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When Jimmy was gone, Salley climbed back down to the stream. She’d intended to head upslope, toward the foothills of the Mediterraneans, but something about the day, the heat, the slant of the afternoon light, sapped her will. She found a fruit-maple tree that looked like it needed her to sit underneath it, and so she did.
Leaning back against the tree but not in its shade, half-drowsing in the dusty sunlight, Salley closed her eyes. She resurrected a fantasy of the sort she had long ago learned not to be ashamed of but to accept as a natural part of the complex workings of the human mind.
In her fantasy, she was working a cliff face in the badlands of Patagonia, delicately picking out the intact skull of a giganotosaur a good third again larger than had ever been found before. Which would catapult Giganotosaurus past its rivals and establish it, once and for all, as the largest land predator the world had ever known. Simultaneously, she was speaking via satellite uplink to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, for whose a
The SVP had just awarded her the Romer-Simpson medal, and she was making her acceptance speech.
In her fantasy, she was wearing a wide denim skirt instead of her usual jeans. With one hand, she pulled the skirt up above her knees. Then she seized Leyster by the hair and forced his head between her legs. She wasn’t wearing any panties.
“Lick me,” she whispered harshly in a moment when her speech was interrupted by spontaneous applause. Then, cu
Which was a lie, but she wanted him to do his damnedest to please her.
Leyster was shockingly erect. She could tell by the earnest and enthusiastic way he ran his tongue up and down her cleft. By the small noises he made as he nuzzled and kissed her until she was moist and wide. By the barely-controlled ardor with which he licked and played with her clit.
But as he labored (and she spoke, to thunderous approval), the quality of his lovemaking changed profoundly. It became gentler, more lingering… romantic, even. This was—in her fantasy, she could tell—no longer an act of lust but one of love. In the heat of the act he had, all against his will, fallen in love with her. Inwardly he raged against it. But he was helpless before his desire, unable to resist the flood of his own consuming passion.
It was at that moment that she reached orgasm.
At the same time that she came in her fantasy, Salley grabbed the soft i
Afterwards, she leaned back, thinking about Griffin. She was aware of the irony of including Richard Leyster in her fantasies. But she didn’t feel that this was in any way being unfaithful to Griffin. Just because you loved somebody didn’t mean you had to fantasize about him.
She did love him. Salley inevitably fell for every man she had sex with. It was, she supposed, a genetic predisposition hardwired into her personality. But, still, the thought that this time was for real and forever was inherently odd.
Why him?
Griffin was such a strange man to fall for! She knew the smell of his cologne, and that he invariably wore Argyle socks (she had never before been involved with a man who even knew what Argyle socks were) and a hundred other things about him as well. She knew that the awful watch he wore was a Rolex Milgauss, self-winding, anti-magnetic, and originally designed to sell to nuclear power plant engineers. But she didn’t really know him at all. His i
When Gertrude had popped into her life like a demented fairy godmother, she’d said, “Trust me. This is the one. He’s everything you want. A week from now, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without him.”
But a week had gone by, and more than a week, and it was like every other relationship she’d ever been in. She was as confused as ever.
True love sure didn’t feel anything like she’d thought it would.
Not half an hour later, Molly Gerhard strolled casually out of the forest. Salley trusted Molly-the-Spook even less than she did Jimmy. Molly came in under your radar. She was such a pleasant woman, so patient and understanding. So easy to talk to. She was the kind of person you wanted for a friend, someone to confide in and share all your i
“So,” Molly Gerhard said. “How’s it going?” She’d put on a few pounds from her early days, and that only made her seem that much more comfortable and trustworthy. “I ran into Jimmy just now. Wow, is he looking sour. You really put a bee in his ear.”
“If we’re going to talk, let’s not pretend you just happened to wander by, okay?”
Molly Gerhard gri
“Just us gals, huh?”
“Jimmy can be a real jerk,” Molly Gerhard said. “Griffin too. I know I’m not supposed to talk about my boss like that.”
“Not unless you want to establish rapport with his girlfriend, no.”
“But we really do need to talk. Come back to the village. I’ll make you a pot of tea.”
“I was going to go upstream and…” Salley began. But suddenly she didn’t want any such thing. “Oh, all right.”
So far as Salley knew, nobody had bothered to give the village a name. It was a scattering of cottages with thatched roofs, indoor plumbing, and several appliances she couldn’t figure out. She’d seen motels that were bigger. “We have conferences here sometimes,” Griffin had explained.
“How come I’ve never heard of this?” she’d asked.
“They’re for government types—pla
“Why is that?”
“To be perfectly frank, you’re not important enough.”
Upriver from the village loomed Terminal City, looking for all the world like a cliff of solid gold. When first she’d seen it from a distance, she’d thought it was two sea stacks miraculously stranded far inland, separated by a razor-straight line of sky and river. The color, she’d assumed, was reflection from the setting sun. Then that it was a structure built in imitation of eroded geological forms, rather like one of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures, only of yellow bricks.
But no. It really was made of gold.
“You know what?” Molly Gerhard said, breaking into her thoughts. “This would be the perfect place for a honeymoon.”
Salley snorted.
“Wrong thing to say, huh?” Molly Gerhard said quietly.
“There’s my cottage. Let’s go in. I’ll make the tea.”
Salley had just put the kettle on when she heard a familiar noise outside. She hurried to the ice box. “Here. Watch this,” she said, and went to the back door with a cabbage in each hand.
Something big was moving out in the bushes. She underhanded the cabbages lightly in that direction. Molly Gerhard came up behind her and waited.
They didn’t have to wait long before a glyptodon came lumbering out of the underbrush and onto the lawn.
Glyptodons were charming creatures, as armored as a turtle and as large as a Volkswagen. Their backs were covered with a pebbled shell that looked like a bowl turned upside down. They had matching armored yarmulkas atop their heads.