T hey returned to the dance floor, conscious of the fleeting minutes and wishing they had more of them. When the first song ended, Joseph turned from her, and she saw a slash of light gray angling across the back of his jacket.
"Joseph, you're marked."
Quickly he turned to face her. "I'm what?"
"Turn around again. Your jacket is dirty from the floor of the gazebo." He presented his broad back, and as she brushed it free of evidence, she wondered what his shoulders looked like inside the clothing. She was too aware of how hard his muscles were, of how trim his contours, especially down his lower half. He looked back over his shoulder and grinned.
"I could get used to this if you'd let me."
She stopped brushing, hand hanging in midair as he turned slowly to face her again, and she stared at the appendage as if wondering whose hand it was. Then she clutched it to her stomach.
"Safe subjects… remember?" she reminded him just as the music began again.
"Pick one," he ordered, reverting to a waltz position with six inches of space dividing their bellies.
She grabbed the first passing thought. "Where did you take the bride?"
"Out to Daytona."
"You mean the Daytona Club?"
"Yes."
"Why ever did you pick a place like that?"
"Because I'm a member, and it's a twenty-minute ride, and we had to keep her away an hour, anyway. So we went out there and had a drink."
"You're a member?" she asked, surprised.
"Yes."
"What do you play?"
"Tennis, racket ball, golf. Nearly everything. I like to keep in shape."
Her eyes grew round and glittery. "I do, too!"
"I could tell that from the condition of your muscles. You're as hard and smooth as a watermelon."
"So are you. What's your favorite?"
"Depends on the season. In the summer I like tennis because it's more active than golf. I play baseball, too, with my brothers. In the winter I do some jogging and play quite a bit of racket ball, again with my brothers.
"So do I-oh, not with my brothers, of course. I don't have any brothers. But Sandy and I play racket ball, or we used to, but I suppose that may change now that she's married. She and Mick will probably do that together from now on."
"What about old Hildegard? Doesn't he play with you?"
Was there a sexy glint in his eye, a note of sexual innuendo in the question? If so, she chose to ignore it.
"Occasionally. But he doesn't care for physical things. He likes to be neat and fragrant and unsweaty. He's a brain man. I'm a body woman."
Joseph Duggan's eyes made a tour of her face. He lingered longest upon her lips, then nestled her securely against his sturdy frame. Into her ear he said, "So tell me… what else don't you and the computer man have in common besides physical activity and the wonders of silicon chips?"
"Not much else. Only our taste in clothing."
"What?" He backed up and looked down at her breasts, then up at her hair. "What could he possibly not like about your taste in clothing?"
"Oh, I hardly ever dress like this, in all these feminine things. That's his main complaint. I'm active. I like sweat suits and blue jeans and tennis shoes and headbands. He says clothes make the man-or the person, rather. There are times when we get ready to go out, and I know he's disappointed when I show up in jeans and cowboy boots. I'm trying to get used to dressing in cuter things."
"Why should you?"
His question stunned her. It was the first time she'd bothered to probe the issue. She'd always felt it was a shortcoming in her, as a woman, that she preferred boyish clothes. Her mother had never failed to chide her for dressing like a tomboy.
"But, even you said you liked the way I'm dressed today."
"I love the way you're dressed today. But I'll bet you're sexy as hell in a pair of jogging shorts and running shoes with your ankles bare and your hair bouncing around free." His eyes lifted to it momentarily, then slid down again.
"When you say things like that, it makes me want to jump into my sweats and take a fast sprint around a blacktop track. That's the real me, not the one in this hairdo and merry-widow bra."
"Then let's do it."
"What?"
He dropped his arms from her waist and checked his watch. "It's only five to one. That's early. There's got to be someplace in this city where we can find an empty jogging track that's got at least one streetlight shining on it. Let's go and burn it up. Whaddya say?"
"Are you serious?"
"Dead serious. I've been wracking my brain, trying to come up with some ingenious suggestion for something we can do together. It's almost time to call it a night here, and I find I haven't had my fill of you yet. I want to be with you a little longer. Can you think of anything safer for the two of us to do than jogging?"
