"Your shoes," he whispered, his breath brushing her lips.
"Oh … my shoes," she said dreamily. "What shoes?"
He smiled and delicately kissed her upper lip … then her lower one … then the corner of her mouth where he probed inquisitively with the tip of his tongue before riding it, as if crossing a rainbow, to the opposite corner. "You were going to take your shoes off," he reminded her in a velvet voice.
"Oh, yes … where are they?"
"They're down there someplace."
"Down where?"
"Someplace on your damp feet."
"Mmmm…"
"Should I take them off for you?"
"Mmmm…"
He tipped his head farther and fit his mouth upon hers with incredible perfection. As their tongues dipped deep for second tastes his hand played idly over the small of her back. They took third tastes, and fourth, still resting against each other with only the faintest contact, his fingers drawing circular patterns along her waistline, where fasteners and ties and boning formed lumps within her silver dress. In time she freed her lips reluctantly and whispered against his chin, "Thomas?"
"Hm?"
"My shoes."
"Oh yes." He cleared his throat and drew her by the hand to one of his kitchen benches, where she sat gazing up at him, her cheeks colored by a becoming blush. He went down on one knee before her and searched beneath her skirts to find one delicate ankle, which he drew forth and studied silently. Her shoes were high and buttoned, made of pearl-gray leather and silk vesting, which encased her foot tightly well past the ankle.
"I see this won't be as easy as the time I pulled your boot off. Did you bring a buttonhook?"
"It's in the bedroom with my things."
He looked up and neither of them spoke while his thumb stroked her anklebone through the silk vesting, heating a spot that shimmied straight up her leg. At length he said quietly, "I guess I'll have to go get it. Would you like to come with me?"
Sitting in his gold-streaked kitchen with an hour yet to go before sunset, she nodded with virginal uncertainty.
He dropped her foot and rose. Her eyes lifted to him and he read that uncertainty, drew her up by the hand, and ended her misgivings by leading her through the long spears of light slicing across his kitchen floor, past the foot of his staircase and into the bedroom where now the windows were trimmed with curtains and shades and her own bureau stood against one plastered wall.
"Get it," he ordered quietly, with all traces of teasing gone, "and take them off."
He removed his top hat and put it in the closet, where her clothing now hung beside his. She found the buttonhook and sat on the edge of his bed, which was spread with Fannie's homemade quilt, the quilt she'd been standing behind the night he'd chosen her bare feet from among all the others. She bent forward, concentrating on her shoe buttons, while he removed his gloves from his pocket and lay them on her bureau, then shrugged from his jacket and hung it neatly in the closet. He went to the north window and pulled it up but left the shade at halfmast, letting the remnants of the chinooks drift into the room from the uninterrupted grassland beyond. He went to the east window—the one facing the street—opened it, too, but drew that shade to the sill.
She slipped off one shoe and began unhooking the buttons on the other while he took off his boots, standing first on one leg, then on the other, and set them in the closet.
When her second shoe was removed, Emily crossed her toes and looked up uncertainly. Tom stood watching her, drawing the tails of his shirt from his trousers while his suspenders trailed down beside his knees.
"You can put them in the closet beside mine," he invited.
She crossed before him, feeling doubtful and ignorant and taken unawares because it seemed that what she thought would not happen until well after sundown would happen well before. She bent to set her shoes beside her husband's and as she straightened his arms came around her from behind. His warm, soft lips kissed her neck.
"Are you scared, Emily?" His breath made dew upon her skin and fluttered the flossy hair upon her nape.
"A little."
"Don't be scared … don't be." He kissed her hair, her ear, the ruching of her high collar while she covered his arms with her own and tipped her head aside acquiescingly.
"Thomas?"
"Hm?"
"It's just that I don't know what to do."
"Just lean your head back and let me show you."
She dropped her head back onto his shoulder and his hands skimmed up her ribs … up, up. She closed her eyes and leaned against him, breathing with increasing difficulty as he taught her the myriad shapes of pleasure; moving his hands in synchronization over her firm breasts, lifting, molding, flattening; then lifting once again. He kneaded circles upon them with the flat of his hand before the pressure disappeared and only his fingertips explored the hardened cores, as if picking up stacked coins. She grew heavy and drugged by arousal, warm within her clothing, and confined by it. Her breath became hard-beating. His right hand slid down and covered the back of hers, his fingers closing tightly in her palm, which he lifted to his mouth and kissed hard before releasing her completely and stepping back to search through her hair for pins.
