Lightning That Lingers (3 page)

“All right, all right! Talk about lascivious … I can see you’ve all had the same thought as I did two years ago when I came upon him sitting on the public pier dangling his toes in the lake, his jeans rolled up to his knees.…” She chuckled at the thunder of delight before her. “When I look for men to dance in my club, I’m looking for very special ones. They have to have better than good looks. They have to have better than good dancing ability. I go way beyond that. I look for men with that unique charisma that—well, you know what it does to you. As you’ve guessed, he’s not the sound man, he’s definitely not a minor and he definitely
is
the showpiece of the Cougar Club! Ladies, the Cougar Club is proud to present the number one male dancer in the Midwest. Here he is, our own native blueblood to make your blood simmer—”

Amid pandemonium, and Jennifer’s confusion because she had not really guessed that the blond man with the gentle gaze and face like a vision would strip off his clothes for money, he strolled onstage to the beat of “Stray Cat Strut.” It seemed profane. It seemed like Michelangelo’s David leaping down from his pedestal and performing a bump and grind on the Accademia Di Belle Arti floor.

And yet bump and grind this was not. He was a
whimsical blue-collar fantasy in a light shiny hardhat. A form-fitting red plaid shirt molded to his upper body, leading the eyes irresistibly downward into the softly faded denim caressing his hips and long thighs. The pounding rhythm loved his hard body. There was a mesmeric quality, an almost playful kinetic energy to his natural grace. Moving to the music with easy sensuality, he pulled off the hardhat in a flow of athletic choreography. The light hair tumbled sensuously, and the blue and hot-silver eyes held a laughter that was at the same time innocent and full of utter deviltry.

“God, he’s so …” murmured Annette.

The quaking excitement inside Jennifer had nothing to do with embarrassment, though heaven knew she was embarrassed by what she saw, by what she felt. The icy ball that her stomach had become was melting all down the inside of her, through her nerves, into pumping pathways that led downward, inward.

He drew a woman from the eager audience. She came easily to him, and basking her in the flood of his radiant gaze, he lifted her hand gently to the top button of his shirt. Holding her smaller hand cupped inside his against his chest, he guided her hand slowly lower, and the buttons fell open as he moved himself, and her, to the music that had grown softer. Soft too was the brush of a finger under her chin, tipping up her face for a lingering kiss.

He let one arm shrug out of the shirt, then more slowly the other, the liquid sway of his hips still catching the beat. Jennifer could almost feel the softness of his bare flesh, the heat and steel that came beneath. Her throat could almost taste
the light tang of sweat that traced the intoxicating hollows stretched along his muscles. His vitality projected like rocket fire through the room, burning the imagination, flaming the watching bodies. At the edge of the stage he held out his hand to a woman seated below. When she stood beside the stage, hungry to touch him, he took her wrists in his hands and stirred her palms slowly over his lean hips and the compact satin flesh of his lower stomach. One of his hands slipped into her short curls, dropping her head lightly back to receive his kiss.

Smoky disco and husky harmonics poured over the stage and into the audience as another woman came forward. He carried her hands to his jeans and through the motions of dragging open the snap, dragging down the dense brass ribbon of the zipper, and peeling the pliant cotton fabric lower as though she were unwrapping hard candy.

Now, except for the slight fabric that left him exposed almost completely in back, he was nude. The purity of clean body lines in the ivory spot carried the wattage of chain lightning. The rim of the low stage filled four deep with women waiting breathlessly to tuck a folded dollar into the tiny garment he wore and to kiss the wide, smiling mouth.

Jennifer felt a twist of longing so strong that it made her stomach hurt as she stared hypnotized at his long hands bringing up a trembling chin on a curved forefinger, capturing a face carefully between his palms, his lips parted, parting further over mouths beneath his. Smooth hands reached up to him during the kisses, caressing
his shoulders, holding his waist, running daringly over the solid willowiness of his buttocks.

Over the music and boom of room noise, the comments of women returning from the stage were clear.

“Oh God … his lips are so soft.…”

“He
kisses
—I mean he
really
kisses.”

“I could die for a man like that.” A laugh. “I’m going to make my husband do this at home.”

Diane flopped back in her seat beside Jennifer, throwing one hand over her heart.

