Bloodstone (13 page)

She kept kissing him, and the dam kept crumbling. And somewhere inside his head a voice whispered to him to stop, that it wasn’t right at all, that the result of their love could only be disastrous, but as his tears mingled with hers and he felt her hot bare skin, he finally stopped listening.

The first time was hard and hungry, too eager. But by the second time it had become the gentle love of two people who had spent a lifetime together, knew every inch of flesh and every private thought, every feeling and desire. If she had had any doubts before, they were gone now. Never had she felt this close to a person. She knew that her feelings for Billy Smith were stronger and more intense than they had any right to be. And she knew that she should hate this man, that by all rights he should be in jail for kidnapping. But for a good part of her life she had been controlled by men, by their violent acts and their sexual urges; she had made a promise to herself during the past few weeks that things would change, that no matter what else happened she would regain control of her life again. This was different, she told herself, not only because of the visions they both had shared but because he was tormented by his own demons, and because even though she had seen the way he looked at her lately, he had resisted getting physical, knowing what it would have done to her. Until finally she had made the choice, and she had made it of her own free will.

Only weeks ago she had been having sex for money, and that sex had been cold and lonely, a simple piston-like drive toward orgasm for her male partner. The faster he reached
it, the better. No tenderness, no kissing, the physical feelings dulled by the heroin rushing through her veins. Many times she had felt as if she were floating somewhere above her body, as if she were watching someone else performing these acts, and other times she would let herself drift away altogether, closing her eyes as the men slammed themselves into her, thinking about hot beach sand under her feet, the waves breaking against rock, the sound of the surf. Letting herself go, finding her own private place. The man with her would speed up, looking at her closed eyes, her smile, and that was fine, because it would be over faster, and that was what she wanted.

Every once in a while, especially those last few weeks before Billy Smith came so violently into her life, these daydreams would go bad, and she would find herself watching her brother dragging himself out of the surf, and the vision would be so sharp and detailed she would be able to see every feature in his bloated face; and he would grin at her as he wriggled like a crab across the sand, his hair tangled with seaweed and crusted with salt. If she was with a man when this vision came, she would drag her nails across his back, drawing blood, and cry out. Sometimes he liked it, sometimes not, but not one of those men had realized that she was responding to something far more horrible than anything they had done. Her dead brother had come to warn her of something, but when he tried to speak that grin would resurface on his face, and he would cease to be her brother and become someone or something else.

With these visions came the sudden urge to
hurry up
, a terrible feeling that she needed to be somewhere. Only she didn’t know where. At first she chalked these things up to the drugs, and if she had been strong enough to resist them she would have stopped then and there—but they had a hold on her that she could not break. And later when she began to have the visions even when she was sober and alone in her apartment, the heroin became an ally, helping to ward off
the worst of the visions until her brother’s bloated features became nothing more than a blur in the darkness. She took more, and still more, and yes, she was speeding headlong toward a brick wall, and she no longer cared. She would have welcomed the darkness, and the peace that came with it.

Then finally that afternoon on the beach when Billy Smith had come for her. But that no longer mattered, none of it did, not here in this cool shadowed room with the softly rushing water below their window like whispers in the dark, with his hands on her bringing out every last drop of sweat, every last tremble of her limbs.

They rolled together across the little hotel bed, the springs creaking and popping, the sheets rustling softly, twisting around their legs, forming a half-cocoon. His movements were slow again now as he slipped deeper into her, a gentle rocking of the hips as they lay side by side, as she kept her lips against the skin of his neck and whispered his name over and over like a prayer, tasting the salt of his sweat.

Later, she unwound herself from the sheets and threw her thighs up and out and let him all the way in, and still it was not enough and she pulled him closer, wrapping her legs around his waist, telling him to be quick now, gasping it out as her hands slipped down his back to his buttocks, the words catching in her throat as her body clenched and exploded and she held him so close she could hardly breathe.

