Butterfly (70 page)

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Trudie sighed as she felt the hard penis enter her. She locked her legs around his waist,

closed her eyes and whispered, “Faster.
Faster.”

His name was John or Mike or Steve. She had met him the night before in the cantina

of the Red Onion restaurant and had gone home with him. They had decided to enjoy a

morning quickie before they both had to get themselves off to work. She didn’t know

what he did. And she didn’t care. She had no intention of ever seeing him again.

This has definitely got to stop,
she thought as he climaxed before she did and therefore

withdrew before she was finished.

Later, as she guided her Corvette down the winding, hilly streets of Bel Air, Trudie did

some serious thinking about her life. And what she saw did not please her. The game of

anonymous sex with revolving partners was just too dangerous to be played anymore.

And besides, pickups in bars were no panacea for loneliness. In fact, she decided, they

made the loneliness sharper and more unbearable.

She wanted someone permanent. Someone to love and share her life with.

But who? Besides the Saturday-night pickups, who were the men in her life?

Bill came into her mind. He was doing that a lot lately; they ran into each other on

jobsites. They never spoke—just a nod to acknowledge each other’s presence. He was still

mad at her, she supposed. Even though she had apologized to him. It annoyed Trudie that

it should cross her mind on such occasions to wonder what kind of a lover he was. She

decided just by looking at Bill that he was a three-minute egg: one of those on-again-off-

again macho lovers who invariably ask you afterward if it was as good for you as it was for

them. In Trudie’s experience, the lousy lovers always asked that time-worn question after

sex, whereas expert lovers knew they were good and never had to ask. Like “Thomas” at

Butterfly. He never asked.

Thomas…

There it was again, the enigma that surrounded her relationship with the Butterfly

companion. Every time she was with him Trudie tried to figure out what it was about her

encounters with Thomas that made them so special. She had decided that it wasn’t the

anonymity of them, because that was what some of her Saturday-night pickups were:

totally without identity. And it couldn’t be as simple as the fact that he was a good lover.

Some of her Saturday-night men were excellent lovers, but the skyrockets were missing.

What, then? What was it about what she did inside Butterfly, with her paid companion,

that made those evenings so spectacular?

She couldn’t shake the unpleasant aftertaste her night with John or Mike or Steve

had left her with. There had been something so animalistic, so soulless about their

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lovemaking, that it had almost felt like a perversion. How could a rational, intelligent

woman like herself do something so tacky as getting naked with a strange man and

doing things with him that really should be reserved for times when deep love needed

to be expressed?

Lovemaking? That was hardly what she could call her activities of last night and this

morning!

Her luncheon with Jessica was at two o’clock and now it was only just eleven. Trudie

decided to check up on a couple of pools in progress before heading for the restaurant.

The glorious May sunshine shed its benediction over a washed-clean Los Angeles and

upon Trudie’s blond shag as she sped down Sunset Boulevard. When she came to the cor-

ner where the pink buildings of the Beverly Hills Hotel peeked from behind palm trees on

her left, Trudie thought of the job TruePools was doing up the hill on this same street.

She had inspected it only yesterday. Sanderson had done a good job on the excavation

(he was on perfect behavior after the water-table fiasco last month), and Bill had been

alerted to bring in his crew. That was the next stage in pool building: after the hole was

dug, the steel was laid and the plumbing put in.

This job was the first referral from her movie star up on Coldwater Canyon. The

house had just been bought by a TV producer, Barry Greene, whose hit medical show,

Five North,
was putting him in bigger bucks than ever. Trudie had spent two intensive

weeks with him designing an elaborate pool area that would have combination redwood

and brick decking, waterfalls, three spas, boulders, tropical ferns—just like a movie set.

What she loved about it was that he had given her free artistic rein and a practically

unlimited budget.

On an impulse she turned left, away from the business district and shopping center of

Beverly Hills, telling herself that because this was such an important job, she really should

keep close tabs on it. Even if Bill would be there with his crew.

And, of course, his GMC 4X4 was parked by the excavation…

She put her sunglasses on as she got out of her car and walked over the gravelly con-

struction site. The house was not yet occupied—Greene was having it massively over-

hauled. And the backyard was a mess with heavy equipment, tools, mounds of dirt, and

men sweating shirtlessly in and around the newly dug crater. Bill was going over blue-

prints and giving orders to his crew.

Trudie hung back by his 4x4. She suspected Bill might take her surprise visit as a per-

sonal insult, thinking that she was making sure he wouldn’t botch this job. But that was-

n’t it at all. Trudie trusted him; she had meant it when she had told him he was the best in

the business.

Lighting up a Virginia Slims, she glanced inside Bill’s car. The front seat was cluttered

with contracts, audio tapes, a baseball hat, and a book.

The latter caught her interest. She reached inside, brought it out, and read the title:

Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Right! she thought. I can just see Bill reading
this.
What did he do, carry it around to

impress the chicks?

“Hey, boss-lady!”

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Kathryn Harvey

She looked up. Bill was walking toward her. When had he taken his shirt off?

“You were here only yesterday,” he said. “Checking up on me?”

“I see you’ve been doing a little heavy reading.” She held up the book.

He took it from her and tossed it back onto the seat. “I’ll thank you to keep your

hands out of my car.”

“I’ll bet you impress a lot of women with that book. Do you actually tell them you’re

reading it?”

He picked a towel off the dashboard and wiped his sweating face and neck. “I’ve

already read it, if it’s any business of yours.”

“Oh?” She walked a few steps away from him, casually smoking, surveying the busy

construction scene.