One by one he plucked them out and dropped them to the floor at their feet. They fell like ticks of a clock marking off the last minutes of waiting. When all were heedlessly strewn, he combed her hair with his calloused fingers, spilling it in a black waterfall down her back. He plunged his face into its waves and breathed deep. He kissed it, gripping her arms from behind, working them almost as he'd worked her breasts, in hard, compact circles. He made of her hair a sheaf, and drew it over her left shoulder, then stood away, touching her only with his fingertip while opening the long line of pearl buttons down her back, to her hips. He found, within, the string-ties at the base of her spine, and tugged them free, loosening them to her shoulder blades. He unbuttoned the petticoat at her waist, then skimmed it all down—dress, corset, garters, petticoat, and stockings—in one grand sweep, leaving her clothed in only two white brief undergarments. Caressing her arms, he dropped his head and kissed her shoulder, then her nape, then turned her—still standing in a billow of abandoned clothing—to face him.
"Could you do that to me?" he asked in a soft, throaty voice. "Mine is much simpler."
Feeling herself blushing, she dropped her eyes from his face to his throat, from his throat to his wrinkled shirt.
"If you want to," he added in a whisper.
"I want to," she whispered back, and caught up one of his hands to free first a cuff button, then its mate, while he held his wrists at an obliging angle. She had just turned her attention to his collar button when he reached out and, with the backs of four knuckles, brushed the peak of her left breast through its white cotton covering.
"I love you, Mrs. Jeffcoat," he whispered, bringing an added glow to her cheeks while continuing his seemingly idle caress, watching as she shyly avoided his eyes. With each successive button she moved slower, until, reaching the bottom one, she gave up her task and closed her eyes while his knuckles went on fluttering over her nipple.
"I…" she began, but her whisper faded as she leaned both forearms against his hard plaster cast. For seconds she stood thus, balancing against him, absorbing the grand rush of sensation created by so faint a touch it might have been only the warm chinook fluttering her chemise against her skin. The fluttering stopped and his hands brushed upward between her elbows to free four tiny buttons between her breasts.
"You…?" he whispered, studying her closed eyes, reminding her of her unfinished thought.
"I…"
He spread her chemise wide and slipped both hands inside, laying them flat upon her naked breasts for the first time.
She lifted languorous eyes to his and let her body be rocked gently by his caresses, drowning in the deep blue of his eyes, then closing her own as his open mouth descended to hers. With warm tongue and warm hands he stroked her, teaching her
open mouth and naked breasts how rapture begins and builds. When she was taut and ruched he removed her chemise and pantaloons, slipped his hands to her back, and caressed it with widespread fingers. He drew her firmly against him, against cold, hard plaster above, and warm, hard man below. Barefoot, she lifted on tiptoe and wrapped her arms about his sturdy neck, lavishing in the play of his hands over her naked skin.
Still caressing her back, he leaned away, and searching her eyes, freed his last shirt button with one hand. Following his lead, she divested him of the garment, reaching up to push it from his shoulders with polite decorum that oddly suited the moment—one of her last as an innocent. When she had laid his shirt with great care atop her own fallen dress he captured her wrists, gripping them firmly and skewering a thumb into each of her palms. He kissed the butt of the left … and the right… then laid them on his chest, above the white plaster, teaching her the ways a man likes first.
"We're married now … you can do what you like … here…" He played her palms across his firm pectoral muscles. "Or here…" He took them to his waist. "Or here…" He left them at his trouser buttons.
These, too, she freed, slipping her fingers between his waistband and the worn edge of plaster. She did it all, all he bid, self-conscious but willing until both of them were naked, and they walked that way to the side of their bed where he threw back the covers, piled the pillows one atop the other, and lay down first, then reached a hand to her in invitation.
She lay down beside him and suddenly everything was natural—to twine her arms around him and be taken flush against his body, to feel the sole of his foot ride up the back of her calf and follow his lead with her own, to make a place for his knee, which cradled high against her, to feel his hand on her hip, then on her stomach, and his tongue in her mouth while he touched her within for the first time and groaned into her mouth. To feel her own hand guided to his distended flesh and taught a love lesson which she was more than eager to learn. To feel the rivers of her body flood their banks as if the chinooks had melted a winter's snowfall there inside her as it had outside their open window.
