Damn. She pushed away from the car and started down the road. There’d be time to think about next month when it was here. And, she thought with returning mirth, where there was one of his kind, there will be others.

  They were not that much alike, she and he.

  One of them had been of a darker kind.

  The Baited Night

  The barmaid brought George another Budweiser. Odd, seeing as how he hadn’t ordered one. He hadn’t, in fact, even finished his first—wasn’t so sure he was going to. The pain was less than usual tonight, half a beer and it was just a remote, minor annoyance, like the buzzing of a distant insect. And he really didn’t want to be here. The hotel’s bar, with it’s mariner motif, rock and roll noise, smoke, and boisterous people (all of whom were having the time of their lives while successfully ignoring him), was making him sick. He didn’t know why he’d come here in the first place.

  “Thanks,” he said, blinking at her through cigarette smoke, “but I think you’ve made a mistake.”

  “No mistake, love.” She shifted a wad of gum to one cheek and pointed across the bar room to where a tall redhead sat beneath a weathered harpoon at a corner table. “Compliments of the lady in the blue dress.”

  George tried not to look dumbfounded. “Uh... did she say anything?”

  The barmaid leaned over the table so she wouldn’t have to shout over the music. “A drink from someone in a bar usually means they’re interested,” she said in the same tone his college professors had used when he’d failed to grasp some basic, intuitive engineering principle.

  “Interested?”

  “You’re invited over to her table, numbnuts!”

  “Oh. I see.” But he didn’t.

  She gave him an exaggerated wink. “She ain’t bad lookin’. I’d get over there now if I was you, ’fore she decides to buy someone else a drink.” Then she was gone in a swirl of skirt and dancer’s thighs.

  So, George thought. It actually happens just like in the movies. Drop into a bar and get picked up. Just like that. Easy.

  But you’re not going to get picked up if you don’t get your ass in gear. Numbnuts. He laughed, letting a smile split his usually sour face. Across the bar, the redhead saw the smile and thought it was for her. She sent one back.

  Encouraged, George got up, taking the fresh beer with him. He tried to walk nonchalantly across the smoke-filled room, but nonchalance wasn’t easy for him, not at six foot six inches tall and two hundred pounds. Gangly was the term most often used to describe him. He possessed all the grace of a rhinoceros—and most would say that comparison did the rhinoceros an injustice.

  Halfway there, he noticed how short her blue dress was. And how long her legs were. Golden, tanned legs. The color of warm cinnamon in sunlight. No hose. Just legs. A woman with legs that nice didn’t need hose. The dress was one of those sexy little one-piece jobs. It was so short he could’ve seen her snatch if her legs weren’t crossed. He was excited by the way her thighs lay across one another, brown velvet over long, toned muscle. A man could die happy between thighs like those.

  From there, his gaze traveled across hips excitingly smooth beneath the thin veneer of her dress. Her waist was small, her stomach flat, her breasts just perfectly so. She wasn’t wearing a bra and the dress had assumed the firm contours of her breasts. Her nipples were hard, buttons mistakenly sewn inside her dress. Her hair lay like gathered copper fibers across her shoulders. Her lips were red, eye shadow blue to match her dress, cheeks lightly flushed—makeup or excitement, he couldn’t tell which.

  “Mind if I join you?” he heard himself say. A stupid opening line when she’d more or less invited him over, but what else was he supposed to say? He braced himself for a dismissal: she’d say there’d been a mistake, the beer had been meant for another man, or in the poor light she’d thought he was someone else when she sent it over. He cursed himself for a damn fool for being here in the first place. But, God, she was a looker!

  “Please do.” Her voice was soft music.

  “Thanks for the Bud.” He took a quick sip to show his appreciation, set it down, and pulled out the chair across from hers.

  “You don’t think it was too forward of me?” Her eyes said that she didn’t care if he did. She struck him as the type that knew what she wanted and went after it.

  He sat down. “Not at all.”

  “A lot of men are put off when women make the first move.”