“You’ve
read it, of course,” he said, reaching into the backseat for a chilled can of Pepsi.

“I enjoyed it.”

Trudie heard Bill pop open the can and mutter, “I’ll bet.”

“And I think their argument is a good one,” she said, turning around.

He took a long drink, ran his hand over his mouth and said, “Well, I don’t.”

Trudie regarded him from behind her large sunglasses. “Why not?”

Bill didn’t look at her. He leaned against his car and watched his crew working in and

around the big hole in the ground. “It’s too pat. Too simplistic. And it reads like a revenge

thing. What have the authors got against the Masons, anyway?”

“So you really read the book. I suppose it was condensed in
Motor Trend.”

“Hasn’t anyone told you that sexism is passé.”

Trudie stared at him. The noon sun shone on tanned muscles and longish hair that

was damp at the ends. His jeans were slung low on his hips, and a single trickle of perspi-

ration was making a track down his breastbone. He was right, damn him—she had

lumped him in with the species of beer-drinking types she usually encountered on jobs; it

would never have occurred to her that he would be reading books like that.

“Well,” she said quietly, tossing down her cigarette. “I can see I was wrong about you.

You’re not just another pretty face, after all.”

Bill stared at her. He watched how the May breeze stirred the curls on top of her head,

the way the bangs fell just over her eyes. And the dress was something new. He had never

seen her in a dress or skirt before. “Well then, I guess you had me fooled, too.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, then Trudie said, “I’d like to debate the

theory of that book with you sometime.”

He considered it. “You’re on,” he said. “But it’s only fair to warn you that I’m damn

good at it.”

“And I was on the debating team in school.”

“What school is that?”

“UC Santa Barbara.”

“So, she’s college-educated yet.” He bent his head back and drank down the rest of the

cola.

Trudie watched his neck, the way the tendons stood out. When he carelessly tossed the

can into the backseat of his car, she said, “And I suppose you have a Ph.D?”

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“Only a bachelor’s.”

“In what?”

He walked past her and headed for the excavation. “Oriental philosophy,” he said,

then shouted, “Hey, Frank! Tell the guys to break for lunch.” He turned and faced Trudie,

folding his arms and standing with his weight on one hip. “Except that by the time I got

my degree I discovered there wasn’t anywhere I could go with it. So I went back to what I

had been doing to support myself through college. Construction work. Why are you in

the pool business, Miss Debating Champion?”

“Tell me what I can do with a degree in English lit besides office work or teaching. My

dad was in construction. He taught me everything he knew.”

“Your dad must have been a smart guy.”

One of the workers had turned on a radio. The Pointer Sisters did “Neutron Dance”

while thermoses and sandwiches were produced from lunch pails.

“So,” he said, pointing to the book lying on the front seat. “Have you seen their latest,

The Messianic Legacy?
This time they raise the question whether or not Jesus really

founded Christianity. I’ve only just started it, but I’ll be glad to lend it to you when I’m

done.”

“Thanks, I would like that.”

“Would you consider it an insult from a male chauvinist pig,” Bill said, “if I told you

you look pretty today?”

Trudie squinted up at the sky. “Only if I can tell you you have a cute ass.”

“Are you married?” Bill asked.

“Who would have a bossy broad like me? And you?”

A smile slowly lifted his mouth. “I’m married to a Catalina 27 that’s moored down at

the marina.”

“Hey, Bill!” called one of the crewmen. The guy strode over and engaged Bill in a few

minutes of shoptalk while Trudie stood and watched them. And as she did, as she saw Bill

shift his weight from one hip to the other and run his hand through his hair, she was sur-

prised to find herself suddenly turned on.

Really turned on.

This wasn’t just the casual curiosity about what kind of a lover he would be; Trudie

was experiencing sudden, surprising and genuine sexual desire for the man. And the more

she thought about it and tried to understand it, the more she discovered that she very

much wanted to see him again, alone.

Puzzled over this sudden and unexpected turn, she walked away from Bill and his

assistant, and paced beside his 4X4.

Why? she wondered. Why these feelings for him now? He certainly didn’t look any

different from the way he usually looked on jobs: dusty and sweaty, often without a shirt.

She’d liked his looks, but she had never been turned on by them. Why now?

She took a cigarette out of her purse and held it in her hand, unlit.

As a matter of fact, she began to realize as she watched him get down on his knees with

a piece of machinery and use some tools on it, this new feeling wasn’t all that new. It had

a familiar flavor to it, as though she had felt this way before. But not with him. With

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Kathryn Harvey

someone else. A feeling that rarely came over her—an intense sexual urge for a particular

man.

And then she knew: Thomas.

This was the way she felt when she was with her Butterfly companion; this was how

Thomas affected her. It was the same turn-on, the same electricity. Trudie’s silver-haired

lover had made her feel the way no other man ever had, and, she had feared, the way no

man ever would. And yet, surprisingly, here she was suddenly experiencing the same

hunger for Bill.

Having finished whatever it was he needed to troubleshoot, Bill was now walking back

toward her, pausing once to turn around and shout something to his foreman. And the

way he turned, the way his arms swung, the way the muscles of his back knotted, made

Trudie’s heart rise to her throat.

“I put in three return lines this time,” he said with a smile. “Want to count them? Or

would you rather debate the merits of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail?”

And then she knew. There it was, the reason for this strange, wonderful feeling—why

she experienced it with Thomas, why Bill should now trigger it—the mystery of her fab-

ulous evenings at Butterfly and why she couldn’t seem to re-create them in the real world.