The Common Thread (16 page)

“It feels more than okay. It feels perfect. I just want you to know that.”

Katie narrowed the gap between them and kissed her hungrily. Although she hadn’t had enough, she found herself leaving Jet’s mouth to venture down her neck, tasting the flesh as she went but not lingering, anxious now to complete this journey that had been so long in commencing. She reached Jet’s breasts, still threatening escape, and pushed them free, up from the fabric and against her face. Caressing her skin against their softness, bathing them with kisses, she moaned, suddenly needing more. “Can I take this off?” she asked, pulling at the shirt.

Wordlessly, Jet sat up and helped Katie remove the garment, and then they worked together to free Katie of hers. They were left in just underwear, Jet in boxers of soft, worn cotton and Katie in bikinis that clung to her every curve. Katie wanted those off too, eventually, but she could wait a few more minutes. She planned to enjoy Jet’s breasts first.

Even with both hands Katie couldn’t fully cup them but instead kneaded them, kissing the tender flesh, pulling the hardened nipples between her lips, sucking hungrily on them until the sounds Jet uttered indicated she was enjoying this attention as much as Katie enjoyed giving it. Katie felt her excitement growing with each touch, each kiss, as her sex grew wetter and throbbed with need. She stopped for a moment and pulled back, the movement of Jet beneath her causing a pleasurable distraction. “Wow, Jet. That feels so good,” Katie confessed.

She’d positioned her center against Katie’s thigh, and Katie was now experiencing the pressure of Jet’s hip against her as Jet rocked, pulling them closer together. She felt exquisite pleasure and forgot about the journey of exploration she’d been taking and she met Jet’s eyes. The look of desire and joy on Jet’s face encouraged her to let go, to take instead of giving, and she did, moving purposefully, grinding her hips against Jet’s. Within seconds she closed her eyes and began to shudder in the seizures of orgasm. She cried out softly, mindful of her children in the next room, and opened her eyes to see Jet looking at her, still thrusting, but smiling and then moaning and laughing quietly as she, too, tumbled over the edge.

Katie joined her laughter for a moment but found, to her surprise, that her laughs quickly turned to tears. And as Jet pulled her closer and kissed her hair, murmuring words of comfort and love, she didn’t know if they were tears of anguish or of joy.

“If you want to keep your job, put the phone in your pocket and keep it there,” Nic said.

The young man dwarfed by the expansive marble desk in the Marjorie Place lobby jumped, lifting his dark eyes from the device in his hands.

Where do they get these people? Nic asked herself. With a few sparse whiskers sprouting from a weak chin and a frame barely able to fill the small-size shirt on his back, the man did little to inspire the sense of security his job description implied. He resembled a teenager at Halloween dressed as a security guard more than an actual working model. His lack of professionalism was even more appalling than his appearance, though, and she measured her words carefully, wishing to make her point without causing a scene.

Shoving the phone into his shirt pocket, he stammered, “I’m sorry. How can I help you, ma’am?”

Nic hid her irritation as she addressed him as she would a disobedient child. “It’s
Doctor
. Dr. Coussart.” With all the fees she paid for services in the building, was it too much to ask to have someone reliable at the lobby desk? Someone who knew her name? Although she no longer lived in the building, she expected the staff to know who she was—she was an owner, for God’s sake. Yet seemingly every time she visited, a different face greeted her in the lobby, and none of them recognized her.

“I need you to hold my key,” she said as she handed him a single key on a ring with a charm from the Louvre.

“Sorry, Doctor. I’d be glad to take care of that for you.” He smiled as he reached for the key and revealed unevenly spaced, crooked teeth. After writing her name on a tag he attached to the key ring, he looked at her again. “Can I help you with anything else?”

“Not at the moment.” Nic turned abruptly and glided across the marble floor toward the sheets of smoky glass that formed the vaulted lobby’s wall, pushed open the door, and sprang into the muggy morning. With little traffic, this was as quiet as the day would be. Most of Philadelphia’s citizens were still in bed, or at least still at home. But, because this was the city, a panhandler was already hard at work begging for change.

