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Beneath it, the brain.

But no, she tried to throw the temptation off. There in her mind’s eye, Marcus lay naked upon the bed, an ebony nest of curls rising and falling on his chest, still manly and muscular despite his forty-nine years. Below, a plane of flesh led to a riot of dark bestial hair (Mediterranean somehow), where his limp penis lay like a dead eel-carcass waiting to stir. How could she harm him, even being aware of his lies? He had secrets. He’d cored out the heart of their marriage with his lust bunny, yes. But the paradox, and it startled her, was that they were still deep friends despite it all. And they’d continue so even if his trysts came to light.

His death is for you! came the voiceless voice.

A positive good, thought Katt, riding the suggestion as her friends’ hands worked upon her. A way out. A way which not taken would surely mean the death of her spirit. That was what killing her husband (the idea both horrified and excited her) signified.

It could be done. The fancy was strong, and that was often a good indicator that the reality might be achieved.

Ten days and they’d arrive. Ten days to toy with the dark notion, to turn it over again and again in her head.

“You’re unusually tense tonight,” Lyra said, her soft voice as unobtrusive as ever. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” said Katt. “Everything is fine.”

And to her amazement, it was.

The drive to Denver would take an hour. The sun was touching the mountain peaks to the west. By the time the skyline grew jagged with the city’s downtown, night would be upon them.

Katt studied the profile of the woman driving. Love Bunny. She thought of her that way, even though she knew her name was Sherry Feit—BBS information could be easily cross-checked, real names to aliases, if you wanted badly enough to ferret but someone’s identity.

The passage 1-25 followed, straight south, was known as Colorado’s Front Range. As Love Bunny drove, the talk kept to safe topics—the explosive growth in Fort Collins and outlying areas, the Front Range’s changeable weather, how the Old Town Square refurbishment was finally firming up as a new city center. Her husband’s lover, Katt knew, was being careful to shield her identity until she gained a clearer notion of who Newcummer (Katt’s computer alias) was. Trust was a precious commodity, not to be doled out too eagerly. Love Bunny was being sensibly cautious.

But she didn’t hold back when it came to filling in, in delicious detail, her precious BBS descriptions of the Denver parties, the couplings she’d seen and participated in these past many months. The host, not without reason, had adopted the alias Twisted Man and his guests likewise went by their BBS names during the festivities.

“Things start normal,” she said, her deep red hair a straight tug of bloodlit filaments in the gathering dusk. “But once his rug rats go beddy-bye, the stuff everyone’s been waiting for finds its way out.” Love Bunny had huge Sarandon breasts, a tight waist, a tasty flair of thighs, and sleek legs. No wonder Marcus lusted after her. Katt had planned to drive down to Denver on her own. But last night, in chat mode on their favorite BBS, Love Bunny had wheedled her into being picked up, at any place of Katt’s choosing, so they could get acquainted on the drive down, after months of BBS conversation, and invade the party in force rather than as singletons.

“Tell me about that Rhino guy again,” said Katt.

Love Bunny sniffed in laughter, a quick impish glance as her eyes came back to the dusk-dimming road. “You have this thing for Rhino, don’t you?”

Katt supposed she had returned again and again to him in their exchanges. “It’s kinda sad and repulsive and—”

“—and your mind has the hots for him, admit it, girl, someone who sits there on the couch and unzips himself and pulls it out to play with, as easy as if he were twiddling his thumbs. It’s gotta fascinate.” “Doesn’t he, you know, dribble on the fabric?” Love Bunny sniff-laughed again. “Newcummer, I swear, you are truly a perv of the first water. Told you so lots of times.”

Katt smiled. “Admiring me all the while.”

“Of course admiring you—takes one to know one.” The Longmont exit rushed past on the right. “You’ll just have to ask Twisted Man’s wife. I forget her alias, PestleMaid or something goofy like that. Make a fascinating study on Sixty Minutes, house-cleaning after BBS parties, how to get the nastiest stains out of couch and carpet.”

Katt wanted to hate this woman but she couldn’t. Her good looks, her personality, were the reasons for Marcus’s job change, for the whole family’s uprooting. Funny, what moved people to act one way or another. If this redheaded lovely hadn’t been seeing a colleague in American Studies, if he hadn’t invited her to last year’s MLA conference, if she hadn’t gone to Marcus’s lecture on the dramatic use of family relationships in English Renaissance tragedy (these things she had pried out of his PC last fall), Katt and her mate would still be in Iowa, sowing their backyard garden, having friends over, driving to the Amanas for an abundant German-style dinner.

