Free Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald Page B

themselves. Keep patting me. I don't want to lose the glow. I don't want to go back out into the cold world. Darling, am I talking too much?"
    "No."
    "If I stopped babbling would you like to have a nap?"
    "No."
    She laid in thoughtful stillness for a little rime, then pulled her right arm free and rested her curled fist on my chest. "I want to keep on feeling good, but I'm beginning to get scared again. In a different way. Tell me everything is all right."
    "I give too many lectures."
    "You have to talk to me before you turn into a stranger again, dear."
    "Reassurances? What do you want of me? Do you want me to buy back your self-respect by telling you I love you?"
    She stiffened. She pushed herself up quickly. She sat, facing me, hugging her legs, her canted head resting on her knees, the round of her hip fitting into my waist. "That was kind of a cruel dirty cold thing to say, Trav."
    "Shock treatment."
    "What the hell good does it do?"
    "By feeling insecure about our making love, Nina, you make the inference we are a pair of cheap people involved in some cheap pleasant friction. Pull on the pants and walk away, adding up the score. I think we're interested in each other, involved with each other, curious about each other. This was a part of exploring and learning. When it's good you learn something about yourself too. If the spirit is involved, if there is tenderness and respect and awareness of need, that's all the morality I care about. Take your choice, honey. It's up to you. You can look at us from the inside, and we can be Nina Gibson and Travis McGee, heightened and brightened and expanded by something close and rare and dear. Or you can look at it from the outside, and then it makes you that silly little broad I banged when I was up in New York. And it turns me into playboy McGee, smirking and winking. It turns an importance into a cruddy diversion."
    She closed her eyes. In the path of bathroom light her face looked small and pale and still. Her hands were clasped. Her cheek still rested on her round knees. It is one of the lovely and classic postures of a woman.
    She opened her eyes and said, "I think I can accept that, if I keep trying. But be patient. I've got a lot of cruddy old conservative traditional ideas about this kind of thing. I don't even know why I wanted to seduce you. I felt terribly wicked and reckless. If I say something now, will you promise not to take it the wrong way?"
    "All right."
    "I love you. And I'm not trying to buy back anything. Or claim anything. Or promote anything."
    "Thank you, Nina."
    She smiled. "That was the only right thing you could have said. You're welcome. Love is a gift, not a bargain. That's something to learn, I guess. But what could you have learned from me?"
    "That a nineteen-inch waist is delicious."
    "Please don't make jokes."
    "I learned that I'm growing older."
    "What do you mean by that?"
    "There was a very special sweetness about you I couldn't identify Nina. A sad, ceremonial, ritualistic sweetness. It became a kind of a love rite."
    "I sensed a little of that, darling."
    "And there was a strange feeling of familiarity, a haunted feeling. Now I know what made it so special, an odd little feeling that you might be my very last bitter-sweet girl, the last one I will ever know with such an unused flavor of innocence about her, an almost childish wonder and intensity. It made me feel that so much of your life is ahead of you, and I have used up so much of mine."
    "Don't," she whispered. "I want you to be glad about me."
    "I am. I don't go hunting for regret. Maybe when joy is a little conditional, it's sharper."
    "Darling, I don't feel childish and I don't feel innocent, and God knows I'm a long long way from feeling unused. Don't patronize me. I really think of myself as grown up. I earn a hundred and sixty dollars a week. I've buried the man I was going to marry. I wasn't a whimpering little ninny, was I? I made love like a grown woman. Please don't turn me into