faint surprise as I reached out and caught her, quite clumsily, and in too big a hurry and almost roughly. Her arms went up about my neck and then she gasped slightly and said, “Jack, you’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I raised my head a little and looked at her, seeing the face slightly flushed from the heat and the eyes very large and dark, almost violet now in the dimness of the room. “I couldn’t help it. I can’t help it. Don’t you see how it is?” I went on, wildly now, and knowing I must sound like a madman to her. “I love you so much I get jumpy being away from you and I can’t keep my hands off you when I’m here. God knows, I don’t want to hurt you. Can’t you see how it is? Don’t you see?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know. It’s exactly the same with me.”
“Is it that bad with you too?”
“Yes. But I don’t think it’s bad.”
“No. Not bad. It’s only bad when we’re apart. It’s awful then. I didn’t know a man could come unstuck like this. Do you suppose I’m crazy?”
“If you are,” she whispered, “I love you for it.”
I raised a jittery hand and started fumbling with the pins with which she had fastened up her hair in that roll behind her neck. In my awkwardness and shaky-fingered impatience, however, I wasn’t making any progress and was only messing it up. “Wait, Jack,” she said gently, and quickly slipped them out. The hair tumbled down and she shook her head, freeing it. It was a dark shadow across her face and throat and I ran my fingers through it. “Is that better now?” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. This is how I wanted it.”
I put my face down against her throat and could feel the beating of her heart. The traffic sound down below us grew far away and faint, like distant surf, and I could hear nothing now except the caught, breathless, and then suddenly desperate whispering in my ear, “I love you, Jack. I love you so.”
We were strangely clumsy, as if we’d never made love before, caught up in a dark and ecstatic wildness full of frenzied caress and inexpert fumbling like the very young. It had never been quite like this the other times, and when it had flown away and left us I lay quite still and wondered at it, watching the lovely face so peaceful now in repose with the eyes closed and the lashes very dark against her cheek. Like a child, I thought, or an angel, and wondered why angels never seemed to have dark hair in pictures.
In a little while she opened her eyes and we lay looking at each other for a long time without saying anything. She brought up a hand and gently ran a fingertip along my face, just touching it. I wondered if she knew or even remembered that she was completely nude, or whether it would suddenly come to her and she would be overcome with embarrassment and confusion as she had this morning. She knew, though, for in a moment she looked down at the swelling, dark-centered breasts and then back up at me with a faint wonder in her eyes.
“I guess I have no shame,” she said.
“It’s a ridiculous word to use,” I said. “Why should you?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? I keep telling myself I should, but there isn’t any. Not at all. I couldn’t get up this way though. Could I?”
“No,” I said. “You’re trapped.”
She smiled very faintly. “Unless you went to sleep.”
“I don’t feel sleepy in the least,” I said. “Or maybe you would be a gentleman.”
“I feel even less like a gentleman than I do sleepy,” I said. “I’m rotten all the way through.”
“Don’t you want me to put on the clothes I bought? You were very concerned about them this morning.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I moved a little and put my face against hers, our foreheads touching, knowing it was a silly thing because I couldn’t see even her eyes then, they were so near. “I think I don’t know what I want. I want you here the way you are, but still I want to see you dressed up and very smart. I want to stand off and look at you and at the same time I want to be so near that there’d be no way of knowing whether there were two of us