She couldn't. A smile touched her lips, then lighted her eyes, and he thought he'd never seen a woman more beautiful. The hair at her right temple was roughened and pulled askew. Once again her lipstick was gone. But she had a beauty that surpassed superficiality. He wondered what she'd look like right after a shower, when all artifice was gone from her face and hair.
"You'd have to stop by my place so I can pick up some sweats."
"And then you'd have to stop by mine so I can pick up some, too."
The night suddenly sparkled with adventure. She didn't have to say goodbye to him yet! "Let's." She smiled impishly.
"You're on!" He grabbed her hand and towed her toward the table to collect her hat, flowers and makeup bag, and two minutes later they were pulling away from the curb in his '23 Haynes Sport Coupelet.
She crossed her left ankle over her right knee, took off the high heel and massaged her foot. "Excuse me, but you have no idea how grossly uncomfortable dyed-to-match satin pumps can be, especially when you buy them for a wedding. You never have a chance to break them in because if you get a mark on them, it's there to stay."
"You mean all this time your feet were aching, yet you kept me dancing without letup?"
"Well, I do love to dance." She angled him a cute smirk. "But it's more fun in old shoes."
"So take 'em off. We won't stand on formality around here."
She eased off the other shoe and wriggled her toes. She stretched her legs as best she could on the angular old car seat. "Ohh… that feels good."
"Here, give me a foot," he ordered, one hand on the wheel, his eyes on the late-night streets where there was virtually no traffic. "And tell me how to get to your house."
"Take Brooklyn Boulevard to Shingle Creek Parkway and turn right. I live in a town house on the corner." The front seat of the old car was very narrow. She backed up against the door and plunked her heels on the car seat, then pushed her dress down between her updrawn knees. He captured her left foot and rubbed it firmly, his hand slipping over the silky nylon, sending shivers up her calves.
"Don't lean against that door. These old cars weren't exactly built for safety."
She curled her spine, dropped her head onto her knees and concentrated on the sensual feeling of his thumb massaging the arch of her foot. "Mmm… you're very good at that, considering I'm the physical therapist." Her voice came muffled from the depths of her lap.
"That's right. I forgot you were. Well, maybe you can give me a rubdown after we run."
She lifted her head and rested her chin on her crossed forearms, which still rested on her knees. "I said I'm a therapist, not a trainer."
He laughed and pressed her foot against his thigh, then left his warm hand covering it. Within five minutes they'd arrived at her house. She rummaged around on the floor of the car for all the trappings she'd dumped there at various times today. There was no interior light in the old flivver, but at last she'd gathered a stack of what she hoped was everything.
"Can I carry something?" he offered.
"Yes, you can bring the plastic clothing bag with my other dress in it." She fished it off the floor, and while transferring the crooks of the hangers into his hand, their fingers touched. For a brief moment neither of them moved. Then she picked up her possessions and hurriedly opened her door. "Come on in and see my house."
There was a For Sale sign in the yard, and he looked back at it while she struggled to fit her key in the lock. "I take it, it's your house that's up for sale."
"Naturally. What would Paul and I do with two houses when he's trying to earn the money to furnish one?"
"No buyers yet?"
"No, the market's been in a slump, the realtors say. But I'm hoping to get more lookers now that spring is here."
Inside she snapped on the entry light, and they faced an ordinary living room decorated in saffron yellow and white. The furniture was nondescript: a striped sofa in shades of brown, two director's chairs in yellow canvas, a table made from an enormous wooden spool-the kind steel telephone cable comes wrapped upon. A wine jug sat on the floor in one corner, sprouting dried bearded wheat and milkweed pods painted in horribly garish purple, red and royal blue. She caught him eyeing the ugly arrangement and offered, "One of my younger patients gave those to me last year, and I haven't had the heart to throw them away. I know they're awful, but I love them in spite of it." She turned, and he watched the slit in the lace along the center of her back shift with each step as she walked away down a hall. Just before she reached what appeared to be her bedroom doorway, both elbows flew in the air, and she reached for the hook and eye at her nape. There followed a soft click as her bedroom door shut, then his long sigh as he ran a hand through his hair. He tried to keep his mind off what she was doing back there. He toured her living room, then the small efficient galley kitchen behind it-a cereal bowl in the sink with three Cheerios stuck to a glutinous puddle of milk, pencils sticking out of a mug that said "Killer" on its side, a tablet on which was written "buy deodorant." He smiled and crossed to a sliding glass door hovering high above the dark yard. He slid it open and stepped out onto a small planked deck. Bracing his hands on the rail, he listened to the soft rush of Shingle Creek chortling in the dark.
