Chapter 18

 

Jared

 

 

Programmed to recognize signs of departing customers, the robowaiter came skating by as they carelessly swept up noters, and Jared thumbprinted the bill without looking, just to get rid of it. She punched the default setting on her car and sent it trundling off empty, and he let her input her address in his nav unit and followed, paying very little attention to where they went. In the somewhat cramped privacy of his car they could kiss again. He wanted to slide his hands under her buttoned-down shirt, under the waistband of those neat well-tailored pants; he wanted to feel her skin under his fingers. But he remembered enough professional objectivity to restrain himself. She said she hadn't tried. She was twenty-eight, but this was her first time, and he knew about that, about the hesitations and small fears; he had dealt with it before. He wanted it perfect for her

So he would at least wait until he got her home before he undressed her, but she seemed to like the feel of his hands outside her clothing and she loved his kisses; he spared a moment to feel sorry for the poor fool in her past who had done it so badly, and then he settled down to enjoy it. He could tell she hadn't done this before; she was a little tentative, clumsy, charming. Greatly daring, she slid her fingers under the hem of his T-shirt, touching the skin on his back, his side, his chest, and he decided it didn't qualify as undressing her if he undid the top button or two of her shirt. He kissed the hollow of her throat, and she leaned back against his arm to give his lips access on their way downward. So it was too tempting to ignore her breast, and he touched it, feeling the shirt fabric and the shape of the bra underneath, ready to back off if he felt her hesitate. But now that she was started she didn’t quit; she paused to register the sensations he was causing, and then she kissed him just under the curve of his jaw, by his ear, and he thought he felt just the slightest tongue action there; she had either read about it, or seen it in a vid, or she had very good instincts.

The car came to a halt; he looked up through the windshield and found them parked in front of a house buried among hedges and trees. Her car was at the side, lights extinguished. "I think we're here," he said, and she turned her head to look out the window and now, her familiar home before her, she did hesitate, eyeing the dark windows, the closed door under the overhang above the stoop.

He couldn't catch the reason for this pause; he didn't think she was having second thoughts, but what else could it be? "You know," he said, although he didn’t particularly want to, "we don't have to do anything tonight. You can show me your, well, do you have very nice art work? And drop off your noter, and we'll go out to dinner."

"I have a lot of readers you can look at," she said, "but I'm not ready for dinner yet." She made her decision; she slid out of his arms and opened the car door before he could open it for her, and led the way up the small flagstone path to her front door. She hit the thumb pad and reached her hand back to him, and he took it and followed her into the house, lights coming up as they entered.

He knew the neighborhood slightly; it was a fairly expensive neighborhood, mostly inhabited by the higher circles of academia. The Drs. Wood lived here when they were in Bridgeton. They might be her neighbors. The lots, encircling the hill, were designed with trees and bushes screening one from another, privacy in an urban setting, and the houses were elegantly understated. This one was small, the lower end of the scale, he thought. Her living room was dominated by a gigantic saegan wood desk with a built-in screen and a desk chair that looked as if it would hold two of her. There was also a huge and very ugly brown couch, the kind that probably opened into a bed. Its very appearance promised discomfort. A smaller rocker and a side chair and a footstool seemed to huddle together for mutual protection against the monsters that took up most of the space.

But there were also shelves. "You do have readers," he said, pausing to look at the array of boxes and holders, giving her time to be sure of what she wanted. "Almost as many as I do." Her library was indeed as extensive as his. As he might have expected, she had a full collection of classics, from the Earthian Bronte sisters to the Green Orchards cycle by Nahno, in the original Bahtan, he noted, impressed. He flipped through the second book in the reader, enjoying again the elegance of the phrases in the author’s native language. Sofi would love this, he thought, spotting a reader of poetry by Zafi p’Zaaf, the new publication.

"I love her work," Cara said, pausing beside him; she had moved off on a quick circuit of the house, as if expecting to find something changed in her absence. She must not have found anything. The house was very quiet, that special quietness of a home occupied by only one person, often absent. She had left a blue flowered coffee mug on the end table by the window, and a handful of cheap data cubes, probably term papers from her students, on the top of the desk, which might, he thought, have belonged originally to her mother. Certainly it was designed for someone in a much larger size, not for this slight blond. Looking at her, he had fanciful thoughts about such otherworldly beings as elves and nature sprites.

