Читать книгу Alice Close Your Eyes - Averil Dean - Страница 11

CHAPTER FIVE

“How did you find this place?” I ask.

It’s 8:30 p.m., and we’re seated at a tiny table inside an equally minute Thai restaurant in Seattle, across the Sound from Vashon Island. The restaurant’s narrow facade is deceiving. Inside, the ceiling opens to a second-floor dining room with space for only six tables. We have a bird’s-eye view of the kitchen below, where a cloud of steam rises from an ancient hammered pot as the cook ladles up two bowls of soup.

“I came here with a friend,” Jack says. “And left with the waitress.”

A young woman appears at the top of the steps and deposits our dinner on the battered wooden table. When she’s gone, I give him a look.

“This waitress? She looks about sixteen.”

“Different one, actually.”

“And is this safe to eat?” I lift a spoonful of soup. “You know better than to piss off the person feeding you, I hope.”

“What makes you think I pissed her off?”

“Seems likely, let’s say.”

He lowers his head with an amused twist of his lips and begins to eat.

“It wasn’t like that. Her father was the cook. He went down on the job. Right there.” He points the top of his ceramic spoon at the kitchen below. “Had a stroke apparently, and fell into the wok on his way down. Spilled hot oil all over himself. The ambulance came for him and I gave his daughter a lift to the hospital.”

His expression doesn’t change, but I sense the reproach.

I drop my gaze to the table. “You do have a way of making me feel like an asshole.”

“Eat your soup.”

The liquid slides down my throat, tangy and unctuous. Slices of sour cucumber float in the broth.

“What happened to the old man?”

Jack pours out some fresh tea. A thread of steam rises from my cup.

“Dead,” he says. “Probably never felt the burns at all.”

He seems to consider this for the first time.

He didn’t ring the doorbell when he arrived at my house earlier this evening. By tacit agreement, we’ve already abandoned the notion of privacy. I left the door unlocked, and he simply walked in and came looking for me as if he owned the place, as if his previous visit had not been an illicit one.

I was at my dresser, clasping a fine silver chain around my neck.

He came to the bedroom doorway, leaned his shoulder against the wall, his sweater pushed up over his forearms. Clean jeans, clean work boots. I wondered what he thought of my clothes, which an old boyfriend described as having been “put together by a twelve-year-old gay boy with a boot fetish and twenty bucks to spend.” Lots of vintage and secondhand. Little discretion.

I cut my own hair, too. With the straight razor from my kit.

“So what’s that about?” he says now. “You follow guys, break into their houses and steal shit that has no value to anyone but them. Why? What’s so interesting?”

“Everything.”

He leans back, waiting.

I set down my spoon and cup my tea in both hands, prepared with my story this time, set to deliver it on cue with a face full of rueful honesty.

“Have you ever been in a crowd—at a concert, maybe, or on the street—and noticed the way all the faces seem to blend together? But when you pick out a single person, suddenly he’s not this anonymous guy anymore. He’s somebody. An individual. You know?”

Jack nods.

“Well, I became sort of fascinated by that. I’d ask myself questions about the guy. Like, I wonder where he lives. I wonder what’s in his refrigerator. Or his sock drawer or DVD collection. What’s his name? How strong are his glasses? What’s in his medicine cabinet? It was a game. But after a while, I started to wish I could check my guesses to see if they were right.”

“So you started breaking in.”

“Yeah. I knew this girl once who taught me how to get into houses. Where people hide their spare keys, how to break a window quietly. She could get in anywhere.”

“Who was this?”

“Just someone from the foster system. I roomed with her at the Center for a while. She’s a wizard, smart as hell. Anyway, I discovered that it’s actually really easy to get in and out, provided no one’s around.”

“You never got caught before?”

“No.” I raise my chin. “And I wouldn’t have with you, either, if you hadn’t picked that day to forget your phone or whatever.”

He looks at me skeptically. It’s impossible to tell which part of my story he isn’t buying. I pretend not to see the doubt in his eyes. I’m locked into my bluff now and need to ride it out.

“And is it only men who interest you?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Never followed a woman?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I already know about women.”

“Hmm. So what did you find out?”

“That most men are perverts. That they collect weird things like agates and toy race cars and Asian porn. That every guy has at least one picture of his dick—God knows why.”

He laughs, and I find an odd, sagging comfort in the sound.

“That they always hang their pictures too high—present company excepted—are strangely attracted to futons and can’t keep their houseplants alive.”

I take up my chopsticks.

“That’s it?” he says.

“Pretty much.”

“And what do you leave with?”

“Just the box.”

“Not the stereo, not the TV. Just the box?”

“Right.”

He tips back in his chair, watching me eat.

