The Animal Girl Read Online Free Page B

herself a little to kiss his shoulders, his neck and cheeks. It took him a while—Kate could have hoped for a briefer first time—but as soon as he was finished, he rolled over and said, “You didn’t, did you?”
    â€œI will next time.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œDon’t be. It was …” She paused, looking for a word, and when she finally said it, the fullness and enthusiasm in her voice embarrassed her, “Lovely.” She felt a deep and heavy laziness of body. Their legs were tangled. Off in the darkness beside her, the fingers of her hand caressed Charles’s neck. She had forgotten for a moment what was happening to her. She was dying, she remembered now. Again. For the second time. And for some reason, it was easy to know. She wasn’t afraid, even as she was certain that the fear would return soon. For now she lay next to a man who must have been as spent and physically oblivious as she since he let out an enormous, accidental belch. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    Half-asleep, Kate giggled lazily. “I’m happy,” she said.
    The next morning, she was dizzy and experiencing double vision. In her bathroom mirror, she saw that her left eye had fallen toward the lower outside corner of its socket. She looked monstrous, and she wanted Charles, who lay slumbering in her bed, out of the house. When she prodded him awake, he rolled over and smiled at her, seeming to expect the kisses and friendliness of a lover. His breath was less than pleasant and his hair was lopsided. She kept a hand over her eye, and when he asked about it, she said something about an infection and eye drops that he didn’t question. “I’ve got to get towork,” she said, after which she stood by him while he dressed.
    â€œIs something wrong?” he asked, standing on the porch in a warmish rainy morning. One of his shoes was still untied, and his shirt was partially untucked. He waited in the drizzle until Kate gave him a peck on the cheek. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
    â€œI’ll call you,” she said, and then closed the door.
    Kate stayed home from work for the next few days. With the house empty, she thought of Charles more than she wanted to: his ease with a shotgun, his pale, gangly nakedness, his postcoital belch, his laughter and patience in her bed. He left four messages on the machine, but she didn’t call him until two days later. It was three in the morning, and she’d woken with a dull, throbbing pressure in her head that verged on pain. She was hot, drenched in sweat—a side effect, her doctor had explained, of rapidly growing tumors—and opened her windows, but the breeze moving in the curtain sent shadows rushing through the dark of her room—walls of blackness falling on top of her. “Kate,” he said sleepily.
    â€œWould you consider coming over here … now?”
    He was in her bed in fewer than twenty minutes. She could only cuddle that night, and he seemed more than happy to oblige her. “This isn’t going to be serious, right?” she asked.
    He kissed her ear. “OK.”
    â€œIt will be pleasant. It will go until one of us says enough,” she said.
    He moved in closer, sealing their bodies together. “Sure. I mean, unless we decide otherwise.”
    â€œI’m pretty sure that I won’t decide otherwise.”
    â€œThat’s fine,” Charles said.
    On subsequent nights, they returned to their lovemaking, vigorous, athletic, more skilled and certain. They did everything they could think of with the eagerness of discovery and the fumbling skill of those who’d done it before. Charles took her from behind with an enthusiastic brutishness—his arm hooked around her neck and his pelvis pounding into her—that left her feeling pleasantly ravished. Kate remembered how to come, straddling Charles and