By the time Angel came back to the kitchen, his ankle was swelling mightily, and he would never have admitted it, but it hurt. His head ached, too. Nasty fall.
Stupid.
She hadn’t changed yet. Her hair hung in strings around her neck, making her look like a wet pup, and her dress was stuck to body. The lace of her slip showed through the fabric. She tossed a shirt at him.
“Put this on,” she said. “Least you won’t catch cold.”
She was gone before he could thank her.
The kitchen was filled with the smell of chicken and beans and cake, the table set for two. Isaiah stared at it bleakly, the struggle within him raging once again. He’d done well all week avoiding her, keeping himself aloof, not letting one single stray thought to cross his mind.
But here in her kitchen the war was on again, and himself so hobbled he could barely walk—or, rain be damned, he’d be gone.
He needed to go, but even as he thought it, Angel came back wearing a clean dress, her hair combed away from her face. It was already drying, curling up a little at the edges.
She was not by a long stretch the prettiest woman he had ever seen. Lots of women like her in Ireland and Scotland—thin white skin and skinny arms. Ordinary, really. Oh, she had pretty eyes and a good mouth, but even those things didn’t elevate her into anything close to a beauty. She was, if you looked at her, almost plain.
And yet, as she ignored him, opening the oven, taking out the platter of chicken, the bowl of gravy, he wanted her all the same, in a possessive way that had nothing to do with reality on any plane. As she slammed bowls down on the table, his stomach growled.
“Hope you don’t mind,” she said in a brittle voice, “if I go ahead and eat. I’m starving.”
He shook his head. A stab of pain forced one eye closed.
“Good grief, Isaiah,” she said, peering at him. “Don’t you even feel that? You’ve got blood running down your face.”
She pushed away from the table again and wet a towel with cold water at the sink, and with a look that dared him to stop her, she pressed the compress to his head. He winced.
“I’m sorry. It’s deep. You probably need a stitch.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Yeah, you think you will.” Her voice was brisk. “You always think you will. How come men always think they’re made of iron?” She repositioned the compress, looked at him closely. “How do you really feel?”
He shifted, and his knee brushed the hem of her dress. He looked at the pattern, thin stripes in blue and pink and purple meeting in a cross hatch design every few inches.
How did he feel?
He felt that she was too close. The scent of her, plain unadorned Angel-skin, filled his head. The long stretch of her shin, bare and pale, filled his downcast eyes. The crook of her elbow hung near his jaw, and the faintest fan of her breath touched the bridge of his nose.
“Isaiah? Let me see your eyes. You can tell a concussion from the pupils.”
It took a hundred years for his eyes to travel from her shin to her face, a long, unfocused journey over the terrain of her body. He let his eyes slide over her belly beneath the cinch of the elastic waist of her dress, over the small, free weight of her breasts, over her throat and plump lips to her eyes, peering at him in concern.
He knew she was too close. As he looked into the water-green irises with their tiny flecks of gray and blue and yellow, he felt the shift in events that tilted them, Angel and Isaiah, in a new direction.
Helpless, transfixed, he found himself lifting a hand to her waist. The cloth of her dress wrinkled under his fingers and he felt the fragile underpinning of hip bone. He moved his thumb over it.
In return, Angel settled a hand on his neck, her fingers curving around the column. He could feel every molecule of her palm. Her thumb traced the shape of his chin.
She whispered his name and the tilt of events pushed them closer still. He hung in the moment, hearing the heavy, rhythmic pounding of the rain on the roof echoing in his chest, and he thought of a thousand things as his hand moved on her waist. He thought of their forays into the trees and of the letters she’d written to him through the war, letters that had leant courage and comfort and hope.
Wordlessly, she moved a step closer and raised her hand to his face. Lightly, lightly she touched her fingers to his mouth. Isaiah fell forward with a soft groan to press his head against her, his forehead close to her diaphragm, his nose against her stomach, his arms tight around her body. The smell of her filled his mouth, his heart, the world, and he breathed it in as if it would save him. She made a soft noise and bent into him, gathering his head closer, her cheek against his hair.
For a long, long moment, they rested together like that. He no longer felt the ache in his head or ankle. It didn’t matter that the world outside this room would curse him, that bloody Texas had hanged men for less.
“You know we can’t do this,” he said, but he felt himself exploring her back.