“You’re an odd little chick, Alice Croft.”

I shrug. “Everyone’s odd.”

“So how long were you following me before I found you in my closet?”

“I don’t know. Two or three weeks, maybe?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. I feel his gaze on me and a tumbling fullness in my stomach.

“So for three weeks,” he says, “I’ve had this gorgeous little thief following me around, just dying to get into my bed, and I didn’t even know it.”

I set down my chopsticks and wipe my mouth. Take a sip of tea.

“Your bedroom, maybe. Not your bed.”

His gaze slides from my face, down the front of my Pink Panther T-shirt and up again.

“My mistake,” he says.

By the time we leave the restaurant, the ever-present clouds have dissolved into rain. Jack opens his umbrella and pulls me underneath, his arm around my waist. His sweater feels comforting against my cheek, a nubbled cushion over the firm bump of his shoulder. The city around us vibrates with the energy of a million lives, with ten million boxed-up secrets. I feel myself at the center of them, small but protected, my feet slapping the rain-sluiced sidewalk and Jack’s falling into step as he shortens his stride to match mine.

“My friend has a boat,” he says. “Would you like to see it? We could walk there.”

A warm, fragile bubble of happiness swells inside my chest.

“Yes, I would.”

* * *

The boat turns out to be a small motor yacht, moored in a slip at the end of a long wooden dock. With a long sleek nose and shining chrome rail, it bobs on the dark water like a shard of wet ice.

“You have some fancy friends,” I say as Jack reaches out to help me on board.

He grins. “This one thinks so. I keep having to remind him about the time he pissed his pants in second grade, just to keep his ego in check.”

I turn in a slow circle on the wooden deck, looking around. The rain has subsided, leaving a blanket of fat raindrops over the seats and metal railings. Jack unlocks a metal box under one of the benches and takes out a rag. He wipes down a seat and part of the railing, then tosses the rag back where he’d found it.

“I have some weed,” he says.

“So do I.”

He laughs and pulls a plastic-wrapped joint from his pocket. “Well, make yourself comfortable.”

We settle on the vinyl seat, half facing each other. The seat is too high for me and my feet dangle, so I curl one leg up and tuck my foot behind my knee. He gives me the joint and lights it with a yellow Bic. We pass the weed back and forth as we talk.

“Where did you grow up?” I ask.

“Upstate New York. My dad owns a chain of liquor stores in the city. I came out here to go to school.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“A brother. Much older than me. He was already in high school when I was born.”

“You were an afterthought.”

He squints at me through a curl of sweet-scented smoke. “Yeah. Thanks for noticing.”

“I’ll bet you were spoiled.”

“The hell I was. My dad was a hardhanded son of a bitch.”

“But your mother stuck up for you, didn’t she. A middle-aged Italian lady with a baby? Don’t tell me.”

He leans back, drapes an arm over the back of the seat.

“You’ve had a head start. You’ve already been in my place, sniffing around. What did you learn?”

“Not much. I wasn’t there very long. I found the ships, the blueprints. Are you an architect?”

“Used to be.”

“So what are you now?”

“A carpenter.”

I frown. “That’s kind of a step down, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“Did one of your buildings collapse or something?”

He smokes the last hit and tosses the roach overboard.

“No, actually I was a very good architect. Everything I designed is still standing, as far as I know.”

“Then what—”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says. “Something you might want to consider.”

“She had eight more lives if I remember right.”

I get up and move to the end of the rail, letting the buzz wash over me. The waves slosh languidly against the side of the boat.

“I looked you up,” he says. “Alice Croft, author of Zebra Crossing. ‘A beguiling, gripping read.’ ‘Dark and dazzling.’ Very impressive.”

I shrug. I hate talking about my work, and especially about reviews of my work. No one ever asks the right questions, and my answers always seem stilted and inadequate. As soon as the books come out, I stash my copies in the closet and try to forget about them.

The Zebra series was a fluke as far as I’m concerned. Something about the motley collection of boys—albino, meth addict, freerunner, clairvoyant, all trapped inside a Scottish neo-Gothic boarding school—captured the public’s attention. So much so that Gus Shiroff has signed not only the foreign rights but film and TV, as well. Nothing has been done with them so far, but there is talk of a cable series and wild speculation about who might be cast in the lead roles.

For me the whole thing is bewildering. Before the Zebra books I had never written for anyone but myself. I sent out my original queries on a whim, expecting a much longer apprenticeship before any of my writing became publishable. But Gus liked the first book right away, and suddenly I found myself with a career and what seems like a never-ending procession of deadlines—all good things, but for a loner with a serious lack of business sense, it’s a bit much. On Gus’s advice, I’ve tried to isolate myself as much as possible and concentrate on finishing the series.

