tiger her face grew pink and she lapsed into blindisms, inappropriate facial movements she had schooled herself against.
Warfield and Hassler saw her forget herself and were glad. They saw her through a wavy window, a pane of new sensation she pressed her face against.
As he watched from the shadows, the great muscles in Dolarhyde's back quivered. A drop of sweat bounced down his ribs.
"The other side's all business," Dr. Warfield said close to her ear. He led her around the table, her hand trailing down the tail. A sudden constriction in Dolarhyde's chest as her fingers trailed over the furry testicles. She cupped them and moved on.
Warfield lifted a great paw and put it in her hand. She felt the roughness of the pads and smelled faintly the cage floor. He pressed a toe to make the claw slide out. The heavy, supple muscles of the shoulders filled her hands.
She felt the tiger's ears, the width of its head and, carefully, the veterinarian guiding her, touched the roughness of its tongue. Hot breath stirred the hair on her forearms.
Last, Dr. Warfield put the stethoscope in her ears. Her hands on the rhythmic chest, her face upturned, she was filled with the tiger heart's bright thunder.
* * *
Reba McClane was quiet, flushed, elated as they drove away. She turned to Dolarhyde once and said slowly, "Thank you... very much. If you don't mind, I would dearly love a martini."
* * *
"Wait here a minute," Dolarhyde said as he parked in his yard.
She was glad they hadn't gone back to her apartment. It was stale and safe. "Don't tidy up. Take me in and tell me it's neat."
"Wait here."
He carried in the sack from the liquor store and made a fast inspection tour. He stopped in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hands over his face. He wasn't sure what he was doing. He felt danger, but not from the woman. He couldn't look up the stairs. He had to do something and he didn't know how. He should take her back home.
Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this.
Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.
He came outside, into the sunset, into the long blue shadow of the van. Reba McClane held on to his shoulders until her foot touched the ground.
She felt the loom of the house. She sensed its height in the echo of the van door closing.
"Four steps on the grass. Then there's a ramp," he said.
She took his arm. A tremor through him. Clean perspiration in cotton.
"You do have a ramp. What for?"
"Old people were here."
"Not now, though."
"No."
"It feels cool and tall," she said in the parlor. Museum air. And was that incense? A clock ticked far away. "It's a big house, isn't it? How many rooms?"
"Fourteen."
"It's old. The things in here are old." She brushed against a fringed lampshade and touched it with her fingers.
Shy Mr. Dolarhyde. She was perfectly aware that it had excited him to see her with the tiger; he had shuddered like a horse when she took his arm leaving the treatment room.
An elegant gesture, his arranging that. Maybe eloquent as well, she wasn't sure.
"Martini?"
"Let me go with you and do it," she said, taking off her shoes.
She flicked vermouth from her finger into the glass. Two and a half ounces of gin on top, and two olives. She picked up points of reference quickly in the house - the ticking clock, the hum of a window air conditioner. There was a warm place on the floor near the kitchen door where the sunlight had fallen through the afternoon.
He took her to his big chair. He sat on the couch.
There was a charge in the air. Like fluorescence in the sea, it limned movement; she found a place for her drink on the stand beside her, he put on music.
To Dolarhyde the room seemed changed. She was the first voluntary company he ever had in the house, and now the room was divided into her part and his.
There was the music, Debussy as the light failed.
He asked her aboutDenverand she told him a little, absently, as though she thought of something else. He described the house and the big hedged yard. There wasn't much need to talk.
In the silence while he changed records, she said, "That wonderful tiger, this house, you're just full of surprises, D. I don't think anybody knows you at all."
"Did you ask them?"
"Who?"
"Anybody."
"No."
"Then how do you know that nobody knows me?"