At a quarter till four, Jet walks out of my woods with her usual long-limbed grace. She’s no longer wearing the sundress she had on earlier, but dark slacks and a white blouse. I’m not sure at first whether she realizes I’m watching her from the patio. The steamer chaise sits lower than my other chairs, which probably does a lot to conceal me. But she knows. She announces this by unbuttoning her blouse as she crosses the grass, then shrugging it off her shoulders and letting it fall as she walks on. Ten steps farther across the freshly mown field, her bra drops to the ground. I assumed she would show up in a very different mood, ready to comfort me for the loss of Buck and discuss the implications of Paul’s suspicion. She may do that yet. But if so, she means to do it naked. By the time she’s ten yards from the patio, she’s wearing nothing but the silver pendant necklace and sapphire earrings I saw at the groundbreaking.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, standing over the chaise with an expression I cannot read. “I had a couple of issues.”
“It’s okay,” I reply, starting to get up.
She holds up one long-fingered hand in a stop gesture. “Did I make a mistake with my clothes?”
I shake my head, reach up with my right hand.
Instead of taking it, she turns away, cups the cheeks of her bottom in each hand, and pulls them apart. The sight is shockingly erotic. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?” she asks.
“Please sit down.”
She looks back over her shoulder and smiles at last. “Why don’t you get those pants off first?”
Chapter 18
Ten minutes ago, Jet sat astride me on the steamer chaise and worked with focused intensity, reaching her first release in two minutes. Then, with barely a pause, she started again, the second time making sure that I fell into rhythm with her, so that I would finish when she did. A sheen of sweat shone on her dark chest, and her eyes dilated as they sometimes do, losing focus as she approached her second orgasm. Her hands gripped my shoulders, her nails dug painfully into the skin, but I made no sound of complaint.
Afterward, she fell forward and nestled her face in my neck without speaking. Given Buck’s murder, this isn’t what I’d expected of our first few minutes alone, but it’s what I needed. Talking to Quinn took a lot out of me, and the last thing I wanted from Jet was more talk. For her part, carrying on an affair in her hometown is exhausting. Each rendezvous requires a carefully planned escape from the tyranny of routine, involving excuses, outright lies, occasional car changes, and constant vigilance. Unexpected crises like Buck’s murder only add to the burden. But why talk about it? Words become superfluous when every cell in your body is telling you to leap into the frantic fusion of sex and discharge all your anxiety in one frenzied rush.
After breathing into my neck for a couple of minutes, she says, “Are you really okay?”
“I’m kind of freaked out, honestly.”
“Because of Buck? Or Paul?”
“Both. But seeing Buck pulled out of that river started it.”
She flattens her hands on the frame of the chaise and presses herself up far enough to look into my eyes. “You saw his body?”
I nod.
“Bad?”
“Bad enough.”
She lowers her head and kisses my forehead. “I never told you this, but when Paul and I first moved back to Bienville, I ran into Buck one day at LaSalle Park. We sat on a bench and talked for a while, just him and me. This was before I’d had Kevin. In his shy and courtly way, Buck told me that he’d always believed you and I would end up together.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I’d always loved you, but it just wasn’t in the stars.” Jet laughs, her eyes shining. “How’s that for cliché?”
“I guess Buck was right after all.”
“You bet your ass he was. And I’ve never been happier to be wrong.”
“I thought you were never wrong.”
She pinches the soft flesh inside my left thigh, and I curse in pain. Before I can pay her back, she flips off the chaise and scrambles to her feet.
“Shouldn’t we talk about Paul and your fight?” I ask.
“We will. I need to pee. Do you want me to come back out here?”
“No, I’ll come with you.”
I follow her to the master bathroom, meaning to tease her a little, but as we walk down the narrow hallway, I see her transitioning from postcoital languor to purposeful intent. It’s in the straightness of her back, the level set of her shoulders. She’s got murder on her mind now.
My back bathroom is larger than what usually comes with an older house. The elderly couple who owned the place before me expanded the room so that the husband, who was wheelchair-bound when I met him, could shower in it. As I pick up a couple of stray socks, Jet begins urinating behind the small partition that shields the commode.
“Hey,” she calls. “You feel like putting on some coffee? It’s going to be a long night with that party.”
“Sure.”
I pull on jeans and a T-shirt, then walk back to the kitchen and pop a K-Cup into the Keurig. For the first time since this morning, the weight of Buck’s loss has lifted slightly from my shoulders. Spending myself in Jet has reset my neurotransmitters, at least for the moment. Had I been able to see her alone this morning, I might not have been sucked into the whirlpool of flashbacks that Buck’s death triggered.
A thin stream of coffee begins to drip from the Keurig, and the welcome scent fills the kitchen. I wonder at her ability to heal me this way. For three months I have felt this peace, after decades of yearning for her. What is the essence of that connection? A thirty-year-old fold in my cerebral cortex? Is the first neural imprinting of love and sex so deep that nothing ever supplants it? Like the music you listened to during those years? No matter how I analyze it, this reality remains: being with Jet is a necessity, an involuntary compulsion like breathing. Except that I managed to live without her, with only the memory of air, for nearly three decades. I held my breath and pretended to live. Somehow, the memory of this woman sustained me, even through my grief over my son. Now that I have her once more, I don’t ever want to stop breathing again.
Jet’s sock feet hiss on the hardwood of the hallway. Wearing my ancient orange Cavaliers T-shirt, she pads over to me, kisses my shoulder, then leans back on the kitchen island to wait for her coffee.
“Three things,” she says. “First, Paul asked me about last Thursday.”
I shake my head blankly. “Last Thursday?”
“Yesterday he ran into Claire Maloney, who I was supposed to have run with last Thursday. I was out here, of course. Claire’s kind of ditzy—that’s why I used her for my excuse—so I got away with it. But Paul noted the disconnect. I realized I had really pushed the envelope.”
“Are you sure he believed you?”
“I think so. But that wasn’t all.”
My mouth goes dry.
“Breathe,” she says, looking up at me. “The second thing was Josh, which is just ridiculous. Paul didn’t have any specific reason to suspect Josh. I think he’s just picked up that I’ve emotionally checked out of the marriage, and he knows I spend hours a day with Josh—even out of town. So he’s the first target of suspicion.”