“I think ham and eggs seems like a very good idea,” he said. “And after that?”
“I came to Marburg because I had friends here. A
girl I went to school with, and her family. I’d like to see if I can find them. Would you help me?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Then let’s have our shower,” Elsa said, and got quickly out of bed and walked naked to the bathroom.
Jimmy quickly followed.
—
Jimmy lay on the bed and watched as she took the lingerie from the PX out of its bag and cut the labels off the black brassiere and the see-through matching panties. She dropped the towel she had wound around herself in the bathroom and started to pull the panties on. Then she sensed his eyes on her.
“Stop looking,” she ordered. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“No, I’m not. You want me to look.”
She met his eyes.
“Otherwise,” he said, “you wouldn’t have flipped the sheet off you”—he demonstrated with his sheet—“when I came back in here from the other room.”
“Guilty,” she said, after a moment, finished pulling the panties on, and then reached for the black brassiere.
“If I told you I loved you, what would you say?” Jimmy asked.
“That you’re very sweet and very young and that you weren’t paying attention to what I said last night.”
“What you said when last night?”
“That when this Colonel Mattingly shows up to take me wherever he’s going to take me, we’ll never see one another again.”
“That was before what happened last night happened,” Jimmy argued. “I gather you don’t believe in love at first sight?”
She walked to the bed and sat beside him.
“I believe in lust at first sight,” she said. “And that you shouldn’t do anything about it unless you know that it’s only going to be for a day, or two, and then you will never see the man ever again.”
He didn’t reply.
“And I also believe that you can’t count, sweet Jimmy. I’m thirty-two, and that’s much too old for you.”
Again he didn’t reply.
“Jimmy, please don’t ruin what we have.”
“I don’t want it to end,” he said, finally.
“There’s nothing either of us can do about that.”
She ran her fingertips down his cheeks.
“Can we change the subject?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“What do you know, or think, is going to happen when this Colonel Mattingly comes and takes me wherever he’s going to take me?”