he murmurs. “I like seeing you smile and hearing you laugh. You work so hard, and there is so little joy in your life. But I don’t want to dance.”
He touches my face, brushing his thumb across my cheekbones and over the bridge of my nose, like he’s tracing my freckles. I step into him and rise up on my toes, my body brushing his as I press my mouth to his throat, warmth and salt and smooth skin against my lips. He lowers his chin and returns the caress, moving his lips across my jaw and over my cheek before settling his mouth against mine, inhaling as he does, his lips slightly parted, pulling me in.
He says he doesn’t want to dance, but that is what we do. It’s just a different kind of dance. His mouth is pressed to mine, seeking and sinking, moving together and apart, all things working toward the same end. Or the same beginning. We are a circle of two.
It is not like the first kiss we shared. That kiss was all clash and confrontation. He wanted me to run, and I wanted to stay and fight. This kiss is not a fight. This kiss is slow and languid like the Platte, hardly moving, while beneath the surface the silt shifts and settles. His arms snake around me, and my palms flatten over his heart, needing and kneading, and heat grows in my belly and in my heart and where our mouths are moving together.
“I need you to marry me, John,” I whisper against his lips.
I need it because I know too much. I am not a girl afraid of a man’s touch or a man’s body. I’ve lost my maiden dread, and I know the pleasures of the flesh and the marriage bed. Daniel was gentle, and he was quick, doing his business without lights and without baring me or himself more than necessary. I didn’t really mind, though I always felt a little resentful that Daniel finished before I could even get started. It only hurt the first time, and I was curious and confident enough to find contentment in the coupling throughout our short marriage.
But even then I knew there was more. I felt it in the liquid expectation in my limbs, in the coiling in my belly, and in the need in my chest. I just never knew how to draw it forth before it was all over.
With John it is an ever-present ache, and he makes me want to find it, whatever it was that Daniel found when he closed his eyes and shuddered like he’d swallowed a piece of heaven. Like he’d found that transcendence Ma talks about.
“Why is that?” John whispers back, and I hear the same need in his voice. It gives me confidence.
“Because I want to do more than kiss you. I want to lie down with you.”
For a minute he stays curved over me, his cheek against mine, his big hands circling my waist. And then he speaks, so soft and so slow that his words tickle my ear and the heat grows.
“That isn’t going to happen, Naomi. Not here. Not now.”
“I know it isn’t,” I murmur, curling my fingers into his shirt. “But I want to. I want to so bad that I can’t wait until we get to California.”
“Naomi,” he breathes. “I won’t live in another man’s wagon or marry another man’s wife.”
“Is that how you see me? Another man’s wife?” I gasp.
“That’s not what I meant.” He shakes his head. “I cannot . . . marry you . . . under these circumstances. Not with your dead husband’s family looking on, your family listening—” He stops abruptly, and his embarrassment billows around us. “I have nothing to give you.”
“I have nothing to give you either,” I whisper. “But all I want is to be beside you.”
“That’s not your head talking,” he says, shaking his head, and his hands fall from my waist, leaving me unsteady. “Thinking takes time. Feeling . . . not so much. Feeling is instant. It’s reaction. But thinking? Thinking is hard work. Feeling doesn’t take any work at all. I’m not saying it’s wrong. Not saying it’s right either. It just is. How I feel . . . I can’t trust that, not right away, because how I feel today may not be how I feel tomorrow. Most people don’t want to think through things. It’s a whole lot easier not to. But time in the saddle