Free The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons by Paula Guran Page B

live or to St Louis, as she preferred. I would give her my address and telephone number, with twenty dollars, perhaps, or even thirty. And I would tell her in a friendly fashion that if she could find no better place to stay she could stay with me whenever she chose, on tonight’s terms. I speculated upon a relationship (causal and even promiscuous, if you like) that would not so much spring into being as grow by the accretion of familiarity and small kindnesses. At no time have I been the sort of man women prefer, and I am whole decades past the time in life in which love is found if it is found at all, overcautious and over-intellectual, little known to the world and certainly not rich.
    Yet I dreamt, alone in that dark, high-ceilinged bedroom. In men such as I, the foolish fancies of boyhood are superseded only by those of manhood, unsought visions less gaudy, perhaps, but more foolish still.
    Even in these the demon’s shadow fell between us; I felt certain then that she had escaped, and that he had come to take her back. I heard the flushing of the toilet, heard water run in the tub, and compelled myself to listen no more.
    Though it was a cold night, the room we would share was warm. I went to the window most remote from the bathroom door, raised the shade, and stood for a time staring up at the frosty stars, then stretched myself quite naked upon the bed, thinking of many things.
     
    I started when the bathroom door opened; I must have been half asleep.
    “I’m finished,” Eira said, “you can go in now.” Then, “Where are you?”
    My own eyes were accommodated to the darkness, as hers were not. I could make her out, white and ghostly, in the starlight; and I thrilled at the sight. “I’m here,” I told her, “on the bed. It’s over this way.” As I left the bed and she slipped beneath its sheets and quilt, our hands touched. I recall that moment more clearly than any of the rest.
    Instructed by her lack of night vision (whether real or feigned), I pulled the dangling cord of the bathroom light before I toweled myself dry. When I opened the door, half expecting to find her gone, I could see her almost as well as I had when she had emerged from the bathroom, lying upon her back, her hair a damp-darkened aureole about her head and her arms above the quilt. I circled the bed and slid in.
    “Nice bath?” Then, “How do you want to do it?”
    “Slowly,” I said.
    At which she giggled like a schoolgirl. “You’re fun. You’re not like him at all, are you?”
    I hoped that I was not, as I told her.
    “I know – do that again – who you are! You’re Larry.”
    I was happy to hear it; I had tired of being myself a good many years ago.
    “He was the smartest boy in school – in the high school that my husband and I graduated from. He was Valedictorian, and president of the chess club and the debating team and all that. Oh, my!”
    “Did you go out with him?” I was curious, I confess.
    “Once or twice. No, three times. Times when there was something I wanted to go to – a dance or a game – and my husband couldn’t take me, or wouldn’t. So I went with Larry, dropping hints, you know that I’d like to go, then saying okay when he asked. I never did this with him, though. Just with my husband, except that he wasn’t my husband then. Could you sorta run your fingers inside my knees and down the backs of my legs?”
    I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”
    “That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”
    “You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”
    “Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and