Read Online The Donzerly Light by Ryne Douglas Pearson - Free Book Online

“The titty bar again?”
    “Yes.”
    Well, she was the one who had told him it was okay to go the first time Rude Jude had squired the boys that way, and Jay had asked her before agreeing to go. Asked her if it would bother her, and of course she had told him that it was all right with her, and he had then assured her that it was the drinks, and the drinks only, and that the women were just...decorations on the place. And, well, if she’d been any kind of feminist, she suspected that that characterization would have offended more than soothed, but in the end she told him that he had just one thing to remember about the ‘decorations’—that he could look, but that he had better not even think of touching. So, she really couldn’t rag on him for going this night, or for staying late, which ‘the boys’ always seemed to do, though not this late before, but she could needle her mad just a bit. Needle jealously.
    “Did you have fun?” she asked, needling just that little bit in the suggestive way she asked.
    I had something, Jay thought. Too much to drink, a lecture on misguided charity. And what to call the other thing? A mystical experience? In the end he just nodded, not wanting to lie about that, nor even to skirt the issue this time.
    And to his reply Carrie herself smiled, something devilishly more than a happy face, and lifted her nightshirt to her neck, exposing her smallish breasts. Perfect little mounds that would not get her a job at BK’s, but were enough to raise a leering grin on her man’s face. “See anything as nice as these?”
    He stared, surprised not at all that after all their years together he still did stare, then shook his head. “No. No I didn’t.”
    She lowered the nightshirt, leaving just the yellow bird’s beaky grin pointing at Jay. On her face the smile was gone, leaving just a look of invitation, one that said, ‘Hurry, you’. “Well, they’ll be waiting for you in bed.”
    And with that she turned and headed for their room. His eyes dropped naturally to her rear, the cutest pair of cheeks he had ever known, the most alluring natural wiggle that still made his knees weak. That still made him want to know her in ways biblical and profane.
    Except for now.
    He turned back to the table once the bedroom door clicked shut, this wanting stronger than the wanting of her. This wanting to know. To understand.
    Three times, he thought, looking upon the coins. It would have to stop there, wouldn’t it? The envelope had been pushed, stretched, and broken. Right?
    As before, there was but one way to know.
    He did not want Carrie to be roused again, so he went to the living room and retrieved the paper from the day before. The day before the day before, he had to remind himself. It was Saturday already, and what was what he opened upon the table after taking the coins in hand was Thursday’s paper. Or the stock pages from Thursday’s Journal, to be precise. He spread them out just like he would if scanning the long columns of financial data, but now it was not to read, but to cushion. To quiet.
    His fist closed around the coins. He shook them like dice before a very, very critical roll, then let them fall again.
    And they came up heads.
    Four times.
    His head shook slowly from side to side and he whispered, “No way.”
    Again, he took them in hand and dropped them on the papered tabletop. They fell, settled with no unnatural display of motion, and came up heads once more.
    Five times.
    Jupiter was where Jupiter should be. And Mars. And Venus. God’s six day project was not torn asunder. The heavens hadn’t opened to spill destruction upon the world. Nothing cataclysmic had happened.
    But...
    But something was happening. Was developing. Slowly, like an image on film being gradually cut by the light shone upon it. Jay sensed this. Felt this. Knew this.
    “I see you, Jay.”
    He spun fast this time, because that was NOT Carrie’s voice. Of that he was certain now. Of that he was