One Kind Favor I Ask of You (Kit Tolliver #8) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (2 page)

No idea what name she’d given Alan, and what difference did it make? “Mine’s Pam,” she said.

“Pam. Why’d you come?”

“To see your brother.”

“Thinking maybe y’all could have a life together? Only life he’s got’s gonna be in that trailer. Only life I got’s taking care of him. They was sure he was gonna die but I’m making sure he lives.”

“I see.”

“Few months ago I’d of said he’d be getting better. Well, that can’t happen. I know that now. All he can do is stay alive, and all I can do is keep him alive. So whatever you had in mind—”

“I don’t know what I had in mind.”

“Thing is, maybe you want to turn around and go right now. Oh, that sounded cold. I didn’t mean it that way. What I’m saying is you might want to spare yourself the pain of looking at him, and he’ll never know you were here. That’d be what I would do, I was you.”

“I came all this way,” she said.

“You want to see him.”

“I do.”

“Well,” Joanne said, and glanced at her wristwatch. “Time I woke him, anyway. If I let him sleep too much during the day I’m just dooming him to a restless night.”

Worse than she’d expected.

She thought she’d prepared herself, but the reality was worse than the images she’d conjured up on the way back to the trailer. She wouldn’t have recognized him as the young corporal she’d slept with in New York. She could barely recognize him as human.

So much of him was gone. One leg ended below the knee, the other at mid-thigh. One arm was off at the shoulder. The other stopped between the elbow and the wrist.

Vivid pink scar tissue covered half his face. His eyes were a clear blue, but only one of them looked at her. The other, she realized, was glass, which struck her as a curiously futile cosmetic touch, like spray-painting a car after a head-on collision.

“This is Pam,” Joanne said. “You and her knew each other in—”

“In New York,” she supplied.

She met his stare, unable to tell if he recognized her. Now that she’d seen him, she wanted to push back the clock five minutes; then, when Joanne gave her an out, she could agree that slipping away was the best course for all concerned. Then retrace her steps to the convenience store, and either catch the next bus or take a shot at hitching a ride, and get the hell away from Hedgemont as quickly as she possibly could.

Because there was no work for her here. It sometimes seemed to her as if she had an important piece of herself missing, in that the rightness or wrongness of killing her lovers didn’t seem to carry any weight with her. Killing was fun, there was no getting around it, and killing men she’d slept with felt appropriate, and that was as much as she had to know.

But to kill this man, this poor maimed creature, could not possibly be appropriate in any way. She’d put him on a list that existed solely in her own mind, and rather than cross him off she could hang a gold star next to his name, or a Congressional Medal of Honor.

She didn’t want to kill him. Quite on the contrary, she wanted to do something for him.

But what? Cook him a meal? Joanne prepared his meals, if you could call them that, and fed them to him through an IV line.

Give him a massage? Joanne performed that function, she’d confided, because it was necessary for his circulation, but he couldn’t feel it, because he couldn’t feel anything below the neck. The blast that took his limbs and his eye had severed his spinal cord. So he couldn’t move anything, not that he had much to move, and couldn’t feel anything, either.

She should leave, she thought. Say hello, say goodbye, and get the hell out.

But somehow she couldn’t.

“
Paaaam.
”

Her name, or at least the name she’d given him. His voice was low in pitch, raspy, as if dragged abrasively through his scarred throat.

“Yes, she’s right here, Bubba.”

“
Paaaam.
”

“I’m here, Alan.”

“
You came.
” He had breath enough for a single phrase, then had to gather himself for the next one. “
’S really you.
”

“Yes.”

And, haltingly, in three- and four-word bursts, he told her and his sister how much she had meant to him, how her letters had kept his morale up throughout the horror of desert warfare, how he’d longed to return to her, how he’d despaired at her ever being able to find him after his accident.

“You never said, Bubba.”

“
Try forget.
” A ragged breath, a gathering of verbal forces. “
She here now.
”

“I’m here now,” she agreed, wondering what else she was supposed to say, and hard put to guess who he thought she was, and what role she played in his personal mythology.

“
Sis . . .
”

And he rasped out what he wanted. Some time alone with his Pam. Joanne was hesitant, then agreed it would be a chance for her to get the grocery shopping done, and see to a few other errands she never had a chance to run. You’re here all the time, he told her. You never get a minute to yourself. Take an hour, take two hours. And give him some time alone with his Pam.

