and frightened Will Chatam. He was totally gone on this girl, and the possibility that he had said or done something to screw it up—especially now, after they'd just made love for the first time—filled him with dread and an abrupt, abiding self-hatred. Something had happened in that bedroom, something that was lost completely to Will. But it had finished them. He knew that with an almost preternatural certainty.

"What happened?" he asked again, holding Kelly's gaze despite the tears he knew would soon come.

"I. . . can't tell you that, Will. I'm not even sure myself." She took a slow, ragged inhalation. "But I think it would be best if we didn't see each other again for a while."

She didn't say forever, Will thought immediately, choosing to cling to this slim hope rather than face the hurtful truth that lurked between the lines. "If a woman needs space," his mother had once counseled him, "give it to her. Give her that space or you'll lose her." And despite an almost insuperable urge to challenge Kelly's words, to plead with her if that was what it took, Will decided to heed his mother's advice.