Chapter 9 – Tracy Patten

It was touch and go there for Muriel for a while, but she pulled through—at least for now. At first I almost regretted she had. I had worked with kidney-failure patients before. It was a terrible, long, painful way to die unless you could get a transplant. The Lewises were well off, but I had a good idea how much it would cost for a kidney transplant, and I knew how hard it was to find one and then acquire it, even if you could afford the operation. And your surgeon would have to be first rate, which meant your surgeon would be astronomically expensive. Just bad news all around.

I knew she was running out of time. I think Muriel knew it too and had decided not to fight it—just to drift away. I'm not sure she understood the pain involved in that, though.

But in that she underestimated the regard the residents had for her—and for each other despite all the foolishness we got involved in in our tight little community. She also had underestimated the determination and the capabilities of her neighbors. Soon, even sooner than I'd thought possible, we were well on the way toward making a sizable dent in what the transplant would cost—and with each passing day her surgeon said she was becoming better prepared to endure the surgery.

Her surgeon. Wasn't he a godsend? And there all because Jaivon Johnson—the young man nearly everyone had been treating as invisible—and that some, I knew, had taken full advantage of—had the necessary connections and called on them. Muriel couldn't have had a better friend. None of us could.

And now Jaivon had disappeared. Just did his angel bit and left us. Did we send him away because of our indifference to him—treating him no better than his ancestors had been treated in Savannah three centuries ago? God, I hoped not. Muriel certainly hadn't. And he'd shown his appreciation for that.

But why did he leave us? I wondered. He couldn't take the attention his service surely would bring him?

While this tragedy had descended on Muriel and the square, my own world was soaring. I almost felt guilty that, in the midst of all this travail and worry, I was euphoric.

Late in the evening on the day the ambulance came for Muriel Roberts, I returned to Pulaski Square—to the apartment I shared with Donna Davis. I was walking slowly around the square from the inn, where Martin Lewis had left me off, toward our apartment. I didn't quite know what to say to Donna. I knew she wasn't fully mine—that she was bi and even that she was being fucked regularly by the landscaper, Caleb Freeman. I even suspected she'd been having it on with Mark Vaughn. She certainly couldn't stop talking about how much he looked like a young Paul Newman.

But she'd been so luscious and pliable, so accepting of my needs. And I had admired her so much. I wanted to be like her—no, I wanted to be her. In my insecurities, I tried to be her.

But now there was someone else for me—someone who touched me deeply in ways Donna never had. What could I do about Donna?

As it turned out, I didn't need to do anything. When I entered our apartment and went into the bedroom, it wasn't Donna who was waiting for me—it was Kathy Kimbel, who I'd left earlier in the day, intending to tryst with her, when I had to accompany Muriel to the hospital.

Kathy was lying there on her back, naked, stretched out on top of the sheets, wide awake, her eyes bright with welcome, her perfect little V and the trimmed pubes beckoning to me. She opened her arms to me, and without a question, I sank down between her legs, buried my face in her cunt and feasted on her, as she arched her back, grabbed my head in her hands, writhed under me, and moaned to the ceiling of the dark room.

She only put up with this for ten minutes or so before she was struggling to sit up, reaching down to grab me under my arm pits, and pulling me up onto the bed—not up to where our lips could meet, but turning me, signaling that she wanted me to continue doing to her cunt what I already had been doing with my mouth and fingers, but showing me that she wanted to do the same to me.

Donna had never done this for me—69d me. No woman had.

When we were both spent and were stretched out in an embrace, our hands still gliding over the curves and into the crevices of the body of the other and we'd come out of a deep kiss—then and only then, I asked her how she came to be in my bed.

"And where is Donna?" I added.

"Donna knows," Kathy answered. "I discussed it with her. She's fine with it. She's moved into the carriage house behind Emily Goodwin's mansion—to be with Caleb."

"And Mark?"

"For now he's bedding at Terrence Rowland's house. I would imagine that he and Terrence are now doing what we just did. And more power to them, I say. I'm fine with it. And he's fine with me being here. We'll still keep up appearances of sharing an apartment—for our parents' sakes. But we've both had enough of the pretense and of trying to fight our natures. Luckily, we came to that point at the same time. We can just be good friends now."

"So, you'll be moving into Donna's bedroom?"

"No, I'll be moving into your bed," she answered.

My heart soared. I embraced her tightly. My lips went to hers and my fingers moved through her folds and found her clit. Kathy arched her back and moaned deeply. She moaned so much more deeply for me than Donna ever had. She began to move her hips, rubbing her clit against my finger, which I held steady and strong, reveling in her using me to pleasure herself. I reached over the nightstand, opened the drawer, and pulled out the vibrator. As she moaned and struggled—but not too hard—to turn away from it, I worked the vibrator inside her, and turned it on. She began writhing on it and crying out her pleasure immediately. I held it inside until she'd given me two orgasms—two orgasms that I knew were genuine rather than the ones she said she had been faking for Mark. She couldn't have fooled me, another woman, about this.

"Shit," she whispered, "that's as thick as Caleb is."

I didn't' ask her how she knew—then or ever. This was all just too perfect for me. I wasn't going to rock that boat.

We were drifting off to sleep, when she murmured to me, "Just one thing, Tracy."

"What, love?"

"Please pick a hair color and style that suits you better than mine does. And I think the way you talk is much better than mine is. With me you can be yourself. You don't have to try to be me. I want you, not another me. Can you do that?"

"You got it, baby," I answered as I moved a hand between her thighs, pushing my bunched-up fingers inside her, and she went hyper for me.

"Yes, like that. Just like that. Oh, God, oh shit. Just . . . like . . . that."