Free After by Marita Golden Page A

part-time job, Carson doubled his salary and had a fat chunk saved. He was just making the money and squirreling it away. Now he knew he’d been saving that money to start a life with Bunny.
    There was no rush, because this was for keeps, he thought in those first weeks. Still, there was so much more of Bunny, so much more than he had imagined as he watched her walk toward him, coming out of the ladies’ room as he stood in line to buy popcorn at the movies, or away from him, her hips undulating in the tight jeans she sometimes wore, as she walked to her front door when Carson took her home. So much more of her than he had thought from holding her on the dance floor at Ecstasy, his hands roaming the geography of her back and her hips as he throbbed bloated and impatient against her groin, as she laughed in his ear and ran her tongue across his lips. There was so much more of her when she was finally in his bed and he suckled her heavy, bulbous breasts, the dark brown nipples tense and veined with desire. Her thighs were more muscular than he thought, and they imprisoned him as she rocked beneath him, her moans not garbled but articulate and clear, chiseling an ancient language on the walls of his room. And there was so much more of her than Carson thought as he kissed her abdomen, the mixture of sweat and perfume, the biting smell of her, blistering his tongue. She shifted her body so that Carson was staring at her pussy as her fingers played with his ears and her hands massaged his head. He didn’t hesitate to kiss her there. Bunny was thrusting and tensing with moans she muffled with her own hand.
    And after Carson made love to her and then fucked her and made love again, and their bodies were twisted and joined in an embrace Carson swore to make last forever, they talked, because what they had just done didn’t shut Carson down like when he’d just made it with the wrong girl.
    Carson asked Bunny about her mother, who still assessed him warily when he came to the house, whose approval he could not seem to win, who set him shuddering with undeserved generalized guilt the way his stepfather, Jimmy Blake, used to do. Bunny lay propped up on several pillows, clutching the sheets above her breasts. Her hair was rumpled, framing her face in a seductive, delicate architecture.
    “My mom’s got a problem. It’s called my dad. They divorced when I was ten and my father remarried. My mom won’t move on, won’t let go of him or what they went through.”
    “So when she looks at me she sees him?”
    “Sort of. I mean, she just doesn’t trust men.”
    “Tell me about it.” Carson sighed, placing his hand beneath the sheets, embedding it between Bunny’s thighs.
    “Maybe you ought to find her a boyfriend.”
    “She can never meet anybody good enough for her. And when they get serious she breaks it off.”
    “Damn, so you mean she
wants
to be miserable, unhappy, and alone?”
    “This
is
my mom we’re talking about,” Bunny said, punching him on the shoulder. “But yeah, sometimes it seems that way.”
    Carson wanted to ask Bunny what her mother had said to her about him, but he didn’t want her to confirm the disdain he saw so often in Doris’s eyes and he didn’t want her to lie.
    By the fall Carson was ready to ask Bunny to marry him. He had quit the weekend security gig to spend more time with her, easily, gratefully letting the job go. Bunny passed the ninety-day test. In ninety days, Carson was convinced, you discovered everything you needed to know about a woman. In ninety days you usually discovered why you’d stay. Or what would one day make you say good-bye.
    Still, Carson kept waiting for Bunny to tell him she couldn’t handle the demands of The Job, how much it took out of him. How little it left, some nights, for her. But she never said those words.
    A week after Thanksgiving Carson met Bunny’s father. Eddie Palmer owned a Ford dealership in Queens, New York, and was staying at a hotel one weekend