A fly buzzed over the top of the curtains on her front window, one of those ubiquitous hitchhikers who had come with baggage and produce from Earth along with cockroaches and mice to spread themselves through the galaxy. This one was out early, rushing the season. There was no other sign of life in the house, other than the two of them.

She was standing very close to him, looking up at him; she had handled whatever concerns had made her hesitate, and the fire was still blazing, in her, in him. He put down the Nahno and put his arms around her again and her arms came around him. When he bent to kiss her he felt her hands slipping under his shirt, and those hands wakened feelings he had not had for most of a year. And now she was in her own house, and he searched for the tail of her shirt, tucked neatly into the waistband of her pants. He pulled it out and felt her skin soft under his hand, which made him want to pull her shirt up, get the buttons undone, feel her arms and her shoulders and get the bra unhooked so he could see and feel her breasts, too, but he needed to go slowly and carefully this time, although the feel and the scent and even the taste of her – grazing her lips with his tongue, quickly, a trial run only – increased his hunger for more and more of her.

She was pulling his shirt up as if she wanted it off; he began to open her shirt, one button after another, and he had to remember those long sleeves and the buttons at her wrists, but getting the front open, seeing her at least half naked – her hands were running up and down his spine, causing small thrills, and he caught one hand and awkwardly, keeping an arm around her as he did it, he got the wrist button undone and kissed her hand and pulled the sleeve over it. He reached for the other hand and she shrugged the shirt away and moved her body against his, bare skin against bare skin. "You feel good," he said.

"So do you. So very good. Is it all right?" she asked. "I want to do it right."

"Entirely all right. Better than all right." He tossed her shirt aside and, since she was having a little trouble getting his shirt over his shoulders, he stopped to take it off and dropped it, too, and Maud's pendant dangled against his chest; he remembered that he had never worn it with a client because he could always see it hitting the girl on her nose in a moment of passion. He made a mental note to take it off in the bedroom.

And now he had her with only the bra, which was a simple, practical, white one trimmed with a small border of lace. He held her close for a moment, enjoying the feel of her, making sure he wasn't rushing her, and then he found the bra hook, waited for a second to see if she minded. She didn't seem to, so he unhooked the bra and brushed the straps down from her shoulders; it landed somewhere on the floor with their shirts.

He let his hand wander over her breasts; she greeted this with an indrawn breath and no protest at all. And now he wanted to lay her down somewhere, and see her, and feel her, and take those pants off and the panties underneath – slowly, slowly, he reminded himself, and slid his hand up to her head again, all the hairpins and that restraining twist. It had been loosened, he found, somewhere along the way, and he combed the hairpins out of her hair with his fingers, enjoying the feeling of that pale silk, and located the twist, which he unfastened. She was beautiful with her hair light and loose over her shoulders. She leaned back, shaking her hair out of the way, and he drew her face up to his again and kissed her, a little more passion this time.

She was breathless when he let her go; her eyes were huge and dark. He took a half step back; it gave him a better view of her lovely body, and a chance to see exactly how those pants, with their knife-edge creases, fastened, at the front, he thought. Once he had her on the bed, he could begin to move his hands below the waist, over her hips, her thighs, getting her accustomed to his touch as he eased off her pants and –

Afterward he was not quite sure of the sequence of events, even when it became important to remember it.

Her hands lingered on his chest as if she liked to touch him, and his hands lay on her shoulders; he was thinking of bringing her close against him and picking her up. The bedroom was, he thought, just past the arched doorway leading to a hall. A door was open across the hall, and he glimpsed what he thought was the corner of a bed.

And then there was a shriek, the kind of sound you might expect to hear from a spirit lost in the wastelands of hell, and something shot through the small space between them, something like a small meteorite, compact and dark and very hot; they both ducked away from it.

