poisoned, as any man had ever been and remained conscious. Oh, he had a powerful constitution, but not powerful enough. He could still hear, see, think (though not much of the latter), but he couldn't have moved a muscle, couldn't speak any more, didn't understand that the crimson pounding in his skull, his heart and his veins wasn't sexual potency but an effect of the drugged wine.
And the ceiling was revolving, first this way, then that; and the faces of the girls looking down on him were foxy, wolfish, lustful; and B.J. herself -
- Wasn't Bonnie Jean!
What she was exactly Jimmy couldn't have said. But as the nightgown slid from her slender, furry form, and her soft dark muzzle wrinkled back in a half-snarl, half-smile, he thought:
What a bitch! Which was perhaps as close as he would ever come to the truth of it. Or to anything. Ever again.
When the siphons sank in, Jimmy barely felt them. He felt the warmth leaving him, and the cold seeping in, and a tide as dark and darker than the deepest ocean floor rolling over him, washing him to and fro, and gradually dissolving him all away . . . but that was all.
* * *
At 2:30 in the morning Bonnie Jean got Harry out of bed to answer the door; Sandra had dropped her off. There had been an after-hours birthday party for one of the girls. BJ. was sorry, but she hadn't been able to get out of it. Anyway, here she was. Or, if it was too late ...?
Too late? Harry told her she must be joking, made her a coffee in the kitchen while she watched, had a hard time keeping his hands off her but managed it somehow. And he even made smal talk, until she asked him: 'Can't we talk in bed?'
Then he almost had her on the kitchen table, and she was equaly wanton on the stairs, until finaly, in the bedroom ... geting her out of her clothes was a frenzied affair, for both of them.
Afterwards ...
... Harry lit one of his very rare cigaretes, and eventualy B.J. said, 'Don't think me vulgar, please, but that was a fuck. That wasn't just making love ...' And replete - in every way replete - she was asleep before he could think her vulgar, or think anything else of her.
Before sleeping himself, he touched her body al over, but very gently so that she wouldn't know. Maybe it was to reassure himself that she was there. But it felt like he was making sure that she was ... she? What that was al about, he couldn't say.
In his bed, she smeled of woman, and warm flesh, and sex, and -something else. Her breath? Copper? Salt? Or was it just the sex. Hah! Just the sex! But she'd been like an animal: vibrant, writhing, crushing him in her coils. He had found himself thinking on several occasions that she would draw blood - with her nails or her teeth - but she hadn't. He believed he'd actualy felt her holding back; he knew there had been a repressed violence in her (purely sexual, he thought), which had inspired the same sort of frenzy in him. But now:
Now, despite that he felt exhausted, it was hard to get to sleep. Something was bothering him. Finaly Harry realized what it was: the light of the ful moon, pouring its rays in through his bedroom window.
So he got up and drew the faded curtains ...
Life became a blur. Space, time, places, faces: Harry couldn't say where they came from, or where they went. He even began to forget where he'd been; would have forgoten, he was sure, but for the list he kept of the places he'd visited. Spring turned to summer. The seasons were turning, and Harry frequently felt that his mind was turning, too ... from sanity to ful-fledged madness. Yet when he was with B.J. he knew he was sane. Indeed, those were the only times when he did know it.
Upon a time he'd had difficulty accepting his body; he had felt that when it was hurt - despite that it had hurt - that it realy didn't mater because it wasn't his body anyway. But those times were past now.
That had a lot to do with B.J., too, the fact that she had accepted him. She'd become his anchor on an increasingly ephemeral world. She'd anchored his body, anyway. But his mind was something else.
Frequently