She was the kind of woman he'd been searching for for a long time. At least, so far he thought so. Just his luck to find her and learn she was engaged to another man. He hoped Hildebrandt had more than silicon chips in his pants-she seemed like the kind who needed and deserved a mate who was all man, demanding and reciprocating. She had that way about her-the strong sure way she moved, walked, danced. She exuded a physicality. And she had the body of an athlete-toned, tensile, firm. Surely a body like that must be agile when it came to loving.
He stepped back inside and closed the sliding door. "Are you decent?" he called.
"Yes."
"Can I come back there?"
A silent pause followed, then she called, "Yes, come ahead."
The doorknob clicked, the door swung open slowly, and Joseph Duggan leaned against the frame, his weight slung on one hip and his hands slipped inside his trouser pockets. His eyes swept her gray sweat pants and hooded shirt, then swerved to the bed where her merry widow lay like a plaster cast of the front half of her body. She snatched it up and stuffed it into a dresser drawer.
"Why aren't you and this computer man living together? Wouldn't it be cheaper?"
"I bought this town house two years ago because he said it'd be the wisest thing to do with my money at the time-an investment, you know? Then when we got engaged, he started looking for a house for both of us right away, and as soon as we found it, I put this one on the market. Unfortunately it hasn't sold, and I'm stuck here until it does."
"Meaning you'd rather be living with him?"
She dropped to the foot of the bed and began pulling on tasseled white sport footlets and a pair of Adidas. "You're very presumptuous, asking questions like that." Her eyes never left her feet.
"Sorry," he said with not the least hint of pique at her sharp retort. His eyes moved from item to item around the room: the rumpled bed, unmade, but with the spread tossed up, half covering the pillows; her panty hose; one discarded satin pump lying on its side with the tiny pearl against the saffron carpet; photographs stuck into the edge of an old-fashioned dressing-table mirror; a tangle of Ace bandages on a dresser top to his left, lying beside a black perfume bottle, a round white plastic container of body powder, a handful of change, a pair of theater-ticket stubs, a package of Big Red gum and a small plastic case with compartments numbered like days of the month.
He eased his shoulder nonchalantly away from the door frame and ambled over to the dresser, chose the black flask, uncapped it and took a deep sniff. He watched her pull on one tennis shoe while he smelled the perfume and admired the curve of her spine as she bent sharply from her perch on the mattress. Without a comment he placed the Chanel No 5 back where he'd found it, then tinkered around, touching other things atop her dresser, observing that half the compartments in her birth-control pillbox were empty before moving on to the quaint scarred dressing table.
He knew very well she'd observed him inspecting her personal possessions, particularly the pills. And she knew he knew. He admired her for not leaping up and fussing about it in some artificially apologetic way.
"Is this you?"
She looked up to find his palms braced on the top of the dressing table, head cocked to one side as he studied a photo slipped between the mirror and its frame.
"Yours truly," she replied, reaching for her other shoe. He glanced back over his shoulder, still braced on the dresser, and gave her a disarming grin. "You were really cute in the pigtails. But what happened to all those freckles?"
"Luckily I outgrew them."
"Mmm, too bad," he mused, returning his attention to the photo and a string of others. "You played tennis in school?"
"Uh-huh."
"I played basketball and ran in track."
Her shoes were tied. She threw him a defiant look. "You don't seem tall enough to be a basketball player." She stood up, pulled her sweat shirt down at the waist, then reached around him to get a brush from the top of the dresser. He didn't move, only turned his head aside to watch her shoulder and breast brush close to his arm.
"I was one of those quick wily guards. What I lacked in height I made up for in speed."
"I'll bet." She smirked, and he finally straightened, then pulled out a small boudoir chair from under the kneehole of the dated dressing table, slung his leg over as if he were mounting a bronco and straddled it, facing her.