“I know,” she whispered, but she touched his face, caressed his jaw, and he felt a tear land on his eyebrow. He raised his head, and saw that tears were streaming down her face. “Isaiah,” she said, barely a whisper, and she opened both hands on his face, and as if in a dream, she bent to slowly, deliberately kiss his brow, each one of his eyelids, his nose.
“You are the only man I have ever loved my whole life.” Holding his face in her small cold hands, she pressed her mouth into his, and Isaiah felt something splinter within him.
He pulled her down into his lap and tucked her hard into the crook of his arm and kissed her with all the heat and longing and deprivation he’d been feeling for a week. A year. A lifetime. Her mouth was plump and firm beneath his tongue, and her teeth nipped at his lips. She locked her arms around his head, her body twisting to press into him, their tongues meeting and feinting.
He threaded his fingers through the weightless strands of her hair, kissed her chin and bit her neck as she pushed her buttocks into his groin, rubbing against him in an ancient invitation. He covered her mouth and pushed up her skirts, running a hand over her thigh, sliding his fingers beneath her panties to her buttocks. She made a noise and wiggled against him, sucking on his lower lip.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said, and raised his head, breathing hard. “I need to look at you.”
She gravely looked at him, touched his forehead, rubbed a hand over his hair, his cheekbone, his mouth. Tenderly, he kissed a fingertip, pulled the tip into his mouth. Her nostrils flared.
“My Angel,” he said, and reached for the buttons on the front of her dress. Paused and met her eyes. “Last chance.”
She took his hand and pressed it around her small, taut breast. “I’m going to die if you don’t touch me all over,” she said, and there was hectic color on her throat.
His skin was electrified at the huskiness of her voice, and he unfastened the buttons one at a time, revealing a thin slip below. She caught her breath as he drew his fingertips over the bare skin, edged the lace covering the top of her chest, then slid over the rise of her breasts.
“Isaiah,” she whispered, her hand on the back of his head. He bent and kissed her throat, tasting her skin. Her skin.
He had been waiting all of his life, all of his life, to make love with Angel Corey, and he didn’t plan to hurry. He wanted to remember, for the rest of his life, what it was like.
So he calmed her when she panted. “Easy, baby,” he said. “We got no place to be except right here. I want to remember. Sit up a little.”
He gently slid the dress and then the ribbon straps of her slip away from her shoulders. A buzzing burned across the top of his head as her torso, pale and thin, was revealed, and he skimmed his hands over the delicate collarbone, her arms. She hunched a little as he touched her breasts, almost apologetically.
“I know there’s not much there,” she whispered, and it was true. Her breasts were not large, but they were as round as apples.
“You h
ave no idea,” he said raggedly, “how many times I thought about this.” He traced the curves with his fingertips, touched each tip in turn, nipples that were not the soft rosy pink he’d always imagined, but ruddy and sturdy. He bent and tasted her. She clutched his shoulders, shivering, as he moved his mouth over the sloping terrain of a thousand night’s imaginings. Every hair on his body was electrified, so that when she brushed her fingers over the nape of his neck, his hands prickled.
Remember, he told himself. Remember this.
Remember the silkiness of her thigh as he pushed up her skirts. Remember the taste of her flesh against his tongue, remember the restless way she moved against him. Remember finding the heat between her thighs, and the cry she let free, her hand grasping his wrist as if to push him away.
He said, “Trust me,” and she let go, and he slid his finger inside, suckling her breast and she quivered.
For only a minute. “Not this time, not that way,” she said, slamming her legs tight on his hands. She pushed herself upright and kissed him and Isaiah thought he would die. “Can you walk to my room?” she asked.
He rubbed his nose on her chin. “Oh, yeah.”
So she stood up and collected her dress around her, modestly pulling it up over her breasts. She led the way to her bedroom. Isaiah hobbled behind her, and reached for the lamp. Yellow light flooded the room. It fell on the nape of her neck, the curve of her spine, the swell of her hips, and for one airless moment, he could not catch his breath both in fear and desire.
“God help us,” he breathed, and reached for her.
Angel turned and wiggled out of her dress and slip, standing for a moment in her panties, and a shudder moved down her back at the look in his eye. He unfastened his overalls and let them fall, leaving his long legs bare. She moved toward him, and unbuttoned his shirt, one button and the next and the next, his hands on her shoulders, down her back. He bent to kiss her collarbone, her throat.
