The Blue Chair by Tabitha King

Beth drew the draperies over the window that, at that moment, offered only a fading view of the parking lot below. She sat down on the edge of the nearer of the paired beds to unstrap her sandals. Kicking them off and putting her legs up, she found herself noticing the chair by the window.

And the more she looked at the chair, the sillier it seemed. The navy-blue upholstery not only padded the back and seat, it was drawn over the arms, which were slim, squared, and bent to the seat like an old man grasping his thighs. The straight, slim legs supporting the platform on which the seat cushion rested were footed with silvered casters that looked like the claws of some mythical, otherworldly bird of prey. And the legs of the chair had been upholstered too. They made Beth think of pants on horses.

The chair was the touch of overdecoration that declared the room to be a rented one, duplicated in complementary or contrasting or identical colors fifty times in this hotel. The room wasn't half bad. It had been done in otherwise sure taste, witnessed by restful, predominantly clean lines and colors. Making the best of a box, she thought, but that didn't answer the question of why hotel decorators never seemed to know when enough was enough. No matter the valiant effort, ugliness crept in.

Anomie will out, she decided. She wiggled her toes and massaged her feet, rubbing out the cramps and tiredness that had settled in them during the day.

Too many hotels, she reflected, when a person begins to wallow in the philosophy of their decoration. Or too much time in the noonday sun. Which, here in Washington, seemed to beat down from seven to seven with the relentless energy of a two-year-old child, most inappropriately for such a bloody-old star. The humidity was what one might expect in August. It washed the life out of her, until she felt like a pile of bones by a desert track.

She rose from the bed to strip and shower. It was almost worth sweating like a pig all day, for the pleasure of a long, cool shower. That was the Vermont in her. While agreeing politely with all her contacts that the heat was terrible, in her heart she knew it was blasphemous to complain of a little free warmth.

With the water running over her in silken sheets, she contemplated her immediate future with a little more modest pleasure. Tonight, for the first time on this trip, there were no clients to entertain. Not that she minded the rituals of dining in expensive restaurants, or escorting VIPs to shows or concerts or private film screenings. It was like the sun; her Vermont heart told her she liked it too much for her own good.

She studied her body in the full-length mirror that discreetly backed the bedroom door. Only sweating like butter left out on a summer day kept her from blowing up like a balloon, she told herself. A night away from the opulent tables of Sans Souci and Dominique's would do her body a world of good.

This trip was a milk-run, a feverish bore. At the same time, it was what she needed to put her over the top, the culmination of three years of sweating-blood effort. Her future, a partnership come Christmas, was on order, the down payments made but nothing confirmed, nothing delivered. It was like early spring in Vermont, a time of treacherous, sucking mud, bogging down cars, ruining shoes, spattering the backs of one's legs. The mud followed one indoors, on boots and rubbers. It seemed to want to draw a body down to its own slick, idiot slapstick level. When the ice broke, the rain came, hard cold rain, but it left in its wake a warm and fragrant air that promised summer. Falsely, always falsely; one shivered in the muck, left wanting.

But there was nothing to fear. Everything was going according to her best-laid plans. There was no reason to be apprehensive. Except, her Vermont heart answered back, that that was exactly why there was everything to fear. The odds had turned against her; she was due for a fall.

She stuck her tongue out at herself. Executive paranoia. Too much goddamn sun.

Wrapping herself in a thin cotton robe, she ordered a spartan meal from room service. She dropped her briefcase ceremonially on one of the narrow beds, flopped belly-down after it, took out a pencil and settled down to work. The pencil wandered to her mouth; it was a filthy habit, chewing pencils, but it seemed to help her concentrate ever since she gave up smoking. In seconds she was absorbed in the work, oblivious of the room around her.

Abruptly, the pencil splintered in her mouth. She bit down convulsively on a foul-tasting mash of graphite, flakes of paint, and shards of wood, and into her own lip. At once the taste of her own blood overpowered the taste of the shattered pencil. She spit a bloody mess, like some obscene, machine form of granola, into her cupped palm.

