Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,35

weary, as if under a sea-spell to sleep. He pulls the covers up over them, to the middle of their faces.

Janice was shy of his eyes so Ruth heats in his darkness. His lids flutter shut though she arches anxiously against him. Her hand seeks him, and angles him earnestly for a touch his sealed lids feel as red. He sees blue when with one deliberate hand she pries open his jaw and bows his head to her burdened chest. Lovely wobbly bubbles, heavy: perfume between. Taste, salt and sour, swirls back with his own saliva. She rolls away, onto her back, the precious red touch breaking, twists. Cool new skin. Rough with herself, she forces the dry other into his face, coated with cool pollen that dissolves. He opens his eyes, seeking her, and sees her face a soft mask gazing downward calmly, caring for him, and closes his eyes on the food of her again; his hand abandoned on the breadth of her body finds at arm’s length a split pod, an open fold, shapeless and simple. They enter a lazy space. He wants the time to stretch long, to great length and thinness. As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall. The body lacks voice to sing its own song. Impatience tapers; she floats through his blood as under his eyelids a salt smell, damp pressure, the sense of her smallness as her body hurries everywhere to his hands, her breathing, bedsprings’ creak, accidental slaps, and the ache at the parched root of his tongue each register their colors.

Nudge enters his softness, “Now?” Her voice croaky. He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs, her body blurred white, distended willingly under him. With her help their blond loins fit. Something sad in the capture. He braces himself on his arms above her, afraid, for it is here he most often failed Janice, by being too quick. Yet, what with the alcohol drifting in his system, or his good fortune stunning him, his love is slow to burst in her warmth. He hides his face beside her throat, in her mint hair. With thin, thin arms she hugs him and presses him down and rises above him. From her high smooth shoulders down she is one long underbelly erect in light above him; he says in praise softly, “Hey.”

She answers, “Hey.”

“You’re pretty.”

“Come on. Work.”

Galled, he shoves up through her and in addition sets his hand under her jaw and shoves her face so his fingers slip into her mouth and her slippery throat strains. As if unstrung by this anger, she tumbles and carries him over and he lies on top of her again, the skin of their chests sticking together; her breathing snags. Her thighs throw open wide and clamp his sides and throw open again so wide it frightens him, she wants, impossible, to turn inside out; the muscles and lips and bones of her expanded underside press against him as a new anatomy, of another animal. She feels transparent; he sees her heart. She suspends him, subsides, and in the folds of her withering, his love and pride revive. So she is first, and waits for him while at a trembling extremity of tenderness he traces again and again the arc of her eyebrow with his thumb. His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel. At each shudder her mouth smiles in his and her legs, locked at his back, bear down.

She asks in time, “O.K.?”

“You’re pretty.”

Ruth takes her legs from around him and spills him off her body like a pile of sand. He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows a sad expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair. Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little price leaves you with nothing. The sweat on his skin is cold in the air; he brings the blankets up from her feet.

“You were a beautiful piece,” he says from the pillow listlessly, and touches her soft side. Her flesh still soaks in the act; it ebbs slower in her.

“I had forgotten,” she says.

“Forgot what?”

“That I could have it too.”

“What’s it like?”

“Oh. It’s like falling