"John Kessel - The Pure Product" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Ruth came out of the bathroom, saw me, did a double take. “You
look—perfect!” she said. She slid in the bed beside me, naked, and sniffed
at my glass of Chivas. Her lip curled. She looked over my shoulder at the
paper. “You can understand that stuff?”

“Don’t kid me. Reading is a survival skill. You couldn’t last here without
it.”

“Wrong.”

I drained the scotch. Took a puff of the cigar. Dropped the paper to
the floor beside the bed. I looked her over. Even relaxed, the muscles in
her thighs were well-defined.

“You even smell like one of them,” she said.

“How did you get the clothes past their store security? They have
those beeper tags clipped to them.”

“Easy. I tried on the shoes and walked out when they weren’t looking.
In the second store I took the pants into a dressing room, cut off the
bottoms, along with the alarm tag, and put them on. I held the alarm tag that
was clipped to the blouse in my armpit and walked out of that store, too. I
put the blouse on in the mall women’s room.”

“If you can’t read, how did you know which was the women’s room?”

“There’s a picture on the door.”

I felt very tired and very old. Ruth moved close. She rubbed her foot
up my leg, drawing the pajama leg up with it. Her thigh slid across my groin.
I started to get hard. “Cut it out,” I said. She licked my nipple.

I could not stand it. I got off the bed. “I don’t like you.”
 She looked at me with true innocence. “I don’t like you either.”

Although he was repulsed by the human body, Jonathan Swift was
passionately in love with a woman named Esther Johnson. “What you did at
the mall was stupid,” I said. “You would have killed that guard.”

“Which would have made us even for the day.”

“Kansas City was different.”

“We should ask the cops there what they think.”

“You don’t understand. That had some grace to it. But what you did
was inelegant. Worst of all it was not gratuitous. You stole those clothes for
yourself, and I hate that.” I was shaking.