In the night room Page 0,74
hand found the switch, and the room filled with purple shadows and silver moonlight. A small, pale body with white strips across its chest and beneath its smooth belly slid through the bright darkness and slipped into the bed.
“Oh, I love this bed,” Willy said. “I think this is the perfect bed, the one all other beds aspire to be. I’m too tired to think about agency and too fuzzy to contemplate the imponderables of our situation. Here I am, in a bed with Timothy Underhill. Everything is crazy, and nothing makes any sense, not even the slightest, faintest trace. At least I had a complete day, with no parts skipped over.”
She scooted a bit toward me, and I a bit toward her.
“You’ll hold me, won’t you? I think that would be heavenly, and I’m not even going to question why. I’m too bushed. But one thing I will say: in about an hour and a half I’m going to get up and prowl around the parking lot to see if that miserable fucking car is anywhere in sight.”
Her head fell gently on my chest, and I put my arms around her. I stroked her back, her shoulder, the cool, soft, silken length of the arm lying across my torso. Her slim straight leg nestled against my leg, and we lay like that for what seemed an eternity built up of one second after another. My hand moved to the small of her back and stroked the cool skin there. She did not feel like a fictional character; she felt like a lovely human being with a boy’s hips and a woman’s soft, duck-tail bottom, only smaller than most. It had been a long, long time since I had been in bed with a woman, and that had been nothing like this. I wanted to touch every inch of Willy Patrick, to slide into Willy Patrick’s tender body, and I wanted that with a depth of passion I had probably not felt since my twenties.
Her hand slipped down to the band of my undershorts, and my leg moved between hers.
“Oh, God,” she said, and I said, “I know. This is so odd.”
“Where are you?” she said. “Are you there? Ah, I see, you are there. My goodness. Don’t you think you should sort of wiggle out of that stupid thing you’re wearing? You’re so huge, you’re going to strangle yourself.”
I wiggled out of the stupid thing, my panting organ even harder for having been so blatantly flattered, and she shed her bra and her little tighty-whity with what seemed one fluid motion, and after that a kind of paradise opened before us. When I entered her, it was like entering paradise. Within her, I felt miraculously, blissfully at home—in the perfect place at last. I fell in love—that’s the corniest, most banal, and truest way to say it. Before, I had felt as though I was falling in love, and now I had completed the journey. I was there. I wanted to hold her, cherish her, celebrate her for the rest of my life. It happened that quickly: I felt cleaved to Willy Patrick, as if we had one soul. We were like the gods depicted in erotic transport on half-ruined temples lost in the middle of great jungles. In the end, we seemed to flow together, to wear each other’s skin and find ecstatic release as one four-legged, four-armed, two-headed organism.
“God,” Willy breathed. “You’re the author I want when I’m depressed, all right. I’m going to stop fretting about agency. I don’t care, I’ve never been fucked like that before, and I want more of it.”
“I have no idea how this is going to work out,” I said, and kissed the palm of her hand, “but I don’t ever want to lose you.”
“Why should you lose me?” Willy asked. “I’m yours, aren’t I?”
Soon after, she fell asleep. I slipped into my shirt and trousers and went the back way down to the parking lot, where something like a dozen cars, none of them silver Mercedes sedans, slept under the shelter of the looming trees.
What happened in this room is what Cyrax meant when he sent across my monitor in his Arial ten-point font u will have a chance of achieving something extraordinary & incestuous & ravishing unto heart-melt & impossible for every crack-brain author but u!
Now, ravishing unto heart-melt, Willy is raising her head and groping the pillow beside hers, and this crack-brain author is going to put down