Plainclothes Naked (43 page)

He looked down at his middle, then back up at her, afraid to ask. “Relax,” said Tina. “Your new liver is taking nicely.”

“My WHAT?”

“You lucked out. They had a nice fresh one when you got here. In the same ambulance, as a matter of fact.”

“Zank?” he made himself ask.

“They considered it, but with his you’d have come out of postop like a big crack baby.”

“Don’t tell me... .”

“You guessed it. The late Mr. Lipton. Turns out you two were very compatible.”

“Jesus,” he croaked again. His vocabulary seemed to have been sapped along with his strength. He wasn’t exactly loaded, just numb in a comfortably toxic way. But all the special effects were back: the basso squawk his voice took on on smack, the itch in his nose, the glaze of putrid sweat. . . . But mostly, he felt so chewed up it was hard to tell nausea from intoxication. “What am I on?”

“Demerol. But your last shot was hours ago, so it’s probably faded.

You can have your codeine back tomorrow.”

“I don’t want it,” he said, surprising himself, and instantly regretted the statement. Who was he kidding?

Tina watched him squirm. Pleased. She smiled in a way he hadn’t seen before and unbuttoned the top button of her uniform.

“Maybe we’ll find you a better drug.”

She undid two more buttons, then pulled a prescription bottle out of her pocket and dropped it on the night table.

“What’s that?” he said, gripped with equal parts dread and excite ment.

“Toradol, handsome. Nonnarcotic painkiller. Kills the pain without the euphoria. Strong as the real stuff. Just no fun.”

“And that’s the better drug?”

Manny felt something cave in his chest. He already had that steel-wool-on-the-nerve-ends feeling. In a few hours the air would sting his skin. His hair would hurt. There were a couple of years on junk and a decade on codeine before the little taste of Demerol.

“I didn’t say
that
was the drug,” said Tina, and stepped out of her uniform. This was the first time he’d seen her naked, and the sight made him religious. She watched him watch her for a minute, her expression hard to read. He one-eyed her breasts, the aureoles purple-red half dollars around nipples already erect. Then his gaze fell to her belly and he realized what she was waiting for him to see. A lavish scar, the same shade as her nipples. As thick around as the cord on a vacuum cleaner. It ran at a smooth diagonal from her left hipbone to her navel, then dog-legged down and curved around her right side, where it stopped.

“First time I saw a straight razor,” she said, with a shrug that con tained a lifetime.

Manny wanted to let her talk, but she said nothing else. Her eyes were inside his.

“One of Mommy’s boyfriends?”

“The one I married,” she said. “Don’t ask. I was fifteen and a half.” Then she turned around to lock the door, and showed him her other surprise. On her back, in brilliant reds and blues, was a tattoo of a nine-armed goddess. It looked a little like Betty Page, in full lotus and bare-breasted, hurling diamonds, arrows, snakes, and hearts in a fan pat

tern that converged on the cleft of her teardrop ass.

“Kali?”

“I’m impressed,” she said.

“Don’t be. I eat in front of the Learning Channel.”

“Whatever. It was Marv’s idea. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I feel like the cover of a menu in an Indian restaurant. Mostly I don’t think about it.” Tina plucked her nurse-wear off the floor and tossed it over the visitor’s chair. “But we can talk later,” she said, when she turned off the bedside lamp.

“Okay,” said Manny, suddenly wracked with the sense that one eye was not enough to absorb the vision before him. He felt strain in ocu lar muscles he never knew he had. His eye wandered over her breasts, moved south to her sweetly shaved pussy, then traveled upward, return ing to the thick cord of scar tissue. It was the scar that obsessed him, at once beautiful and tragic, startling and exotic, and erotic in a way he could not explain. Everything, in short, that he felt about the woman who bore it.

He didn’t know he was choked up until he spoke. “The bastard must have gutted you.”

“Actually, he gave me guts, baby. Now don’t move. And don’t peek, either.”

Manny closed his eye and she stepped out of her shoes. Then she eased the blankets all the way down to his ankles. A drainage tube ran from under the gauze cummerbund at his middle. She eased it sideways and reached beneath it.

