Programmed for Peril

patiently through a marsh of his small talk, waiting for his assessment of the status of their relationship. From it would issue the condition of not only their engagement, but his compassion. A man’s love was best read when tested.
    In time he dropped the anchor, left the wheel, and joined her where she sat sunning in her favorite deck chair. He wore clip-on mirror sunglasses against the glare. They gave him the look of a blind man. She would have preferred to see his eyes.
    “Trish, I’ve been thinking a great deal about us.”
    “Good thoughts, I hope.”
    “Good and bad, to be honest.”
    “I want to hear where you’ve gotten to,” she said evenly. He sat silent. The gentle swells stroked the hull. “I’ve had to work hard to deal with your past. It hasn’t been easy.”
    Trish began to speak sympathetically, but he cut her short with a jabbing gesture. “Before I can say I’ve been successful, I have to ask you a question. I’m sure you can imagine what it is.”
    She frowned. “I’m not sure I can.”
    “Oh? I had hoped you would. If you had, you might understand the source of some of my... anguish. The question is: Do you have any more surprises for me? Like those I’ve recently had? The depravity of your relationship with Carson, for example. The minor detail that Melody, sweet as she is, is another man’s bastard—”
    “Foster! That word. It—doesn’t fit her.”
    He shrugged. “And that, whatever your sexual adventures, you never bothered to marry. Are there more such revelations in store for me? Even one more?”
    “No!”
    “Are you sure?” The blind man’s glasses turned to her in unspoken skepticism.
    “Absolutely.”
    “Your word?”
    “Foster!”
    “No more weird secrets in Trish Morley’s traveling bag?”
    “I said no.”
    He nodded. “Then...” He smiled. “Let’s go below and make love.”
    “Yes!”
    She remembered Mother Marylou’s pronouncement about the bed being the best adjudicator of lovers’ quarrels. She scampered down the hatch, giggly and frisky. In the end it was going to be all right!
    They stripped on the wide bunk. Midsummer tan lines marked their skin. She reached up. “I’ll take your glasses off.” Her job in the preludes to their private loving.
    “No. I’ll leave them on for now.”
    “You look like a blind man,” she said softly.
    “I have been.”
    Trish readied herself for his touch, eager to please. She wove herself enthusiastically into the familiar pattern of his kisses. By now she knew the order of his caresses and anticipated them with delight.
    He broke the order.
    She opened passion-weighted eyes. He was groping beneath the bunk. She clung to his neck, impatient with the unexpected delay. “Foster...” She ran the moist pad of her tongue across his ear.
    His hands moved up into view. In them he held short lengths of plastic line. “Give me your hands,” he said.
    He was going to tie her to the bunk.
    She began to tremble, not in fear, but in dismay. Far from getting past Carson and Queen of My Heart, Foster had allowed himself to be infected with the devil’s disease. Nothing positive for either him or Trish could come from knotted lines and mock submission. Having Foster conduct himself this way was no more natural than a modem artist beginning to paint like an Old Master. Time and personalities built stronger barriers than her fiancé could ever climb with his timid copycatting.
    “Don’t,” she said.
    He ignored her, sliding the previously tied slip knots around her wrists. “It’s nothing you don’t know well,” he said.
    Anguish rose in her heart. Couldn’t he understand that what he was attempting to do wasn’t authentic for him? She had accepted his adequate loving, wishing only distantly for long-gone forbidden pleasures. He, too, should accept the physical side of their relationship as it was. How crucial was self-acceptance to happiness!
    No one could be Carson but Carson. No one!
    What she ought to do now confronted her with the might of a philosophical question. Should she oppose what he was attempting because in the end it was doomed to fail, or should she go along for now? She faced a woman’s dilemma. She had to judge whether or not this was a situation in which it would be wise to defer her own wishes in favor of those of her man. Resisting him might well punch out another board from the already damaged hull of their engagement. On the other hand, submitting carried some messages, too,