In Too Deep Read Online Free PDF Page A

humming sounds whenever he began to wane.
    The coffee seemed to staunch the flow of his words. She sat beside him and they sipped in silence. The coffee was a precursor, cleaving the next couple of hours’ schedule in stone, and neither of them felt quite sure how to act or what else to say. They sipped, rabid for the heat and nervous about what would follow. Finally, she set down her cup and, without saying anything, stood, turned ever so slightly away into profile and began to undress. He watched her until she was more or less halfway through, a part of him wanting to smile at the determination that pinched her face, the rest of him wanting to sweep her up in his arms. Once she was naked to the waist, it began to feel almost unseemly to stare. Trembling inside, he pulled off his tie and slowly undid the buttons of his shirt.
    When he was naked, she took his hand and led him to the bed. The sheets felt cold, and for a while they fumbled with one another, all gasping breath and uncertain grunts. She seemed almost too delicate to touch. Lying there on the bed, her wide pale eyes surveying everything, she could have been a child. Her body was rail thin, disturbing in its seeming fragility, ribs and hip bones jutting up through the vague film of her skin. With a feather touch, he let his hands caress the scant breasts that lay splayed flat against her chest, his fingers plucking at the small, hard, unripened berries of her nipples.
    â€˜I know you,’ she whispered, as he kissed her. ‘I know who you are.’ Her hands stroked his shoulder blades and traced the ripples of his spine down into the small of his back, and her hips pushed at him, calling for some response. But there was some obstacle in the way, some blockage in his mind. He kissed her cheek, trying to buy time or maybe to apologise, then pressed his face down into the pocket of her neck so that he could hide his tears. Feeling the heat of those tears against her skin, she raised her chin, making the fit a snug one. Blood pumped in her veins; he listened to its rush against his ear and tried to imagine the heaving of oceans.
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ she sighed, comfortable beneath his weight. ‘It happens. But the world goes on spinning, and there’s always time to try again.’
    â€˜What did you mean?’ he asked, after some time had passed. He had given up, and now lay huddled beneath the flimsy blanket. The wool smelled of her, the sweat of her skin, but of deeper and even more distinctive scents too, and he drew its edge up to his chin so that he might better savour such an unexpected detail.
    She lay beside him, on the brink of sleep, though her hand raked back and forth beneath the blanket, her fingertips teasing and getting to know the down of hair that smattered his chest and stomach.
    â€˜When you said you knew me, what did you mean?’
    She opened her eyes. Her face lay just inches from his own, and he was again shocked to find a beauty that added up to far more than the mere sum of its flawed parts. ‘Just that,’ she said, her voice all smoke again, a stunning aural texture. ‘I know you.’
    â€˜How? ’ He rolled onto his back, and took to studying the ceiling. He realised that he was afraid of what the answer might be.
    â€˜Why, you’re me, of course,’ she said, with a little hiccup of laughter, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I mean, we’re the same, you and I. Looking at you is like looking in a mirror. We carry around the same sort of secret, but there are others like us, too many others. I can always tell them at a glance. Anyone can, if they know how to read the signs. Some are more clearly marked than others. With certain people the evidence might not be much, just a hardness around the mouth, a distance to their stare, the way they hold their shoulders when they walk or how they react to a question asked, but whatever it is, it’s still there, and it’s