The Storm Murders by John Farrow Page B

both.” He studied the ceiling awhile before daring to carry on. “But it’s not driven. That’s what’s hard to get used to. It’s no longer hard-wired. Perhaps I shouldn’t use the word hard. ” That got her to grin a little. “It’s as if I have to arouse myself by visiting old memories, knowing that I used to feel a certain way, or maybe project myself into old responses or somebody else’s responses, but it’s … an adjustment, let’s say … it’s an adjustment to make love to the woman you love when sex is no longer urgent or a necessity or a response to need or even desire. So it’s—as it just was—fun. But the passion is on a different plane. I can’t pretend to be in the same place I was years ago or even—and this is telling, because you’re younger—even where you may still be.”
    “So you don’t need sex anymore,” Sandra summarized. “The passion is gone.”
    “Not gone. Transformed. And diminished. But I’m not going to lie.”
    “I’m not asking you to.”
    “It’s like the joke I heard this older comedian say once. ‘At my age, if a woman says yes, that’s great! If she says no, that’s okay, too!’”
    Sandra laughed. Then she did more than laugh. She leaned across and kissed her husband. In their postcoital ease he found it as natural as breathing to cup her breast, then to run a thumb over and around the lovely large brown nipple. She pulled back, but not away. And looked at him. She placed a hand over his, as if to assist him in caressing her breast.
    Then she fell away again and covered up against the cool temperature.
    “So I’m younger than you,” Sandra said. “This is not news. I’m not at that stage yet when desire is … diminished, or gone, whatever … and maybe it’s different for women anyway. But if you’re saying, as I think you’re saying—are you saying that even if you’re no longer driven by urge or desire or some rampant horniness you can, with pharmaceutical assistance, perhaps, still enjoy yourself? And enjoy me?”
    “And appreciate the whole shebang more than ever,” he added.
    “Shebang—no pun intended, I suppose.”
    This time he was the one who laughed. “Okay, so, the pun was not intended, but it is appreciated, if you follow my drift. Like sex, it may no longer be intended as it once was, but it is enjoyed just as much. Same pattern.”
    She loved it when they could playfully joust with each other’s intelligences. In the old days the sessions often proved preliminary, a kind of foreplay before foreplay, and now, were such times to be post-postcoital instead? A shift, but, in the overall scheme of things, a minor repositioning. One she could live with, in any case.
    “What else though,” he asked, “because I agree with you, sex is a symptom here, not a cause—what else pushed us off the rails?”
    She had to think about it, or perhaps her delayed response sheltered what she would prefer not to say. Sensing her reluctance, Cinq-Mars grew worried, feeling a cloud, a larger issue he might neither have anticipated nor necessarily desired to spring from its hiding place.
    When finally she spoke, he understood that his premonition was accurate. In a millennia he’d never have anticipated this response, not from her, and he wasn’t at all sure that, for once in his life, the truth was something he wanted to know. That the issue had nothing to do with him made it all the more perplexing.
    Sandra said, “I think I’m done with horses.”
    Whoosh. A wind blew through them both. Cinq-Mars felt a seismic lurch.
    The silence lingered awhile, then she pressed, “You have to say something.”
    “I can’t. I’m stunned.”
    “I know. I know. It doesn’t seem possible.”
    But there it was. He had quit policing, but time had brought that on. A difficult end to a career integral to his being. Nonetheless, in the realm of personal choices a necessary one given his age and physical condition. Retirement had always been an