“You’ve been up there twice,” Annette said, her eyes sparkling, mirthful.

“I know! I told him I had to come back.”

Lydia leaned toward her. “What’d he say?”

“He just laughed. Jennifer, heavens, don’t miss it! How often does anyone get a chance to make magic with a man like that?” Diane gave Jennifer a gay little nudge, and Susan, coming back with flushed cheeks and overbright eyes from the stage, tried laughingly to haul Jennifer to her feet. Sticking like a burr to her small wooden chair, thrown further into unfamiliar mental disarray, Jennifer tried feebly, “I’d better not. I … think I have a cold coming on and I wouldn’t want to—”

The end of her sentence was swallowed up by the laughter of her companions. Lydia was saying, “Fie on you, woman! You haven’t either!” when Jennifer, whose eyes had been straying helplessly to the stage for no very good reason, saw that for the second time that evening, the blond man was looking right at her. He must have seen the attempt of her friends to pull her from the chair, and her strong negative reaction, because he released
the beautiful young woman he was holding. His head tilted in a pantomime of tenderness and curiosity. And then he beckoned to her, his smile roguish, sensual.

Jennifer’s fingers clutched the sides of her chair in a death grip. One corner of his beautiful mouth quirked upward as he gave her a look of humorous reproach. Trying desperately to maintain the little that was left of her dignity, her accustomed air of self-command, she didn’t resort to such drastic measures as putting her head back into her palms until she saw, disbelievingly, that if she wouldn’t come to him, he was going to come to her. She was beyond being about to control the small moan of distress that rose to her lips, or the fluid rise of heat to her cheeks as she covered them with her hands.

The women around her greeted his action with ecstatic relish, yet his seductive murmur touched her ear with the morning-soft mist of his respiration.

“Hello lady,” he whispered. “Open your eyes.” When she would not, he murmured, “I only want to kiss you.” She felt the shock of his warm hands gently pulling at her wrists and urging her chin up. Then, not persisting in the face of her frozen resistance, he stroked the outer curve of her hot cheek with a soothing finger, “You know what, lady? I think you’re sweet.”

She was not able to watch the rest of his act as he abandoned his final cover to Dylan’s melodic rasp. The unfeigned lyrics of “Lay, Lady, Lay” seeped through the loudspeakers. But she knew that it was another voice and the light experienced
touch of one man that would stay with her through the night.

He came out of the shower into the small room that was supposed to be his private dressing room, and found Darrell, in his own clothes now but, in spite of it being three o’clock in the morning, still wearing the aviator shades that had become his trademark as Peter the Policeman. Darrell had arranged himself comfortably on one of the two chairs with his boot up on the other. He moved quickly through to protect his suede jacket from errant water drips as Philip passed him.

“I swear, Philip, you’re as bad as a bird dog the way you shake off your hair after a shower,” Darrell objected. “Listen, I’m going over to Julie’s house tonight and—”

“Which Julie?”

“Julie with the Porsche. And I think you ought to come along. Her sister’s going to be there; you remember April—”

“Yes. Thanks. But not tonight.”

Darrell frowned. “It would do you good to get laid.”

The mildly scolding tone amused Philip. Moms and chicken soup. Darrell and sex. “Why?” he asked, though the question was moot, an affectionate tease.

Darrell hated to think about the “whys” of anything. He was still looking disgruntled and muttering “What do you mean,
why
?” to no one in particular when Michele poked her head in the door.

“Are you decent?” she asked. She glanced at
Philip standing nude in the middle of the floor toweling his hair, and walked in anyway. It would have been useless to try to evict her, but he knew she would be disappointed if he didn’t make the effort so he said, “Is this a private showing or what?”

Michele grinned. “I’ve already seen you plenty.” Kicking Darrell’s booted foot off the extra chair, she collapsed in it, lifting the heavy coil of thick black hair tiredly off her neck. Her eyes were awake and genial as she ran them suggestively over his hips and said wickedly, “After all this time it’s no big thing to me.” After his laughter, “You were good tonight.”

He began to pull on his jeans. “You say that every night.”

