Treasure Box Page 0,20

ever read so fervently and rapidly and intensely as he did during the twenty minutes he waited for her to arrive.

By the time she got there he had already decided against most of the things the books suggested. Maybe people who had been married for ten years might be comfortable enough to do stuff like that with another person, but no way could he imagine trying it with Mad. All he wanted to do was see if he could, as the books suggested, give her any kind of pleasure during mild foreplay; and, of course, by so doing assure her that he was in fact straight, if inept.

And maybe he was also hoping to see if she, in turn, was at all interested in him as a sexual partner. That would be, all in all, a great deal of very useful information for them to gain from what would be quite a minor event, taken in its proper perspective. Besides, skimming the books, however rapidly and urgently, had left him in a state of dazed arousal. Or, to use the more technical term, rampant horniness.

They talked, they ate ice cream, they laughed, they sat down to watch the news and then maybe catch Letterman before she went home, and there on the couch with the weatherman occluding his fronts and alofting his lows, Quentin touched her cheek and turned her face toward him and kissed her and realized for the first time how chaste all their kisses had been, and so he tried the thing where you slide the tip of your tongue along your partner's lip during the kiss and -

And that was the end of the kiss. She looked rather startled and laughed nervously and put her arms around him and hugged him with her face against his shoulder.

Did he do it wrong? Even pimply teenagers used their tongues when they kissed, for heaven's sake - couldn't he manage even that much?

No, no, it just startled her, that's all.

He ran his hands up and down her back. She giggled.

"What?"

"That tickles. What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to, uh, introduce a new level of physical closeness in our relationship."

She looked at him like he was crazy.

"Look, I'm just - I just thought it was maybe time we - "

We what? The only image that could come to his mind was the most weird of the suggestions the sex manuals offered. That wasn't at all what he wanted to do, at least not today, but still there was that picture in his head and it pretty much drove out of his mind the words he had meant to say.

But apparently she interpreted his silence in the worst possible way. She shuddered with revulsion and leapt up from the couch. "No!" she shouted. "Do you want to make me puke?"

This reaction was way beyond anything his dread had conjured up.

"All I did was - "

"If you think I'm ever going to do anything so disgusting with you for love or money - "

What did she think he meant? Since he had said nothing - did she mean she didn't want to have sex at all? "We're getting married," he said. "Married people generally touch each other without one of them puking. Most people assume that getting married means that somewhere along the line you - "

"I hate you!" she screamed at him.

He had never seen her like this, as she frantically picked up her purse and put on her flats - or rather, halfway put them on - and hobbled to the door as she finally settled her heels into her shoes. She slammed it on the way out, or at least an attempted slam, since the weather seal around the door kept it from making a satisfying noise. By the time Quentin could get to the door, she was already pulling away from the curb in her Escort.

He tried to call her that night and all the next day but only got the voice mail on her cellular service. All the time, he kept trying to think what he had done wrong. What had she thought he meant to do? They were engaged, weren't they? It wasn't as if he meant to have sex with her that very night - he intended to wait till they were married. He had been raised that way. But couldn't he touch her? Or was he so bad at it that it physically revolted her?

Or was it him at all? Maybe she was -