Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

She was wavering. This was a room where whatever a woman wore would slip down or ride up. Where a man didn’t fade into the woodwork but seemed like a Great White Hunter taking a break from the noonday sun.

Max could do this room justice in a New York minute.

Matt would take a while to get into the groove. But he would. And getting him there would be all the fun.

“Temple. We haven’t talked.”

She didn’t talk then.

“Since,” he added.

Since.

He’d made a proposal then. Literal. Marry him. On the maybe plan. Civil ceremony. Civil opportunity to undo it all. Not a bad scheme for an ex-priest hooked on a fallen-away Unitarian with a pretty serious ex-Catholic boyfriend.

She had a proposal too.

She reached up, cupped his face in her hands and pulled it down into a kiss that did justice to the room, to Danny’s romantic hopes, to her burdened heart, to Matt’s expanding psycho-sexual ambitions. She was the experienced one. She shouldn’t take advantage of his situation, his dead-serious feelings for her. He’d be so easy to seduce that he . . . was seducing her.

This felt like heaven. The sweet, seriously escalating way he kissed her, his hands clinging to her like she was his personal life raft. The hell with it! She just wanted to sleep with him. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. She felt him respond heatedly to her mouth, her hands. Want met need met love met sexual steam heat. Ah . . . the Perfect Storm.

She broke away. She did. Put a shushing finger on his lips.

Somebody had to run for safe harbor before the storm broke and drowned them all.

Afternoon Delight

Now that Temple’s personal life was in a sensual shambles, the art and magic extravaganza at the New Millennium was starting to pull together.

She may have enjoyed a brief encounter, an intimate interlude that had ended in a draw: she and Matt had both drawn back, shaky, from a brink that was still awaiting them with a sweet, edgy certainty. Hesitation only intensified the Danse Romantique.

But crass reality didn’t slow down life crises for a second.

The media, like a Roman coliseum audience having had a dead body thrown to it, had buzzed around like flies. Then they’d accepted the notion of a petty thief caught in his own inept web and moved on to other, more gruesome crimes. Hanging was so bloodless.

And Art Deckle’s rap sheet was too penny ante to present a serious threat to such a major event. He was a fruit fly caught on adhesive paper meant for a far larger pest.

Temple felt rather bad about that. She considered that if she really wanted to really feel bad, she’d make sure she and Max rendezvoused soon so they could seriously examine the state of their union.

But she didn’t feel quite up to that yet after her brief but warm encounter with Matt yesterday afternoon.

So, she lingered at home for a change, brooding over her four P.M. energy-boost coffee and yogurt smoothie while Kit padded back and forth from the living room to her office bathroom with an ex-actor’s heavy-lidded dislike of mornings.

“You must have been up really late,” Temple said as her bath-robed aunt sleep-walked past for the sixth time. “I’m sorry this New Millennium project has put the kibosh on our running around town and having fun.”

“Don’t be.” Kit paused beside Temple at the kitchen counter stool and yawned. “I have been running around and having kinky fun anyway.”

“But Vegas isn’t a place to see all by your lonesome.”

“Who said I was lonesome?”

“I thought we’d do all these girly things, like the hotel world-class shopping malls.”

“That will be fun.” Kit hopped up on the adjacent stool and poured coffee into a clean mug.

“There’s Splenda in the dish.”

“No thanks.”

“Cream or milk in the fridge.”

“No thanks. I want this cup as hot as hell, as black as sin, and as strong as the devil.” “Goodness, Auntie!”

“. . . has nothing to do with it, as Mae West remarked. I didn’t come in until four A.M., but you were slumbering like the babe you so clearly are in my memory. Glad I didn’t upset your dreams.”

“Four A.M., Aunt? What were you doing?”

“None of your business, Niece.”

“Have you picked up some gambling jones while I wasn’t watching? Mom would never forgive me.”

“Why should she? She never forgave me.”

“Forgave you for what?”

Kit’s pale blue eyes, now half open, eyed Temple over the mug’s thick rim.

“Let me count the ways. For being her younger sister. For majoring in something as impractical as theater, for leaving Minnesota when I was twenty-two, for never marrying, for actually getting acting jobs in New York, for never having kids, for becoming a writer on top of everything when I got too old to play thirty-somethings.”

“Kit. I thought you and mom were . . . okay with each other.”

“There were just two of us, Temple. Two sisters only a couple years apart in age. That’s an awful lot of sibling rivalry for one family. Didn’t you ever wonder why you were her fifth child?”