She stretched her right hand to its absolute tendon-creaking limit and felt the glass slide a tiny bit farther down the shelf. Then she closed her fingers again, praying it would finally be enough, because now there really was no more-she had pushed her resources to their absolute limit. It almost wasn’t; she could still feel the wet glass trying to squirm away. It had begun to seem like a live thing to her, a sentient being with a mean streak as wide as a turnpike passing lane. Its goal was to keep flirting toward her and then squirming away until her sanity broke and she lay here in the shadows of twilight, handcuffed and raving.

Don’t let it get away Jessie don’t you dare DON’T YOU DARE LETTHAT FUCKING GLASS GET AWAY-

And although there was no more, not a single foot-pound of pressure, not a single quarter-inch of stretch, she managed a little more anyway, turning her right wrist one final bit in toward the board. And this time when she curved her fingers around the glass, it remained motionless.

I think maybe I’ve got it. Not for sure, but maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe it was just that she had finally gotten to the wishful-thinking part. She didn’t care. Maybe this and maybe that and none of the maybes mattered anymore and that was actually a relief. The certainty was this-she couldn’t hold the shelf any longer. She had only tilted it three or four inches anyway, five at the most, but it felt as if she had bent down and picked up the whole house by one corner. That was the certainty.

She thought, Everything in perspective… and the voices that describethe world to you, I suppose. They matter. The voices inside your head.

With an incoherent prayer that the glass would remain in her hand when the shelf was no longer there to support it, she let go with her left hand. The shelf banged back onto its brackets, only slightly askew and shifted only an inch or two down to the left. The glass did stay in her hand, and now she could see the coaster. It clung to the bottom of the glass like a flying saucer.

Please God don’t let me drop it now. Don’t let me dr-

A cramp knotted her left arm, making her jerk back against the headboard. Her face knotted as well, pinching inward until the lips were a white scar and the eyes were agonized slits.

Wait, it will pass…it will pass…

Yes, of course it would. She’d had enough muscle cramps in her life to know that, but in the meantime oh God it hurt. If she had been able to touch the biceps of her left arm with her right hand, she knew, the skin there would have felt as if it had been stretched over a number of small smooth stones and then sewn up again with cunning invisible thread. It didn’t feel like a Charley horse; it felt like rigor-fucking-mortis.

No, just a Charley horse, Jessie. Like the one you had earlier. Wait itout, that’s all. Wait it out and for Christ’s sweet sake don’t drop thatglass of water.

She waited, and after an eternity or two, the muscles in her arm began to relax and the pain began to ease. Jessie breathed out a long harsh sigh of relief, then prepared to drink her reward. Drink, yes, Goody thought, but I think you owe yourself a little morethan just a nice cool drink, my dear, Enjoy your reward…but enjoyit with dignity. No piggy gulping!

Goody, you never change, she thought, but when she raised the glass, she did so with the stately calm of a guest at a court dinner, ignoring the alkali dryness along the roof of her mouth and the bitter pulse of thirst in her throat. Because you could put Goody down all you wanted-she practically begged for it sometimes but behaving with a little dignity under these circumstances (especially under these circumstances) wasn’t such a bad idea. She had worked for the water; why not take the time to honor herself by enjoying it? That first cold sip sliding over her lips and coiling across the hot rug of her tongue was going to taste like victory… and after the run of lousy luck she’d just been through, that would indeed be a taste to savor.

Jessie brought the glass toward her mouth, concentrating on the wet sweetness just ahead, the drenching downpour. Her tastebuds cramped with anticipation, her toes curled, and she could feel a furious pulse beating beneath the angle of her jaw. She realized her nipples had hardened, as they sometimes did when she was turned on. Secrets of female sexuality you never dreamed of, Gerald, shethought. Handcuff me to the bedposts and nothing happens. Show me aglass of water, though, and I turn into a raving nympho.

The thought made her smile and when the glass came to an abrupt halt still a foot away from her face, stopping water onto her bare thigh and making it ripple with gooseflesh, the smile stayed on at first. She felt nothing in those first few seconds but a species of stupid amazement and

(?huh?)

incomprehension. What was wrong? What could be wrong?

Yow know what, one of the UFO voices said. It spoke with a calm certainty Jessie found dreadful. Yes, she supposed she did know, somewhere inside, but she didn’t want to let that knowledge step into the spotlight which was her conscious mind. Some truths were simply too harsh to be acknowledged. Too unfair.

Unfortunately, some truths were also self-evident “As Jessie gazed at the glass, her bloodshot, puffy eyes began to fill with horrified comprehension. The chain was the reason she wasn’t getting her drink. The handcuff chain was just too fucking short. The fact had been so obvious that she had missed it completely.

Jessie suddenly found herself remembering the night George Bush had been elected President. She and Gerald had been invited to a posh celebration party in the Hotel Sonesta’s rooftop restaurant. Senator William Cohen was the guest of honor, and the President-elect, Lonesome George himself, was expected to make a closed-circuit “television call” shortly before midnight. Gerald had hired a fog-colored limo for the occasion and it had pulled into their driveway at seven o'clock, dead on time, but at ten past the hour she had still been sitting on the bed in her best black dress, rummaging through her jewelry box and cursing as she hunted for a special pair of gold earrings. Gerald had poked his head impatiently into the room to see what was holding her up, listened with that “Why are you girls always so darned silly?” expression that she absolutely hated on his face, then said he wasn’t sure, but he thought she was wearing the ones she was looking for. She had been. It had made her feel small and stupid, a perfect justification for his patronizing expression. It had also made her feel like flying at him and knocking out his beautifully capped teeth with one of the sexy but exquisitely uncomfortable highheeled shoes she was wearing. What she had felt then was mild compared to what she was feeling now, however, and if anyone deserved getting their teeth knocked out, it was her.

She thrust her head as far forward as she could, pooching her lips out like the heroine of some corny old black-and-white romance movie. She got so close to the glass that she could see tiny sprays of air-bubbles caught in the last few slivers of ice, close enough to actually smell the minerals in the well-water (or to imagine she did), but she did not get quite close enough to drink from it. When she reached the point where she could simply stretch no farther, her puckered kiss-me lips were still a good four inches from the glass. It was almost enough, but almost, as Gerald (and her father as well, now that she thought about it) had been fond of saying, only counted in horseshoes.

“I don’t believe it,” she heard herself saying in her new hoarse Scotch-and-Marlboros voice. “I just don’t believe it.”