But here she was instead, breathing distance from her husband’s lover—knowing her identity but unknown to her—on her way to an odd, openly sexual party for computer sex fiends, down Denver way. No one she knew, not her project team at HP, not the friends she’d left in Iowa, would have believed her capable of such a thing. Truth to tell, Katt had a difficult time believing it herself.

She held the paragraph of directions and the unwieldy map of Denver in her lap. 1-25 onto 1-70 and south on 225 into Aurora, an east-hugging suburb. A few wrong turns, a few curses at eyesight and streetsigns in poor light (Love Bunny had memory for locale like a sieve), and they pulled up three houses past their destination. Corner house, two-story, typical as could be. Love Bunny, in her button-up-the-front, break-above-the-knees dress, didn’t knock. She turned the knob and marched right in. To Katt’s surprise, the door was unlocked. Ten feet ahead of them, a stairway rose to a landing, breaking left into the living areas and right toward bed and bath. A cushion of blond hair bobbed on the pleasing head of a thirtyish man. “All-right-it’s-Love-Bunny!” his pauseless words hurtled forth.

“Hello, twisted one,” said Love Bunny, ascending the stairs in her best slink. “This is Newcummer, who lights up Fort Collins with her lust.”

Twisted Man appraised her. “I’ll bet she does,” came the response, but Katt knew he harbored doubts and that he spoke more from form than substance. “Come on up!” With a gleam of gold at one lobe and a subtle musky scent, he was a sturdy man, warm and engaging, detached by choice from day-to-day routine, as were they all. Ushering them into the kitchen area, he played the game of remembering everybody’s alias, and Katt nodded and let the intros he spoke slide past her ears. A few couples. A surprising number of hefty single women seated around the table. One scrawny young guy with specs bowed low and kissed her hand, Love Bunny’s too (but his leer spoke volumes about past exchanges), when Twisted Man introduced them.

Odd. In one corner of the living room, though it was mid-June, stood a Christmas tree, a couple of little girls in pajamas tossing dice on a board. When Katt asked their host about it, he grinned. “Special goings-on around that tree last New Year’s Eve. Me and PestleMaid keep it up to remind us of certain, um, lace and latex ornaments some of our guests adorned its branches with.” Ah, she said. She knelt, attempted to say hi to the girls but they glared at her and continued their game. Bing-bong went the chimes. A tap on her shoulder. “It’s Rhino,” Love Bunny said, and this beached-whale walrussy sort of mustachioed guy ambled up into view, glad-handing Twisted Man and waving at other folks like faded royalty recalling past parades. He found a drink— or rather, PestleMaid, knowing his tastes, had it handy for him in advance. Tugging at his knee creases, he settled into one end of the long couch, adjusting, nodding at Katt and Love Bunny, righting his butterscotch eyeglass frames with the fingers not clutching his drink.

“Stay with me,” Katt murmured to her companion.

“Don’t worry,” came the reply. “He observes, he 27

does himself favors, but he only rises—gets up, I mean—for an occasional potty break. It’s a sight to see.” Love Bunny smiled and Katt noticed that, pretty as she was, her teeth stalactited out of high pink gums.

A couple arrived, cute off-kilter folks, with a sweet shy girlfriend in tow. Nope. Correction, they’d happened to arrive simultaneously—but Bashful broke off from them, and sat in an armchair near Katt’s folding chair. In soft thoughtful tones, from behind a Veronica Lake waterfall of auburn hair, she ventured upon a verbal volley full of the oddest and most brilliant wordplay Katt had ever heard. A young man, owner of Phantom Zone, a Denver BBS, rolled out a passable Steve Martin imitation on Bashful’s other side. He was clearly drawn to the shy young girl, puzzled, awed, and bowled over by her. But Katt watched him run his eyes over Love Bunny too, when she swayed by to check on Katt’s state of mind before returning to the hard knot of raucous partiers crowded around the kitchen table, running through rounds of beer and jokes. A belcher showed, a six-pack on his shoulder, some jock boozer seeming out of place though he appeared less so as time went on.

