VACANCY & ARIEL

Could it be that simple? He’s tempted to accept her explanation, but he’s reluctant to accept what that may bring. Rain begins to fall more heavily, screening them away from the world with gray slanting lines.

“What do you see in me?” he asks. “I mean, what makes someone like you interested in a fifty-something used car salesman with a bad back. I don’t get it.”

“Wow. Once you start them up, some guys are worse than women. Out comes the rotten self-image and everything else.” She glances up to the ceiling, as if gathering information written there. “I’ll tell you, but don’t interrupt, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’re friends. We’ve been friends for going on four years, and I like to think we’re good friends. I can count on you in an emergency, and you can count on me. True?”

He nods.

“You make my head quiet,” she says. “Not last night, not when I’m in party mode. But most of the time, that’s how I feel around you. You steady me. You treat me as an equal. With guys my age or close, I can tell what’s foremost on their mind, and it’s always a battle to win their respect. Like with Tucker. That may explain why I’ve got this thing for older men. They don’t just see tits and a pussy, they see all of me. I’m speaking generally, of course. I get lots of horny old goats hitting on me, but they’re desperate. You’re not desperate. You don’t have a need to get over on me.”

“That might change,” he says.

She puts a finger to his lips, shushing him. “Everything changes, everybody’s kinky for something. Some guy shows up at my door with a muskrat, a coil of rope, and three pounds of lard, that’s where I draw the line. But normal, everyday kinks…They’re cool.” She shrugs. “So it changes? So you’re fifty-four with a bad back? So I’m kinky for older men? So what? And in case you’re going to tell me you don’t want to be a father figure, don’t worry. When I’m around you, I’m always wet. Some times more than others, but it’s pretty much constant. I don’t think of you as my dad.” She blows air through her pursed lips, as if wearied by this unburdening. “Fucking is just something I do with guys, Cliff. It doesn’t require holy water and a papal dispensation. It’s not that huge a deal.”

“That’s a lie,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says after a pause. “It’s a fairly huge deal. All right. But what I’m trying to say is, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll cry and be depressed and hit things. My heart may even break. But it won’t kill me. I heal up good.”

The rain beats in against the window, spraying under the glass, drenching the ledge, spattering on the floor, yet Marley doesn’t bother to close it. She sits up and, with a supple movement, shucks her t-shirt. The shape of a bikini top is etched upon her skin and in the half-light her high, smallish breasts, tipped by engorged nipples, are shockingly pale in contrast to her tan. It strikes Cliff as exotic, a solar tattoo, and he imagines designs of pale and dark all over her body, some so tiny they can only be detected by peering close, others needing a magnifying glass to read the erotic message that they, in sum, comprise. She lies down again, an arm across her tight, rounded stomach. Sheets of rain wash over the window, transforming it into a smeary lens of dull green and silvered gray, seeming to show a world still in process of becoming.

“So,” Marley says. “You going into work today?”

“Probably not,” he says.

Chapter 7

BEFORE GOING INTO work the following day, Cliff stops by the cottage. It’s a sunny, breezy afternoon and all should be right with the world, but the stillness of the place unnerves him. He peels police tape off the doors, hurriedly packs a few changes of clothes and, an afterthought, tosses his copy of Sword Of The Black Demon into his bag. If things get uncomfortable at Marley’s, he’ll move to a motel, but he has determined that he’s not going to spend another night in the cottage until the situation is resolved, until he can be assured that there’ll be no reoccurrence of blue witches and flashing lights and two-hundred-foot tall swordsmen.

He pulls into Ridgewood Motors shortly before two and, from that point on, he’s so busy that he scarcely has a chance to glance at the Celeste. Jerry’s in a foul mood because Stacey Gerone has run off and left him shorthanded.

“She’s been screwing some rich old fart from Miami,” Jerry says. “I guess she blew him so good, he finally popped the question. That bitch can suck dick like a two-dollar whore in a hurricane.”

Dressed in his trademark madras suit and white loafers, Jerry cocks an eye at Cliff, doubtless hoping to be asked how he knows about Stacey’s proclivities; he’s brimming over with eagerness to divulge his conquest.