The data cubes flew off the desk as if someone had snatched up a handful of them and flung them at the tiny meteorite, but they missed.

And then the big floor lamp fell. It was beside the desk, and it came down, aimed right for her head, and Jared slammed it away with one hand and she jumped back. He could not be sure whether she lifted her hands to her head then or later, but she did run into the desk chair, which rolled away from her on its huge wheels, so that she overbalanced and went down, smashing against the corner of the desk as she went. It got her right side, hard; she gasped and hit the floor and, somewhere in there, her head must have collided with the desk or the chair or the floor, so that she sprawled on the carpet with both hands over the top of her head and blood trickling down her side.

She tried to sit up, and fell back with a gasp of pain. Jared was already kneeling beside her, looking at injuries; there was a nasty gash on her side and he didn't know about her ribs, and she clamped her hands against her head and closed her eyes as if the light made some monstrous headache worse.

"Oh, god, I'm sorry," she said. "Oh, god, right in the middle of everything, oh, god."

The blood ran down her side, dripping onto the floor; he looked for something to stop the flow, tissues, maybe, or – "Towels," he said, and she opened her eyes and winced and closed them again.

"Down the hall," she said, pointing in the general direction of the arch. "Second shelf."

"Don't move," he told her, and touched the side of her face, a quick caress before he got up and ducked through the arch. The open door right across from the living room was, indeed, her bedroom; he saw an old lavender quilt, faded from many washings, spread neatly over the bed. The next door, also open, led into the bathroom, brush and comb by the sink, a towel on the rack by the tub and shower enclosure.

He looked around for the linen supply, rejecting the closed door to some room at the end of the hall. The shelf unit was built in beside the sink. The top shelf was filled with various supplies thriftily bought in bulk; the second shelf held a clutter of cosmetics and bath salts and lotions, and a neat pile of towels, assorted sizes, and washcloths, coordinated pastels, not showing much wear; he hated to use them for this purpose. The lower shelf had several piles of folded things; he grabbed the topmost item and found himself looking at disposable pants designed for an incontinent person with very broad hips. This would certainly be absorbent, but inconveniently shaped. Beside that pile was what he was looking for, a stack of older towels, clean but faded and frayed and probably destined for the rag bag in the near future. He picked up the top two towels, dampened the end of one, and detoured through the bedroom, where he spotted a blanket folded on the chair by the window and took it along.

She was lying where he had left her, with one arm crooked over her eyes and a cleaner rolling in from the archway on the other side of the room, attracted by the noise. And that damned fly from the window was seesawing in the air over her head. It darted away as he approached, and he dropped down beside her, shoved the cleaner out of the way, removed a hairpin digging into his knee, and used the damp end of the towel to wipe off the blood. There was more than he liked, and, which he liked even less, she gasped with pain again when he applied very mild pressure. So, her ribs, he thought, and holding the towel lightly against the wound, he reached up with his free hand to check her head, causing her to gasp and wince. "Where does it hurt?" he asked her, and she touched the top and back of her head cautiously.

"We need a doctor," he said, trying to think how to get her into the car without causing her more pain, or, worse, more damage. "Ambulance," he mused, and she shook her head and gave a little gasp of pain at the movement.

"'Bandage," she said, keeping her arm over her eyes.

"No, sweetheart, you've bruised your ribs for sure, and probably your head, and that wound needs to be sealed; it's too big for a small sealer and a bandage isn't going to do it."

"Oh, god, how stupid, I'm so sorry!"

"Yes, I'm sure you planned this," he said, amused at the apology, "just so I wouldn't carry you off to bed with me."

"I bet you don't even want to now," she said, under her arm.

"Oh, you'd lose your bet. But I admit this isn't the right moment." He used his free arm to draw her a little closer, for whatever warmth and comfort his body could offer. The cleaner nudged him again and he elbowed it aside. "It's going to be all right," he told her. "I'll see that it's all right." He turned her face into his shoulder, out of the light, and got the end of the blanket and wrapped it around her as well as he could with one hand, getting a corner of it over her head to protect her eyes from the light. He thought if he could keep moderate pressure on her side he could keep the ribs in place, just in case they were worse than bruised, and he could staunch the blood flow, and he could keep her face against his shoulder, and the blanket around her, and in this way he could carry her to the car and into the nearest emergency room if he only had an extra pair of arms. Unfortunately he had only the regulation single pair.