“A lot of loneliness in those books,” Jack says.

I accept this in silence. It’s a common observation.

“What about your family?”

“Dead.” The word seems flat, so I keep talking to fill the silence. “My grandmother died when I was nine, and my mom a year and a half later.”

“And your dad?”

“Don’t know him.”

“So who do you hang out with, then? What do you do?”

“Write.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Very glamorous, this lifestyle.”

“No boyfriend?”

“Not at the moment.”

He is quiet, looking at me. When he speaks, his voice sounds different, lower in pitch.

“Not at the moment,” he repeats, as if to himself.

He gets to his feet and moves toward me, hands in his pockets, his face lost in shadow. For a second I forget what he looks like. His features won’t come together in my mind.

He stops, leaning against the rail.

“Last night you had a knife in your hand. Now look at you.”

I glance around at the deserted docks, where rows of boats bob silently in the inky water.

I don’t like this, I want to say. Take me home, I want to go home.

My empty fingers curl into a fist, pressed to my thigh.

“You wish you had one now,” he says softly. “Don’t you.”

He closes the distance between us, lifts his hand and traces the column of my neck, down the front of my T-shirt—the barest brush with the tip of his forefinger.

A bone-deep shiver breaks inside me, as though my gears have slipped and are juddering for purchase.

He turns away and disappears through the cabin door. I close my eyes, waiting. A minute later, a familiar song seeps into the cool night air, a haunting, languid groove, and he’s back, his hand outstretched toward me. He pulls me into his arms.

My home feels very far away now, across the water and another divide I have not yet measured. Jack’s heartbeat is more than idea or even a sound—it’s a vibration under my cheek, a relentless drumbeat driven by something I don’t understand. More than sex, darker than seduction. This is pure male impulse.

On the last thread of music, he begins to undress me, his fingers cool and rough as stone against my skin. He unbuttons my sweater, slips it over my shoulders and drops it to the deck. He pushes me before him, a step at a time, down the narrow staircase to the tiny bedroom. I feel the mattress behind my knees, and he puts a hand behind my head to keep me from bumping it as he lowers me to the bed. This small kindness blooms at the base of my throat and burns my eyelids and the bridge of my nose.

Silence closes around us, broken only by the hollow sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and the eerie flow of the music around us.

He reaches under the hem of my skirt and runs his hand up my thigh until it comes to rest on my hip. With his other hand, he takes off his glasses and sets them on the bedside table.

You wish you had that knife now. Don’t you...

What would happen if I asked him to stop? Would he take me home? Apologize? Get angry and call me names? Would he stop at all? I’ve told no one about him, or where I would be tonight, and he knows it. He could hurt me, kill me, carry my body out to sea and no one would ever know what happened to me. I would be the face on the milk carton.

My train of thought stops there.

No. I could never be the face on the milk carton. Those missing people have families to search for them. No one would look for me.

I would be gone. Gone.

He strokes me, down my thigh and up, sliding his palm along my waist. He tugs at the strap of my underwear and winds it twice around his thumb, pulls it tight until the fabric nips and pinches between my legs.

I close my fist around the front of his sweater. He leans over this obstruction to kiss me again, one hand cupped around the back of my head, one between my legs, slipping along the edge of my underwear. His kiss is firm and insistent, slanting to stroke the inside of my mouth with his tongue. He tastes like burned marshmallow on a young stick, toasty and green.

His teeth close over my lower lip as he traces me through my underwear. I twist and clutch at his shoulder, trying to catch my breath. But his mouth is demanding, and he has found, with his thumb, the bump of my clitoris. I choke back a moan of anxious greed, and raise my hips to meet him, sinking my fingers into the damp fringe of hair at the nape of his neck. I trace his stubbled jaw and the edge of his lip, feel the muscles below his ear bunch and release as he kisses me, the steady strength of his pulse against my thumb.

He tugs my underwear aside. My thighs tighten reflexively, but he’s already kneeling between them; he’s got his foot in the door. His back stiffens, two fingers slipping through my folds. His tongue moves past my teeth, deeper, seeking, and I know he’s worried, the way all men worry when they get this close to the prize.

Don’t stop me. Don’t pull back, don’t take what I need. Don’t get in my way.

He eases my panties down to my ankles and slips them off. Sits back on his heels and looks at me, with my skirt around my waist and my underwear crumpled in his fist, pressed to his nose. His gaze never leaves me.

“Take off your shirt.” His voice is quiet and direct.

I peel off my T-shirt, trembling from the blast of adrenaline and the force of him. The room swims around me. The bobbing floor beneath us feels insubstantial and unsafe, as though we might suddenly sink beneath the water and never realize it had happened. I want him to hold me and give me something solid to keep me in place.

