Free The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell

this, Mae. I just can’t handle it. I don’t know what you want from me anyway. Not now. What is there? And besides—”
    Besides.
    “I’m dying,” Laurel said into the phone.
    “You can’t be.”
    “Yes I can,” she blurted out. Her voice shifted to irritability, still only on the surface at first. Then something deeper; I thought she might weep. “Mae, I don’t know where you are, but I can’t go back into that crazy fantasy with you. I can be dying like anyone else, and I am.”
    It upset me, I am ashamed to say. Laurel, saying a thing like that. It pushed me off my center for a moment, and made me start to plead.
    “Don’t you remember … ?”
    “Can’t you understand I don’t want to remember?” The voice moved from petulant to firm; I felt her hardening her shell. “Mae, I wish you well, but please don’t call.”

    In the desert there was starlight but no moon. The dust had settled, for a time, and the air was calm and dry. I heard coyotes, not so far away, but didn’t see them.
    Reach out and touch someone, I thought. I hadn’t yet considered that someone could touch you back.

What if, with Laurel, it had never been enough? The prospect of tenderness endlessly unfolding, pleasure without pain—like meat without salt. It left, untended, the desire to be stabbed in the heart.
    So then one day. So then.

    O—— appeared at the lodge and asked if I’d seen Eerie. He was fretful, gold skin crimped between his brows. Barefoot, shirtless, he got out of his rock-star convertible, and cast about the grounds before coming toward me. No one else was in sight. Well, there was one of those bikers who liked to hang around the place, tinkering with a dune buggy engine, but all you could see of him was his raggedy gang colors humped over the open hood, the crack of his ass poking out of his jeans.
    “Not here,” I told him, which was technically true, depending on your definition of here. As a matter of fact I knew just where Eerie was—in the school-bus wing stroked out on the smack Ned had given her—but she wasn’t in the lodge and I could prove it. And if O—— was worried that Eerie might be with D——, I knew that she wasn’t, because someone else was.
    I caught O——’s hand, trying for the flower-girl carelessness that Laurel would have used to make that move. But O—— seemed to pull away from the touch, so I let him go and merely beckoned him inside.
    “Come on,” I said. Inside the lodge, I showed him all the places Eerie was not, which included D——’s octagon room up top. A flowered sheet hung across the doorway at the head of the stairs, quivering slightly with a breeze coming in from the other side. I stopped to listen but heard nothing, then pulled a ripple of sheet back.
    “Don’t let him see you,” I whispered into O——’s ear. Not that D—— would have cared who saw him do what—but if he knew that O—— was present he would have bent his energy on keeping him there and using him for something.
    I must have already plotted what I would do next, if I didn’t want that to happen.
    However, D—— was asleep, or feigning sleep, or turned deeply inward—the blind mask covering his face with empty eyeholes streaming backward to the stars … Or one might have said his shut-eyed face was peaceful, even beatific. The back of his hand lay on Laurel’s bare belly, just above the first cinnamon crinkle of the hair between her legs, rising and easily falling with her sleeping breath.
    I waited near the foot of the stairs till O—— let the sheet fall back into place and came down, relieved, to join me. But I didn’t try for his hand again. I’d need to do it my way and not Laurel’s.
    You’re the knife and I’m the butter.
    I stepped within O——’s compass and smiled up at him; he didn’t move away this time. O—— was tall, a clear head taller than me, so I had to tilt my head to catch his eye.
    “See?” I began. “It’s—”
    There was a