It was two in the morning of Christmas Eve (or, I suppose, properly, Christmas Day) that I got the phone call from Marilynn Williams.
I had sort of known Marilynn for a couple of years, but only sort of. She was a young woman who had dated a couple of men I knew, and presumably several I didn't. The times I talked to her she seemed pleasant and intelligent, but I had never really gone out with her -- mostly because I had been dating others. She seemed nice enough, though.
That "really" was because a friend of mine was part of a group of four going to a concert, and he bowed out because of a stomach virus but called me to substitute (and get back the price of the ticket). I did not pay for Marilynn, but the other couple was definitely a couple, so what constitutes a date is the question, I guess. I never asked her out again, though we got along well.
She did not seem to have any long relationships, but she was young enough that she might not have been interested at the time. I did not think about her in particular, one way or another, until she called. I did not even know where she lived, though I think I knew it wasn't far from me. The once we went out together she walked to my place. All this sounds like I had thought about her a lot, but really it's that afterward I had tried to reconstruct what I had known about her.
The reason she was calling me at 2 a.m. was that she was looking for a place to stay. There was a fire in her apartment building (probably somebody hooking up a Christmas tree stupidly, one fireman told her) and while her part of the building was safe, with maybe damp halls, the fire department was not letting anybody back in.
She went down the list of everybody whose numbers she remembered, and nobody was home over the holiday, and then she started looking up names in the directory, or really getting numbers from directory assistance because somebody tore up the directory in this phone booth, and this was the last of the quarters she borrowed, and she was getting cold, and... Could she sleep on a couch or in a corner or something?
That was all in one breath, punctuated by shivers, so she was cold for sure. And while she was talking, I thought: the place is a mess. She can help move stuff off the couch. This is a hell of a night to be out, with the two feet of snow and the fact that it had half-melted already, so the top of everything was ice. (Maybe worse where she was, with the heat from the fire.) So when she stopped for breath, I just said: "Where are you?"
It was only about four blocks, and I put on a heavy coat for the trip. A car would be useless, I thought, since the fire trucks would keep me away from where she was. As soon as I opened the door to the street, I found out that a wind had come up during the night, and it was a strong and cold one.
That trip was like something from a dream, or maybe a nightmare, with half the houses lit up with lights and everything covered in icicles -- the pavement too. And being awakened at 2 a.m. added to the effect.
The fire was visible a block away, audible further than that, and I could make out Marilynn Williams easily. She saw me and turned toward me, and I could see that she was dressed in an old top coat with one button, and cotton pajamas. (The coat, when I asked her later, she said was the warmest she had.)
When we were a dozen feet apart, I saw a mass of ice on one building loosen and fall toward her. I yelled at Marilynn to move back, and she did so without thinking. That turned out to be a mixed blessing. The ice actually hit to the right of where she had been, right into a big puddle from melted snow and fire-hose water, where a storm-drain had been blocked up. The splash went right for her.
So instead of a cold unhappy young woman, we now had a freezing soaked miserable young woman. I took off my coat, which normally would have been not as good as what Marilynn had but was dry, and put it on her. Hers I carried, figuring that I would suffer less in the four blocks than she.
We really only walked one block. A man saw us, got the situation in a sentence, and drove us the rest. Once in my apartment, I moved her into my bathroom, stripping my coat off as I did. I told her to pass me her pajamas so I could hang them up, and take a hot shower so she could get halfway back to normal.
Her hand was waving the soaked clothing from the door in a few seconds, and I grabbed it. That place did not have either washer or dryer; I just took laundry down in the basement, but that was locked up now.
She looked awful coming into my place, but usually Marilynn Williams was cute enough. She was five foot two, dark-haired, a long face (more so at that moment), with small but nice breasts and a trim body. Not that I saw it at that moment; all I saw was the waving hand. Long fingers.
A couple of minutes later I walked into the bathroom with a couple of fresh towels, a set of my old pajamas, a bathrobe, and a cup of hot chocolate. She acted disturbed from what I could see behind the shower door (all I really recall seeing was one nipple, dark against the skin) so I called to her what I was leaving, and left.
Soon she emerged, saying to me, "I'm still cold, I'm still very tired, but I'm a lot better. I want to thank you very much."
I started to tell Marilynn to forget it, it was nothing, but instead decided to tease her a bit. "It's very seldom that I find a woman who is actually eager to go into my apartment, get naked, and spend the night with me."
She blushed very prettily, laughed a bit, and replied, "My God, I hadn't thought of it that way!"
I had cleared the couch while she was showering, so we sat there. The cup of cocoa got rid of the tiredness, for a while at least, but soon she said, "I must have really been chilled to the bone. Could you turn the heat up in here?"
"The whole building's on a timer, and I'm not sure it would help much anyway. The only real solution is to stand in the kitchen by an open flame. Or--well, I hesitate to suggest it, since we don't know each other all that well, but I could just hold you to warm you up."
Marilynn looked over at me, very seriously. "I guess I could trust you... I guess I might as well, since I'm already staying in your apartment overnight!" And she touched her hand to mine. Yes, she was chilled to the bone. A good thing my body-mass was about twice hers.
We spent some time there, my arms around her, the bathrobe over us, talking softly. She admitted to me that two of the men she called from the phone booth were home, but told her pointedly that she would not be welcome because they already had someone with them.
I told her that was short-sighted. If the other, uh, guest sleeping over was another woman, *she* would not object -- though she'd want to be consulted. Any amatory activities which might be postponed through discretion might be more intense later for being postponed. Taking Marilynn in for the night should raise a man in two women's estimation, and that can always be useful to a single man.
Marilynn was silent, and changed the subject. But we both got sleepy, and that was a problem. The couch was too narrow for us both to stretch out, we could not sleep comfortably sitting up, and she still needed my warmth -- or maybe just the comfort of being held.
In any case, there came a point when she said timidly, "Charlie?"
"Hmm?"
"How far could I trust you?"
"Why?"
"Would it be all right if we moved to your bed? I mean, I don't want you to think I want to have sex with you or anything, but you are so warm and all--"
"All I want to do is sleep, with or without you. Let's get in there fast; the more I wake up, the more you would tempt me."
The truth was that I hoped I was tired enough to sleep instead of lying there thinking about Marilynn lying beside me in bed. I took off my clothing down to shorts and got the blankets over us, and prayed it would not be a hard night. Actually, it got hard as soon as I touched her under the covers, but that's another story. I ignored it. She did not seem to notice it. But I still wished that she hadn't decided to kiss me good night.
The next thing I knew was about six in the morning, maybe three hours later, when Marilynn crawled back in beside me from a trip to the bathroom. "You should know," she said softly, "that you are the first man I have ever spent the night with."
"I should tell you," I replied, "that it's a lot more fun that way. Too many people these days just have sex and go. Lying there together afterwards is the best part in a lot of ways. You should try it."
She made an odd kind of sound, half laugh and half whimper, and lay there for a moment.
"You are so relaxed," she said. "All my boyfriends always seem so much in a hurry about -- you know, going to bed."
"Hmm. Well, already being there may be a factor." She laughed. "But there's also the fact that I haven't known you well enough to be hot for your body. Though the proximity is changing that situation some."
"I never knew that a man has to know a woman to, to want her that way."
"He doesn't. But at least for me it gets stronger if I do."
