Free When She Was Bad: A Thriller by Jonathan Nasaw Page A

after twenty years on the links still hovered around the drinking age.
    Not that there was any shortage of either booze or bars on the peninsula, he told Irene. But at least there nobody felt sorry for him—largely because he’d told no one of his loss. “So you can see, it’s nothing personal,” he concluded. “You’re an attractive, intelligent woman, Irene— with legs to die for, don’t think I haven’t noticed. And I’m flattered as hell you’d even consider…well, you know. But it’s too soon—I’m just not ready yet.”
    Irene raised her head—she’d spent the last few minutes studying the carpet—and cocked it to the side, looking up into Pender’s pained eyes. “Yet being the operative word?” she asked him.
    “Oh, definitely,” said Pender.
    She smiled. “Well that’s going to be a little awkward, isn’t it? Waiting for yet, I mean.”
    Pender thought it over. “Tell you what. When the time is right, I’ll show up at your door in a slinky negligee,” he said, just as Irene raised her glass to her lips.
    And so what was to have been an evening of romance dissolved into a spit take. But afterward, alone in her room, when her mind insisted on exploring her moment of humiliation the way a tongue explores a broken tooth, up popped the image of Pender knocking on her door in a see-through negligee, carrying a box of candy and a floral bouquet, and she found herself smiling instead of weeping.
    Pender too, had a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, he told himself, when he was alone in his room again. Turning down that elegant trim at your age—good God, man, you must have lost your mind.
    8

    “Anything else before I go?” inquired the chunky, bespectacled night nurse. She had already brought Lyssy a glass of water, given him his sleeping pill, helped him take off his leg and change into his pajamas, and tucked the covers around him.
    “Yeah, could you move my crutches closer to the bed? In case I have to go to the bathroom?” Lyssy, who’d been trying to postpone the inevitable, began to sense the nurse’s growing impatience. The problem was, he wasn’t just afraid of the dark, he was afraid of anybody knowing he was afraid.
    “There you go. Anything else?” She waited by the door, her finger poised at the keypad, ready to punch in the security code.
    “I guess not.”
    “Good night, then.”
    “Good night.”
    The heavy door slid open, then closed again behind the nurse, locking automatically. The ceiling panels dimmed gradually; soon the only illumination in the room was a faint trapezoid the color of moonlight, cast onto the carpet by the recessed night-light in the bathroom.
    What a roller coaster of a day, thought Lyssy, slipping one hand under his pajama bottoms and closing it around his penis, which was already satisfactorily heavy with anticipation.
    To make it hard, he thought about the girl he’d met this afternoon, then plugged her image into his standard masturbatory template, which always involved a rescue. Tonight he would save Lily from a fire—another night it might be Miss Stockings whom he saved from a flood, or the pretty black nutritionist who had to be rescued from one of Lyssy’s neighbors on the locked ward. And after the fire (because for Lyssy the idea of even taking the initiative in a sexual encounter, much less resorting to coercion or violence, was a brake-screeching turnoff), Lily became the grateful aggressor. I know what you want, she whispered as she began to undress herself at the foot of the bed, I know what you need….
    Another feature common to Lyssy’s sexual fantasies was that the actual sex tended to be indistinct, breast-oriented, and R-rated—he rarely got as far as the nitty-gritty before reaching orgasm.
    Tonight, though, strange things started happening. Lyssy had stroked himself into a sort of trance state, picturing the girl turning her back to him while she slipped off her bomber jacket. But when she