Blindly, she scrambled to snatch a tissue from the box she'd left by the window. Then she was tangled in the blue chair, slamming her shinbones into its legs and seat.

"Goddamn!" she shouted.

A sharp pain shot through her haunches, answering the dull complaint that burned along her tibia. Hobbling to the bathroom, she couldn't believe how quickly she had cramped. Slopping over the bed at a lazy angle plus too much concentration, she decided, and sucked at a cold, wet washcloth. The ice bucket was empty, but the tap flowed chilled enough so that by soaking the washcloth frequently, she was able to keep the lip from swelling noticeably.

She sat down on the john and examined her legs. Ugly red patches fringed with bits of shredded skin promised variegated bruises in a day or two. That meant opaque stockings, in this Christless heat. She must have taken on that chair with some impetus. And lost her balance, lunging for the tissue, because she knew there had been a clear path between the bed, the window, and the chair when she took off her sandals. Impossible to tell now, for her clumsiness had pushed the chair well out of place. She was surprised the heavily padded chair had had bones enough to really bruise her.

Sighing, Beth walked stiffly back to the bed, sat down on the edge and gathered up her working papers. She took a new pencil from her briefcase and set to work again, keeping the pencil gripped firmly enough to whiten her fingers, and maintaining an upright posture. In minutes, she was awash with nervous sweat, all too conscious that the symbols on the page were dissolving to incoherence before her eyes. The pencil slipped between her damp fingers, sliced a black scar across the page, and snapped insolently against the sensitive cap of her knees as it fell to the floor.

"Jesus!"

She dumped the lapful of papers to the carpet and kicked at it violently with her bare feet. The paper exploded upward like a flight of doves. Turning away, she threw herself on the bed and pounded the pillows with clenched fists.

And then fury gave way to the giggles; clutching her knees to her chest, she rolled over the bed, rocking herself gently until the spasms of giggles passed, until her breathing was even. She closed her eyes tight.

Lady, lady, she scolded herself, I don't believe this. Either tomorrow you start your period, or you need a man. Ho ho.

She opened her eyes. The blue chair sat in its place, a few of her papers drifted on its seat and arms. There was something unnerving in its hideous indifference, the idiot serenity of a pagan idol, with the pale, bloodless bodies of its sacrificial victims cradled in its dark arms. And she didn't remember moving it back into its place at all.

There was a knock at the door, room service with her meal. Called back to the real world, she jumped to her feet. When she had tipped the waiter and sent him away, she came back to the bedroom to scoop up her papers, re-order them, and place them neatly on the round glass dining table in the living room of her small suite, mercifully out of sight of the blue chair. It was a much better place to work; she should have realized that in the beginning.

She was eating her salad, watching "The White Shadow" on television, when the telephone rang. She couldn't imagine who would be calling. The day's business was concluded; she could recall no social connections in the area. But she was pleased to talk to someone, anyone, and not just to relieve her solitary state. It made her feel competent, businesslike, to put aside her fork, wipe her mouth with the hotel's stylishly rough-woven linen napkin, and lean over the broad arm of the sofa to pick up the receiver.

"Hello," she said. Her voice was modulated, but sexy in a low-key way, a nice contrast with her cool, creamy personal presence that had not hindered her career at all.

"Beth?" It was a male voice with an upper-class Boston accent that hinted at chaste small boats on endless summer seas. It was as if she suddenly saw her own face in a mirror, as she really was.

"Jay!" she cried, "Jay!"

"I saw you," he said, teasing like a small boy spying on his older sister, "last night, in Sans Souci."

"My God, why didn't you say hello? I didn't see you," she protested.

"You were leaving when I saw you. With the two Japanese and the godfather type. I didn't want to make a nuisance of myself when you were obviously working."

She laughed. "The godfather was a mere lobbyist, and I am permitted an occasional visit from my relatives. Anyway, you called at last, and I am glad. However did you find me?"

