“Ask away.”
“I need a place to stay tonight.”
“You’ve got it.”
“A pallet on the floor will do. I know your place is crowded.”
“You’ve got it.”
“I thought I should leave the house to Addie and Robert. You see, the original plan was that—”
“I know what the original plan was.”
“I’d rent a hotel room for the night, but they’re full and—”
“Are you going to quit apologizing? We’re your friends. You’ll stay with us and no questions asked.”
She found Addie and told her. Addie said, “I feel like I’m putting you out of your own house.”
“It’s your wedding night. If we had a train, you’d be on it, heading somewhere for a honeymoon. Since you can’t be, I’m going to Emma’s.”
At Emma’s, after all the others had retired for the night, the two women sat in the kitchen, sipping something Emma called “teakettle tea,” little more than weak tea diluted with a lot of hot milk.
“It was a nice wedding,” Sarah said.
“Yup.”
“And Addie was a beautiful bride.”
“She was that.”
“Matheson didn’t bat an eye.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“I’ve never seen Robert so happy.”
“We going to chitchat all night about junk like that or are you going to spill what’s on your mind?”
“You know what’s on my mind... Noah.”
“I thought that was over.”
“It’s supposed to be, but I still love him.”
“I saw him staring at you a time or two when you weren’t looking, too.”
“You did?”
“Me and about five hundred others. So what happened between you two?”
“Oh Emma, it’s so complicated.”
“I’m not simple, you know. I might be able to shed some light if you give me a chance.”
Sarah considered, sipped her teakettle tea. She wanted to confide in Emma, but now that the opportunity presented itself, she wondered about loyalties.
“I’d be telling you without Addie’s permission so I must have your word of honor it’ll go no farther than this.”
“You got it.”
Sarah told the entire story. When she reached the part about Addie and their father, Emma put a hand over her mouth and squeezed hard. Above it, her eyes seemed incapable of blinking.
“... and so ever since then, every time Noah touches me... I don’t know... something happens inside me and I stiffen up. I know he’s not my father, I know that, but somehow I feel threatened and I freeze up and... and I feel so stupid and guilty and... Oh Emma, what am I going to do...” Sarah was in tears as the last word wailed through the kitchen.
Emma, appalled and out of her depth, found it easiest to draw Sarah from her chair and clamp her in a hard embrace to avoid meeting the younger woman’s eyes. A father and his own daughter. Dear lord, in all her born days she’d never heard of anything so vile. Poor Addie, and this poor one here, worshiping the damned old swine all those years. Who could blame her for backing off from anything wearing pants after getting a shock like that? But what should she tell her? How should she comfort her when Emma’s own reaction was so horrified she was having trouble coming to grips with it herself.
Sarah sobbed and clung as she would to a mother. Emma patted and rubbed her shoulders.
“Oh, my dear, dear girl, what a terrible thing for you to go through.”
“I love him, Emma. I want to be married to him, but... Oh Emma, how can I change...?”
Emma had no notion what to advise. Such convoluted relationships were beyond her scope of experience. She had fallen in love with a plain man, married him, had his children, worked hard and lived by the Good Book. She’d thought that’s how most lives worked. This disgusting story though...
“You’ve got to give it some time is all. Isn’t that what they say heals all wounds?”
“But I hurt Noah so. I pushed him away when all he wanted to do was help me. He’ll never come back.”
“You don’t know that for sure. Maybe he’s just giving you some time to heal.”
“I don’t want time. I want to be married to him now and be as normal as everybody else.”
Emma patted her some more, rubbed her shoulders, felt like crying herself, but could think of not one word to ease this pitiful creature.
“Oh me,” she sighed. “I wish I could help you.”
Sarah dried her eyes and Emma refilled their cups. When the two women were reseated, Sarah spoke, gazing forlornly at Emma.
“He danced with that girl from Rose’s today. I saw them laughing together.”
Emma could only squeeze her hand in silence.
In the house on Mt. Moriah Road, the bride and groom entered their bedroom. Robert set the lantern down, closed the curtains and returned to Addie. He smiled, reaching to the top of her head. “Your flowers are wilted.” He took the plum blossoms and put them beside the lantern.
She rolled her eyes up and touched her hair self-consciously. “I’m surprised they didn’t fall out. There’s hardly enough hair to hold them.”
“There’s enough,” he said, drawing her hands down, keeping them.
They had been among a crowd for ten hours, jovial, smiling, celebrating, while this singular hour waited like winter-locked violets await the spring.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Nervous.”
He laughed. “Why? We’ve only waited six years for this, or is it seven?”
“More like twelve,” she said. “Since we were children.”
“Very young children, and I came to your door begging for fat drippings and thought you were the most beautiful creature God ever put on this earth.” He took her face in both his hands. “I still think so.”
“Oh Robert.” Her glance dropped.
How amazing, he thought, she’s timid with me.
He dropped his hands to her shoulders.
“Mrs. Baysinger,” he said, as if the word had some new, exotic flavor that he was testing on his tongue.
