Free In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood Page A

April. Her scent, a fleshy undertone in the shower’s downpour, told me she was ready.
    â€œGuide me,” I whispered, and April’s hands groped for me again. She led my body’s blind, rigid desire to the place where her heat reached its nexus. Suddenly, with a virgin’s tremor, I realized I had slipped inside of her. She bore down with her mouth open wide as I filled her, and I was consumed by her endless, grasping embrace. I climbed as high as physics allowed. We rocked and moved together beneath the shower stream, whimpering in chorus.
    For all we knew, water and pleasure washed us both clean away.
    Later, without saying a word, April climbed nude beneath my sheets. I nestled beside her, spooning her as I enjoyed the treat of her company through the long night. The humiliation I’d felt with Lynda Jewell was nearly forgotten with her healing presence, as if April confirmed only the best parts of me. Like the first time she slept in my bed.
    I had drifted off before I was awakened by April’s wordless anxieties. She hadn’t moved or made a sound, but I knew from her breathing that she wasn’t asleep. I gazed toward her in the darkness until I saw a glimmer from her eyes.
    Tears?
    My heart caught. “Baby?” I said.
    â€œI’m sorry I woke you up,” she said in a tiny voice. Trying to hide the tears.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    It took her only seconds to answer, but the wait was years. Maybe I had lost her trust, which can’t be replaced. I’ve rarely felt so helpless as I did waiting for her to tell me my fate.
    April sighed a long, fractured sigh. I heard her nose bubble. “Ten…I’m just lying here thinking…and I might not ever have another chance like this. I have to go to South Africa.”
    I wondered why it had taken her so long to figure that out.
    I wanted to try to talk her out of it, but that would have been selfish. Most people travel less, not more, as they grow older. April was twenty-eight. It was her time.
    â€œI know.”
    I thought about Alice, the actress who had left me my house in her will. She’d never had any children, and I was her favorite house-sitter, so she made the job permanent when she died. With April and Chela and Dad around, the house felt less like Alice’s and more like mine, but within those walls Alice was rarely far from my mind. Alice was the closest thing I’d had to a relationship—and she was a client, not a true lover. I saw Alice very late into her life, until she was as old as Billy Dee. I was almost young enough to be her grandson.
    Maybe if life had promised Alice more of a future, I would have wanted her in mine. I can’t say; my thoughts had never dwelled there. But she was my longest-standing client, and my favorite. Every few months, she’d call and send me a ticket to join her in Calcutta, or Tokyo, or Johannesburg, and then she’d kiss me fondly good-bye at the airport, send me home, and vanish for a while. She had a “gentleman friend” the whole time I knew her. Sometimes Alice and I traveled together, and she introduced me as her nephew. Sometimes she left me behind to water her plants and feed her fish. In Alice’s memory, I fought to keep those neons and tetras alive. All the original fish had died, but you replace one at a time, so the actual pet is the tank.
    Her laugh was golden. I wish I had recorded her stories; she was the most fascinating person I have ever known. I missed her when she was gone. I still do. I remember sitting in Alice’s empty house, stir-crazy while I waited for her to come home. Waiting is excruciating work. I told myself only a fool would agree to a long-distance relationship. Not me. Never.
    That night, lying in bed beside the first woman who’d helped me understand why a man would want to be married, I remembered my vow: Never. I loved South Africa, but my drop-everything-and-leave days were long behind