  “Not me.” He extended a hand across the table, careful not to knock over his beer or her margarita. Clumsiness was another of his less desirable traits. “George Cooper.”

  She placed her dainty hand in his large one. Her hand was warm and soft. Her nails were red like her lips. A painted woman, his mother would have said. But what did Mother know? It was Mother that had kept him isolated for so many years. So much time wasted. So little remaining.

  “Cheryl Morgan,” the redhead replied, her eyes like green diamonds.

  He wanted to kiss her hand, but knew how foolish that would look. Romance and gallantry were dead save for the fantasies he read and the dreams he kept to himself. “Pleased to meet you, Cheryl.” Saying that made him feel foolish too.

  “Likewise. What do you do for a living, George?”

  “Engineer. I work for the government. I’m here for a conference.” Diarrhea of the mouth. He was spilling answers faster than she could ask the questions.

  “Are you here for long?”

  “Just through Friday.”

  “Do they send you to many conferences?”

  “A few,” he said. Then, before she could fire off another question, he blurted, “Would you like to get out of here?” He felt heat rise to his face. There was probably a proper way to build up to such a question. His limited experience gave him no idea what it was, but he was certain you weren’t supposed to jump straight to “Your place or mine?” not more than two minutes after introducing yourself.

  To his surprise, she didn’t bat an eye at his abrupt request. Instead, she tossed off the last of her margarita. “What are we waiting for?”

  He wanted to toss off his own beer. That would have been the macho thing to do—perhaps even the polite thing since she had paid for it—but his hands were shaking too bad. He didn’t trust himself not to spill it all down the front of his shirt.

  She rose, uncrossing her legs to do so. White bikini underwear. The whitest, smallest, sheerest goddamn underwear he’d ever seen in his life. His heart near slammed through his chest.

  “Have you got a car?” Cheryl asked.

  He swallowed the lump where his heart had lodged. “Uh, yeah. Rental car. Out front in the parking lot.” As he got to his feet, she slid her arm through his. Her skin was soft silk, cool and yet electric at the same time.

  It wasn’t until he was opening the door for her that he wondered why they needed a car. He was staying here in the hotel. He’d assumed she was too. Another odd thing: she didn’t appear to have a purse. He couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman out without her purse before. He wondered how she’d paid for drinks at the bar, but he wasn’t about to ask anything that could blow the magic of this evening.

  She swung her shapely legs into the car and he closed the door after her. He ran around the front of the Plymouth Reliant and got in behind the wheel. The Reliant started easily. “Where to?” he asked, shifting into drive.

  “How about going up the coast a ways? Maybe find a nice quiet stretch of beach?”

  Oh God. “Great idea.” He hoped his voice didn’t sound as nervous to her as it did to him.

  “Full moon tonight. You ever swim naked beneath a full moon, George?”

  He couldn’t get his mouth to work on an answer to that one.

  The sand was an opalescent blue beneath the pale moon as George followed Cheryl’s swaying hips across the beach and down to the surf.

  It’d been a quiet drive, she asking most of the questions, he trying his best to answer them without sounding like a dork. She’d asked where he was from, what type of things he liked to do whenever he wasn’t engineering (her words), and whether or not he liked Virginia Beach. She didn’t ask if he was married, but he’d managed to work the fact that he wasn’t into one of his answers anyway. Somehow they’d briefly touched on the subject of his parents. George had explained about his father’s death in a freak railroad accident. That had happened when George was eight, leaving him very few memories of his father, a salesman who’d been gone most of the time anyway. George had carefully maneuvered the conversation away from his mother. Cheryl had asked about his job; he’d told her what he could about the Army’s Advanced Weapons Lab and what he did there, steering clear of the classified research projects. They’d gone only a few miles up the coast when she’d directed him down a side road where, after a few hundred feet over sand and gravel, they’d come to a secluded beach.

  Cheryl had left her high heels in the car, and as he followed her across the barren beach, George found himself mesmerized by the little spurts of sand her feet kicked up. Rather than stopping at the water’s edge, Cheryl walked right in.