Lean and toned, Nic wore short nylon running shorts and a matching, ribbed tank top. Although she wasn’t tall, her body was perfectly proportioned. She spent time in the gym, which showed in the swell of muscles from her shoulders all the way down to her calves. Resting one hand against the glass wall, she grabbed her ankle with the other and pulled it up toward her butt, stretching her quadriceps as she studied the vagrant.

He was a scary sight, unshaven, with long, stringy hair. His dark pants were torn, his shirt only partially buttoned. Even though he was a distance away, Nic could smell the putrid combination of alcohol and urine that stained his clothing. Or, at least, she imagined she could. She’d smelled it too many times to count during her residency in emergency medicine here in center city. So many times that the smell came back in nauseating detail and she involuntarily shuddered. She might not have pediatric-neurosurgery consultants at her fingertips in the ER in Wilkes-Barre, but the vagrants were scarce, too, and that was worth the trade. Well worth it. If she never had to lay her hands on another homeless person in this lifetime, it’d be too soon.

She’d heard the preaching of the social workers and psychologists, listened to their lectures linking mental illness and homelessness, but she just didn’t buy it. Perhaps there was some connection, but she considered the numbers inflated and manipulated to improve funding in shelters and soup kitchens. People used any excuse they could for their laziness and ineptitude. They explained away their failures instead of finding ways to succeed.

That had never been the case with her. Even though both of her parents were physicians, she’d worked her tail off to earn the grades that got her through college and medical school. She’d pulled thirty-hour days and hundred-hour weeks and did what she had to do to get through. Colleagues in medicine and nursing had similar stories. They climbed their way out of poverty with hard work and determination, some of them leaving their native lands to come to America, searching for that fabled opportunity. They’d taken control of their destinies and made something of their lives, instead of making excuses for failing.

Nic turned and put the man behind her, hoping the police would have chased him away before she returned from her run. Then a better thought occurred to her. As soon as she saw a policeman, she’d report the derelict. She and Louis had put their apartment on the market, and the last thing a potential buyer needed to see was a homeless person on the doorstep.

At her home on a private lake in the suburbs of Wilkes-Barre, she didn’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense.

She’d been born in Philadelphia nearly three decades earlier, when her parents were both residents at Temple University Hospital, but this city had never been her home. Just a newborn when they moved home to Wilkes-Barre, Nic had spent the first twenty-two years of her life in the northeast corner of the state. She’d come back to Philly for medical school and residency, and had spent seven years here before she fled back to the mountains at the first opportunity.

Even though she still owned her apartment here (or at least co-owned it), this was the first time she’d been back to Philly in the year since she’d left. And she didn’t miss it one bit. Well, except for the food. Philly had many great restaurants, and that was perhaps its only redeeming feature. As soon as she finished with the conference that brought her here, she’d gladly head back up the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Wilkes-Barre.

Walking a few steps to the corner of Fifteenth Street, Nic turned north and began her morning run. She crossed a series of busy streets, all of them named after trees, and couldn’t resist a glance over her shoulder at city hall. William Penn gazed down at her and the entire city of a million and a half souls. The pious Quaker would probably share her sentiments about modern Philadelphia, and she winked at him in solidarity.

At John F. Kennedy Boulevard, Nic turned into JKF Plaza, and after circling the fountain, she emerged onto the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The parkway was a scenic and generally safe route to Kelly Drive, the tree-lined road along the Schuylkill River where Nic had been running since she first came to Philadelphia nearly a decade earlier. It was the perfect place—no traffic lights for miles, enough pedestrians to discourage crime, and as beautiful a scene as one could find anywhere. Her route across the city and out along the river and back was almost a perfect ten-mile trek, an ideal distance for her. Not too far to wipe her out and enough to keep her in racing form.

