She took a deep breath. It felt good to be free of the piercing grief of the last three years, felt good to remember them with laughter instead of tears. She leaned out the window, feeling deliciously wicked and definitely cooler as a breeze blew across her and tightened her nipples into hard little pink nubs. Maggie shuddered and remembered when Nick had taken her nipples into his mouth and sucked on them. She touched herself there, and felt a throbbing, almost-pain assault her body. It had been so perfect, that time in the library. She wanted that again.
The moon was a curved sliver of pearly-white, Venus a blue-white dot right beside it. She
craned her neck back and stared up into the sky. God’s toenail, Maggie thought. That is what Da always called the moon when it looked like that. I remember sitting contentedly in Da’s arms, the moon looking just like this, Mama beside us with that indulgent smile on her face.
Everything looked so different at night, darkness cloaking even ugly scenery with a mysterious beauty. She loved the night; loved the way it smelled, the quietness of it, the blue-black shadows that camouflaged ordinary objects, the rustles and noises of animals as they went about their business. It was soothing, somehow, to her soul, to stare out at the beauty of the night. It had been one of her Da’s favorite things, too. Mama had not understood about the night, but she had known that it pleased them, and so it had pleased her, too.
The white gauze curtains were sticking to her sweaty self like glue, and Maggie brushed irritably at them, then halted. What had that been, moving in the shadows by the horse barn? She leaned forward intently, straining her eyes as she tried to penetrate the ebony night. She bit back a gasp as the silhouette moved once again, and separated to become two distinct shapes. One was unmistakably a woman, and the other . . . the other was her Uncle Ned. Maggie gripped the curtain and took a step to the side as the Ned-shadow hesitated and looked up toward her room, then slipped into the barn after a long, tense moment, the woman-shadow following right on his heels. Maggie let out the breath she had not realized she was holding. What was Uncle Ned doing sneaking around in the middle of the night? And who in the name of God was that woman? Maybe it was a lady friend. She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a sudden giggle at the thought of gruff Uncle Ned with a girlfriend. Maggie resolved right then to tease him unmercifully on the morrow. That sly old thing, sneaking around in the middle of the night like a youngster with his light-of-love! Maggie giggled again. Uncle Ned, with a lady friend! She had not known he had it in him.
Maggie went back to bed with a lighter heart, distracted from her troubles at the very least. She dropped off to sleep quickly, but was troubled the night long with dreams of Nick. Nick touching her, kissing her as he had done in the library, skimming his hands down the overheated skin of her body.
Nick was telling her he loved her, his head laid in supplication in her lap as he begged her to come to him at night. She touched the silky blackness of his hair, running her fingers through the thick, soft stuff as he pleaded with her to be his, please love him, because he could not live without her. Then the texture of his hair changed underneath her fingers, became coarse and oily, and Maggie realized with horror that it was David’s face that lay in her lap, and his features were distorted with hatred, just as they had been on that last day. Suddenly, they were back in his office, where she had found the stacks of Ned’s letters hidden behind the book she had been trying to filch to secrete away in her room, nearly one letter for every month of the more than three years of her parent’s deaths. She had gone through them frantically, disbelieving, and she had lingered there too long. He had come home from his office to find her still there, poring over them.
“Shrew!” he had screamed when she had confronted him with the letters, waving them in his face, too angry to be frightened in that moment. She had thought her uncle dead,