say."
"Ummm. That's good," Dolarhyde said softly. Clearly this little speech was very important to her. Was she inviting him into the two-category club with her and the Chinese paraplegic? He wondered what his second category was.
Her next statement was incredible to him.
"May I touch your face? I want to know if you're smiling or frowning." Wryly, now. "I want to know whether to just shut up or not."
She raised her hand and waited.
How well would she get around with her fingers bitten off? Dolarhyde mused. Even in street teeth he could do it as easily as biting off breadsticks. If he braced his heels on the floor, his weight back on the couch, and locked both hands on her wrist, she could never pull away from him in time. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, maybe leave the thumb. For measuring pies.
He took her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned her shapely, hard-used hand in the light. There were many small scars on it, and several new nicks and abrasions. A smooth scar on the back might have been a burn.
Too close to home. Too early in his Becoming. She wouldn't be there to look at anymore.
To ask this incredible thing, she could know nothing personal about him. She had not gossiped.
"Take my word that I'm smiling," he said. Okay on the S. It was true that he had a sort of smile which exposed his handsome public teeth.
He held her wrist above her lap and released it. Her hand settled to her thigh and half-closed, fingers trailing on the cloth like an averted glance.
"I think the coffee's ready," she said.
"I'm going." Had to go. Home for relief.
She nodded. "If I offended you, I didn't mean to."
"No."
She stayed on the ottoman, listened to be sure the lock clicked as he left.
Reba MeClane made herself another gin and tonic. She put on someSegoviarecords and curled up on the couch. Dolarhyde had left a warm dent in the cushion. Traces of him remained in the air - shoe polish, a new leather belt, good shaving lotion.
What an intensely private man. She had heard only a few references to him at the office - Dandridge saying "that son of a bitch Dolarhyde" to one of his toadies.
Privacy was important to Reba. As a child, learning to cope after she lost her sight, she had had no privacy at all.
Now, in public, she could never be sure that she was not watched. So Francis Dolarhyde's sense of privacy appealed to her. She had not felt one ion of sympathy from him, and that was good.
So was this gin.
Suddenly theSegoviasounded busy. She put on her whale songs.
Three tough months in a new town. The winter to face, finding curbs in the snow. Reba MeClane, leggy and brave, damned self-pity. She would not have it. She was aware of a deep vein of cripple's anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her determination to wring all she could from every day.
In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night-light; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering "Is this all?"
She knew that she would never have the light, but there were things she could have. There were things to enjoy. She had gotten pleasure from helping her students, and the pleasure was oddly intensified by the knowledge that she would be neither rewarded nor punished for helping them.
In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few - the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.
Involved. Reba knew that she was physically attractive to men - God knows enough of them copped a feel with their knuckles when they grabbed her upper arm.
She liked sex very much, but years ago she had learned something basic about men; most of them are terrified of entailing a burden. Their fear was augmented in her case.
She did not like for a man to creep in and out of her bed as though he were stealing chickens.
Ralph Mandy was coming to take her to dinner. He had a particularly cowardly mew about being so scarred by life that he was incapable of love. Careful Ralph told her that too often, and