  “Take your shoes off, George.”

  Easy enough. He sat on the sand and pulled them off. The waves were washing around Cheryl’s knees by the time he’d tucked his socks into his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and joined her.

  “It’s cold,” he said and instantly felt like a wimp.

  “No, it’s wonderful,” she replied, but her nipples were like small marbles.

  A wave rolled in, and she hiked her dress up over her waist to keep it dry. For a second, he stared wide-eyed at her flat brown stomach, hips, navel, and the V of her crotch. The wave washed around her; then a moment later, receded, leaving her panties soaked. In the moonlight, the dark triangle of her pubic hair stood out in stark relief beneath her underpants.

  “Wish we had a board.”

  “Board?” he stammered.

  “A surfboard, silly.”

  “Oh.” He was having trouble thinking beyond the tight fit of her wet underwear.

  Something surfaced and splashed in the darkness to their right.

  “What was that?”

  “Dolphin,” she answered. “They’re out here all the time.”

  “What if it’s a shark?” George asked nervously.

  “Sharks don’t splash around like that. They just cruise along under the surface and look for something to eat.” Cheryl snuggled against him, still holding her dress up above her waist. “See anything you’d like to eat, George?”

  There it was again, just out of sight in the darkness, something big breaking the surface of the water. George thought he heard the slap of a tail before it was gone. She was probably right. Just a dolphin. Nothing dangerous. He’d even seen a few of them earlier from the balcony of his hotel room. It was certainly nothing worth distracting him from her.

  Another wave rolled in, prying them apart. As it slapped George just above the small of his back, he realized he’d unwittingly been moving out into deeper water. Cheryl was clutching her dress in a knot just below her breasts. When the next wave hit, she squealed and gave a little jump. As she jumped, tender white flesh bobbed out from under the dress, the lower half of one sweet, untanned breast, so captivating that he almost didn’t notice when something brushed against the back of his right thigh.

  “Hey!” Startled, George jumped, lost his footing in the shifting sand, and fell forward into the water. He came up sputtering and already starting for the shore.

  “George? What’s wrong?”

  He hesitated. This wasn’t right. He couldn’t leave her out here alone. “Let’s go back to the beach. Something brushed against my leg a second ago.”

  “Don’t be silly, George. It was probably just a fish.”

  “It was bigger than just a fish.”

  “A dolphin then.”

  “Maybe.” But he wasn’t buying it. “I think we should go in anyway.”

  She pouted, her full red lips moist with salt spray. “I wanted to go for a swim.” The moon played spotlight as she pulled the dress off over her head. Her breasts shone in the pale light like two smaller moons, each orbited by a small dark satellite. He stared, open-mouthed, as they bounced with the swell and fall of the surf.

  There’ll never be another night like this, George thought. Like she said, it’s only a goddamn dolphin. He moved toward her, his shaking hand reaching out to cup one of her soft white breasts. Against his palm, her nipple was rigid. He kissed her once on the mouth, lightly, timidly. She smiled reassurance, her tongue a furtive animal that darted once across his trembling lips. His free hand swept down her back, over the firm contour of her ass, beneath her wet underpants. The muscles of her stomach quivered as he bent and put his mouth over her other nipple.

  Something struck George’s leg hard enough to take it out from under him. He sprawled in the sea, his mouth popping off Cheryl’s teat with a sound like a pacifier yanked from an infant’s mouth. He came up fast, choking on salt water, feeling a sudden numbness in his leg. Shock. He’d read somewhere that it takes several minutes before you actually feel it when a shark takes a limb.

  Until his face grated on sand, he didn’t even realize he was vacating the water. Muscles fueled by high-octane adrenaline, driven by survival instincts he didn’t even know he possessed, had propelled him like a speedboat through the water and onto the beach.

  Cheryl!

  Terror, already twined like crawling ivy about his spine, clenched him in razors from rectum to just back of his eyes. He screamed her name, sweeping the dark waters for some sign. Where was she? Surely if something had happened to her he’d have heard her scream. Wouldn’t he? Or had he been in too much of a panic?