Time passed, how much she did not know. They both lay there, exhausted, content, the thin moonlight through the window painting bars of shadow across their legs, the sweat drying on their skin. He lay on his back with his arm curled around her, cupping her soft breast in his hand. She snuggled in close on her side, feeling his heat, drawing her right thigh up and over his legs. Let her finger trace the long raised scar that ran across his stomach and down his hip, a ridge of hard tissue like a second backbone.

“You almost died, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Almost.”

“But you’re still alive. You lived through it, and that’s a gift and it should be treasured, not thrown away.”

“I guess life wasn’t finished with me yet.”

“No,” she said, “it wasn’t.”

He shifted, drawing her closer, and kissed her softly on the forehead. It was a sweet, unselfconscious move, and she was touched.

“You’ve never asked me my real name, not once. Don’t you want to know?”

He seemed to think about this for a moment. “Tell me.”

“Gloria Johnson.”

“You’re kidding.”

She laughed. “I hated it as a kid. Gloria always seemed like an old person’s name—I always thought of a lady with glasses on a chain around her neck and a double chin.”

He smiled and kissed her again. “I think I’ll stick with Angel.”

The next morning when she woke up he was gone, and there was a note on the bedside table.

Gone down to work at the clinic. Looked so sweet this
morning I didn’t want to wake you. Later this afternoon I’ll
be back, we can talk about a few things. Thanks for last
night, for what you did and what you said. You did me a
world of good. See you soon. Billy
.

And that was all. She didn’t know what to think. Just when she thought she had him figured out, he threw her a curve.

But he had opened up to her last night and that meant something. She stood up out of the cozy bed and went to the window, clutching the sheets to her naked body for warmth. She kept getting this mental picture in her head of a road slick with oil and antifreeze, littered with broken glass and twisted metal, and Billy stumbling across the dirt shoulder holding his belly in with his hands. The children in the other
car, how they must have looked to him. No wonder he had the nightmares, anyone would.

So where did that leave her? She knew she was falling in love with him, and wasn’t quite sure how to handle it—it had come upon her so fast. Was it really love? She had to wonder. She knew about kidnap victims and their strange connections to their kidnappers. But she wasn’t your ordinary victim. She didn’t feel threatened, she was free to go any time, and she knew that he had been driven by visions that they shared. If he hadn’t taken her, she might be dead by now—or she might have found her way here on her own.

Billy Smith was not exactly the type of man she had always dreamed of falling in love with, with his tall, too-thin frame and shock of unruly black hair, his dark eyes that looked like they had seen too much pain. But he had a certain charm.

Then again, so had her last real lover. In an entirely different way, of course. Billy was shy and often awkward; Rick Davenport had been smooth and self-assured.

She’d met him in Miami. When she had left home she had been little older than a schoolgirl, her head filled with vague dreams of stardom, thoughts of bright stage lights and seats filled with admiring faces, screaming fans. She hadn’t had much money, but she found work in a nightclub, serving drinks, cleaning tables. The pay hadn’t been much, but it had kept her alive. She found a place to live too, a little hole in the wall above a pizza parlor. While she worked, she looked in the papers for auditions. When she went to them, she found she needed a portfolio, tapes, references; most of the time they wouldn’t even let her in the door, and she would go home empty-handed, curling up into a ball on the narrow bed in her single room, listening to the shouts of the cooks and the noises of the people moving below and crying herself to sleep. Sometimes she sang to herself, just to keep her voice in shape. But she knew she didn’t have the money to make a demo, or even to get some decent pictures
taken. And she didn’t dare go home, afraid of what her father would say, afraid of admitting her mistake. Or the worst possible thing that could happen, finding out they had hardly noticed she was gone.
My brother is dead
, she had wanted to scream at them, that night before she left.
But I’m not. Don’t
you even care that you still have a daughter?

Then one night as she was working at the club, Rick walked in, looking like a movie star. He started talking to her like she could be someone, told her all she needed was a break and he could get her one. She wanted to believe him, she had wanted it so much. He told her she needed a stage name, and she had thought about that one for a while, finally settling on Angel because that was what her brother had called her when she was a little girl, before he had gotten sick, when they used to play together out behind the barn in the small dirt square they used as a sandbox. One word,
Angel
, like Madonna or Cher. Rick loved the name, told her she was going to be a star. God, he was a smooth talker, so sure of himself and cocky, plenty of money in his pockets and expensive suits in his closet.

