Red Blooded Murder

Her voice was hypnotic; I was waiting to find out where she was taking me. “Yeah,” I said.

“My point is …” She leaned even closer so that our faces were only an inch apart. “What if …” I could feel her soft breath near my mouth. “What if he moved toward you, just like this? What if you could feel the heat from his body and his mouth when he spoke to you? You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t move. I felt as if I was holding my breath, waiting for the end of the story.

“No one is around.” Jane was now speaking her words in my ear. “It’s loud and it’s buzzing in that bar, and the more you talk, it just seems like the two of you, no one else. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” In my peripheral vision, I saw the front window of the coffee shop over Jane’s shoulder, but I wasn’t truly seeing. I was in South Beach at that bar.

“So what if … what if right at that moment, he stopped talking …” Jane halted for a second, turned her head a fraction of an inch. Her mouth was near mine. “And what if he kissed you?”

We stayed there, Jane’s lips close to mine, and for a second I wondered if she was going to kiss me, just to prove her point. And though I had never thought of kissing a woman before, it didn’t seem a terrible prospect. In fact …

I let myself drift, far away from my mind, which had been so sure of what it wanted and how it would act only minutes before. I closed my eyes. I parted my lips for just a second.

“See?” Jane said. “See? You would have done it!”

My eyes bolted open. “No, I wouldn’t.”

She sat back and slapped her knee. “Yes, you would. You would have kissed me.”

“Bullshack,” I said, trying out one of my swear word replacements. Then to really make my point, “Bullshit.” I picked up my mug and drank a few gulps of tea.

“Fine, then you would have kissed that guy in South Beach.”

“No.” But the way she’d told the story, she might have been right. In a moment like that, I might have slipped. “If I did,” I said, “I would have felt awful. It would have been cheating to me.”

“No, that’s not cheating. Kissing or making out, especially in a situation like that, is not cheating.”

“It is.”

She sighed. “You know how many of your friends who are in relationships do stuff like that?”

“None that I know of.”

“None that tell you.”

I laughed. “Maybe you’re right.” But the truth was I felt like a farm girl led into town for the first time. Was she right? Was this one of those things that everyone believed except for me? Was I some innocent, as Jane said? Someone behind the times?

“You won’t tell anyone about me … you know, about me being red-blooded, will you?” She smiled then dropped it.

“No way. I’m a vault.”

“Good. You’ll be the only one in the news business.” She glanced at her watch. “I should get going.”

I felt as if I had missed some amorphous opportunity, one that would have allowed me to connect with Jane, and I regretted it. “Hey, Jane. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, silent. She picked her phone off the table, looked at it, then bent down and tossed it in her bag. She straightened up and smiled.

“That’s your anchorwoman smile,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”

She laughed, her own personal smile returning, one that was natural and made the sides of her eyes crease just a little. She reached across the table and lifted my hand, giving me a little squeeze. Her fingers were smooth but firm. “I’m glad we’re going to be working together.”

“Me, too. Hey, Jane, don’t I need to do something this weekend, like rehearsals?”

She shook her head. “Just the on-air people. But be ready for trial-by-fire on Monday.” She took a silver cigarette case out of her purse. Opening it, she pulled out some bills and put them on the table. “I’ve got to get out of here. Zac has had enough time to cool off. Time for damage control, and then I have to get to the station.”

“Will you and Zac be okay?”

She gave a hard, short laugh. “A few months ago, I would have said ‘yeah.’ Zac knows I’m red-blooded. And he still loves me.”

“What’s happened over the last few months?”

She gathered her wrap made of taupe-colored cashmere, her eyes downcast. “He’s been getting sick of it. I mean, who can blame him? It’s just that we had an understanding before, and now he’s not … Well, he’s not so understanding anymore.”

Elegantly, Jane swung the wrap around her shoulders, then released her deep black hair, letting it fall around her like a shiny shawl. She stood. “I forgot to ask you—what happened with Theo last night?”

I said nothing, and in that moment, Jane must have read my face.

She laughed. She leaned over me. “Was it hot?”

In that instant, I saw Theo leaning over me, moving into me, his hair brushing the sides of my face. I blushed with the memory. “Yeah.”

“Did it feel like anything you’d ever had before?” When I paused, she said, “C’mon. You’ve had sex before, Izzy, but this was something different, right? Something more electrifying than you’ve felt.”

I could feel his lips biting mine; I could feel his fingers everywhere. I flushed more deeply. “Yeah.”

“Was it so good it felt like your whole body filled up with heat? The kind of heat that you didn’t know if you could bear, but yet somehow you loved it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you felt like your mind was going to explode?”

I saw Theo and me then, slick with sweat, coming together, setting off explosions. “Yeah.”

She stood up, taking the heat of the moment, the heat of the memories with her. “That’s how I felt last night, too,” she said. “That’s how I always feel. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve had such a hard time giving it up.”

“What are the other reasons?”

Her eyes went thoughtful. She looked past me for a moment. “There isn’t one person who can be everything to me. I think it’s unfair to try and make Zac my best friend, my lover, my business partner, the co-owner of our houses, my accountant, the person I cut loose with, the person whose shoulder I cry on.” She looked at me.

I said nothing, sensing more.

“Different people inspire me in different ways,” she continued. “They fascinate me in different ways. I like to be let into someone else’s life, to see what other people are doing with their days.” She stopped and shook her head. “I just look at my own life differently after I’ve gotten a taste of someone else’s.”

I nodded. I understood a little, I suppose.

“Anyway, I’ve got lots of other reasons,” Jane said. “Those are just some of them.”