tasted plums, kissed her harder, and she weakened against me. I picked her up, felt legs around me. Then more motion and we were inside, up the stairs and onto the bed that knew so well the force of our passion. Clothes evaporated, as if burned away by flesh too hot to bear them. My mouth found her breasts, the hard, ready nipples, and the soft plane of her stomach. I tasted all of her. The dew of her sweat, the deep cleft of her, her legs like velvet bands across my ears. Her fingers clawed at my hair, tangled, and she pulled me up, said words I couldn’t possibly understand. She took me in her roughened palm and led me into her. My head rocked back. She was heat, fire; she cried my name again, but I was beyond response, lost and desperate never to be found.
CHAPTER 8
I drifted for what felt like hours. Neither of us spoke; we knew better. Peace like this came rarely and was as fragile as a child’s smile. She nestled against me, on her side, one leg thrown across my own. Her hand trailed lazily across my chest, down my stomach. Occasionally, her lips brushed my neck, and they felt like feathers.
I had my arm around her, my hand pressed against the smooth curve of her lower back. I watched the ceiling fan spin, brown blades against her creamy white ceiling. A breeze passed through the window, stroked us like a penitent breath. But I knew it couldn’t last, as did she; it never had. We would talk, and as the words came, so, too, would the steady push of reality. I knew the pattern. It always started small, a vague itch in the mind, as if I’d left something undone. Then the face of my wife would make its silent, swift invasion and the guilt would follow on tiny feet. But it was not the guilt of the adulterer; that had passed years ago, soon after Barbara’s smile.
This was a different guilt, born of darkness and fear in that stinking creek so many years ago—the day we met, the day I fell in love and the day I failed her. That guilt was a cancer, and under its assault the cocoon would crumble and I would leave, hating myself for again using the only person in this world who loved me, wishing that I could undo the past and make myself worthy. But it was the one thing that I could never do, for if this guilt was a cancer, then the truth was a bullet in the head. She would hate me if she knew. So in time I would leave, as I always did, and already I was dreading the hurt in her eyes when I told her I’d call, and how she’d nod and smile as if she believed me.
I closed my eyes, let myself sink beneath the blanket of this momentary joy, but inside I was hollow, and cold was a fist around my heart.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
It had begun, but that was okay. I’d missed the sound of her voice.
“You wouldn’t like them,” I said. She rose up on an elbow and smiled down at me. I smiled back. “They’re dark, horrible thoughts.” I kept my voice light.
“Give them to me anyway. A present.”
“Kiss me,” I told her, and she did. I would give her my thoughts, those that she could bear. “I missed you,” I said. “I always miss you.”
“Liar.” She cupped my chin in one hand. “Filthy rotten liar.” She kissed me again. “Do you know how long it’s been?”
I did—seventeen months and just under two weeks, each day an agony and an exercise in longing. “No,” I told her. “How long?”
“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s not dwell on it.” I saw the pain in her eyes. The last time I’d been with her was the night my mother died. I could still see the reflection of her face suspended in the windowpane as I stared into the night. I was searching then, looking for the strength to give her the truth. But her words had stopped me. “Don’t think about such nasty things,” she’d said. So I had not.
“Ezra’s dead,” I told her. “They found his body two days ago.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
She would never have raised the subject. Just one more way that she was unlike every other. But she’d always been like that. She didn’t push or