Tears Are for Angels Read Online Free Page B

forget about me? Get on back to your bottle and your rifle and just let me go."
        She was pleading with me now, for the first time, and the sincerity was gone out of her face. And then I knew that whatever it was she had come for, she had found. Because now she wanted to get out. She wanted to get away from there, after she had worked so hard to stay.
        "Please," she said.
        "No. You better stay a while longer."
        "Why?"
        And, without any conscious will to do so, I thought of a good reason.
        I put my hand on her right breast and squeezed gently.
        "I haven't felt that in two years," I said.
        At first, she clawed at my wrist. Then she leaned up a little bit and swung at my face and I took my hand away and blocked the punch.
        I stood up, and as she tried to rise. I pushed her back on the bunk. Then I was on it with her and feeling for the neckline of the T-shirt.
        She was a coiled spring of fury. I felt fingernails rake at my arms and face, and teeth in my neck. But I caught the T-shirt and yanked it away.
        "Get off of me!" I heard it coming at me in a raging whisper and I laughed and tore at the straps of her brassiere. They gave easily and my hand fumbled at her breasts again. This time they were bare.
        I had no other arm. There was only my body to hold her down, and now she rolled under me and I went against the wall and she got away and sprang to the middle of the room. I cursed the useless stump hanging from my shoulder, and in one continuous motion I was on the floor too and we faced each other in the dim lamplight of the room.
        She stood there, not even trying to cover the bare breasts. They were even smaller than I had thought, and they were stark white against the deep tan of her neck. Her hair was wild and the brown eyes blazed at me.
        I took a step forward. Instead of retreating, she came lunging at me, her breath heaving, and I grabbed at her. She squirmed free and aimed a kick between my legs. I jumped back and the backs of my legs struck the bunk and I sat down abruptly.
        She could have run then, but she swung wildly with her fist. I moved my head to one side and caught her arm and pulled her across my lap and crushed my lips down on hers. She struggled furiously and I took my head away and her eyes glared into mine.
        "You can do it," she said, "I know you can. But it won't do you any good, you bastard!"
        I grinned at her. I felt more alive than I had in two years and I knew I had to have her. I had to have a woman like that, who could have run but who had kept on fighting back.
        I hugged her tightly now so that only her legs could move and she could not reach me with a kick. Her breasts pushed against my bare chest.
        "Why won't it do me any good?"
        "Because you can't stop me that way. You'll have to kill me to stop me. Like you killed Lucy."
        

CHAPTER FOUR
        
        For a moment. I didn't move. Then I pushed her away from me. She hit the floor with a bump and gave a little cry and lay there looking at me.
        I ran.
        I sprang across her and out the door of the little house and I ran, on and on, across the dunes. I ran till my whisky-shortened breath caught in my throat and sharp knives pierced my ribs. I staggered on a little farther and sprawled out in the sand and put my head on my arm and shook.
        After a while it passed and I rolled over on my back.
        She knows, I thought. She knows I killed Lucy.
        And it came to me then with startling force how I had been living with the horror of it these two years, how I had pushed it into the remote corners of my mind and saturated it with the whisky and the hate and the sell-pity and the loneliness until I didn't even know it was there. But it was there, coiled, waiting, ready, and then an unknown girl had touched it, released the spring, and it had come shooting out