Edward Lee Read Online Free Page A

looked more like a vast and very tranquil lagoon. This is better... Tone down, relax. Get your mind off things.... Like—
    Last night...
    What had come over him? He’d chosen a sexual self-indulgence over a typical civic duty, as if his orgasm was more important than a woman being beaten. Get off it! he suddenly yelped at himself.

    Oh, no, he thought next.
    The mental blinders weren’t working out here. Lines of them: women with faces and bodies worthy of swimwear calendars. God in heaven! Stop!
    The woman seemed to drift rather than walk down the beach; it seemed as though she were an entity coming out of the sun. Flood’s heart shimmied even at the initial distance, eyes blooming at this virtual paragon bereft of defect. Waist-length hair the color of the same sun-lit sand she walked on danced in the faint breeze coming off the Gulf. Zero body fat but every contour full, even exploited for the visual effect. Breasts the size and undoubted firmness of fresh grapefruits. A harder cardiac shimmy when he noted in detail her apparel: a white fishnet bikini, each “box” of which was one inch square, and through these boxes everything was flaunted. Beer-can-top-sized areolae, darkly puckered, and nipple-ends sticking out as hard and crisply delineated as bullet cartridges: perfect cylinders of pink flesh. His gaze trembled to the pubic region, where the large fishnet squares made no secret of the fact that she dealt with an expert electrolysist, the vaginal furrow and mystical folds simply right there, for all to see, burgeoning against the threads.
    God’s really kicking my ass today—showing me THIS, Flood thought. His groin seemed to cringe. The woman appeared to be in a hurry, looking over her shoulder. Flood just stood there; he didn’t even bother trying to pretend he wasn’t staring overtly at her body.
    She walked right up, stopped; she seemed perturbed but cheerily greeted him. “Hi.”
    “Huh-hi,” Flood said.
    She kept looking behind her. A gust of wind lifted her white-blond hair. Flood was staring at the nipples showing through the net squares but managed to be coherent enough to ask, “Is something wrong?”
    “Well, yeah. Some filthy old drunk guy is following me...”
    It pained him, but he took his eyes off her body and looked down the beach. In the distance, he saw a guy with glasses staring back but he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there staring as no doubt many, many men stared at her with regularity. Dressed like this—if one could call a few ounces of threads “dress”—she must be used to it.
    “No, not him. That guy.”
    Flood’s eyes flicked. The glare of sun provided a momentary camouflage...then, from its glow a man emerged. You gotta be kidding me, Flood thought. It was one of those beach denizens, who was probably forty-five but looked sixty-five. Raggy shorts and flip-flops, skin scorched by decades in the sun, skinny but with a belly sticking out from chronic liver damage.
    “Does this guy even have teeth?” Flood remarked. “He looks like Captain Salty on the skids.”
    The girl laughed but was still addled. “He’s been following me for a half mile, saying the dirtiest things, stuff like because of my bikini I’m asking for it.”
    “Yeah, well, I think all this guy’s gonna be asking for real soon is a liver transplant. Look at him. He’s a wreck.”
    The man staggered closer. Tufts of matted hair sprouted around the rim of a crooked Orioles cap stained nearly white with sweat-salt. The gray-blond beard looked like fungus-encrusted Brillo. “Hey, there, brother,” he cragged, “what say let’s double-team that honey? You see the tits and box on that?”
    Flood snapped, very unlike him, and stuck his face right in the old man’s, shouting, “What the FUCK is your problem, you wasted geezer? I mean besides the obvious alcohol problem? What are you doing harassing that woman?”
    Captain Salty didn’t back down. “Don’t’cha be messin’ with me,