The Shaft Read Free Page B

responsible for stealing the laughter from her eyes.
        Back at their place he had drawn her a hot bath dense with oil and scented bubbles. She sank in to the tip of her nose and simmered for half an hour. She surfaced just to kiss him with a mouthful of Cabernet Blanc. When she stepped from the tub to the shower stall, he joined her. They lathered each other in familiar ways and she ducked out first, to change CDs on the player in the living room. He emerged from a cloud of steam, wound into a towel. She wore her favorite blue silk robe, her hair free and damp and shaggy. The robe's hem brushed the floor, but the topography emphasized by its sheer, slinky fabric was almost too much for any mortal man to bear.
        They were tired. At least this was detente. She instructed him to lay on his stomach, on the cool blue sheets, and she straddled him to work the kinks from his back with strong and practiced fingers. Her crisp, close pubic thatch teased his butt. Then he did her. She suffered a touch of Marfan's Syndrome, a looseness of ligaments at the joints. It was perpetual bother. She could pop her entire skeleton like a trucker cracking his knuckles. Her shoulders and hands ached much of the time; Jonathan feared incipient arthritis. In ten more years those joints would begin to swell.
        For her to rub him down was a matter of caring, of saying I still love you despite our problems . For him to rub her was a matter of knowing from experience what to massage, and how rough to be with each area, because she was hurting.
        Afterward, they had fallen asleep, entwined in each other's arms, and a stranger would have said that these were two people in love.
        Until Jonathan was hallway inside of her, gliding easily into the embrace of her musky orchid cunt. Until she told him no.
        'No, Jon. Don't. Hurts.'
        He backed off, reining himself, fighting not to be a Visigoth about how badly he wanted her just at that moment. He parted her vulva with his thumbs, so gently, and tried again. No strain. She was as wet as a thunderstorm.
        'No.'
        She had jerked down and away. It was a definite physical rebuff. She had not meant that his angle hurt. She had not meant not now but in a minute.
        Jonathan popped free of her and felt a speck of moisture strike his cheek. His treacherous cock had catapulted a droplet of her lubrication right into his face. It was damned near symbolic.
        Amanda had meant no. Period.
        And Jonathan had suddenly seen himself as ludicrous. An absurd man on his knees with a hard-on jutting toward space like a cruise missile with no target to blow up.
        Useless then, useless now.
        The Greyhound's tilt-seat was a classic, slickly grimed in the manner of a doorjamb that has suffered a million filthy hands. A disinfectant tang lingered in the cabin. It persistently reminded Jonathan of a bar men's room in Mexico. Dingy place. He had logged an unlovely half-hour or so there, hooting into the big porcelain megaphone, in another life. No hard liquor since that adventure, no thanks. Just some wine, or beer with lime at dinnertime. Amanda had smoked dope to relax for as long as he had known her. Jonathan had found that if he smoked enough to get dizzy, it made him frisky, then leadenly tired, and he would spend the next day and a half with a sore throat. He lacked any taste for the permutations - hash, bongs, half-and-half. Amanda was a browser, a sampler who used drugs infrequently and socially. She only did coke at parties. Jonathan thought sucking powder up your nose in order to be groovy was genuinely repulsive. His drug of choice was caffeine, plus that other white death, refined sugar. Jonathan was a coffee achiever.
        Smoking dope helped Amanda knock down some of the barriers she habitually cast in the path of her own sexual pleasure. She almost never orgasmed easily; it took caring effort and a commitment of time from