  When he failed to find her bobbing silhouette against the gray horizon, George tried to stand so he could see above the white surf. His leg wouldn’t hold him. Looking down, he saw why. The world spun, his stomach heaved, and the beach slapped him in the face like some irate lover.

  ...There was sand plastered to the side of his face, more packed in his ear, coating his lips, and sticking salt-bitter to his tongue and teeth. It took a second to realize he’d passed out. He sat up quickly—too quickly, for his head spun and black fingers pressed at the edges of his vision. He bowed his head into his sandy hands and simply held on, waiting for it to pass. When he thought he could maintain his flimsy hold on consciousness, he dared to raise his head and survey his situation.

  It didn’t look as if he’d been out long. The moon was still where he remembered it and the tide, lapping dog-like at his bare feet, had neither advanced nor retreated. And, of course, he hadn’t bled to death. Yet.

  He reached down to examine his wound, pulling aside the leg of his trousers. The pant leg was dangling by no more than a third of its original circumference, ragged and torn, wet with water and, darker, his blood. Beneath the rent cloth lay his pale flesh, likewise torn. There was so much fresh blood it was difficult to tell just how serious the wound was. Gripping his calf, he tried to feel out the extent of the wound. When he moved the muscle, the back of his leg sagged open in a wide, wet grin. Fresh blood literally sprayed across the sand.

  George gasped, felt the world spin again, but held on. The cut was deep. Within its obscene pinkness, he spotted the gleam of bone. In that instant, the expression bone deep took on a whole new meaning for him. The cut, like the tear in his pants, went almost the whole way around his leg.

  He started to be sick, forced it back, gagged on bile and the taste of pennies in the back of his throat. The pain was starting now, tip-toeing forward on silent, stockinged feet; then, once it knew it’d been spotted, charging full speed, armed with knives, needles, and isopropyl alcohol. Open that cut up, my friend. We don’t want an infection, do we? Open that up, pin it back... there we go; now, let me pour in this alcohol. George screamed at the moon; it stared back silently, an unblinking, ambivalent eye.

  Got to stop the bleeding. He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from around his waist. Where does one apply a tourniquet? He settled for just above the knee and pulled the belt as tight as he could. The pain seemed to be increasing exponentially.

  Cheryl? He tried to stand again, managed to get up on his good knee from which he had a slightly better vantage point. The effort left bright firecrackers going off in the back of his head. The dark fingers were back, probing behind his eyeballs like exploratory surgeons.

  No sign of Cheryl.

  He fell back to the sand, leg and head throbbing in synch. He was having trouble focusing his eyes, but he thought he could see the Reliant where he’d parked it an eternity ago. It seemed miles away.

  Just before he blacked out again, he wondered if it would be morning before someone found him. And if he’d still be alive by then.

  “Doctor, he’s coming around.”

  Midnight faded to gray, gray to white, and white to reality. George blinked several times, trying to focus on a golden sun hanging over his head. The sun rearranged and clarified itself to become the concerned face of a fat, blonde nurse. A tall man in white joined her. There was a black serpent hung about his neck. A second later, the snake moved and transformed itself into a stethoscope.

  George closed his eyes. So much white, it hurt. And the smell of this place was disturbingly familiar. Since his condition had been diagnosed he’d spent enough time in places like this.

  A hand settled softly on his shoulder. “Easy, Mr. Cooper. You’re in a hospital. You’ve had a rough night. Lost a lot of blood.”

  “How—” George croaked. His throat felt scorched.

  “Get him some ice,” the doctor said, presumably to the nurse. George didn’t open his eyes to check.

  “Some kids found you this morning on the beach. My name is Doctor Fennimore. I just want you to rest. The nurse will bring you some ice. Suck on the ice; that’ll get your voice back in working order. There’s an officer waiting outside to speak with you, but I’ve told him he has to wait till you’ve—”

  “No.” If there was to be any help at all for Cheryl, it had to be quick. He opened his eyes, forced them to focus.

 

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