"I detect a wry note in that comment." He relaxed back, catching both elbows on the table behind him. The two top buttons of his shirt were freed, revealing a V of pale brown hair on his chest. His tuxedo jacket fell aside while the snowy ruffles of his jabot thrust forward, framed by the deep low U-shaped curve of his vest. The pose was unqualifiedly masculine. Unequivocally sexy. And it conjured up in Winnifred's mind the word "hombre." With his knees widespread on either side of the low delicate back of the diminutive chair, he looked more virile and tempting than ever. The black fabric of his trousers stretched taut across his groin.
She raised her eyes to find his had been watching the direction of her study, and she dredged up a comment to put him in his place because she herself was acutely discomfited by what she'd just seen.
"Short and fast, that describes you pretty well, I'd say."
"I'm tall enough to put you where you belong, and I can be as slow as the next man when the occasion merits."
"We are talking about basketball, aren't we, Mr. Duggan?"
"Are we?"
She was removing the hairpins from her coil when he answered the last question with one of his own. Her hand stifled in midair, and she treated him to the guileless single-eyed blink that fascinated him so. She did it with her left eye, again in slow motion, and he was certain she wasn't aware of the fact that she possessed this intriguing reflex, or that it showed up whenever she was tense or embarrassed.
Suddenly she seemed to realize she was staring at him, motionless, and began searching her hair once more for hairpins. She pulled out a handful while he watched her every movement, then indolently reached out a palm, waiting. She dropped the pins into his hand, stepped back a safe distance and began brushing her hair while he watched her as carefully as if she were poised prey.
"You have the most fascinating nervous reaction that I'll bet you're not aware of." She kept pulling the brush through her hair but made no reply. "Did you know you sometimes blink only your left eye? In extremely slow motion?"
"I do?" The brush stopped.
"You do. And it makes me want to do things I have no right to think about."
Abruptly, almost angrily, he thrust himself forward, swung his leg over the chair back, stretched to his feet, but turned his back on her. When all was silent for a long minute, he glanced back over his shoulder and ordered harshly, "Keep brushing, for God's sake, and let's get out of here!"
She couldn't help smiling at his smooth black shoulders, wondering if the reason he'd leaped off that chair was the one she thought-because if he hadn't, things were going to start showing any second.
"I'm ready. All I need is a sweatband. Excuse me."
He whirled and jumped out of her way when he discovered her close behind him, waiting to get at a drawer of the dressing table. She stood only a scant foot from him while ducking down to see in the mirror, slipping a braided red headband over her disorderly hair. "I'm a mess, but what the heck. All I'm going to do is run."
Maybe not, he thought, but smiled at her refreshing acceptance of her rather unflattering state. She looked better to him now in her baggy sweat pants than she'd looked in her pink ankle-length dress. She looked approachable, messable and altogether feminine.
At his house they crept. "Shh!" he warned. "My brothers are sleeping." He snapped on a dim light in an old crowded back entry. Basement stairs led straight ahead, and up one step to the left was a kitchen. It was as vintage as his cars, this house. It was built in the forties most likely and had as much class as a four-buckle overshoe. He'd said it was his grandparents' home, and she could see touches of the grandmother left behind: an ivy in a brass pot hanging by a chain above the kitchen sink; an old black cast-iron Dutch oven with a cover, sitting on a very dirty stove; a kitchen dock shaped like a red plastic teakettle. The floor was covered not in vinyl, but with linoleum-one-foot squares of red and gray straight from 1950. It was worn in front of the stove, and the black sublayer was beginning to show through. Linoleum, for heaven's sake! He left her to go upstairs, and she poked her head into a dark living room and heard the floorboards creaking overhead where Joseph rummaged for his athletic clothes. A bass voice mumbled something, and Joseph's answered-undoubtedly he'd roused one of his brothers. She heard what sounded like an ancient dresser drawer screeching as it resisted closing, then two thumps that might have been Joseph's dress shoes hitting the floor. She switched on a living-room lamp and perused the room: leftovers of grandma's. An overstuffed sofa with a matching chair, both of wear-like-iron nylon frieze; a step table with a bowl of peanut shells on it; an NFL magazine that was six months old and a stack of newspapers not much newer; an embroidered doily that needed washing and starching-or better yet, throwing away; a black-and-red wool lumberman's shirt and a disreputable-looking pair of work boots with leather strings and oily curled-up toes; ancient ecru-lace panel curtains-lace? Stucco walls. But upon them she saw the first touch she knew to be Joseph's: large color photos of vintage cars, framed in stainless steel and fronted with glass. There were five of them in the room, each one classier than the next. She was facing the largest of them when Joseph spoke just behind her shoulder.
