Read Online SSC (2011) The Road to Hell by Paul Levine - Free Book Online Page A

York, Paris, and Rome. Downtown is wall-to-wall professionals in their business-lady pumps, charcoal suits, and silk blouses. The gym has an aerobics instructor plus a divorcee or two who brighten up when you do your curls. So what’s with this destructive, nowhere relationship mired in the past?
    “ Jake, what are you thinking about?” Gina asked.
    “ Star Hampton,” I answered, truthfully. I rearranged myself on the bed to look straight into her eyes. “Do you remember the time you hit me?”
    “ Was it only once?”
    “ Yeah. You were leaving me for some cowboy. A rodeo star named Tex or Slim.”
    “ It was Jim. Just Jim.”
    “ No, Jim was the Indy driver.”
    “ That was James,” she corrected me. “Or was he the tennis pro?”
    “ You hit me because I didn’t beg you to stay.”
    “ I don’t remember,” she said.
    But I did.
    * * *
    We’d been living together in my apartment on Miami Beach. She stepped out of the shower, her hair smelling like a freshly mowed field. She kissed me, soft and slow, then said she was leaving. I told her I’d miss the wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. She let fly a roundhouse right, bouncing it off my forehead, cursing as she broke a lacquered nail.
    Good kiss, no hit.
    She dressed quickly and tossed her belongings into a couple of gym bags. Then she said it to me, a parting line I was to hear time and again. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, heading out the door. “And maybe I won’t.”
    * * *
    “ Slugged anybody lately?” I asked.
    She laughed. It was the old laugh. Hearty instead of refined. “Gawd, I was so young then. Did you know I turned thirty last April? You think I need a boob job? Am I starting to sag?”
    She sat up, stretched her long legs across the bed, and hefted her bare breasts, one at a time, her chin pressed into her chest. The streaked blond hair hung straight over her eyes. Outside, the wind was crackling the palm fronds. Only three o’clock, but it had gotten dark inside the bedroom. I peered out the porthole-sized window. Gray clouds obscured the sun as a summer squall approached from the west.
    “ Jake! You’re ignoring me.”
    So was Nicky, I thought. Maybe that was why she was here. Or was it just for old times’ sake?
    “ Can we be friends again?” she had asked when she showed up at my office for a lunch appointment.
    “ Friends?”
    “ Friends who screw,” she explained.
    Which, come to think of it, is what we had been from the beginning. After all these years, I was still dazzled by her beauty, the granite cheekbones, the wide-set deep blue eyes rimmed with black, the body sculpted by daily workouts with a personal trainer. Attention must be paid to such a woman, I thought.
    She dropped her breasts, which, as she well knew, sagged not a whit. “Jake?”
    “ Tell me more about Tupton,” I said.
    “ Ugh! No more talk about business.”
    “ I thought that’s what this was about.”
    “ Come on, Jake. That was an excuse. I missed you.”
    She rolled on top of me and grabbed a handful of my sunbleached hair. “You get better-looking every year. I don’t know why I talked Nicky into hiring you. You’re too tall and too tanned and too damn sexy”
    “ That’s why you talked him into hiring me. And here I was hoping it was for my legal acumen.”
    “ It’s for your amorous acumen.” She let go of my hair and began nuzzling my neck.
    “ Look, Gina, you’re just bored. It’s an occupational hazard of the haut monde wife.”
    Her teeth were leaving little marks on my earlobes. She whispered in my ear. “If you think I don’t know what that means, you’re trés trompé . My second husband took me to Paris. Or was it my third?”
    “ C’mon, let’s do some work—unless you want me to charge you two hundred fifty dollars an hour for—”
    “ A bargain at twice the price.”
    “ Gina. I’m serious.”
    “ I know you are. You’re suffering from postcoital guilt.”
    “ Really?”
    “ I’ve