Free Area of Suspicion by John D. MacDonald Page A

I didn’t know why I did that—dreadful thing to you. To us. Because what we had was so good, Gevan. So right for us. I finally figured it all out.”
    “With diagrams?”
    She leaned forward. “You and I are both strong people, Gevan. Terribly strong. Dominants, I guess you call it. Ken was weaker. He needed me. He needed strength. He appealed to something—maternal, I guess. You would never need me that way. My strength seemed to respond to his weakness. He made me feel needed.”
    “And I didn’t.”
    “Not in the same way. It was so queer the way it began. It crept up on us. We weren’t expecting it. And then it got worse and worse and we had to find some time and place to tell you how it was with us. We were going to tell you that same night when you walked in. But having it happen that way made it all sort of nasty. I’ll never forget that night, or the way you looked.”
    “It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind, Niki.”
    “I want to be honest with you. I’ve had to be dishonest for so long. I’ll tell you how it is. I miss him. I miss him dreadfully. He was sweet. But I didn’t love him. So I can’t miss him the same way I’ve missed you for four years. I can’t look at you while I say this. If things had gone on, Kenand I would have separated. And then—darling, I would have come to you and begged forgiveness. I would have come to you on any basis you wanted.” She lifted her head then and looked directly at me. “I would have come to you, Gevan.”
    I looked back into her eyes. They looked darker. “Is that supposed to help?” I asked her.
    “It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. Her voice was soft and remote. It was less question than statement, an acceptance of a mistake which had forever changed our special world. “Much too late,” she said, turning away from me.
    I knew how quickly and how easily I could reach her. The impulse brought me to my feet before I could bring it under control, my empty glass bounding and rolling on the silence of the rug. She sat with her head turned away from me. I saw tendons move in the side of her throat. Except for that small movement, she did not stir for the space of ten heartbeats. Then, with a careful precision she put her glass on the table and rose to her feet with a remembered effortlessness and came over to me, her eyes downcast, smudged by the darkness of her lashes. I heard a hush of fabric and a hiss of nylon. She stopped, inches from me, and slowly raised her glance until, with the mercilessness of a blow without warning, she looked into my eyes.
    After that instant of recognition her eyes lost their focus; her mouth trembled into slackness and her lips, wet-shining, seemed to swell as they parted. Her head lolled, heavy, sleepy, on the strong and slender neck, and her knees bent slightly in her weakness. Her body seemed to become flaccid, heavier, sweeter, softer with the inadvertent arching of her back, and there were tiny, almost imperceptible, movements of which I knew she was, as she had told me long ago, completely unaware, small, rolling pulsations of belly, hip and thigh.
    With us it had been a strong and a compulsive attraction, a grinding feverish spell that always began in this humid hypnotic way, building to an urgency that made frantic use of the nearest couch or bed or rug or grassy place. It wasalways beyond thought and plan, and in a shamefully few moments she had taken me back into our rituals as though nothing had ever come between us. I found I was grasping her by the upper arms, in an ancient sequence, closing my hands with a force that twisted and broke her mouth and propelled the heat of her breath against my throat in a long hawing sound of pain and wanting. Under the strength of my hands I felt the warm sheathings of firm muscles as she strained to break free. It was one of our contrived delays. She rolled her head from side to side with an almost inaudible moan. I knew how violently she would come into my arms the