Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

her that he sensed he could lean on. And even if the protection she offered was not physical—well, maybe there were kinds of protection even more important.

      In bed she did some kinky things, at least as far out as anyone else he’d ever known. And he had known a few. And the coupling of his body with hers had given him more than he’d ever got before, with man or woman or girl or boy. And maybe, Pat thought in a corner of his mind now that he was on the road again, maybe he had better convince himself that it was just the good sex with Annie that was making him look for her now. Because, if he thought about it, he was almost sure that there was more to it than that; and somehow it bothered him deeply that there should be more.

      It could be that one of the things that had him out on the road again looking for her was the simple fact that Annie liked him. She had talked with Pat, stayed with him when she could have chosen to go off with someone else, had gone out of her way sometimes to do little things that she knew would make him happy. Very few people ever did that. Most people of whatever age or sexual orientation did not like Pat for long, once things between them had got beyond the elementary first stage in which they simply admired his more-than-half-childish good looks.

      So here he was, hitchhiking southwest on the interstate out of Chicago. And how many times had he come this way before? He didn’t really know. More than a couple. He wasn’t at all sure how many. One of the problems with being periodically insane was that things in the past always tended to get blurred.

      But, on the other hand, what you might have thought would be a difficult problem, that of locating Annie, didn’t really bother Pat at all. Because he now had a strong feeling for where Annie ought to be. Where she had to be, in fact. He couldn’t name the place but he could tell where it was. Roughly southwest of Chicago, and at some distance considerably more than a day’s drive.

      This was another thing that could be scary if he stopped and let himself think about it much. He knew it wasn’t normal to have this kind of a strong hunch for where another person was. But then there were a lot of things about himself that were abnormal, as he had known for a long time. A number of doctors and other experts had found different words to tell him so. If you looked at it in that light, one more abnormality didn’t seem all that worrisome. Besides, he had figured out that his hunch could have a logical explanation. Annie might have mentioned to him sometime that she intended to head for some certain place in the Southwest, and maybe Pat had been stoned or drunk or half asleep or a little crazy, or all of the above, and what Annie said hadn’t registered properly with his conscious mind. But on some deeper level he had heard, and remembered.

      On the first day of this present trip, going southwest through Illinois and then Missouri, Pat told the people who gave him rides that he was headed for California. Each time, as soon as he had told someone where he was going, they wanted to know where he was coming from, and each time he said that he had just left home. To questioners who tried to pin him down more closely, he answered that home was in Chicago—it was a big city, as good a place to be from as any other. He never mentioned his just-concluded stint in the Indiana mental hospital, or any of his previous stints in similar institutions elsewhere. Pat knew he was crazy, but he had never been crazy enough to tell a benefactor that.

      As evening approached at the end of his first day’s travel, Pat hiked himself down off the main highway. Spring was far enough advanced so that he wasn’t going to freeze to death overnight no matter where he slept, but he hoped to somehow get inside. He thought he would be able to manage that. Enough trips on the road, and you developed a feeling for such things, when things were likely to be easy, and when hard. Here the crickets were out as darkness fell, and it was almost like summer. Pat liked deep summer best.

      On the outskirts of Joplin, Missouri, he found himself hiking past a deserted-looking house. No other houses were very near. A look around and another quick sniff of the air decided him that he was not likely to find a better prospect. He went to a side window and checked out the house. No furniture. It was not only deserted but seemed to have been standing vacant for some time. Pat broke a window in the back and climbed inside.

      He put his knapsack on the floor for a pillow and covered himself with his light jacket, the best he could do toward keeping warm. As for food, the last people to give him a ride had bought him a sandwich, too, out of pity, and that would have to do for food until tomorrow. Pat was used to not eating a lot. Though it was still early in the evening he fell asleep almost at once, stretched out on the bare floor.

      At first he knew that he was asleep, and shivering a little. Then he began to dream of Annie. In Pat’s dream, she was asleep, stretched out also upon boards, but her boards looked like the floor of an attic somewhere. She was wearing a nondescript pullover shirt and jeans. Then Annie in the dream opened her eyes and looked at Pat, and smiled at him, and he knew beyond any doubt that in a moment she would reach out her