"Called your home office in Chicago. I'm surprised I caught you in."

"Me too."

"I bet. How long have you been in town?"

"Almost a week."

"Well, listen, Bethie, have you had your dinner yet?"

"Well, sort of. I'm having a spinach vinaigrette in my room. I'm not deeply attached to it. No meaningful relationship forming or anything."

"Oh. Then come out with me, and I'll buy you a disgustingly sweet dessert. And we'll get drunk together and lay bare the secrets of our souls."

"When and where?"

He suggested a restaurant-night club in Georgetown that was better known for its post-dinner revels than its cuisine, the very one to which Beth had taken her pair of Japanese clients and the distinguished-looking lobbyist after they had dined at Sans Souci. She was too excited to wonder whether it was too much of a coincidence; she thanked him and promised to meet him in forty minutes.

With glee like a small August sun in her heart, she stacked the room service dinner onto its trolley and shoved it out the door.

She summoned up Jay's voice again, as she made up her face with subdued lighting and the smog of cigarettes and too many people in mind. She had fallen in love with his clear, clipped Boston accent about the same time she had noticed that her boy-cousin was no longer just another cousin, or another noisy, irritating little boy, but a terrifically attractive male, seemingly a hundred times more sophisticated and suave than the other boys she knew, suddenly louts and oafs and shit-kickers.

Her own up-country Vermont twang was a violent embarrassment at fourteen. She was rid of it now, proud that she sounded satisfyingly like whatever she wanted to sound like, depending on where she was and who she was with. She could even, if she wanted to, sound like Jay, like her father and all that side of the family. Her mother had told her some years ago that now when Beth tried to talk like a Vermonter, she sounded like a tourist, putting it on.

She knew it was true but she also knew her mother was jealous of her, resented her easy passage into the society that her mother had never really been accepted in. The only one of them her mother had ever cared for was Jay, who was forgiven his outrageously snotty accent and cherished for what Beth's mother had referred to as his "antics." He could say the boldest things to her and be laughed at. Perhaps Beth's mother had also seen Beth's growing away from the country life as an intrusion on Jay's uniqueness. Only one of them could belong to both worlds successfully. And only one of them did, for Beth never went home now.

She had not seen or heard of Jay since her wedding thirteen years ago. He had not even made her father's funeral, though the two had been as close as father and son, closer than Jay had been to his own father. By the time of Beth's father's death Jay had become a rumor, an item of family gossip, said either to be dealing dope in the Far East or living as a monk in some Italian monastery. She had not known what to believe of him, for he was capable of anything, and with the stress of mourning and the disintegration of her marriage, Jay had become a dead-end concern.

She threw her wrapper over the blue chair and slipped into a softly cut white sundress. Assembling the necessities into a little evening bag, she dropped her lipstick and eye pencil. The thin gold tubes rolled as if under their own power beneath the chair. Abandoning all dignity, she crawled around on the floor after them, giggling with nervous irritation. When she trapped them against one of the chair's legs, she felt a prick on the bare skin of her back and drag along it as she backed out hastily. A quick peek in the mirror confirmed that the thin line of heat on her back was a long red scratch. A loose upholstery tack or exposed staple under the chair must have caught her. Her evening shawl and then the low lighting in the night club would have to cover it.

She fled the blue chair, the glass table littered with working papers, the trolley going rancid outside her door, into the suffocating summer night with an almost euphoric sense of relief.

Jay was lounging at the entrance to the restaurant; she saw his red head a block away. She stepped from her taxi into his joyous embrace. They babbled at each other. She was struck by how good he smelled. Some discreet and sensuous European scent, worn with the kind of Ivy League clothing he'd worn in college. Not flashy enough for a dope dealer, but definitely unmonkish.

It was enough, for a time, merely to look at each other. They were seated at a tiny table and had ordered drinks before they could speak anything other than a kind of verbal confetti.

