No reason to move either. Janice likes Greenwich Village and
the apartment is spacious enough for two, and cheap, since you
high-pressured the landlord and got the rent whittled down to a song.
He was mixing his metaphors, but it didn't seem important to him at the
moment. Only the future seemed important. It was brighter with promise
than he could have imagined when he'd sat holding hands with her on a
bench in Washington Square on the evening before he'd sold the painting.
He was a little startled when the chimes stopped abruptly, as if a hand
had reached out and ripped the press-button mechanism from the door.
The sudden, loud knocking startled him even more. It came from the
short entrance hall just outside the room--three sharp knocks followed
by a pause and a knock so loud that it hinted at more than just
impatience. He knew that it had to be Janice, for her knocking--when
she did knock--followed a pre-arranged pattern. A fourth knock was part
of the pattern. But not a thump that rattled the door chain.
He sprang out of bed and seized the first garment that came to
hand. It was a terry-cloth bathrobe which Janice had urged him to
have laundered. But he just hadn't gotten around to it, and now it
contributed nothing to his male aplomb and early morning dash. He hoped
she wouldn't mind too much when he took her in his arms and brought
his lips down hard on hers. And smoothed her red-gold hair and ran his
rough artist's hands up and down her back until she began to shiver a
little and purr like a kitten.
He hoped she wouldn't think about the robe and how untidy he looked
in it. Making women forget little disharmonies like that could be
tougher than painting a picture that would put Utrillo in the shade.
Well ... what the heck? He was an artist, wasn't he? Not all women went
for artists, but when they did they usually liked them a bit on the
unkempt, disorganized side.
You just had to keep the disorganization from getting out of control.
If you allowed it to spread to the romance department you were sunk.
But that couldn't happen with Janice--not when he took her in his arms
and told her how beautiful she was.
As he strode toward the door a tiny muscle in his jaw started
twitching. Something was seriously wrong. He was sure of it.
Self-containment was Janice's specialty. Her self-control was
phenomenal and no matter how eager she might be to see him it just
wasn't in character for her to try to break the door down.
Something extraordinary must have come up to make her act that way. It
was hard to imagine what it could be, to bring about such a change in
the way she ordinarily behaved. Fright? Hysteria? But Janice didn't
have a baker's pinch of hysteria in her make-up. His alarm increased as
he reached the door, and started fumbling with the chain. His fingers
were all thumbs and the knocking was so loud and continuous now that it
further unnerved him, so that it took him nearly a minute to get the
door open.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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