Strange. Two days more, Monday midafternoon, Marcus and Conner would pull in off the road, movers following by a day’s lag or so. It seemed, here in this night-darkened house, an eternity away. Protesting ritually, the pajama-girls reboxed their Risk! game and dawdled off toward some hidden recess of the upstairs. Katt wondered if they were locked in, or if they’d contrived to place hidden mikes or cameras where Mom and Dad would never find them. Already, the walrus man’s hand was busy at his lap. He brought his iced tumbler there, an odd gesture, she thought, until she realized he was anchoring the zipper so his free hand made a smooth ripping glide downward without snag. Single-hand to unbelt, unsnap at the top. There bloomed a sudden limp V of trouser, a weary gull’s wingspan, an unconfined bloat of white belly outward. And what had been private was now public, the pull of his hand as casual as an idle scratch. He drank as his fingers moved, then righted the glass, ice cubes knocking about like clattered miniblinds. His eyes roved over women in the kitchen, less so here in the front room.

She’d been listening to Bashful spin incomprehensible biochemical puns around her bewildered prey, content to be an outsider to what went on. Then the stroked cock across the way appeared, so matter-of-fact it did nothing to heat her up, and yet it was the first distant trumpeting of the theme of exposed flesh, a theme now threatening variations at the other end of the couch. A plump henna-rinsed woman verging on fat had started playful banter with Twisted Man about the U-swooped top she wore over a busteous bosom—as to whether she dared reveal any more. Katt looked at Love Bunny on her left, who smiled and shrugged and clinked her glass of ice held in a down-clawed grip, hunched over like a pretty young vulture, legs crossed. Twisted Man’s hands sculpted the air, a hefty squeeze of cantaloupes his point of comparison.

“Softer and warmer. And bigger, dammit,” she said, a grab of hands bunched at her sweeping neckline. The young man she’d arrived with, midcouch, had an arm stretched on the cushion behind her. “The proof is in the viewing,” her host teased. At once, she tugged the tight cling out and down over her breasts, so that their huge unsagging bulk, pinked and ruddied with awesome sprawls of areole and nipple, for the moment captivated every eye. “Ah,” said Twisted Man, “you are right, dear one, and I am wrong. Forgive me. Might a taste, for atonement’s sake, be granted?”

“Yes,” she said. “This one. For a moment.”

And then Katt’s host, who lived in a normal house and had normal kids and most likely worked in a normal office, laughed and asked Love Bunny to save his seat and rose and went to his knees before the couch and started licking the big-bosomed lady’s right nipple. Her boyfriend said, “May I lick the other one?” She said okay and he did, as Rhino watched and worked on himself, and Katt marveled in silent shock at the sight. One minute tops, the two men rose and returned to their places, the licked breasts half-vanished again behind the cloth, and conversations picked up at the point they’d been suspended.

Katt leaned toward her husband’s lover, who beamed at her with an impish glow in her eyes. “Is that it?” Death hung inside her now, same way she’d felt being picked up a few blocks from home: a stunning indifference to what she witnessed, a sense that she was outside it all.

Love Bunny murmured low, “Things usually begin with a tease.” She touched Katt’s neck, first touch, a tingle to her spine. “Watch me liven things up.”

“No, don’t,” said Katt, but Love Bunny got up and set her Anchor Steam beer on the hearth and sirened toward the pair on the sofa. Katt didn’t quite know when the feeling began, whether the tingle at her neck set it off, or if it started when Love Bunny bent to kiss the smiling boyfriend slow and sensual on the lips; but surely by then, her rage had clearly defined itself. Her husband’s mouth must have sampled, in precisely this way, her provocative kiss. His hands must have risen, just so, to stroke her breasts, the dress she wore then the same as she wore now. Seductress. She laughed as she broke the kiss, straightened, pulling a man’s hands to her chest, this man’s hands Marcus’s hands, rousing them with slow rotation, with lynx-eyed lust. Her husband had bit upon the very lure Katt now witnessed, had been reeled in cross-country, family and all, to savor the slink and sleeve of this odd brazen bimbo, this university professor, who now fondled the busty lady on the couch and lipped her, then coyly tossed her shiny red hair and began to unbutton her top. The duo on the couch gazed greedily. “Lovely, lovely,” announced the walrus man but Love Bunny, swaying as the couple stroked her silky thighs, flung him the offshoots of a keep-your-distance smile and continued unbuttoning.

Katt swore she’d kill this woman as well—kill Marcus and then kill his lover. But even as the impulse took its way through her, Katt knew the difference between one urge and the other. This one arose from head and heart, quick, angry, primal, territorial; the other lay deep in the gut, a needful thing, a quiet imperative.