It was a jolt to see that he hadn't changed very much at all. A few threads of white in his hair, promising a distinguished middle age. It was scary how very much he was still the boy who had infatuated her as an adolescent. It wasn't until Jay had introduced her to his best friend from prep school that he lost his place in her heart. Ken had seemed, then and for a long time after, to be everything that Jay was and more. It was natural that Jay should be their best man; he had surrendered her formally and gone away. And taken the luck of their marriage with him.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked her.

She drank in his voice, which was like a dry, silky wine.

"How little you've changed," she smiled, "and how glad I am you left Ken and me to our miserable devices. I'm so glad you weren't there. I would have been terribly embarrassed."

He laughed, just a little cruelly. "I won't say I saw it coming." He paused. His gaze passed over her again, like an approving caress.

"You've changed. You're not just prettier, you're beautiful. I always knew you would be."

She twirled the swizzle stick in her glass lightly. "So kind of you to say so," she said. "Now tell me what you're doing here, and what you've done with the last decade."

"I live here." He sipped his drink. "I work for the State Department. I speak five languages." He raised his eyebrows elaborately. "That makes me invaluable."

"I should think so. Did it take you all those years to learn them?"

"Almost." He waved a bowl of pretzels under her nose as if it were roses. "I'm married."

Beth sat up straight and seized his left hand.

"Wonderful!"

"My wife is Vietnamese. We have three children. My father bought us a house in Alexandria, much nicer than we could have afforded on my salary."

"Why aren't you working for someone who would pay you what you're worth?" Beth demanded.

He smiled at her a little wearily. "You presume I'm underpaid. That, maybe. But I'm doing what I should be doing. Don't worry about me, Beth. Why do you think my father, and our grandfather, and our greatgrandfathers piled up all that long green, if it wasn't to return it to the Republic in a suitably artistic form? I'm just doing my dooty, as a gent."

"Can't dump on that, can I?"

"Nope. Want another drink?"

"Oh, yes. Why didn't you bring your wife? I would have liked to meet her."

That was true enough. Even if the news had produced a small seismic shift in her heart, she couldn't help being both intensely curious about Jay's wife, and somehow pleased that he had married.

"Rachel - that's her anglicized name - doesn't go out. She hates to leave our girls. So she says. She doesn't really like this country very much. It's a little awkward, this town being what it is, and all."

Beth took both his hands in hers again. "Jay," she began.

Loosening her grasp on him, he reversed the gesture, and was holding her hands, raising them to his lips to brush them, almost too lightly to feel.

"I want out," he said slowly. "I don't have the courage just yet. We muddle along."

"Oh, Jay," Beth repeated helplessly.

He looked straight at her and grinned. "Not too good at being married, are we?"

It made her laugh, to see him being jaunty, like a small boy shadowboxing some cosmic comic-book enemy.

"You like your job?" he asked.

"Love it. I'm going to be a partner come New Year's, I think."

He raised his glass to her. "I'm not surprised."

"Oh, you never are," she laughed at him. "Nothing ever surprises you."

"Not true," he protested. "Something does."

"What? I have to hear this. The thing that surprises Jay," she challenged him.

"Every time I look at my little girls," he paused to stare into his drink as if he could see them there, "I'm surprised. I don't believe I'm really the father of three small females."

"It's hard for me to feature that, too," she admitted, giggling.

"I have a secret," he announced. "I talk to your mother."

Beth put her glass down with a thump. "What?"

"Yes, I do," he insisted. "Four times a year - Christmas, Mother's Day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. You really didn't know?"

"No. I don't, you know. Talk to her."

"Yes," he said. He studied his hands. "I know."

"You know everything."

"I saw Ken last year, at a cocktail party in New York. He looked good, a little heavier than he used to be. Had a new wife with him, biiig boobs." Jay drew enormous bazooms in the air.

Beth laughed. "I saw him too, only it was a class reunion. His wife went to school with me, did you know that? Anyway, the shocking thing was I didn't recognize him. I had to look at him for ten straight minutes to summon up his name. How's that for selective recall?"

