Zeroing In (Kit Tolliver #11) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page B

don’t mean to embarrass you, bringing all that up out of the blue, but otherwise it’s just going to hang in the air between us, and I don’t think that’s what either of us wants.”
    “You’re very direct.”
    “But don’t you agree?”
    “Well, yes,” he said, and picked up his glass of lemonade like an alcoholic reaching for his Harvey Wallbanger. “Yes, best to clear the air.”
    Right. “What Rita told me about, and what really stuck in my mind, is the experience you had with proxy baptism. See, I never even heard of that before, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I did some research online, and, well, I keep thinking about it.”
    “I suppose you’d like to find out about getting your own ancestors baptized. Well, that’s not hard to arrange, and—”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said. “See, I had this boyfriend, and we were really deeply in love.”
    “Oh?”
    “We were meant to be together forever, I know we were. But he was married to somebody else.”
    “Oh.”
    “He filed for divorce, and the legal proceedings were underway. And he and I weren’t living together, but we had, you know, a full relationship. And then—”
    “Yes?”
    “He died.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    She reached across the table, put her hand on top of his. “It was very sudden,” she said, “and completely unexpected. We were making love, and what we were doing—I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t go into detail. Would I be embarrassing you?”
    “It’s all right.”
    “Well, I think they call it the Reverse Cowgirl position. He was lying on his back, like, and I was sitting astride him, but facing toward his feet. That was always a very effective position for us, because his dick hit my G-spot perfectly that way, and—is it okay to talk like this to a Mormon?”
    He nodded.
    “Well, that made it super good, and I could regulate the depth and everything, and he could just lie there and enjoy it. Plus I could use one hand for balance and use the other on my clit, just to, you know, help things along. Like.”
    “I see.”
    “So it was really great, and I had this super orgasm with bells and whistles, one of those long rolling things that just goes on forever, and when it finally stopped I said something, I don’t know what, telling him I loved him, that kind of thing, and he didn’t say anything. And the one thing I don’t like about the Reverse Cowgirl is you don’t get to see his face, and I didn’t even know if he came or not, or much of anything. And he wasn’t moving or making any sound, so I swung around to get a look at him, and, well, he was dead.”
    “How awful.”
    “They said he had a congenital heart condition, that it had just been there all his life and remained asymptomatic all that time, so nobody ever knew about it. And then it popped up and killed him. It could have happened while he was playing basketball or hurrying to catch a bus, or it could have happened in the middle of a night’s sleep. It was going to happen sooner or later, and the time it picked was right when I was squirming around on his dick in the throes of an amazing orgasm.”
    She touched his hand again. “Anyway,” she said, “that’s what I thought of when I learned about proxy baptism.”
    “You want him baptized, so that he’s guaranteed eternal life in Christ everlasting.”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “He was baptized as an infant. I don’t remember which denomination his parents were, and I know he’d lost his faith over the years, especially when his marriage went sour, but he was definitely baptized. Now maybe a Mormon proxy baptism would still do him some good, I don’t know about that, but if you want to put his name on the list, well, I’d have no objection to that. But it’s not what I came to Provo for.”
    “Then—”
    “We were meant to be together,” she said, “and I knew that from the moment I met him. And I still know it.