Free Thief of Dreams by John Yount Page B

embarrassed and ashamed.
    â€œI believe it,” James said, “otherwise I’d be dead.” Lester, he’d decided long ago, was made out of something inhuman, steel wire or some such thing, since no one so thin had any right to be so strong, and horseplay with him was always painful. Mostly because he was clumsy and would half kill you by accident.

EDWARD TALLY
    â€œEnter,” Paris sang out when he knocked on her door, and he came in to find her on the love seat in her underwear, wads of cotton between her toes and all her fingers sticking out at odd angles. Her fingernails and toenails were red as blood, red as her lips, and she was waving her hands around as though shooing flies. “I’m just about ready,” she said and puckered her lips for a kiss.
    â€œSure you are,” he told her, wondering how she’d known it was him, or if she’d known it was him, since she always complained about the man downstairs who found endless excuses to come knocking on her door. “Mmmmmmmh,” she said, kissing him, holding his head down with her wrists, although he could still feel her waving her hands around behind his head to dry her nails.
    â€œI just have to slip into my sundress and sandals. All the serious primping is over,” she told him. “Why don’t you make us a gin and tonic, sweetie, while my nails dry.”
    He got down glasses, poured a generous dollop of gin in each, got a lime, tonic, and ice from her refrigerator, and made the drinks. She took a sip of hers, leaving a smudge of lipstick on the rim of the glass, and when he saw it, he realized his mouth felt peculiar, somehow waxy, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. There was a streak of red from his watch to his knuckles. He wiped his mouth again.
    â€œAwwwwh, you looked cute,” she said. “I like it when you’ve got my lipstick on.” She cocked her head and puffed out her lower lip in a pout. “Then anybody can see you belong to me.”
    â€œSince Lincoln freed the slaves, no one belongs to anyone,” he told her.
    â€œAren’t we in a nice mood,” she said. “Is it because of the zoo? Do you not want to take me to the zoo?”
    He wiped his mouth again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Six days a week and twelve hours a day, climbing around in the top of a steel mill putting up conduit …” He waved the rest of his apology away. It was a lie anyhow. He was angry, but he wasn’t sure why. “You look beautiful, and I’m glad to take you to the zoo, or any damned place you’d like to go.” He winked at her and took a swallow of his gin and tonic, grinning, trying his best to look happy as hell, but she eyed him suspiciously, reluctant, it seemed, to give up her pouting.
    Maybe she thought it was seductive, and in some strange way it was, her lower lip puffed out, the pink buds of her nipples and the shadow of her pubic hair showing through the sheer, lacy, buff-colored underwear, which was so nearly the color of her skin she might have grown it too, merely as a decoration. One long leg was bent at the knee, her foot, cotton between the vivid toes, braced on the edge of the love seat; the other leg flopped, loose-jointed, with her heel resting on the floor. She had the slender, wonderful muscle tone of a dancer and short, kinky blond hair with a vicious part down the middle as straight as a chalk line. There was, in fact, blond hair all over her, a soft whirl of it in the small of her back and on her belly, at her temples and on her upper lip, but it was soft as down, as peach fuzz, as velvet; and it made her seem both little-girlish and somehow feline. She was all over the color of ripe wheat. Even her eyes weren’t so much hazel as yellow, fringed with thick, buff eyelashes she crimped in a curler.
    â€œGod damn,” he said, put his drink down on the end table—pushing aside an assortment of cutesy carnival