Read Online After by Marita Golden - Free Book Online Page A

it. Flowered cushions shielded them from the chair’s heat on the eighty-five-degree day. Carson sat down beside Bunny. Never before had he met a woman this young so comfortable in her body. She was an inch or two taller than Carson. But he forgave her for that.
    “I wanted to make sure that you got home all right.”
    “I did.”
    Bunny crossed her legs. Her olive-toned skin was burnished by a slight tan. A mole lay just above her lip. She said nothing about how he had just shown up at her door; she just sat beside Carson as if they already knew everything of importance about each other.
    “Did you have a good time at the club?”
    “It was all right.” She shrugged. “It’s never as good as you think it will be.”
    “You go there every week?”
    “Not
every week
.” She laughed as though the idea was ridiculous.
    “I didn’t see your boyfriend in the car.”
    “That’s right, you didn’t,” she told him, her eyes wide with a slow, sly assessment of him that silenced them both. Then she asked, “How long you been a police officer?”
    “Two years.”
    “You like it?”
    “Yeah, yeah, I do. Especially sometimes on Saturday nights,” he joked, surprised at the subtlety of the humor. This didn’t sound like Carson, but he liked what he heard.
    “You always do stuff like this? I mean, track girls down?” Bunny placed her foot on the edge of her chair, hugged her knee, and stared at Carson the way she had looked at him on the night he stopped her.
    “Believe me, this is the first time I’ve done something like this. This is blowin’
my
mind, but you’re a hell of a woman.”
    Bunny stared at Carson, trying to decide, he knew, if he was a deranged serial murderer who puts on a cop uniform on Saturday nights or really a dude with a serious jones for her.
    “You know my name, but I don’t know yours,” she said.
    “Carson. Carson Blake. And I owe you an apology. And you don’t owe me a thing.” He hoped this new strategy would get him off the hook and speed things up. Shading her eyes from the glare of the sun with her long, red-nailed fingers, Bunny gave Carson one last look that took in everything about him that she could see and everything she suspected and said, “I’m hungry. You wanna take me to get something to eat?”
    “Sure, this is my day off.”
    “Wait till I change my clothes.”
    Bunny came out of the house wearing a navy blue batik sleeveless dress that flowed lovingly over every curve of her body and big dark sunglasses. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a bun. Her mother looked out the window as Carson and Bunny walked away.
    “What would you have done if I wasn’t at home?” Bunny asked after she had buckled her seat belt.
    “Kept coming back until you were.”
    Bunny laughed, the sound throaty and unrestrained. She removed her sunglasses and stared at Carson again. It was as though it finally hit her what she had done and she was holding this thought in her mind, measuring it to gauge the full weight of why she was sitting in his car beside him.
    Bunny put her sunglasses back on and stared straight ahead, and Carson reached over and touched her hand. Without looking at him she entwined her fingers in his. Over lunch at Rips, surrounded by the slightly darkened rustic decor, she asked, “So you never did this before?”
    “That’s the second time you asked me that.”
    “I know.”
    “Why’d you come with me? I know even now you must be a little…”
    “No, I’m not scared,” she insisted. “Not anymore. I came because I wanted to. You don’t frighten me. I got in your car because I knew I’d be safe.”
    “That must be some feeling. It’s one I’m not familiar with.”
    “A woman can tell.”
    “A man can too.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re not the only one risking something here. Knocking on your door was harder than the hardest thing I’ve done on my job.”
    Carson sat outside Bunny’s house for a full ten minutes, wondering what he’d