madly in the dark and thinking not about Bill but about Norman ... as if Norman were lying in bed someplace near and thinking about her. This idea made Rosie cross her arms over her breasts and hug herself. It was all too possible that he was doing just that. She put the armlet back down on the table, hurried into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.
Her troubling dream of Bill and the poisoned fruit, her questions about where or how she might have come by the armlet, and her confused feelings about the picture she’d brought, then unframed, then hidden away in the closet like a secret ... all these things faded behind a larger and more immediate concern: her date. It was today, and every time she thought of that she felt something like a hot wire in her chest. She was both afraid and happy, but more than anything else she was curious. Her date. Their date.
If he even comes, a voice inside whispered ominously. It could have all been a joke, you know. Or you might have scared him off.
Rosie started to step into the water, and realized just in the nick of time that she was still wearing her panties.
“He’ll come,” she murmured as she bent and slipped them off. “He’ll come, all right. I know he will.”
As she ducked under the spray and reached for the shampoo, a voice far back in her mind—a very different voice, this time—whispered, Beasts will fight.
“What?” Rosie froze with the plastic bottle in one hand. She was frightened and didn’t quite know why. “What did you say?”
Nothing. She couldn’t even remember exactly what it was that she’d thought, only that it was something else about that damned picture, which had gotten into her head like the chorus of a song you can’t forget. As she began to lather her hair, Rosie decided abruptly to get rid of it. The thought of doing that made her feel better, like the thought of quitting some bad habit—smoking, drinking at lunch—and by the time she stepped out of the shower, she was humming.
3
Bill didn’t torture her with doubt by being late. Rosie had pulled one of the kitchen chairs over by the window so she could watch for him (at quarter past seven she had done this, three full hours after she’d stepped out of the shower), and at twenty-five past eight a motorcycle with a cooler strapped to the carrier-rack pulled into one of the spaces in front of the building. The driver’s head was covered by a big blue helmet and the angle was wrong for her to see his face, but she knew it was him. Already the line of his shoulders was unmistakable to her. He gunned the engine once, then killed it and used a booted heel to drop the Harley’s kickstand. He swung one leg off, and for a moment the line of his thigh was clearly visible against his faded jeans. Rosie felt a tremor of timid but unmistakable lust go through her and thought: That’s what I’ll be thinking about tonight while I’m waiting to go to sleep; that’s what I’m going to see. And if I’m very, very lucky, it’s what I’ll dream about.
She thought of waiting for him up here, of letting him come to her the way a girl who is comfortable in the home of her parents might wait for the boy who is going to take her to the Homecoming Dance, waiting even after he has come, watching in her strapless party dress from behind the curtain of her bedroom window, smiling a small secret smile as he gets out of his father’s newly washed and waxed car and comes to the door, self-consciously adjusting his bowtie or tugging on his cummerbund.
She thought of it, then opened the closet door, reached in, and snatched out her sweater. She hurried down the hall, slipping into it as she went. It crossed her mind as she came to the head of the stairs and saw him already halfway up, his head raised to look at her, that she had reached the perfect age: too old to be coy for the sake of coyness, but still too young not to believe that some hopes—the ones that really matter—may turn out against all odds to be justified.
“Hi,” she said, looking down from her place. “You’re on time.”
“Sure,” he said, looking up from his. He seemed faintly surprised. “I’m always on time.