He lived in a big place just off the beach with a glass wall facing the water and a second floor that hung out over the sand. He threw parties there on Thursday nights, and that was where he had taken her for the first time, two weeks after they met. Not forced her, exactly, but she had resisted a little, enough to realize he would get rough, before she let him take her pants off. He had been gentle after the first time, and that was enough to make her think he loved her. How naive she had been! All those other women parading through the door day after day, Rick telling her that they were clients, that he “handled their careers.” All of them young, beautiful, well dressed.

All of them addicts and whores.

It was how he got women to do what he wanted, by appealing to whatever it was they wanted most in life, letting them know he could get it for them, and then getting them
hooked. Heroin, speed, coke. Whatever worked. And finally, controlling every aspect of their lives, their money, their apartment, their friends.

Oh, she had been so naive. The auditions had been a joke. Richard Davenport was a pimp, of course. A relatively upper class one, but a pimp, nonetheless. One of Davenport’s girls could command up to a thousand a night, of which half would go to him and the other half toward the drugs she so desperately needed. And so the girl would be broke and dependent on him for everything.

Little Gloria Johnson had taken the bait, swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker, and by the time she realized her mistake, it was too late. Rick had a way of breaking your will mentally and physically, like a cult leader who convinces his subjects that death is the only way out, making them commit suicide one by one. “This is just something temporary, on the side, for spending money,” he’d told her, after the first time she had slept with “a friend of his,” and accepted money afterwards, something she had thought had been a horrible mistake. He said everybody famous started out this way, it was how things worked, babe. No big deal.
Gotta pay your dues
before you can make it to the big time, honey
. By that time, she had known him for six months, and the heroin already had a grip on her. She felt as if she were underwater, her lungs about to burst, and each syringe full of clear liquid was like a breath of air. But it was like coming up out of the water, taking a deep breath, and finding out the air was filled with poison gas. Either way, you were dead.

Men always wanted something from her. Richard Davenport, and those who had come after him, taking what little self-respect she had and flushing it down the toilet. Even her brother, back from the dead, haunting her sleep and then even her waking moments until she had clearly felt the edges of her own sanity, and it was like walking along the edge of a high, rocky cliff.

But no more. As she had told Billy earlier, Miami and all
that went with it was behind her now, she was letting it go, and damned if Davenport would hold any power over her anymore.

She showered, dressed, and took the books back to the library, passing the clinic on her way. She considered stopping in to see what the two men were up to, and thought better of it. No sense in making the first day on the job more difficult for Billy than it needed to be, and besides, she would see him soon. Still, as she passed by, she imagined him watching her from the window and her heart began to jump and her breathing sped up.
My God, I’ve really got it bad
. She hadn’t felt this way since high school. The feeling frightened her a little, but it excited her as well. She was alive, damn it, she was a thousand miles from Miami Beach and she was doing just fine.

At the library she handed the books to the same little man they had met yesterday. Not much sense in keeping those books around, she thought, since there wasn’t much in them. The young man asked her if they had helped, and she smiled and told him they had, not wanting to seem ungrateful. Then she asked him how to get to the historical society, and he gave her directions.

When she left the library the heat hit her again, and it was like stepping into a sauna. Already it was rippling the asphalt down the road, making the new leaves droop on the trees, and here it was hardly ten o’clock in the morning. The weather over the past few days had been the strangest she had ever seen, the days so hot the tar went hot and sticky in the parking lots, the nights so cold you could see your breath. Except for yesterday, of course, when it had rained, and pretty hard, too. For some reason, thinking about the rain, she remembered the librarian talking about the reverend’s funeral. Must have been a hell of a mess, the hardest part of the storm coming about the time of the graveside service. She wondered what had killed him. That night the reverend had died had been the same night…