Read Fury on Sunday for Free Online Page B

had to have some water! He started to cry and leaned his head against the cold metal while the tears ran down his cheeks.
    After a while, he drew his sleeve across his face and started walking along the station, ignoring the way the walls wavered before hiseyes.
I’m going to kill him
, he kept telling himself.
I’m going to kill him
.
    Stan.

2:30 AM
    In dark stillness, she lay starkly awake, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Under the black silk of her nightgown her firm breasts rose and fell and her long white fingers drew in and out at her sides like the delicately pumping claws of a cat. Her red nails made a rasping, scratching sound on the sheet. Her mouth was a stark red line that did not move. Jane was twenty-five and her body lay like a taut spring, waiting for something.
    Across the space between the two beds Stan groaned and rolled onto his side, complaining in his sleep. She listened to him rustling on the sheet of his bed, heard the weak thud as he hit his pillow once. Then he cleared his throat and was silent again. She did not look toward him; her eyes remained fastened on the dark ceiling.
    He was probably sick again. He was always sick after a party. He drank too much and ate too much and made himself sick. Most men, when they drank too much, didn’t eat at all. They filled their bodies with alcohol but took in no food to offset the breakdown of tissues. That’s why drunkards died usually, she thought. That’s why my dear old daddy died and left me the world he could never handle.
    Her still painted lips pressed together now. She felt as if she had to have something fragile in her hands, something she could crush between her straining fingers.
    For a minute she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She remembered how easy it used to be to sleep. Just a delicious exhaustion filling your body, just a closing of eyes and there you were. Now…
    How could you sleep when your mind was like one of those toffee machines you see on amusement piers with those long arms turning and twisting, turning and twisting? Her brain was the toffee. She could almost visualize the metal arms twisting the great grey lengths of her mind. Desire twisted and folded over, frustration twisted and folded over. A deep sighing breath filled her lungs. Abruptly, she turned on her stomach and pressed her body into the bed. Her teeth gritted together and the column of her throat felt as ifit were petrifying. God, to have Mickey Gordon in bed with her. Right now, here, even with Stan over there, what did she care? Or Johnny Thompson. Or Bill Fraser. Or Bob McCall, yes, that she’d like. Even if Ruth was her best friend. What was a friend for anyway?
    Her white hands closed into tight fists. Her nails dug into her palms and she thought she was going to scream. Anyone! Even that gaunt and crazy Vince. Yes, maybe especially that gaunt and crazy Vince. That was what happened when you became a jaded connoisseur of the flesh, a jaundiced gourmet of love’s old song—no longer sweet but in need of new spices. You tired of the plain fares, you wearied of the common menu. You craved something exotic, something new. And, in consequence, you positively threw up at the thought of your husband—at best, a tasteless mush.
    She dug her nails into the sheets now and writhed her hot body on the bed until the gown had worked its way past her hips.
God, I’m going crazy
, she thought.
I’ll end up like Vince. One night I’ll get up quite calm and secure in my maniac shell and drive something sharp and final into the worthless corpulence I married
.
    A rising, whining sound filled her throat.
No, stop that
, she demanded of herself. That sort of thing made Stan raise upon an elbow and whisper into the darkness his hateful, nauseous concern.
    She had always thought of Stan in terms of an old nursery rhyme. Compendium of snails and puppy-dog tails—that was Stan, Mr. Sheldon. Snails for sluggishness of mind and movement. And puppy-dog tails—those flapping,