The Crossroads by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

hesitated and then smiled at him. “I make divine powdered coffee. And if I’m alone I can’t put brandy in it. There’s something so terribly disreputable about drinking al …” She stopped abruptly.
    “Don’t look so upset,” he said harshly. “I’m not sensitive about it. I can’t expect anybody in the area not to know it. And it has gone on a long time.”
    “I can put either foot in my mouth so easily. Come see how the bachelor girl lives.”
    He went in with her. It was very small, immaculate, nicely decorated, fragrant with her living. She chattered continually, amusingly, but with an edge of strain in her voice. They sat at the little dining table in the end of the living room, outside the door of the kitchenette, with coffee and brandy. When her chatter died away there was an uncomfortable silence.
    “Look,” he said heavily. “We’re not easy with each other. Because you think you said something wrong. I can fix that by telling you how it is.”
    “I don’t want you to …”
    “Sometimes you want to talk about a thing like that.”
    “All right, Chip,” she said, looking down.
    He rested his heavy arms on the table and told her. He tried not to color it, not to appeal for sympathy. He made it as factual as a case history. When he finished there was a silence again, but this time it was more comfortable. She looked up at him, frowning, and said, “But what can you do? ”
    “Nothing. Live with it. I’d better go. Thanks for the coffee, Jeana. Thanks for listening. Thanks for … being the sort of person you are, so I could talk to you.”
    “I’m not much of anything.” she said.
    She went to the door with him. Night had come. The highway was a river of lights, moving with a rare slowness. He put his topcoat on and turned toward her. They looked into each other’s eyes for perhaps ten long seconds. He saw her mouth soften, saw the slow deep breath that lifted her rather small breasts under the cinnamon cardigan. When he reached for her she came meekly and obediently, blushing, into his arms, but with nothing meek or shy about the textures of her mouth.
    He took her to bed that night, in her three-quarter bed in the tiny garden studio apartment, with the wind whining outside and intermittent gusts of sleet rattling against the windows. They went to bed as hungry strangers, victims of a mutual attraction stronger—as they confessed to each other at another time—than anything they had ever felt before. They could not subdue their need. Quenched for a time it would rise again. When he left her they were no longer strangers. It was the last time he ever left his car in front of Number 22. From then on they were careful, devious—cautious, greedy schemers.
    When they could talk easily with each other, to the companionable glow of the shared cigarette, he learned that she had never been promiscuous. It eased those jealousies he had felt because of the very ease with which he had acquired her. She could not understand what had happened to her. Nor could he. Together they tapped latent stores of sexuality of which they had both beenpreviously unaware. They took each other to far, strange, sometimes frightening places. And, as what had begun as naked need changed slowly into love, they found an ever deeper, more gratifying use of each other. They shared a little guilt at their overwhelming sensuousness, but guilt was forgotten in the whine of need, the chortle of pleasure, the great cry of completion. They talked in the gentle darkness of how there had never been truly another woman for him, or a man for her. They talked of this new magic. They wondered what would happen to them.
    And they were both aware of the trap. He could not accept—nor did she want him to—the moral and emotional responsibility for destroying the pattern of Clara’s vague existence, and thus destroying what was left of her. Nor could they parade their relationship and consider themselves decent. It had to be