Free All Seeing Eye by Rob Thurman

things pass. It was nice to be reminded of the few exceptions. Abby had helped me with decorating the entire place. I might cultivate my personal look, but when it came to decking out the house, I was like most guys. I bought whatwas functional and closest to the checkout counter, so to speak. If I could sit on it or sleep in it, that’s pretty much all that mattered. Or at least so I thought. Abby straightened me out quick on that front.
    I’d liked what she did with the rest of the house. It was bold and masculine and comfortable. The bedroom had been a different story. She and Gemma, her British girlfriend at the time, had wanted to do the room in white. For peace and moral purity, they’d said, Gemma in all her feng shui seriousness and Abby with a naughty wink. I think Abby was under the impression that I got more action than I actually did. I’m not saying I hadn’t gone through my share some years ago. After a while, that kind of tomcatting had gotten old, but not for the more noble and mature reasons most might eventually reach. I simply had gotten tired of the trying to tune out women’s life stories—stories they’d be horrified to find out I knew. Some guys, dumb-asses usually, bitch that their dates won’t shut up. Try multiplying that by a thousand, a million. I’d learned over the years to hold things off to a certain extent in my day-to-day life, keep it at arm’s length where it was a persistent whisper instead of a loud, constant drone. I’d gotten good at it. But during sex, all bets were off. All that skin-to-skin contact combined with the usual brain shutdown, arm’s length was hardly an option. Try doing your business with a person shouting her life storyin each ear. I’m not saying it isn’t doable, but it’s a challenge, no doubt about it.
    Abby, on the other hand, worked both sides of the fence. Men or women, they were both fair game. She was monogamous and honest to a fault with whomever she ran with, but there was no denying she had a healthy dating and sex life. And she wasn’t averse to sharing the details. Half the time, I didn’t need that nudie mag in my desk. Abby was all the entertainment that money needn’t buy. Once-long hair was now cropped to short platinum curls. That and the tiny diamond stud in her nose had changed her style considerably, but she was still Abby through and through. She had just grown up, and grown up damn fine.
    Was I jealous? Hell, yes, I was jealous. Being a human ask-the-eight-ball wasn’t exactly compensation, no two ways about it. The moment when scarlet stars burst behind your eyes and the base of your spine melts into warm pudding, to feel that and nothing else—how could I not envy that? To hold someone tightly in a tangle of warm limbs and heated breath without seeing the cheap green tile of an abortion clinic and hearing the sobs of a scared and sad sixteen-year-old girl, I couldn’t even begin to imagine it. That was the thing. To her, that memory might be ten years old, melancholy but faded to a rain-washed watercolor. To me, it was fresh as the day … the very minute it had happened. The sound of the vacuum. The nurse’s hand warm and tight onhers. The fact that her boyfriend hadn’t shown up even though he had promised. The ache, strange and different, like none she’d felt before. That was just one memory, one among numbers uncounted. Good, bad, indifferent. Everyone had them. If that weren’t bad enough, and it was, the women who knew what I did for a living always had this look, this wary, corner-of-their-eye expectation, when we were in bed. Whether they actually bought the whole psychic package or not, they still had the look. Does he know I wore the underwear with the ripped elastic because it was laundry day? Yeah, I did. Does he know who I’ll marry? When I’ll die? No. Thank God or the lack thereof … no.
    So, moral purity was less of a problem than I wished it were.
    For the bedroom, I’d vetoed white. Anything but