It was hard to get the woman out of the trailer. She had to provide instructions for every possible contingency that might crop up during her absence. But finally Joanne was out the door, and they heard the Hyundai pull out and head off down the road.

“
She gone.
”

“Yes.”

“
So who the fuck—
” a ragged breath “
are you?
”

Who the fuck was she?

Well, that was easy. She told him she’d met him just once, at a bar in the West Twenties. That they’d gone back to her apartment where he’d spent the night before returning to his unit in Iraq.

He seemed to remember. Remembered the bar, thought he was in the wrong place with all the gays there, and then he got lucky after all. He remembered that. Remembered her, sort of. But her name, Pam—

“Well, I probably gave you a different name.”

But her real name was Pam?

“Yes, Pamela, Pam for short. Pam Headley.”

She’d come this close to saying
Hedgemont
, then remembered that was the name of the town. Changed it to Headley at the last moment.

And what was she doing there? She fumbled her way to an answer. She’d remembered his name, Googled it one day on a whim, and decided it wouldn’t take her that far out of her way to stop by and see him. She hadn’t known he’d been wounded, hadn’t known anything, and the last thing she wanted to do was intrude. But here she was, and if there was anything she could do for him—

“
One thing.
”

“What?”

Hesitation. As if he was afraid to tell her what he wanted.

Well, sure. Looking as he did, reduced to what he’d become, the cocksure quality that had struck her years ago was nowhere to be found.

“If it’s sexual,” she said, “anything at all, just tell me. I won’t have a problem with it. Whatever you want, just tell me.”

“
Sex.
”

“Whatever you’d like me to do—”

“
Can’t feel anything.
”

“Oh.”

“
Neck down. Nothing.
”

“I just thought—”

“
Sometimes it gets hard.
”

“It does?”

He got it out, one ragged phrase at a time. He had no sensation there, but sometimes he got erections, and when it happened he knew it, sensed it somehow even without sensation. If his head was in the right position he could look down and see it.

And eventually it would go soft again, because he didn’t have a hand to jerk off with, and couldn’t have moved it if he did, or felt anything in either his hand or his penis. He’d tried to come by mental effort, tried to increase his excitement by thinking sexual thoughts, trotting out old memories, working up new fantasies. He let his thoughts run the gamut, tender, violent, aberrant. He’d entertain the memory or the fantasy for awhile, and then his erection would subside, and that would be that.

Once or twice, though, he’d come very close while he was sleeping. Almost had a wet dream a time or two. Woke up, though, before he could climax, and that was as far as it went.

Jesus, she thought.

“Is it hard now?”

“
Can’t see. But no, can tell it’s not.
”

“May I see?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. A sheet covered his lower body, and she drew it down to mid-thigh. His penis was soft, and her hand went to it automatically, held it gently.

“Can you feel anything?”

“
No.
”

“But you like that I’m holding it.”

“
Yeah.
”

“And you can tell that I’m holding it, can’t you? I mean, of course you can, you can see what I’m doing, but let’s try something. Close your eyes, and I’ll hold it and then not hold it, like off and on, and you’ll know when I’m holding it and when I’m not. At least I think you will. Can we try that? Can you close your eyes?”

Eye, she thought. He only had one eye to close. Was it wrong to say what she’d said?

Well, it didn’t seem to matter. And he’d closed both eyes, anyway, because that’s how the eyelids seemed to work, you closed or opened them both at once, the real one and the glass one.

She played with him, fondled him. Then let go of him. Then held him again.

“You can tell, can’t you?”

“
Yeah.
”

“Even if you can’t feel anything, you can tell. So deep inside somewhere, you’re feeling it. Your mind just doesn’t know it.”

“
Maybe.
”

“You have a beautiful penis. I don’t want to stop touching it. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard or soft. It’s just beautiful.”

And it was, sort of. In a sense it was just a dick, and God knows she’d seen enough of them in her time, but she was connecting with it in a way that was, well, getting her hot. He couldn’t feel anything, and she was getting hot. Go figure that one.

“I want it in my mouth,” she told him. “I want to suck that beautiful cock, and play with your balls, and stick my finger up your ass. I want it for me, see, and I don’t give a shit whether you can feel anything or not. But you’re gonna feel it, Alan, even if the message doesn’t get all the way to your brain. Your cock’s gonna feel it. It’s gonna get hard as a fucking rock and I’m gonna suck it and suck it and suck it and you’re gonna come like crazy and I’m gonna swallow every drop. Every fucking drop, you hear me?”