He moved her left hand from her head to the folded towel, which gave him the use of his other hand. "Hold it right there," he said. "and keep your head against me. I'll carry you into my car."

She tried to shake her head; it hurt too much. "Not the hospital," she said, "please, can't we just – here at home – it isn't really that bad – "

He was willing to take her somewhere else if he could think where. Dr. Frank came to mind; Dr. Frank would make time for them if it had been earlier, but he was pretty sure Dr. Frank had gone home by now. "Why not the hospital?" he asked, hoping for some small and simple reason he could deal with, relieving her mind, because he could feel that she was upset; it didn't take Ears to know that. But he didn't want to take a lot of time dealing with it, either; she was in pain and he needed to know what was wrong and see it handled.

She mumbled something into his shoulder. "I can't hear you, sweetheart," he said, adjusting the blanket over her head.

"Mother," she said, just above a whisper. "We took Mother – all that blood – oh, god!" She put her free hand to the back of her head as if the pain had gone up a notch or two. "And they had to take her to the hospital even though she was dead and we all knew it."

So there was more to the story of Margo Lindstrom's life and death than had been made public, including at least a lot of blood; that was interesting, but not, at the moment, his major consideration. Her daughter was, and he held her and thought rapidly and decided that it couldn't hurt to try. He fended off the cleaner once more and the second cleaner, just chugging into the room from the area he thought was the kitchen. He fished into his pocket for his phone and scrolled for Dr. Frank's office number.

To his surprise, Dr. Frank answered in person. "Jared," he said, having taken note of the name of his caller on the indicator. "So what's Terry done now? Doesn't he know it's a holiday?"

"Don't you know it's after hours?" said Jared.

"Of course I know; that's why I'm here. I thought I could catch up on record keeping, if I didn't get some idiot with an emergency. So what did he do, fall off the house again?"

"Actually it isn't Terry," said Jared. "It's a friend of mine; she fell and got her ribs and her head, and gouged her side; I was going to take her to Emergency, but she doesn't want to go to the hospital, and I decided to take a chance on you."

"Well, you caught me," said Dr. Frank. "And just for the novelty of it, since it isn't Terry – Rose and Lana are gone for the day, but I bet I can remember how to use an infuser and a scanner without a nurse. Why don't you bring your friend to the back door and I'll let you in and take a look. You think she broke anything?"

"I don't know," said Jared, "but I'm concerned about the ribs." She tried shaking her head at this thought, but it hurt; she quit. He put his hand on the pale silk of her hair to hold her head still.

"Ribs and head. See if you can pad the rib area, just in case, keep her from moving around. I'd come, but I need my equipment here. How far away are you?"

"About fifteen, twenty minutes." If he didn't worry about the speed limit, that is. He was inclined not to.

"Okay, I'll watch for you. Back door."

Jared folded his phone and looked around; he didn't want to risk hurting her, so he wouldn't let her put the bra and the shirt on yet, but he thought he ought to bring them both along, and he thought it might be a good idea to get his own shirt on while he was at it; he could do that once he had her in the car. "This is my doctor," he explained to her, wrapping the blanket a little more closely around her, "and he's waiting for us at his office. Can you hold that towel? No, don't try to get up; I'll carry you."

"I can walk."

"And I can carry you and that's better," he said, and kissed her forehead, which was about all that was visible, and reached over her for the scattered clothes and levered himself off the floor, bending to lift her along with him, thankful that she was small and light, and fit – he noticed even at this point of crisis – so very well in his arms. He took a moment to be sure she was secure and he had the two shirts and the bra in one hand, and then he carried her to the door, past the fallen lamp and the desk chair, now on its side, and the fly buzzing with irritating monotony over the window. The cleaners, rushing to the blood stain on the carpet now that he was out of the way, collided with a thud, scattered hairpins flying.