"That's my dream. To own one of those babies one day."
She leaned forward and inspected the fancy English round hand at the bottom of the picture. "1932 Duesenberg Model SJ." She turned her head to watch his profile as he studied the picture with a reverence she found enlightening.
"When you get it, will you take me for a ride?"
His hand stole up and squeezed the side of her neck. "Honey, it's a date. I'll find you if you're findable by dry land."
She was suddenly saddened to think that if that day ever came, she couldn't go for the ride with him. She remembered the way he'd kissed her in the Haynes this afternoon, how he'd carefully dipped his head down to miss her hat brim, then had to dip back out again as he retreated. She thought of their encounter in the gazebo. And suddenly she wished he'd turn her around by the shoulders and kiss her again, without hat or hairdo to be careful of, with nothing more than their soft sweat suits between their two honed bodies. But instead, he only squeezed the side of her neck and spoke about the car before them.
"They say there were less than forty of those made. But they were the most prestigious car ever produced anywhere, and in their day had an exclusive reputation that put Rolls-Royce to shame. They'd deliver three hundred horsepower and perform like no other machine before or since. The SJ could top one hundred miles an hour in second gear! And she could go from a standstill to one hundred miles an hour in seventeen seconds. And you want to know something sad?"
She didn't, but he went on, still gazing at the picture. "The man she was named after was killed in an accident while driving one of these in 1932."
She lifted her face and half turned to look up at him. "In a way that's not as sad as it might have been. He died doing the thing he probably loved doing best in all the world."
His eyes met hers. "You're right, Winn. I never looked at it that way before. And he accomplished a lot in his life that was left for posterity-he and his brother had a lot to do with developing the Indy 500 into what it is today."
"You mean the Duesenberg is an American car?"
"As apple pie."
"It sounds German."
"They were immigrants, the Duesenberg brothers."
Joseph and Winnie stood for a minute longer in the dim light of the farmhouse-style living room with its peanut shells and work boots and its oddly contrasting 1932 Duesenberg.
"Well, good luck, Joseph Duggan," she said at last very quietly, her eyes on his prize, his dream.
He shook himself from his reverie and tugged on her neck. "Come on, let's go run. I think I know just the place."
They ran around the quarter-mile of Osseo Senior High School, only a few blocks from his house. They drove over in the Haynes and left it parked in the middle of the deserted parking lot. Silently they crossed the blacktop, made their way inside the chain-link fence surrounding the football field and track and peered at the white-painted lane lines that were barely visible in the deep night.
Then they were running side by side, puffing hard, their breathing coming in long controlled intakes and exhalations. There was only the sound of it and the slap of their rubber soles on the blacktop.
She thought of what a joy it was to run beside a man who enjoyed it as much as she.
He thought of what a damn fool old Hildegard was, to show no interest in sharing this with her.
She thought of what Joseph Duggan's legs must look like inside his navy sweat pants as the muscles flexed and stretched.
He pictured the curve of her buttocks, her flanks, her thighs reaching rhythmically along the track before him-naked.
She wondered if he'd ever get his Duesenberg. He wondered if she'd really marry a silicon chip.
She wondered if he did this with the Perkins hostess.
He wondered who'd do this with her once she married the wrong man.
She thought she could run like this beside him forever.
He considered asking her to.
They'd circled the four-forty eight times when they approached the place from which they'd started.
"Want to go around again?" he asked without breaking stride.
"No, I've had enough."
They veered off the track, breathing hard, but not hurting. To their right rose a high set of metal bleachers, standing out like white ribs beneath the quarter moon that hung in the southwestern sky. They slowed to a cool-down pace and reverted to walking side by side, blowing and flexing and shaking their limbs. They padded on silent grass in the middle of the oval, heading for the break in the chain-link fence.
