Find Wonder In All Things
Page 25
He kissed her then like he was trying to make up for all the time they lost, and when he finally released her, Laurel lifted her face to the sky. “What a beautiful night.”
“We first made love under the stars. Do you remember?”
“I could never forget it, but that was a warm, summer’s night. It’s chilly out here in October. Let’s go in, okay?”
He nodded, and they continued hand in hand up the steps and across the porch. She took her key out of the flowerpot beside the door. “You’ll have to take me down to Stuart and Ginny’s tomorrow morning to get my car.”
He stepped in behind her and whispered seductively against her ear. “So I can stay the night?”
She turned and looked him straight in the eye. “You can stay forever.” Pulling him by the hand, she backed into the house. “Please . . . stay.” She flipped a switch by the door, and a lamp cast a soft, warm glow over the room. He nodded, and without a word, she started down the hallway that led to her bedroom. He watched her, his blood whizzing in his brain when he realized where she was going.
Looking over her shoulder, she halted for a second, one hand on the door frame.
“Are you coming?”
He nodded and followed her into the hallway before he found his voice. “Laurel?”
She faced him again. “Yes?”
“Have we said what we needed to?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“We start from here, right now — no more sorrys, no more regrets?”
“No more.”
He approached her, reached up to touch her face, and put his hand back down.
“James?”
“I’m . . . I’m almost afraid to touch you. Once I do, I think I’ll lose control of myself.” He paused, and his voice dropped to almost a whisper. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve let that happen.”
She took his hand, and brought it up to her cheek. “I’ve dreamed about this, especially since you came back last summer — what it would feel like for you to touch me again.” She drew his hand down her neck, over her breast, along the curve of her waist, over her hip.
“Holy hell,” he growled in a ragged voice.
“No, I think it would be just like heaven.” She moved his hand over her abdomen, up to the left center of her chest. Her heart was under his hand, beating wildly against his palm. “This is yours — yours to own, to keep — yours to break.”
“Oh God, Laurel. I can’t stop.”
“Then don’t.”
He pushed her against the wall, his lips devouring hers, tongue in her mouth, hands unbuttoning, unzipping, tugging on clothing, and casting it aside. She pulled his shirt off, and her hands fumbled at the zipper of his pants. He drew back a little and looked at her — her eyes closed, naked as the day she was born, the rise and fall of her chest as she took little gasping breaths. He grabbed her hands and trapped them above her head, pinning her body with his. “Need you . . . Need . . . to be inside you, be part of you.” He dove back in to possess her mouth. “Please, sweetheart.”
She nodded.
He lifted her, and long arms and legs wound around him as he walked her toward the bed, grinning like a kid at Christmas. He gently tossed her on the covers and fell on top of her, holding himself off her with his arms while she squealed with delighted surprise.
The playful roughhousing gave him a much-needed respite from his driving need to take her right then and damn the consequences. He didn’t want to rush her, and a part of him felt insecure about loving her again after all that time. He slid down her body, kissing, touching each part as he went — shoulders, arms, hands. He drew her fingers into his mouth one at a time and blazed up in flames at the erotic noises she made. His mouth traveled over her middle, and he nibbled on her hipbones, less sharp and angled than he remembered — softer, rounder, and more womanly than those of an eighteen-year-old. Somehow that made her exciting in a completely different way, better than any fantasy he’d been able to concoct on his own. He raised his head to see her face, breathed in, and moaned with fierce longing as his mouth descended to her inner thigh.
“I remember this.” Her voice was plaintive and raw. “Oh God, I remember . . . ”
He was speechless, unable to answer, except by enflaming her more. He touched her with his fingers, pushing into her, and then he took her with his mouth. She shattered against him, calling his name. When he stood to finish undressing, he saw tears in her eyes and her lips were trembling.
“Sweetheart?” he asked, concerned, anxious.
She wiped the tears away with her hand and smiled up at him.
“They’re happy tears. How I’ve missed you. How I’ve wanted you.” She sighed and held out her arms. “James.”
He fell into them, sliding into her and closing his eyes against the surge of his own emotions. “So good,” he muttered in a thick, hoarse voice. “It’s still so damn good.”
