The Deed (36 page)

And then her hands were burrowing through his hair, and the thin crinkle of her clothes was failing to mask the warmth of the body beneath, pressing in now at too many points to defend. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the MSG, but Amanda was responding with pure animal passion, and Jason found, to his surprise, that he was doing the same, reacting without thinking, squeezing her to him and pressing her head to his as if devouring her whole were the next natural step in their courtship.

Jason fought hard to keep sensory awareness from busting up the dream. He’d always had trouble abandoning himself in these moments; even at the point of orgasm, his brain was always thinking, agitating, wondering what came next. He brought one hand around to the front of her waist, a warm base camp from which to launch a northern expedition, and decided he was thinking too much about it. He tried tipping her back on the couch, and met some resistance, a struggle to keep her body vertical. Crap. He tried again, unable to believe her stomach muscles could somehow not be in on the game plan, and Amanda abruptly broke off the kiss.

From below his waist, he could practically hear the tiny shout: “Oh,
tell me
somebody up there fucked this up.”

“You okay?” he asked her. “Is this…too…,” he stammered, desperate for answers but loath to give her any ideas.

“I have to move my car,” she murmured.

“What?” he replied, incredulous. “Screw your car. I’ll buy you a new one.”

She giggled. “Alternate-side parking rules. I’m so sorry, but I just remembered. They’ll tow it, Jason. Have you ever been towed here? It sucks like nobody’s business.”

“But…right now?” he protested. “Can’t we move it in five minutes?
Twenty
minutes?” he corrected, smiling weakly.

She grinned, but dropped her hands from his neck. “If we’re ready to move it in twenty minutes, you won’t be staying, my friend,” she said, snatching up the wayward sock and yanking it back onto her foot. “Seriously, I have to move it before midnight, then I can bring it back sometime before eight in the morning.”

“Oh, this fucking city,” he said. “I don’t even want it anymore.” He watched in despair as she snatched up her shoes. “Gimme the keys; I’ll move it.”

She shook her head. “It’d take me too long to guide you to all the safe spots,” she replied, rising to her feet. “But it’s very Sir Galahad of you to offer.”

He nodded, still frowning, and followed her to the door. “Lancelot,” he replied. “Galahad didn’t care much for the ladies.”

“Lancelot, then,” she accepted, already stepping into shoes in the doorway and slipping out of his grasp.

“Run,” he adjured her.

She smiled, threw her arms across his shoulders, and planted a superlative, brain-blackout of a kiss on his lips that, even while it was going on, he knew he’d remember the rest of his life. A wave of feverish anticipation welled up from within and washed over him, pebbling his skin with goose pimples.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, as Amanda pulled away, winked, and headed for the stairs. “Run!” he demanded again. “Run like the wind!”

“I
will,
” she promised, and disappeared.

“That her?”

Through the windshield, Freddie followed Vinnie’s pointing finger to its object, the girl leaving the building across the street, sweater and jeans, clutching her elbows for warmth. “Yeah, that’s her,” he confirmed, checking the photo on the dash. “Go.”

“Where’s her coat?” said Vinnie. “It’s pourin’ out there.”

Freddie boxed him hard in the ear. “Will you fuckin’ get out there? Don’t lose her, you little dipshit.”

“Ow,” said Vinnie, fumbling for the latch. “What about him?”

“Don’t worry about him,” said Freddie. “This guy’s going nowhere.”

Alone in Amanda’s apartment, Jason was flipping madly through her CDs, unsure how much time he had, trying to find something to reestablish the mood after her bout with the elements. But it didn’t look good. The first disc he found was actually a collection of Sousa marches: good for the climax, maybe, but not much help in getting there. A lot of bad top-forty stuff, a few halfhearted stabs at popular hip-hop, nothing romantic that wasn’t cheesy.

“We have such a long way to go,” he said aloud, staring at a Vanilla Ice CD.

He settled for tweaking the lighting—turning off the odd little central chandelier and clicking on a dimmable lamp in the corner. It occurred to him that he wasn’t exactly
prepared,
in the sexually responsible sense. But he let the worry evaporate away—she’d have something. Hopefully. He could always run out, if the need arose.

A loud buzz startled him; coming quickly to his senses, he bounded to the doorway and pressed the button releasing the downstairs door. Not until a moment later did it occur to him, in a flash, that it might have been someone else at the buzzer down there, that he could have just let in some homeless vandal, or worse. He stood, poised but unarmed, at the door, hoping he was ready for whatever happened next.

