“Crank the handle at the side, then press the ON switch. Don’t worry about over-winding it, they’re indestructible.”
Becker turned the crank until the coiled spring inside was tight, then pressed the button and Margery Doyle’s genial Newfie drawl came on, introducing a string quartet.
“Perfect,” I said.
“You like this stuff?” Becker said.
“Don’t you?”
“I listen to MEGA FM most of the time. This is fine, though.”
He returned to the table and started to massage the back of my neck.
“I feel like I should be wearing a suit and tie,” he said.
“Why? The music?” There was a long pause. The cello spoke of caramel passion and the violin sang like spring.
“It’s kind of high-brow,” he said.
“We could turn it off. Nobody says you need music.”
He turned it off, then came back to me.
“Mmmn. That feels wonderful,” I said. “Cop fingers. Strong.”
My shirt melted off.
“Aren’t you cold?” Becker said.
“Come this way. It’s warmer under the covers.”
He had a body like sculpted granite, but his skin was soft and smelled wonderful. We lay there, staring at each other, nose to nose, just grinning. It was the kind of shyness that occurs when two people, who have chosen to act on a mutual attraction, are finally confronted with a delicious expanse of willing, unexplored flesh. It’s dizzying. Where to begin?
Going to bed with someone for the first time is nerve-wracking. I’ve never been thoroughly engulfed in the moment, the way the heroine is in romance novels. There’s no “suddenly they bonded together like liquid fire, she opened herself to his throbbing manhood and their passion exploded so that she swooned with pleasure” stuff.
That isn’t to say that it wasn’t good, but rather than Bolero, ours was an intricate Slavonic folk dance, where every gesture held particular meaning.
Everybody has a specialty or two and our moves were introduced one-by-one, like characters in a play, presented with bashful pride. After all, the audience had never seen the show before.
I’ve never believed that sex was an entirely mutual act. There’s a certain selfishness to it that requires tiny, electric moments of wordless negotiation. If things are going well, the back-and-forth pleasure is seamless and wonderful. With Becker, it was. We kept our eyes open. We fit. We even managed the absurdity of the condom with dignity and humour. After the first tentative rehearsal, we didn’t need to ask each other for an encore, it just happened.
When first sex is satisfying, you feel like you’ve just won a medal for your gender—there’s no other way to describe that “I’ve still got it” glow. You’ve just represented womanhood, or manhood, and you got the gold—no faking it, no failure, no need to apologize and blame it on the booze. You’ve just proved that there’s something deep and profound that men and women can do together beautifully, without messing it up. It makes you really cocky.
We lay together in the classic “her head on his chest/his arm around her/their legs tangled together” position. We were warm and wet and panting happily.
“Mark? I’m sorry. I really have to pee,” I said. “You want another brandy while I’m up?”
“Mmmmn.” He began a caress he knew would make me not want to leave.
“Unfair, Becker.” I retaliated with a move of my own. Later, my bladder screaming for attention, I slipped out of bed, then found myself tucking the duvet around him, a curious feeling of warmth spreading out just below my rib cage. He was quiet, his breathing even. Asleep, the crinkles around his eyes relaxed, and he looked a little sad. I kissed him gently, and he smiled in his sleep.
The outhouse was freezing cold. When I got back, I poured myself a splash of brandy and put the kettle on for a quick wash. I was too keyed-up to go back to bed. Whatever I was feeling—and it was a new one for me—I wanted to savour for a bit.
Lug-nut had looked at me reproachfully when I came out of the lean-to bedroom. He’d accompanied me outside, guarded the outhouse door and stuck close on the way back. Could he be jealous? Great, I thought. No male attention for years and then two guys at once. Go figure.
After my sponge bath, I rolled a small joint and smoked it outside on the porch. The moon was nearly full and the outlines of the trees and the grey ghost of my breath and the smoke swirled together in a comfortable, smug spiral. There was a lot to think about. The evening’s scenes played again in my mind’s eye, from Vern, the pickup boys and the puking girl in the bathroom to Becker’s heroics and inevitably to the last few hours. It was odd to be sad about John’s death, Francy’s pain, Eddie’s black eye and Spit’s getting whacked and at the same time to acknowledge the bubbling excitement I felt at the back of my throat when I thought about Mark Becker.
Then suddenly he was there, zipping up his pants, dressed again. I reached out my hand, and he squeezed it, then dropped it as if it had burned him.
“Are you smoking dope?” he said.
“Yup.” I handed the joint to him in a friendly way.
“I can’t believe you’re offering me a joint.”
“I was being polite.” It was terribly funny, and I started laughing.
“Polly. I’m a cop. Don’t you have any sense at all? I could bust you right now.”
There was a nasty little pause. Oh God. He meant it. He was serious.
“They might want to know what you were doing here at four in the morning, Officer,” I said, punching him playfully on the arm.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even crack a smile. “Did you grow it yourself? A little patch out back?” It was a complete transformation. He was utterly furious, and his anger frightened me.
“Just try it, Mark. It’s very mild. Better than brandy.”
“Just put it out, would you? Please?” He slumped over the porch railing and stared out at the moon.
I touched his back. “It’s only a little grass,” I said. He shrugged my hand away.
“I gotta get going,” he said.
“Let’s just go back to bed,” I said. “We can forget this. I won’t smoke around you if you don’t like it, Mark. This doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
He turned to look at me. His hair was rumpled, and there was a faint shadow of stubble around his jaw line.
“Lots of people smoke the occasional joint,” I said. “It doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?”
He just stared at me. Something passed behind his eyes, some kind of internal battle. The Mark Becker who won wasn’t the Mark Becker I’d just been falling in love with. It was someone else, and the cold, sorrowful look he was giving me made the bottom drop out of my stomach.
“You’re not a bad person, Polly,” he said, “but you are breaking the law. In a way, I am the law. That’s my job, but it’s also my duty, and I care about it. If someone’s smoking marijuana at a party, I may not wade in there and arrest everybody, but I sure as hell leave. Right away.”
“You can arrest me if you want,” I said.
“I’m not going to arrest you.” His voice was full of bitter disappointment. Everything had gone down the toilet in a lightning moment and I would have given anything to put the whole thing on rewind.
“It’s not like we don’t have anything happening between us,” I said, then