Blood Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

giggled a three-drink giggle and put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. You do try.”
    He looked down at his black and green checked cotton shirt and black pants. The clothes were new. What could she complain about? Maybe she didn’t like the Topsiders he was wearing. They were a little scuffed.
    “You work…let’s see.” she paused, stroking her cheek. Her fingernails were masterpieces of the manicurist’s art, thick and long and shiny bronze. “You’re a techie.”
    “Pardon?”
    “You work in one of the labs around here. Hair’s too long to be Navy, and they don’t come here much anyway. Not that I’d know, you work in a lab and you’re…you’re not happy. Why’s that?”
    “Because—” He stopped. Confessing he was out of a job might not be strategic. He had six month’s unemployment coming; that and his savings could disguise his lack of gainful labor for a while. “How do you know I’m a techie?”
    “I can tell. Your shirt pocket—” She slipped her ringer into it and rugged gently. “Looks like it should hold a nerd pack of pencils. The kind you twist and the lead pokes out.” She smiled deliciously and thrust the pink tip of her tongue out to demonstrate.
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. And you’re wearing argyles. Only techies wear argyles now.”
    “I like ’em,” Vergil said defensively.
    “Oh, so do I. What I’m getting at is, I’ve never known a techie. I mean…intimately.”
    Oh, Lord, Vergil thought. “What do you do?” he asked, immediately wishing he could suck the words back.
    “And I’d like to, if you don’t think that’s being too forward,” she said, ignoring his question. “Look, the bar’s dosing in a few minutes. I don’t need any more to drink, and I don’t much like the music. Do you?”
    Her name was Candice Rhine. What she did was accept advertising for the La Jolla Light. She approved of his Volvo sports car and she approved of his living quarters, a two-bedroom second-floor condominium four blocks from the beach in La Jolla. He had purchased it at a bargain price six years ago—just out of medical school—from a UCSD professor who had departed to Ecuador shortly after to complete a study on South American Indians.
    Candice entered the apartment as if she had lived there for years. She draped her suede jacket on the couch and her blouse on the dining table. Her bra she hung with a giggle on the chrome and glass light fixture over the table. Her breasts were small, amplified by a very narrow rib cage.
    Vergil watched all this with awe.
    “Come on, techie,” Candice said, standing naked at the bedroom door. “I like the furs.” He bad a baby alpaca rug over his California king-sized bed. She posed with her finger tips delicately pressed near the top of the door jamb, one knee cocked wide, then rotated on one heel and sauntered into the darkness.
    Vergil stood his ground until she turned the bedroom lamp on. “I knew it!” she squealed. “Look at all the books!”
    In the darkness, Vergil thought all too clearly of the perils of sex. Candice slept soundly beside him, the sleep of three drinks and making love four times.
    Four times.
    He had never done so well. She had murmured, before sleep, that chemists did it in their tubes and doctors did it with patience, but only a techie would do it in geometric progression.
    As for the perils…He had seen many times—most often in textbooks the results of promiscuity in a well-and frequently-traveled world. If Candice was promiscuous (and Vergil couldn’t help but believe only a promiscuous girl would be so forward with him) then there was no telling what sort of microorganisms were now setting up shop in his blood.
    Still, he had to smile.
    Four times.
    Candice groaned in her sleep and Vergil jerked, startled. He would not sleep well, he knew that much. He wasn’t used to having someone in his bed.
    Four.
    His brown-speckled teeth gleamed in the dark.
    Candice was much less forward in the morning.