Stone Shadow

Highland Park

The session had begun at one in the afternoon in the Jones-Seleska law offices in Garland. They had left about three-thirty at Noel's request (No, you won't be imposing) so that she could get this hunk out to her house again. How she managed to keep her hands off him she'd never understand, but so far it had been all business. Still. She could read his desire in those beautiful eyes.

Out in her house in North Dallas she kept up the questions for a while and kept it strictly business, and he kept the answers short and sweet, taking Ukie through the stages of his young life.

Noel wanted all kinds of documentation. She told him what she'd been able to obtain from the cops and from prosecution under “discovery” and what was missing. How it could help Bill if she could find even something—some vestige of the orphanage records.

“They were lost in the big fire, as Bill told you, I guess,” he said, softly.

“Yes. How about the foster parents who raised you? When did they pass away?"

And he took her step by step through all of that again, patiently, the when and how and who of it, and the fact of no neighbors, no next of kin, no relatives of the foster family surviving, and then the odd coincidence that all of the personnel at the now-defunct social-service agency in Branson were either deceased or they could not be located by trace. It was, as Noel told him, quite unfortunate.

“It's almost as if your personal histories had vanished off the face of the earth."

“I know,” he commiserated. “I don't know if you can understand the loneliness and feeling of alienation you suffer when you lose all your roots the way we have. I know it's just a series of coincidences, but even though we didn't have this big circle of close kinfolk the way most people do, you sure do get a sense of loss. A sense of losing whatever ties to a family you might have had. And I guess if you lost a real close relative, you know you'll never see that loved one again and..."

As he spoke to her she felt herself being drawn to him again. Falling under some wonderful spell created by his sensitivity and soft tones, that warm and gentle voice, that sexy voice of his lulling her, promising so much tenderness and loving, and she had to work to keep her mind on business.

She found him acutely interested in the way she'd be handling his brother's case, not just superficially but in the legal intricacies, and at one point she jokingly asked him if he'd read for the law at one time. He had a way of coming around the corner and blind-siding her with these very pointed questions that made her glad she knew her stuff as a lawyer. Joseph was a bright and well-read man. He began probing into the possibilities related to an insanity plea, to which she responded:

“This is an area where even the police have a lot of misinformation. It's quite complex as an issue with respect to Ukie. It's not necessarily true, you see, that a person adjudged insane is legally without culpability or responsibility. When you try a case like this one—just to look at one avenue of the thing, the jury is going to be asked to make a decision based on criminal INTENT. Did that individual entertain a criminal intent at the time of the alleged offenses? You, the defense, you get your psychiatric depositions and your witnesses lined up in a row, and you have to prove to those men and women of the jury that your defendant's insanity is the LEGAL definition of insanity, not the MEDICAL one. They aren't the same, and most people don't..."

And he was touching her. She flinched. If he'd been slow to make a move, when he finally got around to it there was no preamble at all. He made his move without need of flirtation, without a look into hot eyes, without so much as a word or gesture, just the way she dipped her head, averted her eyes suddenly, turned a little into profile, and made herself so openly ready and vulnerable, and he let the vulnerability excite him as he concentrated on the things that pleased him as he moved over beside her and it seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to have this warm and lovely stranger slowly slide his hand up her leg inching it up exposing the golden tan sleekness of the long and perfect legs, now flirting a little when she looked into his serious hot eyes and she can feel him doing something and her twin spheres are exposed and the nipples want to feel his warm caress and they wait, erect, but he cups her breasts instead and without even a first kiss he lowers his head to her and kisses down her chest, the hot tip of his long tongue flicking out and searing her nipples, around them and down to the small, tantalizingly sculpted downiness between her gently curving Y and she says something but neither of them is sure what and he takes the thing out of his pants and as he kisses his way back up her, lets go and wets himself and lubricates her moistness with his hand, and then she feels the large maleness of him fill her and his handsome face is against hers and he is in the hollow of her throat and they are moving and oh my God she tells him she wants him deeper and there is a rock hard chorus and an implosion in the hot tight wetness of their relentless, wild passion.

That voice all the while that has the resonance of some thrilling church organ my God ORGAN oh yes rumbling and whispering and telling her the things he wants them to do, the sweetness of his compliments, she catches a phrase about her “egalitarian elegance” and he tells her he could hardly stand not touching her the last time they were together, the way the slippery sliding slickness of those beautiful long endless legs and kissable curvaceous thighs blowing him kisses as she walked near him, the communication breakthrough he called it, a hearing and sensory innovation, for the first time, he said, “a woman's legs spoke aloud,” and he translated the word to her. The word spoken in leg. She knows the word. It is common in English-language usage. An invitation to dine. Her legs whispered EAT, he says. And because she is his regal queen bestowing a favor on her court jester, he must do as she commands.

And this is the way Noel and Joseph spent the afternoon. On the living-room floor of the Collier home. Pure, raw, funky, wonderful, animal sex. And then he takes her in his arms and kisses her and then this breathtakingly good-looking man enters her again and the both of them give themselves to it with equal abandon. And afterward spent and wasted, flat on his back with the once-tumescent and blue-veined pink engine of destruction flaccid and flopped over dead atop his right leg, the woman beside him snuggled close breathing slowly and with her mouth open, a pair of horses after a long run, sweat drying on them, satisfied, content beyond description, unashamed and together, they cuddled for a moment and decided what to do about it all. They wrestled with the weighty problem for a good four or perhaps five seconds before each of them fell asleep. Asleep with their arms around each other, cuddled together in the gathering darkness in exhausted dreamless slumber.