Read Online Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

unhappy and that he had no intention of trying to hold me against my will. He seemed hurt that I could have thought that of him. You know something? He had me just about feeling guilty. And he had me feeling I was making a big mistake, that I was throwing something away and I'd be sorry I couldn't ever get it back. He said, 'You know, I never take a girl back,' and I thought, God, I'm burning my bridges.
    Can you imagine?"
    "I think so."
    "Because he's such a con artist. Like I'm walking away from a great job and forfeiting my stake in the corporate pension plan. I mean, come on!"
    "When do you have to be out of the apartment?"
    "He said by the end of the month. I'll probably be gone before then.
    Packing's no big deal. None of the furniture's mine. Just clothes and records, and the Hopper poster, but do you want to know something? I think that can stay right here. I don't think I need the memories."
    I drank some of my coffee. It was weaker than I preferred it. The record ended and was followed by a piano trio. She told me again how I had impressed Chance. "He wanted to know how I happened to call you," she said. "I was vague, I said you were a friend of a friend. He said I didn't need to hire you, that all I'd had to do was talk to him."
    "That's probably true."
    "Maybe. But I don't think so. I think I would have started talking to him, assuming I could work up the nerve, and we'd get into this conversation and gradually I would turn around and the whole subject would be shunted off to the side. And I'd leave it shunted off to the side, you know, because without ever coming out and saying it he'd manage to give me the impression that leaving him wasn't something I was going to be allowed to do. He might not say, 'Look, bitch, you stay where you're at or I'll ruin your face.'
    He might not say it, but that's what I'd hear."
    "Did you hear it today?"
    "No. That's the point. I didn't." Her hand fastened on my arm just above the wrist. "Oh, before I forget,"
    she said, and my arm took some of her weight as she got up from the couch. Then she was across the room rummaging in her purse, and then she was back on the couch handing me five hundred-dollar bills, presumably the ones I'd returned to her three days earlier.
    She said, "It seems like there ought to be a bonus."
    "You paid me well enough."
    "But you did such a good job."
    She had one arm draped over the back of the sofa and she was leaning toward me. I looked at her blonde braids coiled around her head and thought of a woman I know, a sculptor with a loft in Tribeca.
    She did a head of Medusa with snakes for hair and Kim had the same broad brow and high cheekbones as Jan Keane's piece of sculpture.
    The expression was different, though. Jan's Medusa had looked profoundly disappointed. Kim's face was harder to read.
    I said, "Are those contacts?"
    "What? Oh, my eyes? That's their natural color. It's kind of weird, isn't it?"
    "It's unusual."
    Now I could read her face. It was anticipation that I saw there.
    "Beautiful eyes," I said.
    The wide mouth softened into the beginning of a smile. I moved a little toward her and she came at once into my arms, fresh and warm and eager. I kissed her mouth, her throat, her lidded eyes.
    Her bedroom was large and flooded with sunlight. The floor was thickly carpeted. The king-size platform bed was unmade, and the black kitten napped on a chintz-covered boudoir chair. Kim drew the curtains, glanced shyly at me, then began to undress.
    Ours was a curious passage. Her body was splendid, the stuff of fantasy, and she gave herself with evident abandon. I was surprised by the intensity of my own desire, and yet it was almost wholly physical.
    My mind remained oddly detached from her body and from my own. I might have been viewing our performance from a distance.
    The resolution provided relief and release and precious little pleasure. I drew away from her and felt as though I was in the midst of an infinite wasteland of sand and dry brush.