Read Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) for Free Online Page B

leaping back into bed at every opportunity. He was
twenty-three, and seemed to know everything there was to know about art,
science, and politics; plus, he knew the location of every single place of
interest in the city. He also knew how to make a woman feel as if she was the
only person on the planet that he ever wanted to touch.
    She lay right back and closed her eyes. She’d been young, inexperienced,
and he made her feel so fabulous. The feeling of having him inside her had been
crazy good, wonderful, and over the years that followed she’d had plenty of
evidence that all men were not like him, and that all sex would not live up to
the tingling, ecstatic peaks of pleasure she had felt there in the Marriot ,
high above Times Square with her young, slim lover.
    Now, almost out of a sense of nostalgia, she found her hand slipping
down beneath the waistband of her pants and resting gently against her pubic
hair. She recalled how he had kissed and toyed with it, softly and without any
rush, until she had yearned for him to go further, to tease her apart with his
lips and drink her up.
    Before long she was stroking herself, letting her fingers get sticky
without them even moving inside her. She could stay like this for hours, toying
calmly with herself, the delicate masturbation no more than an aide de
memoir .
    Then the sound of Skype’s ringtone suddenly filled her ears.
    She turned onto her side and saw Jason’s photo.
    He’d called her.
    For a moment she paused. What was she going to say? Hi Jason,
what a surprise! I was just jerking off over your memory!
    Propping herself up on the bed, she ran a hand through her hair,
made herself half decent, and answered.
    “Hi, Jason! Good to see you, at last!”
    “Hiya!” Jason said. “Yeah, right... Where... I mean, how, where the fuck
are ya!”
    Then the blurred image of him disappeared, replaced by what looked
like the ceiling of a bar, the image spinning. Clearly he’d dropped his tablet
or whatever device he was using.
    A few seconds he picked it up again, staring hard into the screen. His
eyes were blue, just like they had been all those years ago. But now they were
massively blood shot, enough to make him seem like a vagrant. And the bags
beneath his eyes were ridiculous, so loose and voluminous he seemed fifty-three
rather than the thirty-three she knew him to be.
    “Are you all right there, Jason?”
    “What? Me?”
    He looked around, as if trying to work out where he was. There were
bottles behind him, a bar it looked like, and a big, old-fashioned jukebox to one
side. A row of empty stools stood along the bar.
    “I’m just...” he said, unsure of himself, “it’s, I mean, it’s that
just it’s... Dawn has the kids, and I... it’s school vacation. So...”
    So you’re alone and shit-faced in a bar at six in the evening , she refrained from saying.
    “How are the kids?” she asked.
    “Oh, they’re great. Don’t get to see ’em as much as I’d like, not
now...”
    “Oh, I see.”
    “Temporary thing. Couple of months, trial separation it’s called.
You mighta heard of it.”
    “Yes, I have.”
    “So, here I am, drinking a toast to Alex Strange. Hey!” he cried, as
if something just struck him as incredibly important. “You remember that guy,
don’t you? It was, ehm, y’know, in New York.”
    The words seemed to shock them both, as if New York was some
unspeakable secret between them that he’d just blurted out.
    “I remember him,” she said, almost trying to change the subject.
“Why? Has something happened?”
    Jason shook his head as if he could hardly remember, as if the whole
thing had simply vanished from his mind.
    “Jason? What happened to Alex Strange?”
    “Ugh?”
    Strange was a tech guy, she told herself. Hadn’t he been in the news
recently?
    “Jason? What is it?”
    Jason smiled. He seemed to gather his thoughts, but before he said
anything he gestured to the young man behind the bar to line him up