“Yes, Mr. Baysinger?” She looked up.
“Shall I kiss you first or unhook those fifteen hooks down your back?”
“How do you know there are fifteen?”
“I counted them today.”
Her face lit with surprise. “How could you have counted them? They don’t show.”
“I can see I’ll have to prove it. Turn around.”
She turned, smiling at her window curtains while he counted aloud.
“One... two... three...”
“Robert?”
“Four... five...”
“How could you have counted them?”
“Your stitches show. Six... seven... eight...”
“Robert?”
“Ten... eleven...”
She waited through numbers twelve and thirteen before admitting, “I thought today would never end.”
At fifteen the room fell into a vibrant silence, broken only by their breathing. The dress was open to her hips. He slipped his hands inside and rested them on her waist. He leaned down and kissed her gently between the shoulder blades, lingering, breathing her scent, while his pulse felt like hammerblows in his throat.
“I think I deserve a medal,” he whispered, “for all the times I wanted to do this and didn’t.” At her waist his grip tightened. He straightened, drawing her back flush against him, speaking near her ear. “In that hotel room on Christmas Eve, and here in this house on a hundred occasions since then, when I sat across the table from you playing Chinese checkers, or eating apple cobbler, or listening to Sarah talk. Sometimes in the kitchen when we’d be doing dishes or you were sitting at the table stitching a curtain and I’d look at you and watch your hair change from gray to blond, and realize that I’d loved you since I was twelve years old and no other man in this world had as much right to you as I.”
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“Is that what you were thinking?” Her voice sounded breathy.
“I wanted you so much I felt pagan.”
“And I thought it was just the opposite. All these months since you took me out of Rose’s I thought you were remembering my past and trying to get beyond it.”
The butts of his hands pressed down upon her hipbones, then rode her ribs to the hollow below her breasts before starting back down. “How could you think that? I’ve wanted you, wanted this since I was eighteen and I went to your father to ask his permission to marry you. And since Christmas Eve when I made the worst blunder of my life by offering you money. Addie,” he whispered, “can you forgive me for that?”
She turned, forcing his hands to divert to her elbows. Fixing her shining green eyes on his, she whispered, “I will forgive you, Robert, if you’ll end this torture and make me your wife.”
The wait was over. He kissed her wholly, reaching deep around her until their bodies coiled like vines and his hands were inside the back of her gown, skimming her shoulders, waist and spine, sweeping lower still, filling with her petticoats and—faint within them—the swells of her flesh. Through tier upon tier of cotton, he learned her shape, moving the fabric and himself against her while their kiss became grand and avid.
When he lifted his head they were both breathing like runners. Her lips glimmered wet in the lamplight, her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, fixed upon him. He gripped her right hand, hard, and kissed the butt of it with his intense gaze riveted upon hers. Brief as an exclamation point, that kiss, before he dropped her hand and stepped back.
“Don’t move,” he ordered, fiery-eyed as he began stripping off his jacket. “Don’t touch a thing. I haven’t waited all these years to watch you take your own clothes off.”
“My shoes...”
“All right, your shoes.”
She sat on the edge of the bed with a buttonhook while he rid himself of jacket and vest, then sailed his shirt toward a chair. It fell on the floor as he sat on the bed beside her and bent to his own shoestrings. Removing their footwear, they exchanged ardent glances, then he stood, shucked off his trousers, flung them aside and reached for her hand. “Come here,” he said huskily, standing before her in his short-legged cotton union suit. She gave him her hand and let herself be drawn to her feet.
“Now I’m going to see you,” Robert said.
He turned down her dress, unbuttoned the waist of her petticoat, freed her corset hooks and stripped the whole works to her feet, shucking garters and stockings along the way. He rose, offered his hand, and she stepped from the blossom of clothing, naked.
He let his eyes rove, let a smile put a single shallow wrinkle beside bis mouth and said, “Aren’t you the prettiest thing I ever saw.”
He lifted his eyes to her face. “Why, Addie, you’re blushing.”
“So are you.”
The smile reached his eyes. “Well, isn’t that nice.”
She touched the buttons at his chest and asked, “May I?”
He raised his palms and let them fall.
A moment later their blushes intensified.
He touched her the first time with four fingertips, just below her throat, on the firm, pale place above her breasts, as if to confirm her reality. From there straight down, over the tracery of lines left by her tight undergarments, then circling the perimeter of each full breast with a touch as faint as a dropping leaf.
As her eyelids closed he gently put his mouth on hers and murmured against her lips, “You’re so beautiful,” then picked her up and laid her on the bed.
The lantern light angled across her face as he braced on an elbow above her. It gilded her skin and sketched her eyelashes as sweeping dark curves that followed the line of her cheek, just as his hand followed the line of her breast and ribs.
“I love you, Addie,” he whispered.
“Oh Robert, I love you too... so much.”
He opened his hand on her stomach. She might never have been touched before, so fervid was her reaction, a shudder and soft gasp as she drew his head down and claimed his mouth with hers. Silence passed, a long, rich silence, while they became two in love, exalted by it.
