Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

at it, seemed vivid, too, relaxed and clarified, but almost lugubrious in the midst of fucking that exceeded fantasy, exceeded his highest anticipated good. Then, like a swimmer who’s held her breath as long as she can stand, Claire made a gasping cry and shoved him, hard, away. Turning, she took his cock, and Ransom picked her up as Claire raised both knees shoulder-high, and they went at it that way, face-to-face, at jackhammer speed and rhythm, and she stared, open-eyed, with something in her face he didn’t like, almost defiance, as though daring him to miss a beat. He didn’t. They went on, perfectly matched, like oarsmen to the coxswain’s cadence, and finally her face softened, sadness colored it, and she groaned, “Ohhh,” she put her lips against his ear and whispered, “Come on, fuck me, fuck me, don’t you, don’t you think, don’t you think of…” Ran began to come now, too. “Stopping,” she whisper-cried, “ohhh…OHHH, FUCK…OHH, FUCK…OH, FUCK… don’t you, don’t you fuck me, don’t you stop, oh, don’t you, don’t you, stop.”

Lost in lush and irresistible mixed messages, they fell back, spineless, boneless, against the countertop, then spineless, boneless, to the floor, where they lay naked, sweating against cold tile. Like a patient on the table as the anesthesiologist applies the mask, Ransom drifted out, and when he came to, Claire was kissing his cheek.

“How was that for sexual healing?”

Smiling with besotted happiness, he watched her beautiful bare shoulders disappearing, one by one, into her robe. As she closed it, though, something stopped her. Claire looked down and wiped her inner thigh, stared at what was on her fingertip.

“You came?” Her face, as she turned and asked, was wondering and pleased. “How…”

Ransom sat up quickly. “Claire…”

Now everything in her expression began to run downhill.

“This was it, this was all I wanted, Claire,” he whispered desperately. “Just this one time to be with you the way we used to be. Don’t be mad, okay? Please.”

“You’re off your meds?”

“I’m going to the pharmacy tomorrow, okay? First thing. First thing.”

She simply stared at him, and her eyes filled.

“Claire…”

She broke eye contact now, gazed at the wall for perhaps three seconds as though something in the distance had come into focus; then she sashed her robe and left without a word or another glance at him.

Still in the grip of postcoital fatigue, Ran lay back on the floor and closed his eyes. Having died of the operation, he experienced difficulty deciding to come back from the white light in the tunnel where the ancestors await. And the conversation he should have had with Claire he now had with himself. Though it was true he’d flirted with the edge, he hadn’t jumped, had he? He hadn’t gone over into the abyss. Nothing really bad had happened. Things were still retrievable. All he’d wanted was to reclaim his manhood with his wife—Claire could understand and forgive that, surely. After all, she had in the past.

Taking the hard road back to life, Ran got up feeling arthritic, stumbled, used the doorknob as a crutch. Following her to bed to talk, he found Claire fast asleep.

Ransom looked at her, and happiness crept over him, followed by a twinge of sudden doubt. Was she breathing? For a moment, Claire looked almost dead. Her face seemed relaxed and younger in the way the faces of the dead are said to shed their cares and to approximate a stage of youth. Even when he put his ear close to her lips and heard her breathe, touched her skin and felt its warmth, Ran wasn’t fully reassured. A wave of grief washed over him, as though he himself had caused her premature demise. Yet she wasn’t dead—he knew she wasn’t—but the grief came, nonetheless, on and on—such grief, oh! Oh, such remorse! Ran actually began to weep. And why? For what? Wasn’t what had just happened in the bathroom good? Wasn’t their closeness the plausible beginning of that new beginning he had hoped for? Why, then, did it feel like something else? Why this sudden dark foreboding? Premonition somehow mingled with the smell of sex. And the strange thing was, the grief didn’t really feel like it belonged to him. It felt like it belonged to someone else.

With tears still streaming down his face, he walked into the hall, and there the hamper lay in wait. On top of the soiled heap, Claire’s pink panties, exactly as before. Ran stopped. His grief vanished as suddenly as it had arisen. Around him, the house went still.

Another clue…

The voice whispered, and Ransom felt the zing of fear. What if? he thought…What if the journey wasn’t leading someplace good, wasn’t leading him toward his True Self, but someplace…else?…

Oh, go on, check them out, you know you want to.

The voice had a certain point. And if he picked them up and looked them over, if he checked for signs—suspect seepage, crust—what harm? Who would ever be the wiser? If there was something to discover, better to learn it now and face facts. If not, better to know that, too, surely, and spare Claire further unjust doubts. A spot check might exonerate her, mightn’t it? Well, no, not really—it might only prove that she was being careful. Ran suddenly grasped the crucial fact: the only definitive evidence the panties could provide was of a damning sort, the evidence to convict. And if he examined them now, would that, too, constitute a crime of sorts? Would it mark, in effect, the end of marital trust? Would it mean the end of his ambition to be the husband she wanted and deserved? It would, wouldn’t it? And if he ever meant to be that different, better man he’d always believed he could be but had never actually been, wasn’t it also true that Ransom had to start the process somewhere? Didn’t he, in fact, have to start right here, right now, and walk away?

But the voice said, Relax, you lox, it’s human nature, take a