Samaritan by Richard Price

Author:Richard Price [Price, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400040636
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-01-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Danielle—January 20

“I don’t know how else to ask this,” Ray said staring at Danielle’s gleaming compact torso, “but what are you?”

The scent of vanilla was everywhere: the nape of her neck, in her brass-tinted hair, her mouth, between her legs, on his own fingers and belly, rising from the sheets like a mist.

“What do you mean, what am I . . .” She lay on her side, her head propped on a cupped palm. Since the sex ended she hadn’t looked at his body once.

“I mean, you know, ethnically.” He wanted to say “racially,” but thought “ethnically” a softer word.

“Well, that’s an interesting question.” Her legs brushed against each other with a dry slishing sound. “I have one grandfather, he was Dominican, a grandmother who’s black, still alive, and another grandmother who was, I’m pretty sure, a Russian Jew.”

“How about the other grandfather?”

“The other grandfather? He was a sailor.”

“Really,” Ray said, witless with desire. He wanted to touch the crest of her hip where her body began to swoop in then roller-coaster back out again at the base of her rib cage, but the fucking was over for now and he wasn’t sure where he stood.

Her body was on the heavy side but solid; thick-waisted, blunt-toed, with small high breasts that were almost lost in the expanse of her chest and wide swimmer’s shoulders. And she was strong—stronger than him; he’d never been in bed with a woman so physically powerful before—and she used that strength to make him come, leisurely almost absently riding him with a controlled density of muscle that made him despair of dragging things out.

But in fact, the sex, at least in spirit, had been over and done with well before she had ever thrown a leg over him and began the too-short ride.

When he had brought her over to the apartment a few hours earlier, for what he had hoped would turn out to be some slow-boat-to-China fuckery, he was jarred to discover that the initial aura of pillowy gratitude with which she had driven him wild on so many levels in their first two encounters had completely evaporated.

And once in bed, Ray, recognizing a lost cause when he saw one, knew it as such for sure soon after he had worked his way south from her tattooed throat to between her legs. Glancing back up at her after a few languid minutes beneath the rise of her belly, he saw that she had pretty much vacated the premises; her expression was composed, absent, her eyes open and gazing off as if trying to remember something, the remnants of a to-do list, perhaps.

There was nothing cruel or willful in her sexual distance; just a wall of preoccupation that he instantly and accurately knew to be unbreachable, but which also turned him atomic with want. And the hell of it was that, even though she was lying in bed now as detached as if she were waiting for a bus, he was pretty sure she’d

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