A Southern Exposure Read Online Free PDF

he says, “You do have the prettiest voice.”
    Brett smiles, and wishes that she had kissed him, after all. He did look sad, and the room is so crowded that she probably won’t see him again at all.
    There seem to be mostly women in the room. Shimmering lean satin thighs and bare smooth white backs, all very slightly undulating as, glimpsed between all that shimmer, that flesh, the dark suits of men can be seen to move toward drinks, or to crowd toward certain women.
    Someone, not Barney, brings Brett a drink of something she does not want, something sweet and very strong. At which she obediently sips.
    “You’re a stranger here?” this new man asks her.
    “Yes, actually just up from L.A.”
    “I thought so.” He smiles amiably, his small eyes racing around the room.
    “I guess I’m not the person you were supposed to get a drink for,” says Brett. This has seemed the polite thing to say, but it came out somehow wrong.
    “Say, that’s quite an accent you’ve got. You pick that up in L.A.?”
    “No, it’s more from where I’m from.”
    “Well, you’ve done a great job. Sounds almost real. I’ve got a friend down there sells accents, can get you any kind you want. In case you want to change.” He grins at her in a congratulatory way, so that Brett feels it would be rudeto explain. Besides, she is suddenly too tired, too tired for anything.
    “Well, my lady, did you think I’d got lost?”
    It is Barney, returned with champagne—Barney who suddenly seems an old, old friend. He says, “You look very, very tired,” as the other man smiles and goes away.
    Barney leads her naturally out of that room and down the hall and into her own (but how did he know where, she later wonders? Did she give him the key? She must have). Like an old friend then he undresses her, touching her soothingly, slowly, as Brett half thinks, half feels, No harm can come of this. Not possibly.
    Partly because of all the champagne, and because she was at first so tired, Brett finds it hard, later on, to reconstruct or to remember just what happened—or, rather, how; it was all so strange, so dream- or trance-like.
    She lay naked between warm silk-smooth sheets and Barney lay beside her. He had only taken off his coat and shoes; so reassuring, no harm possible. But as he began to kiss her, at first very gently, at first just on her mouth, as he gently explored her body with his hands, new sensations of the most extreme intensity began to run all through her veins, and then to concentrate in the joining of her legs, in what she thought of as her place. As his hands and then his tongue touched her more and more deeply. She felt the familiar heat that she knew, or used to know with Russ, but then more spasms, deeper, more entire, until she felt her whole body might burst. She could not, did not then or later, think of what he was actually doing to her, kissing her there; what she remembered was an endless, endless sensation, like a series of rooms, explosions of light.
    “I have the most terrible hangover,” she says to Fleurette, who calls to wake her early that next morning.
    “Then don’t drink any water—after champagne you’ll just get drunk again.”
    “But I’m so thirsty …”
    “Hold off for orange juice. Believe me. Just get down a couple of aspirin with as little water as possible.”
    The aspirin doesn’t work—nor does the orange juice, or the coffee. She crosses the city with Fleurette dazed and miserable, unseeing.
    The doctor, a chiropractor, is Chinese. Tall and thin, extremely polite, quick and nervous.
    “Don’t make noise,” he says to her several times, in the course of the work he does on her body.
    As though she would.
    The pain is so severe (no anesthetic) that Brett has instantly recognized that if she makes the smallest whisper, if she gives in to it in any way, she is lost, gone—is mad.
    On the drive south what looked so dazzlingly beautiful two days before now is ghastly, terrifying: the