He touched her in all ways—wondrous, deep strokes, and tender surface petting. He wet her breasts with kisses, and suckled them, and fired her body with befitting want, along with his own. He made her quiver and seek and damn the wrappings around his ribs that robbed her of the flesh that was rightfully hers.
"I love you," he told her.
"Do," she said when desire had bent her to his every whim but one.
"I'm sorry about this damn cast," he said in a gruff, breathless voice.
But the cast created no barrier whatsoever as he arched above her and entered her in a long, slow stroke. She closed her eyes and received him, becoming his for life—wife and consort, inseparable. She opened her eyes and looked up into his face as he poised above her, still for the moment, waiting.
She whispered three words. "Heart, soul, and senses."
And as he began moving they sealed the vow forever.
It was a splendid thing, of thrumming hearts, and souls in one accord. And senses—ah, the senses, how they reveled. She closed her eyes and loved the feel of him filling her body, and the sound of his harsh breathing matching her own, and the smell of his hair and skin when he closed the space between them, and as the beat accelerated, his soft throaty grunts and sheer, swift thrusts. Then at her own unexpected spill, a rasping cry—hers—followed in short succession by his deeper, throatier one as he shuddered upon her.
Then silence, broken only by their own tired breathing and the caressing scrape of his thumb against her skull going on … and on … and on.
She lay upon her side with her mouth at his throat and his heavy hand on her head, the thumb still in motion. She felt beneath her ear his relaxed arm, and upon her knee his heavy enervated leg. She experienced her first total repletion—a wholly unexpected gift—lying there surrounded by his tired limbs.
"Mmmmm…" She felt the sleepy syllable vibrate against her lips and pictured his cheek against the pillow above her, his eyes closed, his hair disheveled.
She stroked his naked hip—only once; she hadn't the further energy. Her hand fell still and they lay on, drifting in the realm of the blessed. She had not expected the satisfaction. It was a gift as precious and unforeseen as the arrival of the spring winds.
When she'd thought him asleep, he spoke in a soft rumble, the words resounding through his arm to her ear. "Heart, soul, and senses."
"Yes." She kissed his Adam's apple.
He pulled himself from his lethargy to tip his face on the pillow and look down into her eyes.
"How are your heart, soul, and senses now?"
"Happy."
"Mine, too." He touched her nose lovingly and they basked awhile, appreciating each other silently, recounting the last half hour. "Did I bang you up with my cast?"
"Only a little."
"I'm sorry, tomboy."
"Say that again."
"Tomboy." He grinned.
"The first name you ever called me, and the last before you kissed me."
"Did I?"
"In the closet. 'Come here, tomboy,' you said."
"You remember it very well."
"Very well."
"Come here, tomboy." He grinned and drew her close to renew old memories.
* * *
Sunset had come and gone, and he had taught her a few ways to avoid being bruised by his cast. She slipped from bed and found in her bureau drawer the postcard with the floral heart and verse and propped it up against the base of the lamp where they could both see it first thing upon waking in the morning.
The town was still and the wind had died. At the sill the curtains hung motionless. Emily stood looking through the lace, feeling the air cool toward nighttime. Tom came up behind her and doubled his forearms across her chest. They rocked peacefully.
She hooked her hands over his arm and spoke for the first time of those who'd been absent from their wedding ceremony.
"I missed them," she said.
"So did I," he replied against her hair.
"Even Tarsy. I didn't think I had any feelings left for her, but I do."
"I don't think she'll come around too quickly, probably never."
They ruminated for minutes, staring out the window toward the north, rocking still, before she asked, "Do you think Charles is in Montana by now?"
"No, not yet."
"Do you think he'll ever come back?"
Tom sighed and closed the window, then put an arm around her shoulders and walked her toward the bed. "The world's not perfect, tomboy. Sometimes we have fires and fistfights and lose friends."
"I know."
They got beneath the covers and snuggled, back to belly, facing her valentine.
She found his hand and cupped it upon her breast. She felt his warm breath on the back of her head and asked winsomely, "Is it all right if I keep loving him, just a little?"
He kissed the crown of her head and said, "He'll come back someday. With both of us here waiting, he'll come back."
* * * *
Vows Page 42