They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online Page A

and ran my fingers through her thick, straight, ebony hair. It was frighteningly like silk, too perfect.
    â€œPull it!” she demanded, picking up her pace. “Pull it! Make it hurt!”
    As I pulled, I got an eerie feeling that I had done this before. I hadn’t. Believe me, I would remember. But I couldn’t escape the familiarity of the scene. There was a resonance in her words, even in the way she rode me.
    â€œThat’s it!” she sighed. “Harder!”
    I pulled harder. She quickened the pace. She reached back, taking my right hand, and guided it onto her right nipple. I pinched it, but not too hard. She gasped. Her back muscles flexed erratically. Her thighs began to stiffen. And as they did, another wave of resonance passed through me. My head was swimming, fighting to keep one part of itself uninvolved. Was I losing it completely? Had I done this before?
    â€œHarder!” she repeated. “Pinch it! Pinch it!”
    I sat up some and placed my left index finger on the moving target of her clitoris. When I found it, Kira wrapped her hand around my finger and rubbed herself. We rubbed together, fast and faster. We were very close now. I waited for her to start crying: “Please! Please! Please!” But that cry never came.
    â€œThat’s it, lover,” she sang. “That’s it! Hard—er. Hard—er”’
    Breathless, she could barely speak the words. And again the words, even the intonations were familiar to me. But how?
    â€œOh God, Wyatt! Wyatt! Wyatt!” she screamed, stiffened around me, and shook so fiercely the bed moved. “Wyatt.”
    As I writhed in orgasm beneath her, the confusion vanished. Wyatt Rosen was my character, the detective featured in my two novels: Coney Island Burning and They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee. In They Don’t Play, Wyatt Rosen hooks up with a newspaper reporter named Anne Curtis. In an attempt to gain insight into Rosen’s investigation of an allegedly corrupt Wisconsin congressman—a transplanted Brooklynite, hence the title of the book—Curtis enters into a steamy affair with the detective. On the morning after their first night together, Anne Curtis wakes Rosen up in exactly the same manner Kira did me. Curtis speaks the same words Kira spoke. No wonder the scene was familiar to me. I wrote it.
    â€œYou’re better than Anne Curtis,” I said, pulling Kira onto my chest.
    â€œThank you,” she whispered. “That scene between Wyatt and Anne is the most erotic thing I have ever read. It’s ironic, when Zak bought me your book, I avoided reading it at first.”
    â€œNot much of a detective fiction fan, huh?”
    â€œNo. And I didn’t want to hurt Zak’s feelings anymore than I already had.”
    â€œWhat hap—”
    â€œLet’s not talk about it,” she cut me off. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, but I never thought I could be with you.”
    â€œDream big, that’s what I say.” I laughed.
    She punched my arm playfully and slid her hair down my chest, down my belly. “As I recall, Anne couldn’t get enough of Wyatt,” Kira said as she put me in her mouth.
    Anne Curtis, of course, was lying about that. But for some odd reason I chose not to remind Kira of that.

Thread Hunting
    We showered together. Kira was more playful in the light. I wanted to take her to breakfast, but she turned me down. She had acted out a dream. Dreams end in the morning, she said, don’t push them. To push them is to destroy them. We had real lives to get back to. She had to go to her room and find her paper on twentieth-century existential novels. I had to find Zak.
    We talked while she dressed. I asked about her loneliness. She didn’t run away from the subject. She had been born in Tokyo, but her father, a V.P. for Japan Airlines, was transferred to Chicago when she was only four, to San Francisco when she