Prospero's Half-Life (5 page)

He couldn’t concentrate on it. He hadn’t really wanted to see
it in the first place.
In a normal
world,
he thought,
if a night was going like this it would probably best to just
get up, say that you should get going, and just go. Now, though,
what am I supposed to do?
He had a mental
image of the street outside, with the gunshot corpses piled up in
the streets, and knew that going outside was simply not an option.
Samantha hadn’t asked him to leave, so he was going to stay. Simple
as that.

Presently he
had to use the washroom. He knew where it was, thankfully, having
seen it on his way in, so it eliminated the need to ask her a
question and risk a glare or worse. He simply got up quietly and
tried to be as quiet as possible on his way there.

After voiding his bladder, he spent some time staring at
himself in the mirror. He looked alright on the surface, he knew;
hair still staying put, clothes still on straight, bearing upright
and intact. His eyes had a wild look, though, that went well with
the speed of his heartbeat.
You’re the
manager
he told himself sharply.
She’s the worker. You’re in charge, don’t let her
dictate the terms.
He knew it was absolute
crap. That relationship had ended the moment that they had left the
store’s parking lot. Now they were just two random people thrown
together by something that Richard still couldn’t feel as a cold
reality. It was unnerving.

When he left
the bathroom he was startled to see Samantha standing in the
kitchen. She didn’t look angry anymore. She was half-looking at the
floor, and there was a sorrowful expression playing around the
edges of her face. Richard stood in the doorway and looked at her
without speaking.

“
I’m sorry” she began.

“
I’m sorry too” Richard cut her off. “I should really learn to
think before I say things”. He smiled ruefully. “Maybe it’s a
manager thing”.

She smiled at that, a real smile that went all the way to her
eyes. “I wasn’t really mad at you, I guess. I just don’t see how
things
can
be any
better”.

“
Well, now I don’t know about that”, he replied warmly. “Except
for this little spat tonight was going pretty well. All things
considered”.

She laughed a
little. “Yeah, I guess so. Tonight’s been pretty distracting, in
the best way”.

They stood
where they were, neither one talking, for a moment that was
temporally brief but felt psychologically much longer.

“
I have some wine stashed away”, Samantha said suddenly,
mercifully breaking the silence. “Want some?”

“
I’d love some” Richard replied, nodding emphatically. Samantha
retrieved an opaque bottle of red wine from under the sink and a
pair of dusty wine glasses from the cupboards over the stove. After
a moment or so she found a corkscrew as well, and with a bit of
effort popped the cork out of the bottleneck. The wine gurgled
richly into the glasses and for a brief, nauseating moment Richard
imagined that it was blood pouring out. He shook his head and
gritted his teeth, and the image soon passed.

They took the
wine back into the living room and resumed the movie. Samantha sat
beside Richard, moving closer every few minutes until they were
practically cuddling. Instinctively he put an arm around her,
panicking slightly at the last moment about whether he was being
too forward with her. She didn’t seem to mind, however. She nuzzled
into his side after he did it, and sipped at her wine. Her
closeness made him feel oddly nervous, as if he were doing
something vaguely illegal and she was at any moment going to get up
and tell him to leave, that she wasn’t like that. He sipped at the
wine (rich, fruity, hints of blackberry) and tried to keep his mind
on the movie and not the warm, curvy woman currently snuggling next
to him.

He was shocked
when he felt her hand caress the fly of his pants but, in a feat of
superhuman will, tried valiantly to keep himself from showing it.
His heart pounded even louder; it was now to the point that he
could feel his ears throbbing in time to it. The wine and the shock
combined to dry his mouth out. His breathing became shallow. He had
all the usual responses he’d experienced in this sort of situation
in the past—except the important one.

Her fingers
traced him up and down for a minute and then she began to slowly,
tantalizingly draw the zipper of his pants down. In a second his
flaccid member was out, a respectable size to be sure but nowhere
near the size that it was supposed to be right now. Her fingers
were warm and her touch was gentle and sensual but still—nothing.
Richard closed his eyes and tried to get himself into order.

Get it together, man
was all he
thought before he felt her shift her position lower. A second later
he felt that familiar hot breath on his exposed sex, then her lips
and tongue rolled over him. This obliterated all thought processes
for an instant, and he leaned back to get more comfortable. After
he did this, however, he realized that he
still
had no response. Samantha, to
her credit, was trying everything that she could think of, and it
was clear that she had some experience in the area, but it was to
no avail. Nothing was stirring.

Presently she
sat up. Her eyes were large, a deep, confused blue.

“
Am I doing something wrong, Richard?” she asked, a slight
tremble in her voice.
Richard
, he thought.
I don’t think she’s ever called me by my name
before
.

“
No, of course not,” he assured her smoothly.

“
Are you gay? Some people said you were but I was never
sure”.

She said it so
matter-of-factly that Richard didn’t really have a chance to be
shocked. He briefly wondered whom “some people” were, then
dismissed the thought. They were probably dead anyway.

“
No, not gay. Just…haven’t been in this situation
much”.

“
What situation? Oh!” she exclaimed, putting a finger to her
lips in a maddeningly adorable gesture. “You mean you haven’t had a
lot of sex?”

“
Yes! No, I mean, I’ve had sex, but…”

“
I thought men that didn’t get a lot of sex were, like, more
the opposite. Like, you’d fly off the handle, you know?”

Richard put
this particular line of questioning to sleep by swiftly kissing
her, deep and hard, taking her by surprise. After a split second
where she seemed unsure, she leaned back and Richard felt her
tongue dart between his lips, a sharp dart flickering in. Then he
was on top of her, her body warm, curvy and distressingly female
beneath his.