“You’re good every night.” She withdrew a somewhat crushed menthol cigarette from her cleavage and stuck it between her lips. “I don’t get it. Here you get a visit from this talent guy from Hollywood”—she paused, inhaling as Darrell applied his lighter, “and you tell him no.”

It was difficult to make them understand and to avoid a familiar argument, he said, “I can’t leave. Darrell would get too lonely.”

Darrell gave him a disapproving stare over the top of the aviator shades and glanced back at Michele. “I think he’s getting weird living alone in that crazy old place. I swear, it looks like the door ought to be opened by some guy with a bump on his back and one eye higher than the other named Igor.”

Michele spit a rush of smoke and laughter. When she was able to choke out an answer to Darrell’s
demand to know what was so funny, she gasped, “What was the name of the other one?”

“Huh?”

“If Igor was the name of”—laughing pause—“of one eye, then what’s the n-name of the other eye?” One look at Darrell’s face brought on a fresh burst that ended with a coughing fit. She waved her hand and said placatingly, “I’m sorry. Never mind. I’m getting punchy. Anyway, it wasn’t all you. I was just remembering that little chick in the first row—the one with the Dorothy Hamill hair who kept trying to disappear into her napkin. When Philip’s pants came off I thought we might have to administer oxygen to the chick.”

Darrell pocketed his lighter. “Chick’s probably never been with a man in her life.”

Amused by the censure in Darrell’s tone that implied the lady was being strongly negligent in her responsibility toward the male sex, Philip’s thoughts wandered back to her … the gleaming brown hair, the bashful eyes, the dusty-rose lips which had fallen slightly open over straight white teeth, the front one slightly chipped. He recalled having the vague urge to stroke the uneven outline there with his tongue, and for the first time that night he felt a rush of desire. Strange, because he rarely paid attention to individuals in the sea of faces and this one hadn’t been particularly striking except perhaps for the brown eyes that had been so filled with personality. He had a sudden memory of her soft flesh under his searching fingers, the firm cheek round and blush-heated.

“Philip? Something wrong?” Michele was staring at him, her narrow face set in the tense way it did when she found him unusually cryptic.

“No.” He smiled at her and bent to kiss her goodnight as he buttoned his shirt. “Thanks again, Darrell. Tell April and Julie—”

“I know.” Darrell gave him a long-suffering look. “Another night.”

The air outside was crystalline, carrying the tranquil scent of the fresh snowfall that glazed the birch branches near the club’s back door and spread like a skirt of moonlight over fields and rooftops. It was icy cold. Clean. And he breathed it deeply. Things were not as bad for him as they had been at first. The feeling of being vaguely revolted with himself had passed as Michele had predicted it would. He had come to accept it, and that was neither bad nor good. It was necessary.

Chaucer met him at the mansion door. He climbed the wide staircase in the darkness with the owl on his shoulder, pausing for a moment on the first landing. Gazing out the huge windows at the black, star-sprinkled sky and the pristine expanse of the lake, he thought of the girl who had refused his kiss and said softly, “I want you in my bed, brown eyes.”

The owl stirred and when he glanced at its starlit face, it gave him a slow wink.

The baby owls were ready to be fed again and by now he was weary. But he was also disciplined, and so he fed the orphans, and when they were full, put them back into the shoebox and set that into an armchair wedged against his bed. If they woke up and managed to clamber out of the box, he didn’t want them tumbling to the floor.

Tired as he was, he read
Nicholas Nickleby
for
half an hour to wind down. Reaching over to turn out the light, he found himself face to beak with the owlets who had scrambled up on his pillow. They were staring intently at him, side by side, twin puffballs with eyes the color of spring dandelions.

“Doubles, anyone?” he said, and reached up to tickle the breast feathers of one, then the other. “You’re cold, I suppose?” He raised himself on his elbow. “I’m going to lay the cards on the table with you two. I’m a human who studies raptors. You, by the way, are raptors, which is why I happen to know how to take care of you. I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but I’m not your mother. There are limits to what you should expect.” They toddled closer to his warmth. “This is really beneath my dignity. I have an advanced degree, you know.” The yellow eyes, shining at him like four tiny moons, held no more awe of him than Chaucer’s ever had. With a sigh, he lifted an edge of the cover. “All right, come on. Just this once.”