“The nurses were all impressed,” she said huskily. “The one who trimmed your pubes took a Polaroid.”

“I don’t want to hear anything about Polaroids.”

“Live by the sword, et cetera,” she said, and took him in her hand. “I hear the doctor dropped his scalpel when he saw you.”

Manny talked with his eye shut. “I thought they kept the patient covered up.”

“They do. You got an erection during the operation. Nearly poked his eye out.”

“He can have my glass one,” Manny said, and gave himself over to the sensation. Tina leaned down and let her breasts drift across his face. He parted his lids and she slapped him, lightly.

“I said no peeking.”

His eye went wide then shut obligingly. After she kissed him, she ran her tongue over his face, down his bruised-blue chest. She unpinned her hair, let it fall over his skin, and repositioned herself on the south side of that giant bandage. When she licked his inner thigh, the stirring in his penis was a relief. He’d heard about guys, after major surgery, who couldn’t get it up without a pump. But by the time she’d run her tongue to the base of his shaft, that particular doubt was allayed. She licked him gingerly, working her way to the head, then took him in her mouth, taking her time about it. He felt the urge to thrust and panicked, imagining what that would do. He pushed once, from the hips, and the pain was like a vampire’s teeth in his spinal cord.

“Oww, shit. ... Hey Tina, can we do this?”

“
I
can,” she said, kissing the now swollen head of his cock. “You can’t move. Can you take it?”

“What do you mean?”

He stared up at her, saw the smoky softness clouding her eyes. She raised her face reluctantly. “God, it’s like a taffy apple.”

Manny squirmed. “What did you mean, can I take it?”

“It means I can fuck you, but you can’t fuck me. Can you deal with that?”

“So I wasn’t just having bad dreams. You tied me up when I was asleep, so you could do me like this.”

“If you have a question or complaint about medical procedure, the patients’ advocate is in the nurses’ station every morning from nine to ten-thirty.”

His left hand was a solid gauze paw. He opened and closed his right one, working his wrist inside its taut canvas strap. “Tell me straight, is this you, or is it the doctor?”

“As nurse, I have authority and responsibility for the comfort of my patients.”

“In other words, you did it.”

He tried to glare at her, but she ignored him. “I thought I told you to close your eyes. I mean,
eye
.”

Manny kept it open, staring up at her as she climbed on the bed. Gripping his IV bar for balance, she squatted no more than an inch or two over his face, straddling him.

“You’re going to have to be very careful,” she whispered, easing

herself down until her wet lips just grazed his mouth. “Any violent movement could rip your stitches.”

Manny breathed her in, then extended his tongue, and she let him taste her. He tried to crane upward, and she placed a firm hand on his forehead.

“What did I say about your stitches? Listen to your nurse, Detective.

No straining.”

She lowered herself again, gauging pressure, so that she could rock gently backward and forward on his face, all the while holding the IV arm with one hand and making sure he didn’t try to crane upward with the other.

“Oh, baby, this must be so hard for you.”

“Mmmmmppphhh. . . .”

She eased herself up, out of licking distance, and ran her finger over her sex. Her voice was a breathy whisper. “A man like you wants to be in control. That’s what being a cop’s all about, right? Control’s just another drug you can’t give up.
You
can’t give it up, can you, Manny? But you
want
to. You
know
you want to... .”

Manny stared up at her, transfixed. His thumb began to throb. “Are you going to torture me?”

“Is that a request or a question?”

Tina laughed and eased herself backward, careful not to touch him above the waist, where he’d been shot, where his ribs were wrapped tight, where the late Lipton’s liver rested in its home away from home. Then she leaned down and kissed him, still talking softly. “Is this tor ture, Manny?”

She slipped her tongue in his mouth and planted one hand on his shoulder, reaching back to angle his cock between her legs. She threw back her head and shivered as she took him inside her.

“Come on, tell me” she murmured, digging her nails into his col larbone. “Is this torture? Huh, Manny? Is this torture, you big bad cop... .”

“You fucking bitch,” he hissed through the sweat already running down his face. His kick was coming on by the second, the pain mount ing even as the groaning pleasure ignited his psyche. The words poured out of him in a mindless rush, “I want to fuck you until I die...
I fuck ing love you
... .”