The city was silent-it was perhaps three o'clock in the morning. The only sound came from a diesel truck that rolled off down the highway beyond the far side of the football field, then all was still but for their labored breathing. They stopped on the black track-by now their eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and its white ribbons of paint stood out like writing on a blackboard.
She flexed forward at the waist, bracing her hands just above her kneecaps, hanging that way. He hung his hands upon his hipbones and leaned backward, blinking, then studying the stars. They both straightened at the same time, facing each other with nothing but three feet of night between them.
He saw her upraised face, bathed in star shine, and the hair upon her temples-damp tendrils clinging down her cheeks below the braided headband that crossed her forehead. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly. He could smell the vestiges of Chanel No 5, brought again to life by her warm sweating body.
"Forgive me for doing this, Winn, but it's got to be done, so I'll know…" His left arm circled her just beneath the ribs, and his right hooked over her opposite shoulder. He pulled her flush against his warm damp body, burying her lips beneath his in a kiss that was wholly different from that shared in the front seat of his Haynes or those exchanged in the gazebo. This was elemental, forceful, like two planets that have been reeling off orbit for several light years and finally collide in a shower of meteorites.
His mouth was open, hot and wet, and his tongue delved into her mouth with ripe demand for response. She gave it, satisfying her own need for this man, telling herself she would satisfy it no further, that this would surely be enough. But she had scarcely thrown her arms around his neck and back before she realized her mistake. This would never be enough-not with this man.
Their sweat suits were damp and scarcely concealed the firmness of the flesh beneath. Hers was equally as toned as his, equally as healthy. Holding her, kissing her with an almost frantic meeting of tongues, he slipped his hand up beneath the ribbed waistband, finding the small of her back damp and inviting. He ran his hand up, up, across the hard flesh just beneath her shoulder blades, collecting the sweet moisture from her skin as he went, moving left to right across the constricting band of her bra where it scarcely depressed the firm muscle.
She, too, slipped one hand beneath his shirt: warmth, dampness and rigid muscle greeted her caress. Their breathing, already labored from the two-mile run, became torturous now as their emotions swelled, and temptation brought their bodies to a fine-tuned peak of readiness.
And, Judas, he felt good. Hard, so hard. Against every surface that touched him, there was nothing less than hard. The soft moldable cotton of their garments conformed to their limbs, leaving little bulk between them to disguise how eagerly they strained toward one another. He stepped forward, placing one leg between hers, and their mutual height made the conformation of their bodies totally complementary. She followed his lead and widened her stance, allowing his hard thigh to press upward against the warm juncture of her legs, and answered the quest for familiarity by exploring him likewise, lifting a knee that was buttressed on either side by his firm thighs. Against the soft hollow beneath her hip, his urgency was transmitted by the thrust of his pelvis. It brought him undulating rhythmically against her, and she answered, in kind.
Inside her sweat shirt his hand went clear up to her neck, circling it, and threading fingers up into her scalp, which also was warm and damp, and exuded the scent of hair spray, not wholly unpleasant when combined with her own female scent.
Perhaps it was the scents that triggered the violent sexual reaction they both felt. Perhaps it was the sheer exertion of running that prompted them to seek something more that was totally physical. And certainly it was the romantic residuals of the wedding that put them in a frame of mind where each was eager to know and explore the other, after the countless times their eyes had met, their words had enticed, and their looks had conveyed both attraction and curiosity.
He broke away, ending the kiss with his mouth only, for it went ardently down the remainder of her body while his ragged voice rumbled near her ear.
"I knew it. Oh, God, I knew it."
"What?" Her own voice was slightly gruff and throaty. Her heart was thudding as if she were still pounding around the track at a full sprint.
"That it would be like this when I really kissed you and held you the way I've been wanting to." Suddenly he clasped her head in both hands, compelling her to stoop slightly. "Here… feel." Her cheek and ear were pressed against the wall of his chest which rose and fell with torturous speed while, inside, the vibrant force of his heart seemed as if it would crash its way through. He lifted her face, cradling her jaws, and held her that way while he kissed her mouth hard and sure. "That's what you do to me. It's been happening all day, since last night even, at certain times when I'd look at you and allow myself to fantasize."
