Little Deaths(69)

By now he knew her habits. She’d be in Gloria’s because it was Thursday. Alone except for Jim Beam—but there would be a couple of shadows in the background watching her and he’d have to make a move before they did.

He pictured the scene: him sliding along the bar, Ruth taking her cue from this shapeless figure who was just like all the other figures, pulling out her cigarettes so he could offer her a light.

Maybe she wouldn’t recognize him. Maybe they’d just make small talk at first. The bar. The weather. The Giants.

All as natural as if nothing had been planned, and maybe he’d start to feel less like a dog with an eye on a butcher’s shop across a busy street, wondering if hunger and raw luck were enough to get him safely through the traffic. But then she’d narrow her eyes and stub out her half-smoked Lucky.

“I remember you.” Unsteady on her barstool, ice in her voice. “What do you want?”

He wouldn’t know how to answer her. He was afraid of her and she’d feel it, just as he’d feel the moment she took hold of that power, when she lifted her chin and stared and he would try to look composed. Try to think of her husband. Of Devlin.

But he was entirely lost in her smoky glitter, and she would know that too.

So she’d drain her glass and slam it on the bar and push upright like a skater moving out onto thin ice.

“C’mon then, Mr. Mystery.”

“What?”

“Let’s go. Liquor’s cheaper at my place”—a filthy look to Hud, who would just scratch his cheek and smile and go on calmly polishing glasses—“and you can tell me all about it.”

She would laugh. He’d never seen her laugh before. “If you can find your tongue.”

But back at her place, wrapped in the harsh, husky voice of a jazz singer, the music low and yearning, and dizzy in the colorful spin of five Scotches, Ruth would stop the playful taunting. Would pour drinks in silence and swallow hers in one defiant gulp. And then she would stop talking altogether, and he’d be helpless as she came toward him, and he would have to close his eyes to stop himself from seeing his reflection in her hungry black pupils.

He imagined the warmth of her, the smell of her powder, her hair, and then the touch of her lips on his.

He would kiss her gently, the way he’d always kissed girls, but her mouth would come down hard and hot and needy and he wouldn’t know how to respond. He’d feel his skin flush and move to kiss her neck with soft pink pecks.

But she would take his face in her two hands and claim his mouth again and speak against his lips.

“Don’t think.”

“Huh? I . . .” Startled, he might pull away, but she would pursue him, her voice harsher this time.

“Stop thinking. Just feel.”

Before he could ask her what she meant, before he could admit that he didn’t know how, her mouth would be on him, her tongue against his, and he would feel her hot breath and her sharp teeth against his lips, and he would feel fear and a growing desire. Let them come, let them swell in him like a great rush of breath so that he felt. He felt.

And at that point his imagination moved beyond conscious thought to a series of images and pure sensations. The soft suck of her lips. The silky whisper of her voice, of her hair. The white expanse of her throat. The long curve of her closed eyelids. The heat of her. The jagged line of pain as she gripped him with her red-tipped fingers. Her moans. The salt taste of her. And then the cresting of a great wave and a sense that there was no way back.

And afterward. How would it be, afterward?

Would he wake up with her in a tangle of sheets, damp with their mingled sweat, the scent of her in his head and her eyes on him? Or would he wake up alone, his muscles aching, water running in the background and then Ruth there in the doorway, the light behind her, and the shape of her all wrong and fully dressed.

“Here are your clothes. You can pick up a cab on Main Street.”

His brain would reach for the memory of her warmth, for the smell of her skin beneath the powders and the creams. But the powders and creams would have been reapplied and the woman he’d touched would be hidden away, beneath arched brows and the slow drag on a cigarette. And when he tried to kiss her, his lips would meet her cool cheek.

How would it be?

The night was cold and the street silent and full of pre-dawn calm. He walked for over an hour, thinking of her. Pushing the image of her husband from his mind, the image of his mother’s face, the faces of Ruth’s children. Pushing away his own shame, his own guilt.

He tried to focus only on her. On her tired, beautiful face. On how she would taste. The sounds she would make. The softness of her under his fingerprints. And he found that it was easy to think only of her.

He felt his heart pound and imagined it attuning itself to her heart. He thought of the connection between them stretching across the city: elastic, taut with possibility. With promise.

He thought of her voice. Of how she looked, and the different textures of her hair and her skin and her mouth. He thought of the things he wanted to say to her, the letters he wanted to write and knew he would never send.

He felt an ache of longing in the pit of his stomach, in the back of his throat. And he felt the space where she ought to be.


Frank came by and said he needed to talk to her.

Ruth’s mother smiled at him, gave him her cheek to kiss, said that she would leave them alone, that she had planned to go to church that morning anyway.