Jay whooped. In the well-oiled, noisy crowd around them it went unnoticed.

"That's great. I'm pleased to hear it doesn't hurt anymore."

"Sometimes it surprises me," Beth mused. "I wonder if I'm heartless, or something. But there's no resentment, no anger, no nothing. That's the worst of it - no nothing."

"You knew his wife in school? Did you like her?"

"When we were in school? No." Beth made a face. "Veddy goddamn artistic. What did you think of her?"

"They'll drift apart eventually. Giving each other space until they forget each other's telephone numbers."

Beth fell silent, playing with her swizzle stick. Jay munched a pretzel lazily and watched her. She looked up and slapped one of his hands playfully.

"Don't look at me like that. I keep thinking one of my straps is broken and I've fallen out."

"You're blushing," he teased, delighted.

"Do you really call my mother?"

He nodded, now solemn.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I miss your dad. We talk about him, mostly."

Beth covered her surprise by reaching for a pretzel. It was not so much a shock to know that Jay wanted to talk to someone about her father as that her mother did.

"And me?"

"Sometimes. I get the biannual bulletins. She talks more about Tory."

"Oh." Beth snapped the pretzel in two, tasted it, set it aside. She picked up her glass and began to push remnants of ice around the bottom of the glass.

"How is he?" she asked evenly.

"Handsome, strong, and bright, she says."

"That calls for another drink."

Jay flagged a waitress.

Beth sucked at the melting ice noisily. She had known they would talk about Ken, about her parents, about her son Tory, because those people were part of the past she shared with Jay. But it was a shock to discover that Jay retained ties to her mother that were more elaborate than her own twice-yearly letter. She had not expected him to know that she had given Tory up to her mother.

She found him watching her again.

"Are you happy?" he asked her matter-of-factly.

She thought about it. His tone was intellectually curious, nonjudgmental, dry as the gin she sipped gratefully.

She nodded.

"Good," he said, and launched into the kind of gross yarn that had once captivated her. She resisted mightily, setting her face in the mask of constipated sobriety that her mother had worn years ago when subjected to what she had called "Jay's foolishness." It was just a game, an old, familiar tease and surrender, and at the proper moment, midway through the third story, she howled with horrified delight.

They came back to her hotel a little sloshed, holding hands. Heads turned as they passed through the lobby; Beth's color, already high with excitement and drinking, increased. From within the glass elevator, they presented sober, mock-American Gothic faces to the curious, and when the door closed on them they burst into giggles.

Beth had to close her eyes against the queasiness induced not only by the normal effect of the rush against gravity as the elevator rose, but also by the sudden dissolution of the outside world. Which was not, she reminded herself, exactly outside, but only the cylindrical multistoried inside of a fancy hotel.

She fumbled the key at the door. The suite seemed smaller and closer than she remembered. A normal side effect of gin, she thought, and no doubt that also explained her sensations in the elevator. She went immediately to the air-conditioner. At once the room was filled with the sound of its light respiration, and was cooler.

Turning, she found Jay looking around the living room, touching everything lightly, intently, as if he were blind and had to map the location of her papers, her portable typewriter, her address book, her briefcase, internally.

"I took you away from work," he commented.

"Oh, yes," she said.

"Good."

"Look over the rest of my home. Cloned all over this hotel, and in thirty dozen other hotels in the U.S. and the Free World. I can draw a map locating the can, the closet, and the drapery drawstrings before I sign the register."

"I know the sensation," Jay said.

He sauntered through, peeking at the kitchenette, and the bath, pausing in the bedroom. He touched her cotton wrapper on the blue chair affectionately.

"That chair," Beth said. "I wake up at night and it's watching me. The revenge of the decorator."

Jay smiled. "I didn't notice it until you said that. What does it eat?"

"Bits and pieces of me, when I get too close," she answered, and showed him her back.

He traced his finger lightly along the scratch.

"Poor baby," he murmured.

She tapped the bedroom door; it swung closed, and she could see herself in the mirror. And then Jay, behind her. It was amazing how much they looked alike.

