The Other Shoe Read Online Free Page B

. ” The girl put the towels and the shining flashlight on a rock near the door of the shed. “Wasn’t my idea. Come on, I’ll show you how to work it.” She drew the T-shirt up over her head and laid it on the towels. Fully revealed she was unearthly, suffused with the same interior light as the moon. Teague’s legs threatened to give way beneath him. His eyes strained as the girl entered the gloom of the shed. “All you do,” she said, “is pull on this deal.” She seized a sort of lanyard and there was a trickling sound. She swept water over her face. “Come on,” she said. “There’s room for two, and only so much water.”
    Then she demanded it. “Come on.”
    He stepped into the shed, partly under the fall of the water.
    â€œWell, you’ll have to take your . . . you’ll get your things all wet again.”
    He would need at least a moment more to overcome a lifetime of modesty. This was a thought far too complex for his present powers of expression. His clothes began to cling to him.
    â€œYou goof. Well, if you’re . . . Here, soap me up, okay?” She put a bar of soap in his hands, turned her back to him, reached behind her to find his hands again, drew them up and around and placed them on her breasts. The roar of his own breathing. The water had found a particular course down the inside of his right pant leg, and he was slightly aware of its tickling. The girl sighed enormously, and her head drifted back until it touched his nose, and he moved the soap lower, circled her navel with it. She pressed back at him, and their breathing was everything until, from just behind him, there came another voice, a third voice, a yelp of fear or pain.

DECEPTIONS
NOT
HER OWN

▪ 1 ▪
    S HE SAT IN a steel chair, her arms folded before her on a steel table, her head heavy and adhesive on her arms, and none of a half-dozen nightmares woke her. Her dreams were full of a pestilent cloud that chased her through a cave of wildly uncertain footing, then along the big ditch down by her folks’ house; she ran barefoot before it, never quite fast enough to escape and never quite caught. Thus, she slept, but Karen Brusett had never stopped to rinse the soap from her chest and belly, and it itched terribly now, and it was that itch that eventually prodded her awake.
    A writing tablet lay at the far end of the table, a pen upon that. The video camera was still aimed at her but was finally blind; the red light had died. Thank goodness for small favors. She wiped drool from her chin. They’d brought her down a cement stairwell, walked her for what seemed hundreds of yards through a concrete maze; she knew herself to be in a deeply interior room of the basement of the county jail. Fiberglass meal trays lay stacked on metal shelving, and there was a large collection of homemade and jail-made weapons and various restraints. Sepia light oozed from wire cages in the ceiling. She drew herself up from her chair and found that she was crabbed like an old woman, that every muscle in her treacherous body had foreshortened overnight. This was not the good stiffness to be had from hard work. Staring back at the camera, her vanity intact and more perverse thanever, she imagined herself the new Mrs. Brusett, saw herself waking into the world as she had ruined it, the very image of her own selfish heedlessness, lips thick and flaccid and dry, eyes like poached eggs.
    At least she’d told them nothing.
    Over their body armor they’d worn uniforms of an ugly, glossy brown fabric, and they’d tried to act like they were her sneaky new friends, and through the night the deputies and the detective and finally the sheriff himself had all made quite a point of reminding her that she could go, that she could leave whenever she wanted, and really, if she didn’t intend to help them, she might just as well take off. What? Did they really think she liked