Read Online Too Much Too Soon by Jacqueline Briskin - Free Book Online Page A

but gazing at each other.His mouth had an unfamiliar softness; she wanted to ever so lightly trace his lips, a tactile urge so strong that she reached for her pearls instead—Crystal, selecting the strand at Woolworth’s, had taken ages to find the deepest luster.
    All at once the heat and noise engulfed her like a bone-crushing demon, spinning her amid the crowded tables. A sourness rose in her throat. She stumbled to her feet, peering around. “Curt, will you excuse me . . .”
    Curt was standing too. “The restrooms are back there,” he said, giving her a gentle push.
    She tottered dizzily past the piano bar. Mercifully the toilet was free. She crouched over the bowl, throwing up stringy, pinkish liquid. The great heaves reminded her of this morning’s weeping.
What a day
, she thought, leaning back on her heels, wiping her hand over her cold, sweaty forehead.
    When she emerged, a woman was repainting her mouth at the rococo mirror. Honora could see their two reflections, her own apparently raised from a crypt.
    “Had one too many?” the woman asked nonjudgmentally. She fished through her beaded bag for a half-finished round of Life Savers. “Here, this’ll take the taste away.”
    Honora thanked her, washing her face and cupping handfuls of water to her mouth before she chewed the candy.
    At the table a cup of black coffee waited. Unable to look Curt in the eye, she stared down at the steaming liquid, her hands circling thethick, hot china. “I didn’t have dinner,” she said. “Do you suppose that was my trouble?”
    “Christ, why didn’t you tell me? I’d never have let you have three. I shouldn’t have, anyway. We’ll get you a burger.”
    “Just fresh air, please,” she said.
    She could not resist a professional glance at the tip he dropped. It was outrageously large.
    Fog had rolled in, and the lighted windows of the closed Italian food stores shimmered hazily and there were no hard-edged shapes, no distances. Headlights and an occasional pedestrian came out of nowhere. She took deep, restorative breaths of the moisture-laden air. Curt didn’t speak, but after they had climbed a hilly block he took her hand. He pressed his hard, warm palm against hers, and their fingers clasped. In the touch of their bare flesh there was a sense of preordained intimacy.
    In the entry tunnel to her building, he turned her toward him, holding her loosely with his hands linked behind her waist. “Better?”
    “Yes,” she whispered. It was very dark in here and the usual smell of urine was overcome by his after-shave, his cigarette, a very faint odor of masculine sweat, the whiskey on his warm breath. She blessed the woman who had given her the Lifesavers that had taken the horrible sourness from her mouth.
    “Sure?” He was whispering, too.
    Nodding, she leaned forward, touching her lips to his—later she would wonder at her audacity, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
    His arms tightened around her and she pressed against the solid warmth she had conjured up so often in her dreams. His mouth was softer than she had imagined, and she touched it with her tongue. When her dates had French-kissed her, she had fought the lingual intrusion, but now she was initiating it, and Curt’s tongue roused exquisite sensations throughout her body. Her nipples had always been sensitive, and the tissue seemed to expand to cover her breasts. His quivering arms were lifting her high above the dark, mist-drenched city, and if she let go she would plummet to earth, so she clung to him with all her strength, arching her pelvis against that coiled strength in his trousers.
    The kiss ended and he pressed his cheek against hers. “I’d made up my mind not to do that,” he said, his breath filling her ear.
    “I kissed you . . . .”
    “You’re too damn trusting and tender. You don’t know the first thing about me, who I am, where I came from, where I intend going.”
    “I love you.”
    He moved