Free Fun with Brady and Angelica (Kit Tolliver #10 (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block

 

     
    R ita said, “Memphis! Did you see Elvis yet?”
    “I was in a restaurant,” she said. “Just a diner, really. And there was an Elvis at one end of the counter and another one in a booth. Those were the only two I’ve seen and I saw them both at once.”
    “Elvis impersonators.”
    “Well, duh, yeah. I mean, if it was just one, I suppose it might have been the King himself, but with two of them—”
    “What I meant was have you been to Graceland.”
    “Oh. No, not yet.”
    “That would have been my first stop. Kimmie, every time you call you’ve got a new phone.”
    “Well, they’re disposable,” she said. “So I tend to dispose of them.”
    “Kimmie, you kill me.” Oh, don’t say that. “You know, I thought I saw you the other afternoon. In Seattle, in Pike Place Market?”
    “It wasn’t me, Rita.”
    “Oh, don’t I know that? I took a good look, and she didn’t really look like you at all.”
    “She was a lot prettier.”
    “Silly! But you know what I went and did?”
    “Picked her up and took her home.”
    “Kimmie!”
    “And ate her pussy.”
    “Kimmie, you’re terrible! ”
    “Am I?”
    “You know you are. But what’s really bad—”
    “You thought about it.”
    “Yes! I went home and jilled about it.”
    “And is that what you’re doing now?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Oh?”
    “But I’m sort of in the mood.”
    “Oh, are you?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well . . .”
    And a little later:
    “So I was out walking one night, and this guy gave me a ride on his motorcycle. I never saw his face. He was all in leather, and he had a beard, and he was wearing these mirrored goggles. And I rode a couple of hundred miles on the back of his motorcycle.”
    “You’re making this up, right? It’s okay if you are, because I like it just fine, but I was wondering—”
    “No, this is real, Rita. Anyway, nothing happened.”
    “Nothing happened? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “There was no sex.”
    “Why not? I mean, even if you were having your period—”
    “Neither of us wanted it.”
    “How come?”
    “I don’t know. We just didn’t. So I’m sitting beside him on the big Harley, and we’re zooming through the night, and there’s nothing in the world but the vibration of the bike and the smell of his beat-up leather jacket, and—”
    “And you came in your pants.”
    “No.”
    “You didn’t? I almost did, just from hearing about it. How come you didn’t?”
    “I don’t know. I suppose I could have.”
    “What stopped you?”
    “I just . . . let it go. Have you ever been, like, out on a cold day, and you’re not dressed for it, and the wind’s like a knife?”
    “And that’s like being on a bike and smelling leather?”
    “No, let me finish. When that happens, out in the cold, there’s a thing I’ll do sometimes. I let the cold just blow right through me, and I visualize it passing through without affecting me. Have you ever tried that?”
    “No.”
    “Well, it sort of works. It’s a mental thing, I guess, but it sort of works.”
    “And that’s what you did? You let this biker guy blow through you?”
    “The feeling I had,” she said. “I just sort of let it pass on through. It stopped being sexual, and then it just went away.”
    “Wow.”
    “I know, it’s hard to explain.”
    “That woman I saw? In the Pike Place Market?”
    “Still thinking about her?”
    “I mean, I never could have approached her. It’s one thing to think of it and something else to act on it.”
    “I know.”
    “I keep thinking I want to try it with a woman. I’m like, Well, if Kim were here, di dah di dah di dah. But you’re not here, and what am I gonna do, walk into a gay bar?”
    “You could.”
    “I know I could. There’s one I keep driving past. I don’t even slow down, but I keep finding excuses to drive past it. Kimmie, tell me the truth, okay? Have you ever been with a woman?”
    “No.”
    “And here we are, a couple of phone sex buddies,