No matter what she was feeling now, tomorrow, guilt would certainly outweigh any satisfaction she'd realize tonight if she let him continue this sexual foray. She removed his hands from her jaws and stepped back.
"I can't do this to Paul."
"You've never cheated on him?"
"Never. And I won't start now."
He studied her, scowling, then seemed to make a decision. "Good. I'm glad. I might not admire you as much otherwise."
She ran her fingers against her scalp, tipped her head back as if in pain and spun away from him. "Don't say things like that!"
"What? What did I say?"
"You know what you said-one minute loyal, the next untrue. It mixes me up."
"Winn." He pulled her hand down from her head and turned her to face him. "How are things, really, between you and him? If you're mixed up, it isn't because you just met and kissed me. It goes deeper than that."
"Don't probe. I don't like it. And furthermore, it's not healthy at this late date."
"Would it be better two years after you marry him? Or four years afterward, when you have two kids, maybe?"
She stiffened and her facial expression grew hard. "I have to go now. I'm really beat."
She turned toward the car. He watched the outline of her loose sweat suit grow indistinct as she moved away. He considered the countless complications this night might yet bring about for both of them. They'd begun already. She walked with her head down, hands in the warmer pocket across her belly. Her footsteps were tired, despondent. She opened the door of the Haynes and dragged herself up into the seat, then slammed the door.
He looked at the stars, at the blacktop, at the car, at his choices. It seemed there was only one.
When he sat beside her on the high seat, he laced his hands loosely over the steering wheel and stared straight out the two-piece windshield. "I'm sorry I've been ragging you about your relationship with Paul. I had no right. I'm a virtual stranger to you, and I've been drawing conclusions and making judgments ever since I met you. I just want you to know, though, that if you weren't… encumbered, I'd be pushing you full force from this day on, okay?" He turned to find her with a sad expression on her face, staring at the break in the windshield. "You're a dynamite lady, Winn Gardner. I hope he knows that."
She turned, lifted her eyes to his hair and dropped them to his lips. Then she looked him steadily in the eye and said in a very soft voice, "Please don't misconstrue this in any way. But there's been something I've wanted to do ever since I first met you. I want to do it just once to see what it feels like." She lifted a hand to his head, lightly touching the curls above his left ear. "Why, it's soft!" she exclaimed in a winsome voice.
"And what did you expect?"
"I don't know. I've just never known a man with natural curls before."
It took a great effort for Joseph to keep his hands on the wheel; they clenched it now, no longer relaxed as they'd been a minute ago. Her touch was brief, innocent, but terribly sensual, and he thought if she didn't get her hands away, he'd lay her flat on the blacktop parking lot beside the car and see if he couldn't change her mind about cheating on old Silicon Chip.
"Don't!" He pulled back, not jerking, not even forcefully. He simply retreated, and she understood: what she'd done was raising as much havoc with his libido as it was with her own. She tucked her hands between her knees and apologized. "I'm sorry. Let's go."
They remained quiet and solitary all the way back to her house. When they pulled up in her driveway, the car engine remained running, and they looked at each other. Neither of them was willing to call an end to their brief time together yet.
"Would you buy me breakfast?" she asked, feeling foolish and as if she were goading him, when actually it was herself she seemed unable to stop punishing.
"I think I'd do almost near anything for you."
"Then buy me breakfast and afterward wish me goodbye sensibly, without walking me to the door, and if we run into each other at the gift opening tomorrow, don't say more than hello."
"You sure that's how you want it?"
"No. I'm sure that's how it's got to be."
They ate apple pannekoekens at the Pannekoeken Huis, which was only a stone's throw from her town house. As they left the restaurant, the sun split the eastern sky with a bright wink of orange that spread and grew and tinted the rim of the world a brilliant combination of purple, heliotrope and lemon. He pulled up at the curb, and as she opened her door by herself, as she got out, he didn't look at her. When she stood on the street, holding onto the handle of the car door, she still waited.
"Goodbye, Joseph Duggan."
"Goodbye, Winn Gardner."
Both of them felt faintly ill as she watched the car drive up the street. He resolutely refrained from looking at her in the rearview mirror as long as he could stand it. But at last he lifted his eyes to see if she still stood in the street watching him drive away. But then he remembered. The Haynes was built before there were rearview mirrors.