“I’ve told you already,” said the woman at the housing office. “We didn’t think you were coming. We gave the room away to somebody else.”

“I’m supposed to get a free place.” Jenks waved the letters like a magic wand.

“But there’s simply no place we can-”

“I’m black,” Jenks said.

The woman’s shoulders slumped, and she picked up the phone.

eight

After Morgan dropped Ginny at her apartment, she thought about him all night. The next morning she found herself getting into her car, driving toward the professor’s house as if she were hypnotized. Not that Morgan mesmerized her, not completely. She was in love with the scheme developing in her head.

Ginny determined that she would weasel her way into the professor’s life whatever it took. He was the most interesting thing to happen to her in a long time.

It rained hard, the sky black with fat clouds. The slap of the windshield wipers contributed to her hypnotized feeling.

Morgan was a real writer. Just a poet, sure, but a published writer. Not like the pussy posers in her fiction-writing classes. Morgan knew publishers, editors. He could help her launch a real career, guide her past pitfalls, introduce her into the right literary circles.

She parked in front of his house, ran through the downpour to his front porch. Her knock was almost lost amid the thunder and sheets of cold rain that pelted Morgan’s tin roof. He opened the door, ushered her in, and shut it again quickly against the wind.

“I didn’t expect you,” Morgan said.

“Is it okay?” She shivered, stood dripping in his living room, shrugged out of her coat, the thin fabric of her blouse clinging to hard, thimble-sized nipples.

“You’re soaked.” Morgan found towels, brought them to her. She dried her hair.

“Your clothes.”

“I need to take them off,” she said.

“Okay.”

She peeled off the blouse in front of him, slithered out of the wet jeans.

Morgan put his arms around her, and she stood on tiptoe, forced her open mouth over his. She was eager and hungry and they tripped and tumbled into the bedroom, fell in a grabbing, rolling pile. She pulled off his pants, took him in her mouth briefly before climbing on top.

She rode him during the lightning, the flashes making her pale skin blue. His hands sank into her round softness. She was warm and deep and she covered him with herself, back arched, mouth open.

Thunder crashed. Rain fell. The storm swallowed their moans.

Morgan didn’t know what to think of her.

“I came back to tell you it will be okay,” she said.

She sprawled across the bed, trying, Morgan supposed, to spread herself over every possible square inch. A leg and an arm draped over him too.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“That I won’t say anything. I thought you might be worried. I know you and that girl-”

“I wasn’t worried.” Yes he had been. Someone would miss Annie Walsh sooner or later, come asking hard questions. And what about Ginny? Strange, soft, bouncy, eager Ginny. Was this some kind of kick for her, bury a body and bed a professor? Yeah, he knew women like that. You could find them at writers’ conferences, chasing after the latest young, hot novelist. Flavor of the month.

She nuzzled closer, ran fingers through his chest hair.

His skin got hot and sweaty where her heavy arm and leg pressed against him. He tried to squirm out from under her.

She looked up. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” He sank back into the pillow.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No.”

“Yes you do.” She curled into a ball, sighed, rolled off the bed, and went into the living room.

“Your clothes are still wet,” he called after her.

She plucked them from the floor, squeezed. “Just a little damp.” She shrugged into her bra. “I’d better get going.”

Morgan watched her dress through the bedroom door and was certain he was supposed to stop her. She was expecting some word from him, the big callback where he asked where she was off to. He’d pull her back into bed, drag her beneath the silky, intimate prison of the sheets. It’s what she expected.

But he could not quite summon the energy. Appropriate words refused to form. He watched her button the blouse, zip jeans, slip her bare feet into squeaky leather hiking boots. And even when he heard his front door open and close, he couldn’t quite make himself tell her to stop, couldn’t think of a single thing that didn’t sound trite and placating.

He heard her engine start over the patter of rain, heard the car fade down the lane.

Thank God.

He’d been unable to resist her fleshy immediacy. This sort of thing had always been his problem.

But in the sticky, hot, awkward after-tangle of limbs and linen, he could only believe he was repeating the same sort of behavior which had landed him in this shit-pie of a situation in the first place. He did not know Ginny Conrad very well. Sure, he knew her taste and her feel and the breathless, urgent whine that squeezed out of her just before orgasm. But he didn’t know what she’d do. What was her temperament? For all Morgan knew, Ginny was a walking mouth ready to gossip away any hope he ever had of steady employment.

He swung his feet over the bed, stood with a low groan. A twinge in his lower back. Ginny had ridden him long and hard, almost shaking apart the bed frame. He was getting too old for this. And too fat. He reminded himself about joining a gym.

He grabbed his pants off the floor, and something tumbled out of the pocket, landed hard and sharp on the top of his bare foot. Cold and metal.

“Goddammit!” He hopped, gritted his teeth, rubbed the foot. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at his foot, red and swelling fast. He had the kind of skin that bruised easily purple and ugly green.

He scanned the floor to see what had bashed him.

The gun.

It lay on the hardwood floor daring him to pick it up.

He didn’t want to bend over the way his back felt, so he nudged it with a toe, metal heavy and cold. Shoved it slowly under the bed. It made a scraping noise on the wood, like a murdered tin man being dragged into the gutter. Good, leave it there. Morgan could climb under the bed for it some other time.

He stepped into his pants, foot still throbbing, back complaining. His head hurt too. Stress.

He stepped into his slippers and grabbed a green flannel shirt off the doorknob on his way to the kitchen. He found a bottle of aspirin. Empty.

“Goddammit.” He shook his head at his own stupidity, putting the aspirin bottle back empty. He always did that sort of thing, milk jugs and pie pans. It made girlfriends crazy, probably why he hadn’t lived with anyone in five years.

The phone rang.

Morgan glared at it, willed it to shut up. It rang again.

He picked it up. “Hello?”

“It’s Jones.” The old man’s voice rattled on the other end like a bad stereo speaker.

Hell and damnation. He must’ve wanted his gun back. Or maybe there’d been trouble with Annie, the body discovered, police on their way to slap him in cuffs. Morgan went chill and damp under the armpits, felt dread swell in his belly. Oh, God, that’s it, isn’t it? It was all blowing up in his face.

“You look at them poems yet?” Jones asked.

“Uh…” What?

“I don’t have formal education like you, but I want to make them good. You told me you was going to read them.”

“Yes. But I’ve only just started.” Lies. “I need more time to really go over them carefully- Mr. Jones, is everything, I mean, it’s all okay, right? You’re only calling about the poems?”

“I helped you with your little problem,” Jones said. “Should be fine. Now, I think maybe I should come over there.”

“Why?”

“We can talk about the poems.”