“My God, you’re serious!”
“Were you listening when I said we don’t have time for bullshit?”
There was a knock at the door.
“Who’s that?” Susan asked, as if frightened.
“Probably the waiter. When I checked in, I told them to cool a couple of bottles.” He raised his voice. “Just a moment, please, I’m in the shower.”
He let go of her wrist and got out of bed.
“Is there another one of those in there?” he asked, making reference to the hotel’s terry-cloth robe and gesturing toward the bathroom.
“I only saw this one,” Susan said.
“Then you better give me that one,” Matt said. “And wait in the bathroom. Or get under the blankets.”
She looked at him doubtfully, then looked around for her discarded clothing.
“Where’re my clothes?”
“I kicked them under the bed,” he said matter-of-factly, then smiled and went on. “Come on, give me the robe. The cow already got out of the barn. I know what you’ve got hidden under there.”
She turned her back on him, unfastened the robe, and, aware that she was blushing again, shrugged out of it and ran to the bathroom.
“What do you want to eat?”
“What do I want to eat?” she parroted incredulously. “Eat?”
“They do a nice standing rib,” he said. “Okay?”
“I just don’t give a damn,” she confessed, and closed the bathroom door.
Feeling dizzy and a little faint, but no longer nauseous, Susan leaned against the closed bathroom door. This gave her a view of herself in the mirrors over the sink.
For a moment, she seriously considered that she might be having a bad dream. That was obviously not the case.
But I can’t believe any of this is happening! Either what happened in the car, or that I came to the room, or what happened here. Anything that happened here, from letting him undress me through what happened after he did, to that clever little unbelievable line, “The cops are onto you, fair maiden.”
She was vaguely conscious of hearing him order dinner—New England-style clam chowder, not the kind with tomatoes, medium-rare beef, baked potatoes, asparagus, and a large pot of coffee—and couldn’t believe that, either.
How the hell can he even think of food at a time like this?
And then he was trying to push the bathroom door open against the weight of her body.
“Hey, you all right, Susan?”
he asked, and there was concern in his voice.
“What do you want?”
“I thought you might want the robe back.”
“Just a minute,” she said, and pushed herself off the door and went after a towel.
Before she reached it, he had pushed the door open. Susan tried to cover herself modestly with her hands.
“Ta-ta!” Matt cried. “The Mad Flasher strikes again!”