Chapter 33

She awoke at two o’clock. Quietly, she made herself a cup of coffee, and turned on a small lamp in the living room and sat on the sofa, reflecting wryly that unlike Scarlett O’Hara she would prefer never having to think about anything, ever. Surely not about Paul, and surely not about Val.

She curled up in the corner of the sofa and contemplated her painting in the chill of the dim room, sipping her coffee, imagining the sound and smell of rain.

She rinsed her cup and returned to bed. Like oncoming rain, drowsiness descended in a gradual enveloping. Her pillow was soft against her face, like Val’s breasts; she pressed her face into the softness.

The only way to bring normalcy back into her life, she decided, was to do all the things that were routine and normal. Like going to work today and concentrating on her job—and ignoring these images and feelings that were compelling her to go to the beach house instead. She yanked the pillow out from under her head, pressed her face into the firm mattress.

When she rose for work she walked grimly into the shower and turned the cold water tap.

She drove to her office in the gray overcast, considering whether she should call Val and tell her she could not come to the beach house that day. But the wording in the note was not an invitation, just a statement of where Val would be—and her own resolve was not so strong that the sound of Val’s voice…Val would know soon enough that she would not be there.

She honked furiously at a jogger who had stepped off the curb. He cast a frightened glance at her, rapidly backpedaled, and sped around the corner. At work, she concentrated with some success on the computer-generated figures she was assessing for the quarterly employment forecast. The office Muzak, which she had become used to and seldom consciously heard, began a disemboweled version of a song that nagged at her with its familiarity. She put the computer sheets aside to listen, determined to remember. And she did remember: “Every Breath You Take.” She had last heard it on the radio coming back from Santa Barbara with Val, on the way to the beach house…

She bent over her desk, as defenseless as if caught in a sudden deluge, flooded with the memory of Val’s mouth, memory so intimate and detailed and vivid that her legs trembled and opened and spread apart, her knees pressing feverishly into the hard edge of the desk, the throbbing between her legs of unendurable intensity, as if she were again feeling that warm delicate tongue.

“Carolyn?”

She started violently, feeling the color drain from her face. She stared at her boss, amazed and mortified; she had been fumbling with the belt of her pants, and if he had come in only moments later he would have discovered her with her hand inside…

“Carolyn, you’re as white as a sheet. Are you coming down with something?”

A few minutes later she left her office, having agreed that she should go home to fend off what must surely be an onslaught of the flu.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 611