In This Skin Read Free Page B

pounded face and the stammer had a name now. A slip of card showed a pale edge against the compartment for credit cards. An address maybe.
        Benedict checked.
        Nope. A neatly handwritten line. A proverb maybe? Benedict angled the card so it would catch the faint streetlight. We are nothing. Less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been. The words haunted Benedict West all the way home.
        

CHAPTER 2
        
        At the same time Ellery Hann slunk into the Luxor Dance Hall and Benedict West headed back to his apartment on foot, Robyn Vincent took a midnight shower. Normally she loved to sleep with Noel's semen inside of her, its warmth nourishing her contentment. They'd been together for almost a year, and they trusted each other, so she'd been the first to tell Noel that she planned to take the pill. Those rubbers might only be a few microns thick but when they made love there might have been a brick wall between them rather than a sheer membrane of latex. For the last few weeks she'd return home from making love with Noel and she'd curl up in bed feeling his come warm inside her, its heat spreading through her stomach to the tips of her fingers.
        Now was different. Robyn wanted it out of her. She'd taken the jets of water from the shower as hot as she could bear. It turned her skin red.
        Her back burned. She'd soaped herself between her legs with such force the lips of her vagina felt too tender to even touch.
        Get that come out, Robyn told herself as she showered. I want it out of me. Its smell sickens me. I don't like the slippery feel of Noel's semen on my thighs or my fingertips.
        ”Get out, get out, get out,”she repeated as she burned her skin under the blazing jets.
        But what's gone wrong with the relationship? Nothing. I love Noel more than ever, but… but-God, it's crazy really-I don't want him to fuck me. As simple as that. She ached to hold his hand, or feel his lips touch her cheek. But the prospect of his cock inside her made her want to scream out loud in disgust.
        But why?
        Why?
        The question rolled around inside Robyn Vincent's head with a ferocity that nauseated her. Her sudden change of feelings toward physical love bewildered her. Noel had said nothing to upset her. Certainly he'd done nothing. He was as sweet and as considerate as ever. Today Noel had even bought her a delicate pewter bowl in the shape of a rose that he'd found at an antique fair. He'd watched her fiddling with a cruddy plastic box that she'd used for hairpins and silently filed the information in his mind to buy her something both pretty and useful. So why the sudden revulsion over him making love to me?
        Switching off the shower, she stepped out of the stall to walk through the billowing steam to the bathroom mirror, where she wiped away the condensation.
        ”OK,”she told her reflection. ”Take stock. You're nineteen years old.
        You're solvent. So the office closed down under you last week, crap happens, but you're starting a new job at the end of the month. You've got twenty-twenty vision, you're in good health, all your own hair and body parts, and it's been six days since I even saw a zit or a blackhead on that face… a face I'm learning to live with at long last.” She forced a smile. It was a good face, after all. Even though she'd hated it in her early teens. It had been too angular. The shape of a triangle.
        Back then her eyes seemed too far apart as well, as if they were trying to put as much distance from her nose as possible. She used to stare at her eyes in the mirror and murmur gloomily,
        ”Those damn things are going to fall off the side of my head one day Of course, she'd grown from a gawky bag o' bones kid into an adult. A little more muscle upholstered those bones now. The awkward skinniness gone, to be replaced by womanly curves. Although her eyes were widely spaced