But he wants to look at me.

“And your bra,” he says. “Take it off.”

The music has changed. The singer chants an impatient bridge, punctuated by a pop-slide in an eerie minor key as the bra straps stutter down my arms. The chorus rises, driving and sensual, a low hum of synthesized bass guitar buzzing underneath the melody. A breath of night-chilled air drifts over my breasts, crinkling the tips, tightening my skin.

A slow smile creeps across his lips when he sees the hoop in my left nipple. He rises and strips to his boxers. And this time he doesn’t have to speak. I shimmy out of my skirt and sit with my knees pressed together, shivering, untethered, enduring his long visual exploration. His face is half-hidden, divided down the center by shadow and light.

Now look at you...look at you....

I let him ease my thighs apart. His gaze falls, locked between my legs. A groan rumbles in his chest when he sees the tattoo low on my abdomen, just above the smooth mound of my pubis: ~ Make it hurt ~ He passes a thumb over the letters, then dips again into the slippery heat between my legs, his fingertips circling, deepening, nudging at my cunt. He kisses the tip of my breast and flicks the silver hoop with his tongue.

“What are you about, hmm?” he says, and sucks my nipple into his mouth. The metal ring clicks against his teeth.

But I can’t answer. I arch my back and turn my face aside. A coil of desire constricts at the base of my belly.

He eases me back, lays a chain of kisses around my breast, down my ribs, into the shallow dip beside my pelvic bone and finally to the liquid heat between my legs.

Our floating room begins to spin. I am strangely disembodied, as though all my senses, all my pain and pleasure and naked want, are concentrated under the warmth of his mouth. I claw at the blankets and bunch them in my fists. But when I sink my fingers into his hair, he catches my wrists and pins them at my sides, muttering under his breath, his teeth grazing my clitoris. With the anchor of his mouth to hold me in place, I wind around him like a tetherball on a rope, in dizzying spirals that lift me to his mouth.

“Come on, baby,” he says. “Right now...”

His voice vibrates against me, and in the last moment it is his breath, the lightest touch of cold and heat, that topples me. I leap under his mouth, my wrists still pinned to the bed, my cries sailing into the night. He follows me, groaning with pride and dark male glee. His tongue flattens over me, dips inside me, drinks me in so thoroughly that I soar up again, simply from the idea of being consumed this way.

As the room spins to a halt, I realize my eyelashes are wet with tears.

Jack kneels between my knees and rolls on a condom. The light skims across his body, painting long, striped shadows in the grooves of his abdomen. He slides inside me without a word, without preamble, driving his hips forward, pulling me to him with one hand splayed against the small of my back. A breath snags in my throat at the size of him.

He stops, the muscle in his jaw flexed and quivering.

“Jesus,” he says. “So fucking tight. Be still.”

After a moment, he begins to move, his hips rolling to the undercurrent of music and the elemental motion of the water beneath us. I wrap my legs around his narrow waist and pull him closer. We fall into a deep, slow rhythm. Each gliding thrust is an incantation in a language I don’t understand. My whole body strains, listening. And from the back of my mind, from some small and lonesome and untouchable place, I seem to hear my own voice chanting in time.

I want to go home, I want to go home.

* * *

It rains again that night. Jack turns off the music so we can listen to the drops on the roof and the surface of the ocean. The sound forms a soft cocoon around us, a background noise to the steady thrum of his heartbeat under my ear.

“Tell me a secret.” His voice rumbles as if from the inside of a bass drum. “Something no one else knows.”

“I like to keep my secrets,” I tell him.

He slips out from under me and raises himself up on one elbow. He pushes the covers aside and runs his hand down my body, brushes the tip of my breast with his knuckles.

“I can’t figure out if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “But you want to be careful with me. I’ll fucking eat you alive.”

He lowers his head to my breast. His mouth opens over my nipple, warm and demanding. His erection hardens like a newly forged sword against my thigh.

* * *

We stop at a café near the marina for breakfast. We are both starved, and devour plates of eggs and pancakes and large cups of coffee in silence, as though we’ve been lost at sea for days. Then we go across to the corner market, where we buy cigarettes and a pack of gum. And condoms, which Jack purchases without comment while I pretend to admire a rack of key chains.

He pulls up in front of my house and walks me to the door. I stand on the step and put my arms around him, press my lips to the stubbled underside of his jaw. He takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks and eyelids and the tip of my nose.

I don’t ask him inside.

I know he’ll call before the day is out. The phone rings four times. On the fifth ring, I pick it up.

“Baby,” he says. “What have we started?”