She called to him, urging him on.
He lost his mind, pounding into her while she met him with her hips, sought his eyes with her own, and cradled him in her arms. His world stopped as he filled her, and in the bliss of a union born of love and loss, he buried his soul in hers.
Epilogue
Fifteen years later
Asheville, NC
James sat on the couch noodling his Mountain Laurel melody. It always helped him think when he ran across a particularly thorny programming glitch. He had spent the last four months working on an interactive software program with funds from the Elliot-Marshall Foundation — the organization he and Laurel founded the year after they married. The software he was currently developing was a pet project of his: using computers to teach music to children. The Foundation funded some of Laurel’s favorite causes too: reclaiming strip-mined land, art classes for children and adults, and education and treatment for people with depression.
For years, James had watched in admiration as Laurel’s confidence and poise rose to meet each new challenge. Never comfortable putting herself on display, she had learned early in their marriage that speaking and mingling would be a necessary part of her life. She had worked hard to develop those skills, but her inner grace was the root of all her inter- and intrapersonal strength. He’d seen ample evidence of it over the years: demonstrating her work, accompanying him to social gatherings for the various software companies he contracted with, and handling the devastating news that she was unlikely to conceive a child.
That had been a blow, but after many tears and long discussions, they reached a decision — no fertility treatments. As she told the doctor, “We’re going to let Fate decide this one. After all, Fate has been very kind to James and me.”
James had to agree. Fate had been kind in ways he never expected and knew he didn’t deserve. And their lives were full with their families, including Laurel’s nieces and nephews, and their friends — like John and his wife Marissa, Eric and Millie and their kids.
So, the Marshalls had both poured their energies into parenting the world in a variety of ways, and life had gone on as it had since the day they found each other again until one morning about four weeks after their ninth anniversary. Laurel met him at the door of their bedroom with a tearful smile on her face and an EPT in her hand.
He, of course, had panicked — as he usually did where she was concerned — but she quietly carried out every special medical instruction for moms over 35. He worried how a new little person would fit into their well-ordered life, but she calmly reassured him that everything would turn out fine . . .
* * *
A blur of black cape and blue pajamas whizzed behind him and leapt over the back of the couch, summoning him out of his memories.
“Whoa there, buddy! You almost impaled yourself on my guitar.”
“What’s ‘impaled?’”
“Fell and stabbed yourself with it. You need to look before you jump, Elliot.”
“Not Elliot! I’m Batman!”
James chuckled. “Riiight.” He th
ought for a second. “Did you know that Batman plays the guitar?”
“Like you?”
“Yep.”
“I never seen that.”
“He keeps it secret . . . but Alfred knows.”
“Nuh-uh.”
James shrugged and said, “I could show you how, but . . . I guess you’re too little anyway. It’s for big kids.”
“I’m a big kid!” Elliot was indignant as only a four-year-old could be. “Show me!”
And that was how Laurel found them when she ventured up from her studio twenty minutes later: James fingering chords and Elliot strumming and singing in an angelic voice. The boy could carry a tune — even at four.
She leaned against the doorway, and James’s eyes met hers for a long, silent moment, during which they said a multitude of sweet nothings to each other.
“Hey, big guys, whatcha up to?” she asked, coming in to sit beside them on the couch and putting her chin on her husband’s shoulder.
“Playing music,” James answered.
“Like Batman,” Elliot piped in, wriggling into his mother’s lap. James gave Laurel a lop-sided smile.
“Batman plays guitar? I like it. I always knew Batman had a sensitive, artistic side.”
James rolled his eyes, and she gave him a radiant smile before addressing their son.
“Elliot,” she began, “how would you like to go to Uppercross and see your cousins for a couple of months?”
“Yippee! See Aunt Susan and Uncle Gary too?”
“Yep, them too.”
“I wanna go. Daddy says Uppercross is the best place, ’cause it’s where there’s mommy’s broom.”
Laurel looked at James, confused.
He squelched a laugh. “No, Elliot — not quite — Uppercross is the best place,” he leaned over to kiss his wife on her clay-spattered cheek, “because it’s where the Mountain Laurels bloom.”
The End
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