Strangers Read Online Free Page B

washroom, going across the hall to their bedroom.
    Naked and wet, the hair on his chest gleaming with water droplets, Michael lay on his back on the large brown oval rug on the tile floor. His arms were out to her. “Come on, honey, yes.”
    She lowered herself upon him, guiding his smooth maleness into flesh that was moist with readiness to receive him.
    So good, she thought… Magic! The fullness within her was exciting, yet was also somehow sentimentally nostalgic, like a trip home after years of wandering. This was a joining together. This was connection.
    Pressing the heels of her hands—on his hipbones, her fingers spread on his lean belly; Beth rocked and felt rooted to him. We are One , she thought, no way to tell where his flesh leaves off and mine begins.
    She moved slowly at first, and then, as thinking became unnecessary, then impossible, with an increasing speed. Her heartbeat quickened. Her body found a rhythm of up-and-down and side-to-side that suited it, encouraged and guided by Michael’s hands cupping her buttocks.
    Beth neared the peak moment felt its promise warm within her. A rising pressure in her throat became a moan.
    And then she was there, theblissful convulsion, the whirling rush into release. It was not a falling into the nothingness of dissolution but a blending—of their selves: HeandI, BethandMichael…
    Michael bucked up hard, his body bridging, lifting her. His climactic pulse— inside her— made him groan, his mouth set in a rictus. Then his face lost all expression, became death-mask placid as his hips fell and he hissed like a tea kettle.
    Beth slumped, resting on him. She liked the flesh-covered line of his collarbone where her cheek lay. She liked his hairy chest tickling her buzzingly sensitive nipples. His breath was a soft breeze around her eyes— a life breeze from inside him, love him…
    Michael said, “I love you, honey.”
    She thought, I am so very happy now and everything is so fine and everything will always be fine…
    The cold ring of the bedroom telephone seemed to drill into the center of her forehead. She felt Michael start.
    She held her breath. She hoped for a wrong number discovered after a single ring, but no such luck.
    Michael swatted her, his palm a damp spat on her backside. “I do believe you’re—closer to the phone.”
    “I… Damn!”
    “Uh-huh, always rings just when you don’t want it to.”
    The flesh parting from flesh was too hurried, making them both say , “Oh.” Snatching a tissue from the plastic dispenser on the toilet’s flush tank, Beth hurried across the hall.
    The call? Michael thought as he sat up. He realized how unlikely that was. There’d been so many calls since he’d begun the waiting time. Calls from aluminum siding salesmen and newspaper subscription hustlers and insurance agents. Calls from Beth’s mother, Claire, who insisted on remaining alive and annoying despite astronomically high blood pressure that should have given her at least one major coronary by now. The pestering, piping-voiced calls: “Can I talk to Marcy?” “Can I talk to Kim?” The wrong numbers. The calls from the damned dentist, reminding him his teeth needed cleaning. A call from the Red Cross asking him to be a blood donor…
    Never the call! The Call of The Strangers—for The Stranger.
    He stood up. He splashed water from the vanity basin— too cold, damn it !— to clean his flaccid penis and pubic hair, dried himself thoroughly with the big brown towel monogrammed “Dad,” and wrapped it around his waist.
    Smoothing back his hair, he studied his reflection in the mirrored doors of the medicine chest. Even after all these years of knowing, it came with the faintest tick of surprise that he was unable to see the aura— his aura. His special glow. The inner light of the Stranger.
    He knew all human beings had auras, variously hued, blue, yellow, green, sometimes utterly clear, sometimes— so rare —a deep red, a red that seemed suffused