Under the Knife(97)

It was. She was home, and okay.

Rita promised to call her first thing in the morning—a lie, but it couldn’t be helped. She hung up and settled back, cradling the receiver against her chest, and watched the rain beat against the window.

And she waited.





SPENCER


Spencer was reclining in his favorite easy chair: a great big La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, perfectly broken in, its cushions molded to his body. Rita was standing in front of him, smiling. She was naked.

Which was nice.

She was gorgeous: thick dark hair, svelte frame, dark eyes bright above lush, smiling lips. He drank her in. He could feel his hardness pressing against the inside of his pants, so hard it was almost painful, like when he’d been a teenager.

She took a few steps toward him. He realized, then, that he was naked, too: which was weird, he could have sworn he’d been wearing clothes a second ago, but that was okay, he wasn’t going to complain or anything.

Without prelude, she wrapped her hands behind his neck and straddled him in one deft motion, as she’d done many times in this same La-Z-Boy; as she’d done that first night when, after he’d patiently (and sweetly, don’t forget sweetly) worn her down, pursuing her through two months of chaste coffee and lunch dates (never at the hospital, she was always afraid someone would see them together), she’d texted him on a Friday night to see if he was home; and when he replied that he was, had shown up twenty minutes later, admitting that she’d fallen for him. Five minutes after that, they were naked and entwined together in the La-Z-Boy, like they were now.

He slipped inside her, and her warmth and wetness enveloped him. She gasped, and he did, too.

Oh, God.

Reflexively, he lifted his hips.

Rita, he panted. I really love you. God, I love you so much.

As she started to rock up and down on him, she leaned forward and kissed him deeply, her tongue exploring his mouth; and then moved her lips to his ear, as if about to whisper in it, as if about to tell him that, yes, she still loved him, and always would.

But electronic rings, not words, came out of her mouth.

Spencer tried to ignore the rings, tried to concentrate on Rita moving on top of him; he’d missed her so much and wanted desperately to go on with what they’d started.

But the rings kept coming. The damn rings wouldn’t be ignored.

He opened his eyes. Rita was gone. He was alone in the La-Z-Boy. The ringing was coming from his phone on the arm of the chair. He reached for it, blinking away the dream.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Spence. Sorry to call so late. How are you, honey?”

He went limp instantly. “Uh—hi, Mom.” Blushing, he groped for the lever of the La-Z-Boy and yanked it out of the recline position. The open medical journal lying on his chest, the one he’d been trying to concentrate on when he’d drifted off to sleep, and the sealed Ziploc bag of ice (now slush) draped across his aching right knee, toppled to the floor. “Is everything okay? How’s Dad?”

“We’re fine, dear. I was calling to check on you. I was watching the Weather Channel just now and wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Why?”

“The storm, dear. There are mudslides in Malibu. Bad ones. Entire houses sliding down cliffs, Spencer. Isn’t Malibu close to you?”

He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “No, Mom.” His folks still lived in the same small town in eastern Washington they’d called home for forty years, and his mother phoned every time a California wildfire, mudslide, or earthquake made the news. None of these had ever occurred within fifty miles of his home, and no matter how many times he’d explained it to her, his mother would never understand that California was 800 miles long and 250 miles wide. “Malibu is 150 miles from here.”

“Oh.” She sounded mildly disappointed, like her life would have been more interesting if her only child was imperiled by tons of choking mud. “Well. Thank goodness. Is it raining where you are?”

He peered out the window. Night had fallen, and hard rain was beating against the glass. Blasts of wind rattled the pane. He lived in a one-story house, and could hear the rain pounding on the roof.

Man. How long have I been out? He checked his watch: two hours.

“Yeah. Pretty hard. About as hard as I’ve ever seen it in San Diego.”

“Exactly! They’re saying this storm—something about El Ni?o—is the biggest one in years. Isn’t there a hill behind your house?”

“No, Mom.”

“When your father and I were out visiting last summer, I distinctly remember a hill.”

“Mom. That was my friend Greg and his wife Sarah’s house. We had brunch there one day.”

“Oh. Well. Maybe you should check on them.”

The hill behind Greg and Sarah’s house was a five-foot-high, gently sloping rise covered with dense foliage—hardly a mudslide waiting to happen. “They’re fine, Mom. So how are you and Dad?”

“Oh. Well. You know—”

His mother launched into a summary of recent happenings: the kidney stone she’d passed (“The pain, Spencer! Worse than childbirth!”); the bridge tournament she and Dad had won; the married town councilman caught up in a sex scandal with a girl half his age. They kept busy and were (mostly) healthy: She was a retired elementary school teacher who volunteered at the local library, his dad a retired cop who still worked their thirty-acre farm and rode a tractor every day. But they weren’t getting any younger. Dad needed a new knee, and had agreed (grumpily) to spend a month in San Diego this winter getting one installed by an orthopedic surgeon handpicked by Spencer.