Jay saw it too; he always had.

"We could be twins," he said.

She remembered the first time he had said it, when they were, what - eleven? She hadn't thought so then.

She giggled. He slipped one arm comfortably around her waist. She looked back at him, over her shoulder.

"Do you think the people downstairs thought so?"

He nodded yes. They looked into the mirror together.

"Little did they guess - not incestuous twins; merely cousins. The children of twins," he said.

"Still, incestuous," Beth said, smiling at him in the mirror. "Unzip me, will you?"

He smiled back at her, his fingers already doing her bidding. Then she turned to him, just as she had always wanted to, and it was so easy, they had done it so many times in their heads.

She brushed his mouth lightly with hers, and he moved suddenly against her, pushing the bony basket of his pelvis into her soft belly. Jay was already huge and hard, and he held it like a weapon against her.

In a quick light rush of words, she told him that this was what she wanted, and had always wanted. She talked all through it, talked about being fifteen and wanting to and not doing it, and later, how the possibility was always there between them. And how now the fact of it would always be there. This would close the circle, finally. This was where they were meant to come.

Without a man for many months, she prolonged the lovemaking until she was glazed with sweat and dazed with fatigue. Jay said very little, only to urge her on; it was apparent her talking was as effective for him as the easy practiced sexual gymnastics.

She ran out of words and separated from him. He closed his eyes and was very still. The air conditioning breathed a draft over them; she drew up the sheet and covered them. She lay quiet, listening to his breathing as it quickly became deep and even.

She was still intoxicated from alcohol, from sex, from Jay and their reunion that had abruptly fulfilled so many old daydreams. The unease that had plagued her for weeks was gone, cleanly exorcised. She was on the mountaintop, she told herself. It was too easy to forget the benefits of getting one's ashes hauled.

She closed her eyes but sleep eluded her. Her body was sticky, her mind busy. Moving slowly, so as not to shatter the wonderful langour of her flesh, she opened her eyes and sat up. The blue chair was the first thing she saw. It made a nice composition - the rainbow colors of the wrapper draped in horizontal stripes, cradled in the arms of the chair, so vaguely and monstrously human, such a deep, unmarkable night-sky blue.

The shower was just right; she stopped it only because she was afraid she might awaken Jay if it went on too long. She passed by the bed; he had shifted and covered his face with one protective arm. His lips curved upward a little, as if he were having a very pleasant dream. The hair in his armpit was reddish gold, as hers would be if she didn't shave it; his pubic thatch was the same color and as full as her own. She did not pause very long to observe him; it was too sweet, promising complications. Picking up the wrapper from the blue chair, she went into the living room and closed the door, gently and not quite completely, behind her.

She had just gotten into the work when the door opened. Hearing it, she did not bother to look up.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to wake you. I couldn't sleep."

When he failed to answer, she looked up to see him leaning against the doorframe. The look in his eyes was one she had seen before, sometimes in the faces of her Japanese clients when they looked at Americans. The what-are-you look, she called it. She smiled at him warmly.

"Go back to sleep. Don't mind me."

"Don't your clients resent it?"

She frowned, puzzled. "What?"

"Don't your clients resent your jumping out of bed to get back to the paperwork. Or is it just part of the job?"

Her anger fell on her good feelings for him like a typhoon upon a lovely dune. She wanted to punch him. How could a man as intelligent as she knew Jay to be fail to understand that no serious woman could afford casual sex with business associates? Precisely because she would always, with or without evidence, be suspected of screwing her way to the top.

"I don't sleep with my clients," she said shortly.

"Oh," he said. "Who do you sleep with?"

"My cousin, for one," she said easily, meeting his gaze directly.

Jay grinned. "You aren't telling me the company has been having your best all these years?"

Beth leaned back in her chair and stretched. This was really incredibly tiresome. And unfunny, if there was an element of joking in it. He seemed to want to spoil their wonderful time with some kind of obscure male tantrum. Perhaps it was necessary to defuse, once and for all, the implication that she whored, literally or metaphorically, for the company.

