Rough Cider Read Free Page B

her time.
    Was it my manly charm that had brought her here? I was once told that some women are powerfully attracted to cripples—and who was I to object?—only I’d yet to have it confirmed. I’d always assumed it was dreamed up by some guy with a game leg.
    The hell with my suspicions. If you’re male and alone on a Saturday night and a nineteen-year-old blonde arrives on your doorstep at midnight, you don’t ask questions, you reach for the champagne. The Perrier Jouet was ready in the fridge.
    I took a flashlight off the shelf and was on my way through the passage to the front door when I heard the creak of a board upstairs.
    My bedroom. The nerve of the girl.
    She’d broken in.
    I was incensed. I’m sure it was a primitive response to my territory being invaded. If I’d had two good legs, I’d have been up those stairs and she’d have been out on her you-know-what before I’d drawn another breath. Instead, while I limped to the kitchen, my brain ran the gamut from outrage to arousal.
    On reflection, I decided, I wouldn’t throw her out. I wouldn’t even register a protest.
    She’d staked her colors to the mast.
    I could be positive too. I took out the champagne and two glasses and put them on a tray. I’m fairly adept at balancing a tray on one arm, even when it comes to mounting the stairs.
    I didn’t put on the light. I know my way around my own bedroom in the dark. I leaned against the chest of drawers to the left of the door and passed my hand across the surface, prior to resting the tray there. Good thing I did, because my fingers came into contact with a pair of glasses.
    Don’t rush it, I told myself.
    A trace of musk reached my nostrils and made me take a longer, stimulating breath.
    I unfastened my belt and stripped. I approached the bed. As my hand touched the pillow, I felt her loosened hair lying across it. She’d unfastened the plait. I got in beside her. She was wrapped in my dressing gown for warmth. Our lips touched, and she guided my hand onto soft, yielding skin.
    Coming up the stairs, I’d been thinking of the dustup if I’d brought Val home, as I’d planned. Now I stopped thinking about Val. Except that she was outclassed.
    When I eventually got out of bed to uncork the champagne, Alice Ashenfelter spoke. Instead of telling me that the earth had moved, she said. “The catch on your toilet window is loose.”
    “So you climbed in.”
    She bit her lip. “Are you mad at me?”
    “Do I look mad?”
    “I can’t see without my glasses.”
    I handed them to her.
    She looped them over her ears and said. “A little distrait but not mad.”
    The cork shot across the room, and 1 filled the glasses.
    My turn to look at her. The light over the bed put strong shadows under her breasts, parting the strands of her incredibly long, fine hair. I liked the hair loose. For a girl of, say, nineteen, the plait was a curiously juvenile affectation. Plenty of the female students I taught grew their hair long, generally wearing it loose or as a ponytail or, in a few cases, some form of bun. Plaits were definitely out. Possibly it was an American style that hadn’t yet made the crossing, but I had the impression that it was special to Alice Ashenfelter. Her wide-eyed directness of approach went with it.
    What I hadn’t worked out was whether the schoolgirlish behavior was just an act or ingrained in her personality. A case of arrested development. But not, I thought appreciatively, in all respects.
    As if she’d read my thoughts, she lowered herself in the bed and pulled up the sheet to cover her breasts. Modesty seemed to be reasserting itself, so I picked the dressing gown off the floor and put it on.
    Now, I thought, for the price tag.
    I sat in the armchair facing the bed and said, “There’s something else you want to say?”
    She raised her head and went through the motion of swallowing without having taken a sip. Then she said, with the reluctance sounding in her voice, “It’s going