Jogging in place as she waited for the light to change, Nic wiped the sweat from her forehead. She loved wearing her hair down over her shoulders, but now it was pulled up in a ponytail. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, ever present to ward off migraine headaches that the sun often triggered. She was alert and cautious, never at ease in the city, not even out here where this magnificent one-mile stretch of real estate boasted the Museum of Natural Sciences, the Franklin Institute, the Barnes Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Priceless artifacts and a billion dollars in masterpieces lined the route she ran, and more cops probably roamed this area of town than at any other location, yet she still worried about random violence. She saw enough bad shit in the ER to know it happened, even to white, upper-middle-class physicians like her.

Sprinting cautiously across the intersection, Nic dodged a car speeding around the corner and then settled into a rhythm, her arms and heart pumping with each stride. She loved running. Something about the solitude beckoned her, and she pushed her body to reach very definable goals—one mile, two miles, ten minutes, eight minutes. She could set the bar and work to reach it, having to compromise with no one about the music she listened to or the route she took.

Some might call her self-centered, and she’d agree. How could she not be? Her parents, thrilled to have adopted her, had given her every privilege a child could want. She was the center of their world. Intellectual and scholarly, they both preferred an evening at home with a medical journal to a game show on television. Their board games were chess and Scrabble, their newspaper
The
New York Times
. Their summer vacation was in London or Barcelona, not the beaches of New Jersey and Delaware.

She’d learned to read and keep herself amused as they did, in the words written on paper and in books, with occasional words spoken eloquently in conversation. She’d learned to become quite comfortable in her own mind. When she was very young, sharing was a foreign concept, and as a result, preschool was a near deadly experience for the other children who wanted to play with her toys.

Learning to socialize at school wasn’t a painful experience, but it was trying, and Nicole always preferred to have one or two close friends rather than large squadrons of them. She preferred solitude most often and, with the exception of her closest friends, chose to limit the time she engaged with others. Running, pushing herself to joyful, breathless exhaustion, was one of her favorite activities.

Beneath the flags of a hundred and nine countries of the world, she broke free of the stress she’d felt just a few minutes earlier. She ran against the current of traffic bringing a wave of workers into the shops, hospitals, and office buildings of downtown Philadelphia, and set apart from the rest, she felt perfectly at home.

At the art museum, she slowed to cross the intersection and circled to the right onto Kelly Drive. Protected there from the relentless traffic by a wide sidewalk, the stretch was lined with trees that sheltered her from the bright sun. She instantly felt the temperature change, a drop of a few degrees in the shade, and looked forward to the mild breeze she’d find along the river. Timing her pace as she approached the entrance to the Water Works, Nic allowed a car into the parking area before once again pushing for her target pace. She glanced ahead to the iconic buildings that made up Boat House Row, paying no attention to the police car crossing the intersection in front of her. She was too far from Marjorie Place to report the vagrant.

Maybe she’d see boats on the water today. She loved to race them. The canopy of trees along Kelly Drive gave the air a fresh, clean scent, and she breathed deeply, giving her muscles the oxygen they needed. She didn’t notice the police car slow down beside her, not until the flashing lights came on and the driver made a U-turn, pulling up beside her. An officer immediately jumped out of the vehicle, holding up a hand, signaling her to stop.

“Is some…thing…wrong?” she asked, sucking in breath as she continued to jog in place so her leg muscles wouldn’t tighten.

“I need you to come with me, Kathleen.” The policeman was short, not much taller than Nic, who was on the lower end of the growth charts. What he lacked in height, though, he made up in muscle and attitude. Huge pectoral and biceps muscles stretched his uniform, and he spoke with an authority she figured few people challenged.

She did, though. “I think you. Have me confused. With someone else,” she said, and tried to step around him.

Before she could protest, his partner had flanked her and grabbed her right arm, jerking it behind her. As she turned to avoid him, the first officer pulled her left arm back, and the cold hard metal of handcuffs closed on her wrists.

“What are you doing?” she yelled. “Let me go!” She allowed her legs to relax and dropped her weight onto them, an old self-defense trick, but it was useless against two of them. It only served to put more tension on her shoulder joints. She quickly changed tactics and tried to wiggle out of their grasp.