"I had a very pleasant relationship with a surgeon in Chicago, up until seven months ago. It lasted three years. Will that satisfy the Inquisition?"

"And?" he persisted.

"And what?" she exclaimed. "And nothing. And none of your goddamn business, Jay. What are you trying to do?"

He smiled again, this time rather sweetly. "Come back to bed with me?"

She stared at him incredulously. "Jesus. Some bedside manner."

He shrugged and left. She heard the bedsprings give as he dropped to the mattress.

She sighed and followed him, leaving the papers where they lay.

It was her turn to stand in the doorway, while he spread himself possessively over the narrow bed. He grinned at her, and opened his arms.

"I am a true descendant of capitalists. I want it all, all the time."

"I don't understand you," she protested. "You were riding me. I never would have expected sexual jealousy from you, Jay."

He punched the pillow playfully. "I hate women who get out of bed to shuffle papers. This frigging town is full of them. It's too much like balling the Secretary of State."

"Oh, you've been screwing the Secretary of State, have you?" Beth teased.

"Well," Jay answered lazily, "I've tried. I'm not his type, though."

Beth laughed. "You bastard," she said and took off the wrapper.

It was a mistake; she knew it almost immediately. This time he took charge, using her brutally. She froze up, going through the motions and hurting because she was dry and put off and put out and angry. What right had he to punish her for some nebulous body of crimes? She had not failed him; she had failed Tory and Ken and her mother and father. Then she was angry with herself, for doing this, trying to please a man she hadn't seen in ten years, trying to please the girl she hadn't been for that long.

He knew, the way he always knew, and he was angry too. He bruised her deliberately; he kept going until she was almost in tears. At last he pushed her away and blurted, "Screw it!"

She crouched against the pillows and joked bitterly. "You have been, bastard."

A power rose up in her over him. She took him in her mouth and brought him quickly to the end of it, though he resisted. She felt him holding back and punished him with the exact degree of brutality he had paid her, leaving bruises on his buttocks and back, scratching his chest and arms and thighs viciously.

Rolling away from him, she spit on the sheets. She went to sit in the blue chair, drawing back the draperies a little so she could look over the parking lot, lit eerily by arc lamps and nearly empty, covered by the thunderous clouded night sky. She wished mightily for a cigarette, thinking sometimes an early death was a fair trade for a little comfort.

He kept his peace a long time, and then she heard him, behind her, dressing. She did not look back at him. She could see all she wanted of him, moving like a shadow on the windowpanes.

"I hope your wife likes your war wounds," she said pleasantly.

He snorted. "What wife?" he said.

Beth was startled, but she would not turn and look at him. She was suddenly very weary and confused. It was like him, of course; he had always been the world's biggest liar. She put her hands on the arms of the blue chair to stop their shaking.

"Bye, Bethie," he said softly behind her. "It's been nice. I'll say hi to your mother and Tory for you."

She said nothing. There was nothing left to say. She just sat there, listening for the sound of the door opening and closing.

At last she thought she must have dozed and missed it; it was a long time since Jay had spoken and the room was so quiet, just the air conditioning breathing, and her own. The chair was surprisingly comfortable to sit in. Just right for her size, actually. The back support at the right place; the legs the right length from the floor. With her eyes half closed she sat still, suspending the thoughts that pecked at her, accusing her of folly and self-indulgence and stupidity. She would face them in the light of day.

Then she felt his arms around her again, very gently, crossing her breasts, around her waist, passing between her legs. She felt his fingers, oddly cold and silken, trace her face and the long, graceful line of her neck.

"Jay," she whispered, immediately aroused by the revelation that it was all one of his games, just another elegant tease. They would be good together again. He was after all, her kin, her spirit-mate.

"Jay," she murmured, and opened her eyes slowly, so that she might see him reflected like a ghostly twin in the window. Only he wasn't there, and the blue arms embraced her.