The Sensual Mirror by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online Page B

own apartment because Gail would be calling both places, and even he wasn’t callous enough to be fucking Julia while his mistress and her best friend was ringing the phone. So, when the space between him and Julia got so thick that they could barely talk, he offered to drive her home after work. She accepted, her knees a bit weak. And they were on her bed, drinking coffee and relaxing after a two-hour fuck when Gail called, using the special signal—two rings, hang up, then call again—that Julia had given to her friend because she wasn’t answering the phone to anyone else.
    “Oh Lord, that’s Gail,” Julia had said, realizing for the first time that she was not only putting herself in a situation in relation to Martin should he find out, but also to Gail. She was in bed with her best friend’s lover. Yet she felt compelled to pick up the receiver.
    As Gail spoke, spilling out her worry, Julia understood the deeper horror of the situation. Eliot had stood her up in order to accomplish this tryst. As her eyes narrowed, Eliot saw that he was in double jeopardy, and should Martin find out, it would be triple. He and Julia carried on a conversation in gestures and eye contact as he dressed and maneuvered his way out of the apartment. He sped to Gail’s place and found her still on the phone when he arrived. He saw from her look that Julia had not told her the truth, so he was off that particular hook. But he now had to face Gail’s anger. And he was wise enough in the ways of the world to know that she would use this incident as an excuse to unload on him every resentment she had garnered for the past year.
    “A beast of a day, darling,” he shouted out with gruff forced humor. The best tactic was to smooth over any reference to the fact that he had kept her waiting for three hours. They both knew it, but any words calling attention to it would merely serve as detonator for the explosion. He needed to buy time and space. The first to allow her to go through some changes on her own before focusing on him, and the second to take a shower. For if the fight went as these things usually did, it would end spontaneously in a fuck. But he still had vaseline and Julia’s secretions in his pubic hair and on his fingers. It might go unnoticed, but that was taking a very big chance. He was prepared, as a last-ditch concession, to admit that he’d had another woman, a prostitute he would say, but preferred not having to go that far.
    “I suppose you’re going to explain,” Gail said. Her voice was fingers stuck to an ice cube tray pulled right out of the freezer. Her eyes were those of the captain of a life raft looking down as he clubbed your fingers off the rim because your weight was dragging the boat down. She had all the force of moral righteousness behind her, that quality which has launched crusades and bloodbaths of all kinds. His crime had tied him to the post and she was flicking the whip to test its power of attack.
    He was caught edging back toward the bathroom. He was so far off guard that he imagined his smell carried across the room and that Gail was already picking up the aroma of an alien beast.
    It’s so fucking feral, he thought. We pride ourselves on our sophistication and intelligence as human beings but the only thing we get from our big brain is the ability to deal with our biology in a more shifty way.
    “I’m sorry, darling, you know I am,” he said, knowing that his best tactic would be to soften his posture, to move toward her, to say in body language what could only be exacerbated by words. But there was the smell. He couldn’t afford to get too close.
    “It’s like being a teenager again,” he said to himself. “Be home by nine o’clock, don’t stay with that rough crowd, do your homework, brush your teeth.”
    “I’m an awful mess,” he said out loud. “I just have to have a shower before anything else.” And then, with a stroke of virtuoso daring, “Would you be a sweetheart