He touched her low, made her lips part and her breath cease.
She took him in hand, made his eyes close and his heart plunge.
They opened their eyes and breathed once more, taking each other back to the beginning... Robert and Addie, children again, innocents, trudging through the days of acquaintanceship. Robert and Addie, adolescents, studying each other with changed eyes, imagining this day. Robert and Addie, husband and wife, pure in intention, taking their due, sharing an imperfect love made perfect by forgiveness.
It was, for Addie, all she had missed, and for Robert, all he had dreamed.
When their bodies joined it became triumph. He was kneeling with her folded around him—a damp leaf around a stem—her arms crossed upon his shoulders, his caught below her hips.
Pressed together wholly, they stilled in wonder. He lifted his face and met her lambent gaze. All those years... how incredible that they’d never before known each other this way. How perfect that nature had provided this accolade for two who loved as they did.
They kissed. And created motion. And made it lithe and graceful as flight.
In time her head hung back and she shuddered, calling out his name... half of his name... the remainder drifting off into infinity.
He took her down beneath him, beat an ardent rhythm upon her and watched her eyes adore his countenance, watched a smile steal upon her face as his left to make way for the clench and flush of climax.
Afterward, he rested upon her heavily.
The hair on his nape was wet. His limbs were sapped and lifeless. His breath was sketchy. Onto their sides he rolled them, keeping her close with one heel, then folding an elbow beneath his ear. He touched her nose with a fingertip and let it trail over her lips and chin.
“How do you feel, Mrs. Baysinger?”
She smiled and closed her eyes. “Don’t make me say it.”
“Say it.”
She opened her eyes; in them, quiet satisfaction. “Like it was my first time.”
He waited, thought some about what to say, drawing patterns on her throat. “It was,” he said, and sketched a grapevine around her left breast.
They loved with their eyes, and after a lengthy spell of silence she said, “Robert?”
He was too content to reply.
“There’s something I must say. It’s about my other life.”
He stopped sketching grapevines. “Say it.”
“Just this once, and then I’ll never talk about it again.”
“Say it... it’s all right.”
“When I was with others,” she told him, looking squarely into his eyes, “I had this place I escaped to, this other person I became. I was Eve, and being her was the only way I knew how to survive. But tonight, with you, I was Addie. For the first time in my life I was Addie.”
He clasped her to himself full length, his chin caught on her shoulder, holding her strong.
“Shh.”
“But you have to know, Robert, how much I love you for giving me back to myself.”
“I know...” he whispered, pulling back to look into her eyes. “I know.”
“I love you,” she told him once more.
He accepted her statement without diluting it by returning the words. And anyway... she knew. She knew.
She surprised him by declaring next, “I want to have your babies.”
He asked, “Can you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“I didn’t know for sure. I supposed there must have been something you did to prevent it all those years. I didn’t know if it was permanent.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He kissed her, taking her neck in his hand and petting her hair afterward as if it were a scarf upturned by the wind.
“Robert?”
“Hm?” He continued smoothin
g her hair.
“I want a lot of your babies. More than this house will hold.”
He smiled and boosted himself above her. Just before their lips met he said, “Then we’d better get busy making them.”
CHAPTER
22
With the loss of Noah, the fervor had gone out of Sarah’s life, Always, before his advent, she had enjoyed a passion for her work that energized and drove her. Whatever the demand placed on her by the exigencies of newspapering, she placed an even greater one upon herself. She had been a fomenter, an inciter, a zealot who oftentimes charged in with horns lowered, her enthusiasm stemming from some source she had not questioned, had not actually known she enjoyed until it disappeared.
In the weeks following the wedding, she lowered her horns no more. She went to the newspaper office each day, but her work there seemed of little consequence. She composed articles, set type and proofread, but her labors seemed trite if not pointless. She scouted news, sold advertising and reviewed plays but admitted that in the long run what she did made very little difference in the grand scheme of the world.
At home she retired early to her room, feeling like an interloper downstairs where Addie and Robert, paragons of marital bliss, snuggled on the settee, held hands and sometimes dropped quiet kisses upon one another. Though she rued them none of their happiness, witnessing it left her feeling bereft.
In her room, she began articles that often lay unfinished while some transient memory would bring forth a line of poetry. Sometimes she composed an entire poem, other times only the one line; sometimes she poured out her loneliness in her personal journal, other times stared at the grain of the tulipwood box until her hand reached out and opened it, removed her engagement brooch and held it, rubbing it with her thumb. Afterward, she would cover her face with her palms and dwell upon her shortcomings as a woman.
Who would ever love her, a frigid shell unable to accept human warmth? If she could not accept it from a man she loved, what hope was there of overcoming her disastrous strait? Sometimes she imagined herself going to Noah and instigating a liaison, carrying it through to its end, simply to test herself. But she was too ignorant to visualize such endings, and after recounting what little she did know of sexual encounters, she would always emerge feeling guilty and dissolute.
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