And then the doorway opened and she exploded upon him, bedraggled and beautiful, engagingly wet and cold. They joined in a pneumatic kiss that felt as if she were actively trying to draw the heat from him, a kiss that outlasted the kicking off of shoes, the slamming of the door, the driving home of the deadbolt that let relief wash over him. They did a Siamese crab walk back toward the center of the room, a face sandwich with too many legs, and Jason had to suck in his belly hard if his fingers were going to make any headway unbuttoning her sweater.

Grabbing both his hands, still maintaining the kiss, Amanda promenaded him slowly back past their dinner nook and toward the last unexplored door, the one that had no choice but to be the bedroom.

“I thought you said the couch folded out,” he whispered.

She shrugged. “Fine, stay on the couch.”

As they passed under the arch, a stack of books on an end table nearby, bumped in the passing, tipped over as if trying to seal the doorway behind them.

Moments later, they were spooning and cupping and squeezing and disrobing all over her unmade futon in a bedroom that, predictably, was a rumpled mess of cast-off clothing, open drawers, and other residual typhoon damage. It was oddly endearing, in the current carnal crisis.

The girl’s dark eyes stayed open, sparkling in the scant light that stole into the room, the faint yellow glow from the main room and the white city lights peeking in under the window shade. Out in the hall, the doors to the patio still stood gloriously open, and the rain’s patter joined with the moody lighting to lend a cinematic sheen to the slowly unfolding scene.

For long minutes, the pure act of making out satisfied them both. Jason had had a thought, back in the living room, that the thing to do was to throw her back on the bed, to playfully bind her hands with one of his and ravish her like a drunken Viking. But all his strategizing had fled in the presence of this awesome reality; he could barely move, let alone ravish. How the hell did the Vikings do it?

He’d ended up beside her in the bed, face-to-face with a gorgeous, if clothed, statue, and he wonderingly let his free hand (the right was pinned beneath her) slide up and into her bra from below, every inch a teenager stoned on Cuervo behind a 7-Eleven. The bra came away in his hand, surprising him. Somewhere in the course of their proto-rutting she had unclasped it, or he had.

The sensation was indescribable. Her breast felt taut and smooth, magically chilly against the hot flesh of his hand. As his fingertips slowly circled toward the peak, he became aware of her own hands subtly working the buttons of his 501s. What a truly wonderful world! He sucked in his gut as discreetly as possible but had to bend his mind to something else, anything; if she touched him now, even through denim and boxers, he was done for; his little armada was setting sail without him.

Sum, es, est; sumus, estis, sunt,
he recited to himself.
Bo, bis, bit; bimis, bitis, bunt.

His right arm was now quite insensate beneath her; the welcome weight of her shoulder had pinned it at precisely the pressure point an Eagle Scout would bind with a tourniquet. His left hand, free, was having the time of its life, and he dismissed the dead arm as superfluous, already half-forgotten, an external appendix to be chewed off at some more convenient time.

Amanda rolled tantalizingly onto her back, eyes closed, shirt open. For a century or two, he could do nothing but stare at the feast, worried that his voyeurism would freak her out if she opened her eyes, but utterly unable to act. Would she be offended or complimented? Then he looked down to see his loyal hands already caressing her legs, covering for his momentary brain paralysis. He tried to allow himself to stop worrying. It was going to be okay.

Cozying up closer, he slid his fingers along her gloriously flat abdomen and down into the waistband of her jeans without pausing, as if the slightest deceleration might trip some defense mechanism. His knuckles skirted elastic, then soft cotton; effortlessly, he popped the button of her jeans with a sideways move of his thumb, elated at having pulled it off so suavely. The zipper below inched down a teasing half inch or so on its own; a nudge of the tiny bar eagerly widened the V.

Veni, vidi, vici,
he repeated to himself.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Amanda murmured something, some sort of vague approval, and he tried to work her jeans off with the one hand, alternating tugs from hip to hip; they were still making out passionately. “Shoes,” she reminded him softly, and he bent to take these off her, soles wet from the walk outside, then rolled off both her socks at the same time and threw them back over his head into a sea of dirty laundry already surging against the sides of the futon.

Amanda chose this moment to pounce on him, literally, knocking him over backward; he laughed as she dragged his jeans off with a few simple motions. He quickly recaptured her and began trailing kisses from the perch of her lips right down to the promised land.

Soon only one article of clothing remained between the two of them as he paused above her just long enough to record the scene. Closing his eyes, he hooked his fingers into the baby-soft fabric at her hips and began sliding it down against her smooth skin, and she arched her hips upward ever so slightly to make it easy, and he thought that this, this was surely the greatest thing in the universe, this business of a beautiful girl actually helping you debauch her, the sublime eternal moment where innocence takes experience out for a spin.