brought upstairs with him. He brought out the two sets of handcuffs which had been inside and held them up for her inspection. A pulse had been fluttering in his throat, a flickery little movement almost as fast as a hummingbird's wing. She remembered that, too. Even then his heart must have been under a strain.
You would have done me a big favor, Gerald, if you'd popped your cork right then and there.
She wanted to be horrified at this unkind thought about the man with whom she had shared so much of her life, and found the most she could manage was an almost clinical self-disgust. And when her thoughts returned to how he'd looked that day those flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes-her hands curled quietly into hard little fists.
"Why couldn't you leave me alone?" she asked him now. "Why did you have to be such a prick about it? Such a bully?"
Never mind. Don't think about Gerald; think about the cuffs, Two sets of Kreig Security Hand Restraints, size M-17. The M designation for Male; the 17 for the number of notches on the latch-locks.
A sensation of bright heat bloomed in her stomach and chest. Don't feel that, she told herself, and if you absolutely have to feel it, pretend it's indigestion.
That was impossible, however. It was hope she felt, and it wouldn't be denied. The best she could do was balance it with reality, keep reminding herself of her first failed attempt to squeeze out of the cuffs. Yet in spite of her efforts to remember the pain and the failure, what she found herself thinking about was how close-how fucking close-she had come to escape. Another quarter of an inch might have been enough to turn the trick, she had thought then, and a half would have done it for sure. The bony outcrops below her thumbs were a problem, yes, but was she actually going to die on this bed because she was unable to bridge a gap not much wider than her upper lip? Surely not.
Jessie made a strong effort to set these thoughts aside and return her mind to the day Gerald had brought the cuffs home. To how he had held them up with the wordless awe of a jeweler displaying the finest diamond necklace to ever pass through his hands. She had been fairly impressed with them herself, come to that. She remembered how shiny they had been, and how the light from the window had pricked gleams of light off the blued steel of the cuffs and the notched curves of the latch locks which allowed one to adjust the handcuffs to wrists of various sizes.
She'd wanted to know where he had gotten them-it was a matter of simple curiosity, not accusation-but all he would tell her was that one of the courthouse sharpies had helped him out. He dropped her a hazy little half-wink when he said it, as if there were dozens of these shifty fellows drifting through the various halls and ante-chambers of the Cumberland County Courthouse, and he knew them all. In fact, he'd behaved that afternoon as if it had been a couple of Scud missiles he'd scored instead of two pairs of handcuffs.
She had been lying on the bed, dressed in a white lace teddy and matching silk hose, an ensemble which was most definitely almost there, watching him with a mixture of amusement, curiosity, and excitement... but amusement had held the pole position that day, hadn't it? Yes. Seeing Gerald, who always tried so hard to be Mr Cool, go striding around the room like a horse in heat had struck her as very amusing indeed. His hair had been frizzed up in the wild corkscrews Jessie's kid brother used to call "chickens," and he'd still been wearing his black nylon dress-for-success socks. She remembered biting the insides of her cheeks and quite hard, too-to keep her smile from showing.
Mr Cool had been talking faster than an auctioneer at a bankruptcy sale that afternoon. Then, all at once, he had stopped in mid-spiel. An expression of comic surprise had overspread his face.
"Gerald, what's wrong?" she had asked. "I just realized that I don't know if you even want to consider this," he had replied. "I've been prattling on and on, I'm just about frothing at the you-know-what, as you can plainly see, and I never once asked you if-"
She had smiled then, partially because she'd gotten very bored with the scarves and hadn't known