But Tina kept teasing. She pushed herself steadily up and down, never letting him all the way in. She stopped before her ass collided with his thighs, at once careful and reckless, driving him crazy by her own control. She’d push him to the brink, then slide back up, shim mying from side to side, all the while keeping her two eyes locked on his one.

“Is
this
torture,” she kept repeating, timing each languid murmur to her downward thrusts. “Is
this
torture?”

Until, losing himself in the rhythm, in brute mortality, Manny for got where he was. He abandoned all awareness of fresh stitches and drainage tubes and wounds still suppurating under gauze. He gave in and plunged upward, gone, until he opened a seam of flesh over his liver and cried out—
“FUCK!”
—and stopped completely, paralyzed by the blade of white-hot pain that impaled him like a jailhouse shank.

“Be careful,” Tina whispered, and held still, only her beautiful small breasts rising and falling as she breathed. Manny wanted to run his tongue over the sheen of sweat on her body. He wanted to roll her over, to pin her down,
to be the man
. But he was helpless. She’d made him that way.

Tina lowered her face to his, so close he could see the flecks of blue and copper that shimmered in her green irises. “I know what you want, but you can’t have it right now, baby. Right now
I
am fucking
you,
” she chanted, “
I
am fucking
you
... .”

She repeated until she lost herself, and slammed down all the way, filling herself with every inch of him, and Manny let out a scream that made her clamp her hand over his mouth, come back to earth, and whisper, “I’m sorry... .”

But it wasn’t pain that sent him out. It was something else. Some thing darker. The delicious, guilty, counter-to-everything-he-thought he-knew-on-the-planet pleasure of surrendering control. This was, he knew beneath all consciousness, more dangerous than any narcotic. If he let go, like this, then surely the world would fall away. The earth would crack open and swallow him. It was that wrong.
And he no longer cared
. He gave up and savored the long, slow fall into the wet unknown. . . .

. . .

When he jerked
back to consciousness Tina was riding him.
And there was nothing he could do
. Tears streamed down his face from his one good eye. The pain was a family of blood-red rats strangling on barbed wire under his skin.

“You . . . can . . . kill . . . me,”
he heard himself cry, through clenched teeth, and something in the way he said it touched her in a place she’d never allowed anyone to touch. It was as if they’d left sex behind. Gone beneath it. The same delirium drove them both: love broken down to naked need, to jagged symmetry, the perfect insanity of passion between a woman like Tina and a man like him....

Then Tina cried out his name, and she came with a kind of shudder ing, perfectly still, drawn inward by a climax so strong as to paralyze her. She bit her lip until it bled, and released a long, low “
Yes-s-s-s-s
... .” Manny watched her, some desperate question stamped on his face. He fucked through the pain, toward the one thing that could consume it. Until Tina kissed him, let him lick the blood off her lips, and held his face so she could see it when he arched his back and shot whatever he had left of himself inside her.

“My . . . whole . . . life,”
Manny muttered when it was over, breathing so hard his bandages popped apart.

Tina laughed, taped him back up, and slid sideways onto the hospi tal sheets. Careful not to press his wounds, she stretched beside him, nuzzling as close as she could, her lips pressed against his throat.

“Christ, I need a cigarette.”

“You don’t wanna know what I need,” Manny replied, and looked miserably at his gauze girdle. “Hell on earth doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on down there.”

“All right then,” said Tina, swinging into professional nurse mode. “Take a couple of those Toradols. I’m also authorized to give you Chlonodine, as required.”

She stood up, pulled open the nightstand drawer, and removed a mini–Dixie cup containing three chalk-white tablets.

“I hate Chlonodine.”

“In that case you should take some. It lowers your blood pressure.”

“I know what the shit does.”

“You’re an expert, I forgot. So you should know that when you lower your blood pressure, you reduce the discomfort of withdrawal. I’ll leave some Xanax, too.”

“I can’t stand Xanax.”

“Perfect, I’ll leave three of those. And, in case you convulse, there’s Tegretol.”

“Are there any shitty drugs you’re forgetting? Why not throw in whippets and airplane glue, and we can have a party?”