Fever by Sharon Butala Page A

with a pure, brilliant light, a hard brilliance that takes Janet’s breath away. She almost falls, and puts her hand out on Baker’s arm, apparently to steady herself, but really because she is afraid.
    She feels the wrinkled softness of his shirt and his hard, warm forearm under that, and amazingly, he sets the fork down, draws her to him, and holds her against him with both his arms around her, his head still raised to the stars.
    Janet is on top of Baker, leaning over him so that her long, dark hair sweeps along his chest. She’s laughing. Tonight there is some moonlight which the curtains can’t fully shut out and she can see how his eyes and teeth gleam as he looks up at her, smiling. She lets herself fall gently toward him till their chests meet. She puts her arms under his neck and her mouth next to his ear.
    “For some reason I keep thinking of this movie I saw. ‘Heartbreaker'? Did you ever see it?”
    “I don’t think so,” Baker says. His hands are on her waist, resting there gently. He slides them down over the curve of her hips and then up to hold her rib cage tenderly between his palms.
    “Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso, or something. They’re these best friends in New York. Peter Coyote is an artist and he has this model.” Baker begins to turn his hips slowly to the right. She realizes he wants her to turn so they can lie on their sides facing each other. She knows he isn’t really listening, but this doesn’t silence her. Even as she turns with him, sliding her leg down by his longer one, she is thinking of how to tell him the next part in an interesting way.
    “And his model is really a nice girl, but she’s a call girl, too. And she loves him, the artist. But he doesn’t love her.” She pauses a moment. Baker has found her mouth and is kissing her so that she can’t speak. It’s almost as if he is trying to stop her from talking. “So one night the two friends and the model wind up in bed together. You know how things like that can … happen …” She pauses, knowing that for a second, at least he is listening.
    “Yeah,” he says, his husky voice rising attentively.
    Encouraged, Janet goes on. “And then, later, she sees all these artists and people around him and she’s really sad, and she says, ‘I know I’m not interesting or smart. The only interesting thing about me is my chest.’ She has these big breasts, you see.”
    “Are you just about finished this story?” Baker interrupts to ask, but he’s laughing and he takes a handful of her long hair and gives it a teasing tug. Janet kisses his mouth, then whispers, “And then she says, ‘The other night?’ “ She kisses his forehead. “'You loved being inside me …’ “ She kisses his chin, and she knows by how still he is that he’s listening again. She remembers how the actress spoke, her intonation, the pain-filled way she turned her head away from the artist to deliver her next line. “ ‘You’re a heartbreaker,’ she says.”
    Janet waits. Baker says nothing. “I don’t know why I keep thinking of that.” Or maybe he hasn’t been listening. “It was a good movie,” she says.
    He rolls over so that he is on top of her, spreading her legs with his, and puts his mouth, hard, over hers.
    “Who was that?” Janet asks. She never, not in a million years, meant to ask him that question, but the look on his face as he returns from the living room where he has been talking on the phone so takes her by surprise that the question is out before she quite realizes she has spoken.
    “My wife,” he says. Janet stops chopping the celery, the quick, hard crack against the chopping board ceasing abruptly, then beginning again. “My ex-wife,” he amends, opening the cupboard where he keeps his pots and pans.
    “I didn’t know you’d been married,” Janet says.
    “Yeah, two kids.” He sets a glass casserole on the stove beside him.
    “Does she live here? In the city?” She tries to sound casual, and, in fact,