Now
there was a response. Higher
brain function ceased and the genetic instincts of a million or so
years of evolutionary development took over. What followed was as
automatic as electricity through a circuit.

FIVE

The next
morning dawned bright and hot; Richard imagined it did, anyway,
judging it by the amount of sunlight filtering through the tightly
shut Venetian blinds in Samantha’s somewhat chaotic bedroom.
Samantha herself was asleep beside him, as nude as the day she was
born and so warm to the touch that Richard wanted nothing more than
to curl himself up beside her and sleep the rest of the day away.
Perhaps even the rest of their lives away.

Awareness
gradually filled him, however, and he was soon staring up at the
rough bedroom ceiling. He felt restless; he had never been one to
laze about in bed for the day. Samantha’s tantalizing heat was a
hard thing to give up, for sure, but his legs were beginning to get
uncomfortably twitchy. He compromised by telling himself that he
would find out if Samantha had coffee, and bring the coffee back
for them to drink in bed. He slipped out of the sleek, cool sheets
and tiptoed away into the stillness of the main hallway. His
footfalls were the only sound he heard; everything else could have
vanished into a dream.

He rummaged
briefly through the kitchen cupboards and found a canister of
pre-ground coffee. There was a percolator on the counter next to
the fridge and he went through the thoughtless ritual of making
coffee. The water gushed out of the tap as he filled the carafe,
and he wondered for an instant about how much longer that would
continue to happen. It struck an odd note in him, a jangly and
angular chord, and suddenly the morning did not seem as relaxed and
carefree as it had upon his awakening.

When he
returned to the bedroom carrying two piping hot cups of coffee
Samantha was sitting up. She had the sheet pulled up to just below
her collarbone but it was slipping down in a way that seemed to
designed to madden him. He set the cups of coffee down onto the
nightstand beside her bed and climbed in. His hands found her hair
and his lips found hers; they fell into it for an hour, making love
greedily. Later, when they were spent, Samantha slid off of him and
took one of the cups with obvious relish.

“
Now this is the best way to start a morning,” she remarked,
blowing across the jittery surface of the mocha-coloured coffee.
“It almost makes me feel like life is normal again”.

“
Almost,” Richard agreed, sipping at his own cup. “Except that
if this was normal life, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here like
this”.

Samantha
smiled mysteriously.

“
I don’t know about that,” she whispered huskily. “I’ve seen
the way you looked at me at work. They way your eyes sort of linger
on me at certain times”.

Richard
blushed and choked a little. He covered it by taking a gulp of the
coffee, which was still too hot to really do anything with it
except to sip at it. It burned uncomfortably as it went down and he
grimaced.

“
Well, uh,” he stammered. “I mean, I would never have done
anything about it. They frown on that sort of thing, you know.
Managers and employees sleeping together. Too much opportunity for
corruption and allegations there”.

Samantha
rolled her eyes and shook her head at him.

“
You don’t have to go around telling everyone about what you’re
doing,” she replied smoothly. “In a way, there’s something even
hotter about being illicit about the whole thing. Like we could
only get together when we were sure no one was watching. Or
something scandalous like that”.

Richard
laughed nervously. “I suppose,” he said doubtfully, and she
laughed.

“
Richard, you’re right, you never would have acted on it.
You’re such a company man”.

Richard
immediately felt offended by this but the feeling faded out as
quickly as it had come. She was right, after all. He would never
have considered acting on anything that might have happened between
them, before everything happened. There were rules, after all.

“
I suppose so,” he admitted tentatively. “At any rate, this is
a different situation”.

“
Much different,” she agreed readily. She took a drink of her
coffee and closed her eyes. “I am not going to be happy when the
last of this is used up,” she said heavily. Richard thought about
it for a moment. It seemed to connect too well to his earlier dark
thoughts in the kitchen.

“
There must be a completely ridiculous amount of coffee
floating around North America,” he mused, trying to find some sort
of upbeat counter to the way the conversation was going. “I bet
that we could bury a major city in coffee grounds if we put it all
together”.

“
Maybe,” Samantha replied doubtfully.

“
A lot of it is vacuum-sealed, too, so it’ll last for a while.
We could be drinking coffee for years yet”.

“
That would be nice,” she said, brightening slightly. “It might
make the whole thing a bit easier to bear”.

Richard
decided to keep going. “This might even prove to be a really good
thing, after all. For us, anyway. Think about it”. He gestured
outward, expansively. “How many people did you run into on a daily
basis that you just wanted to strangle? To slap them in the face
and ask them how goddamned stupid they could actually be? Think
about the customers we’ve both had to deal with, just by
themselves. Rude, arrogant, thoughtless jerks who, in any sane and
loving universe, would have been the first against the wall when
the revolution came”.

“
I don’t think they were all
that
bad,” Samantha countered
playfully, and Richard snorted.

“
Please, we’ve all got horror stories. I thought often about
writing them into a book – can you imagine? The amount of sheer
idiocy that would have been dripping out of the pages would have
been astounding. Like the one who called the cops on Mary because
she wouldn’t honour his expired coupon?”

“
Oh my god, yes,” Samantha replied, sounding amazed. “I was
there that night, that was...I can’t even describe it, that’s how
ridiculous it was. He just shrugged, turned around, whipped out his
cell phone, and called the police. Then he turned back around and
just started screaming. I didn’t even understand half of what he
was saying. Just screams”.

“
It was pretty bad,” he agreed, nodding emphatically. “Imagine,
though – those people are gone”.

Samantha’s
face clouded and she shook her head.

“
Lots of people have died, Richard,” she admonished him.
“People that were close to both of us. Human beings. Remember
that”.