It

cupping his balls; it was not the first time that summer that he had been kicked there.
He leaned over and picked up the switchblade.’ . . . on,’ he wheezed.
‘What, Henry?’ Belch said anxiously.
Henry turned a face toward him that was so full of sweating pain and sick, blazing hate that Belch fell back a step. ‘I said . . . come . . . on!’ he managed, and began to stagger and lurch up the street after Beverly, holding his crotch.
‘We can’t catch her now, Henry,’ Victor said uneasily. ‘Hell, you can hardly walk.’
‘We’ll catch her,’ Henry panted. His upper lip wa s rising and falling in an unconscious dog­like sneer. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and ran down his hectic cheeks. ‘We’ll catch her, all right. Because I know where she’s going. She’s going down into the Barrens to be with her asshole
5
The Derry Town House / 2:00 A.M.
friends,’ Beverly said.
‘Hmmm?’ Bill looked at her. His thoughts had been far away. They had been walking hand-in-hand, the silence between them companionable, slightly charged with mutual attraction. He had caught only the last word of what she had said. A block ahead, the lights of the Town House shone through the low ground-fog.
‘I said, you were my best friends. The only friends I ever had back then.’ She smiled. ‘Making friends has never been my strong suit, I guess, although I’ve got a good one back in Chicago. A woman named Kay McCall. I think you’d like her, Bill.’
‘Probably would. I’ve never been real fast to make friends myself.’ He smiled. ‘Back then, we were all we nuh– n u h –needed.’ He saw beads of moisture in her hair, appreciated the way the lights made a nimbus about her head. Her eyes were turned gravely up to his.
‘I need something now,’ she said.
‘W-What’s that?’
‘I need you to kiss me,’ she said.
He thought of Audra, and for the first time it occurred to him that she looked like Beverly. He wondered if maybe that had been the attraction all along, the reason he had been able to find guts enough to ask Audra out near the end of the Hollywood party where they had been introduced. He felt a pang of unhappy guilt . . . and then he took Beverly, his childhood friend, in his arms.
Her kiss was firm and warm and sweet. Her breasts pushed against his open coat and her hips moved against him . . . away . . . and then against him again. When her hips moved away a second tune, he plunged both of his hands into her hair and moved against her. When she felt him growing hard, she uttered a little gasp and put her face against the side of his neck. He felt her tears on his skin, warm and secret.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Quick.’
He took her hand and they walked the rest of the way to the Town House. The lobby was old, festooned with plants, and still possessed of a certain fading charm. The decor was very much Nineteenth Century Lumberman. It was deserted at this hour except for the desk clerk, who could be dimly seen in the inner office, his feet cocked up on the desk, watching TV. Bill pushed the third-floor button with a finger that trembled just slightly — excitement? nervousness? guilt ? all of the above? Oh yeah sure, and a kind of almost insane joy and fear as well. These feelings did not mix pleasantly, but they seemed necessary. He led her down the hallway toward his room, deciding in some confused way that if he were to be unfaithful, it should be a complete act of infidelity, consummated in his place, not hers. He found himself thinking of Susan Browne, his first book-agent and, at the age of not quite twenty, his first lover.
Cheating. Cheating on my wife. He tried to get this through his head, but it seemed both real and unreal at the same time. What seemed strongest was an unhappy sense of homesickness: an old – fashioned feeling of falling away. Audra would be up by now, making coffee, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, perhaps studying lines, perhaps reading a Dick Francis novel.
His key rattled in the lock of room 311. If they had gone to Beverly’s room on the fifth floor, they would have seen the message-light on her phone blinking; the TV-watching desk clerk would have given her a message to call her friend Kay in Chicago (after Kay’s third frantic call, he had finally remembered to post the message), things might have taken a different course: the five of them might not have been fugitives from the Derry police when that day’s light finally broke. But they went to his — as things had perhaps, been arranged.
The door opened. They were inside. She looked at him, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, her breast rising and falling rapidly. He took her in his arms and was overwhelmed by the feeling of rightness —