The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald Page A

He had somehow anticipated, perhaps because of the difference in their ages, a girlishness about her, possibly a demureness. But this creature arched so closely against him was a mature woman, mother of two, with the humid and silky tautness of perfect health, withoutsexual restraints or fears or ignorances. She seemed there, in the warm night, to open like a tropic flower so that the scents and fragrances of her were enhanced. For the space of a second he was taken aback, startled, possibly somewhat alarmed—like a petty thief who opens the stealthy drawer and sees the heavy stack of currency. But then her response aroused him further, and the night seemed to wheel around them, tilting and breathless. They lost their balance, as though the grassy earth was trying to pull them down. He staggered and caught himself and she whirled away from him and moved three steps, limping slightly, to lean against the side of the house.
    He sat down on the step in front of the kitchen door. He could hear the muted galloping of his heart. She was breathing so deeply he could hear her. He could see her, not clearly, in silhouette, feet braced, head lowered, arms folded across her breasts.
    “My God,” she said softly, giving it more the cadence of prayer than of curse.
    He lighted two cigarettes, held one out toward her. She reached and took it from his fingers without touching him, and moved back to her former position.
    “It was my fault,” he said. His voice sounded clotted and rusty and strange, as though he had not spoken aloud in weeks.
    “Let’s not follow that line of conjecture, please. It’s so damned barren. Your fault, my fault. So what? I wanted you to. For many dirty sneaky shameful months, I’ve wanted to be kissed by you. Kissed for real, because I was curious. And so maybe I thought about it just enough so subconsciously you got the message. That isn’t the point. The point is how we undo it. How do you go about getting unkissed?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Don’t you see? It’s so damn cheap. That’s the thing about it. It’s such a horrid and typical little suburban game.”
    “So,” he said heavily, “maybe we can leave it that way. A little experiment on a summer night in suburbia. And forget it.”
    “Can we really do that?” she asked in such a subdued way he could barely hear her.
    “Now who’s helping?”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I mean, Carl. One of the things I’ve been cursed with all my life is a passion for complete honesty and frankness. Plus an unhealthy amount ofcuriosity. Maybe, if we’re frank with each other, we can open up this little infection and let it drain. Or maybe, God knows, we can talk it to death.”
    “It started last New Year’s Eve, Cindy.”
    “I know it did. When you were drunk. I wanted you to be too drunk to remember.”
    “And ever since then I’ve been telling myself I feel one way about you, and hiding the other way so that even I couldn’t see it.”
    “You hid it so well I couldn’t see it either.”
    “But it was there. And here’s another thing I’d like to believe about myself. That hidden … response to you started to come out in the open last night and tonight. But it’s as though we’d been tricked some way. I mean that when Joan and I planned the time she’d be in the hospital, I had no way of knowing you would be alone here.”
    “I can play that game. When Bucky had the sprinkler system put in he had no way of knowing I would trip and fall at such a terribly strategic time. But maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe my subconscious mind was aware of the location of the sprinkler head and steered me into it so that I would get special attention from you.”
    “I don’t think so. It’s just the timing. It’s a sort of trap that was set for us, Cindy.”
    “What I want you to know and believe, Carl, is that I am a good person. By that I mean I’m not mischievous, or flirtatious or experimental. And by that I mean that I’m not