“My turn,” she said, and pushed the shirt from his shoulders, leaving both of them only in underwear, and for a single, dizzy moment, Angel felt faint. She stepped up to him and pressed her breasts into his chest, touched his back, and felt his hands on her skin, all over her skin, and she said, “You don’t know how many times I’ve thought of this. Sometimes, when I got a letter, I would put it under my pillow and it was almost as if you came to sleep with me.”
“Believe me, I know,” he said, a growl, and he captured her head, kissed her deep, and they tumbled backward to her small but adequate bed, and it was so much more, so much better than all the things she had imagined that she wanted to cry out with it. Their mouths, fitting, his slow, long way of kissing her, his hands on her skin. Her hands moving over his precious, precious flesh, his long back and muscled buttocks and powerful thighs. His engorged member pressing between her legs, and Angel hauling him closer with her legs until he gasped, “I need to be in you, Angel. In you.”
They scraped away the last of their clothes. In the instant before their joining, Isaiah paused, his breath labored. She felt the hard heat of his thighs against her own, felt him nudging closer, and she hovered with him in the endless moment, waiting as he took her head in his hands. Light threw a halo over his hair.
He kissed her. “Since we were babies, Angel,” he said hoarsely, “since we built that tree house, every day during the war, always, always, always I loved you.” A tremor passed through him. “Don’t close your eyes.”
His dark eyes held hers as he slowly moved his hips. Angel took him in, hearing his breath leave him in a long, long sigh. “Now,” he whispered, “now we really are one person. I’m you and you’re me.”
And as she stared into his eyes, the darkness softened until the true Isaiah was shining through. A swirling dizziness filled her, swelled through her mind and spilled into her limbs—the purest most beautiful sense of God she had ever known. Filled to bursting, she arched against him with a cry, and tears spilled from her eyes and she held him as close as she possibly could.
When Angel drifted up through sleep, she thought she was dreaming again, had dreamed all of it.
But slowly, her body awakened a bit at a time, to the length of Isaiah’s thigh over her own, and the soft weight of his genitals pressed damply into the small of her back. His hand, so huge and warm and heavy, was spread open over her belly. His breath moved over her shoulder, and it was the most precious thing she could imagine.
Isaiah.
For a long time, she didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes, content to feel him so close, so protectively shielding her, even in sleep. Between them rose the earthy scent of sex, mingled with the scent of Isaiah himself, a smell like early morning forest and freshly turned earth and bruised grass. Sometimes, while he’d been away all those years, she’d catch a whiff of his particular blend of scents on the breeze, and loneliness would swamp her, swift and sudden and painful. Now, she kept her eyes closed, savoring it, savoring this time.
It was not yet dawn, but a blackbird whistled above them. Soon, the sun would rise to shatter the last of this precious, precious night. Soon, there would be travelers on the road, customers stopping in the store for coffee. One of them would be Isaiah’s mother.
Angel felt unutterably altered, as if a sizzling field now surrounded her, one that radiated outward from the two of them curled in her bed, and would glow above their heads like neon, and stain the entire area around the store, so that anyone passing would know what had transpired.
A cool thrust of terror tore at her joy. She thought of what had been done to men in the forests around Gideon, thought of the brutal treatment Isaiah—and probably Angel along with him—would face if anyone found out about this.
Isaiah’s hand moved on her stomach, moved to pull her to him as if he’d sensed her thoughts. He gathered her close, smoothing her hair, kissing her face, rocking her gently. “It’s all right, baby.”
Angel realized she was shaking, shaking all over, uncontrollably. She pressed more completely into his warmth, taking shelter against the broad wall of his chest, and the length of his legs. He murmured quietly, “It’s all right, baby, you’re safe, I’ve got you.”
After a few minutes, she turned in his arms and buried her face against the sparse hair on his chest. He kissed her forehead, smoothed hair off her face. “We’ll go away. Angel. There are places we can be together, where we can have a normal life. All you ever wanted to do was leave here, anyway. You’re strong, baby. You’ll be all right.”
“You make me strong, Isaiah,” and moved her hands on his smooth body. “I can do anything if you’re with me.”
“I’ll be with you.”
They moved together then, and Angel understood why she had always been so restless, what she had waited for, why Solomon’s loving had left her so dissatisfied.
She’d been waiting for Isaiah.
She kissed him fervently. His big hands pulled her closer, he moved harder, and Angel breathed a prayer. Thank you for bringing him home to me.
And it seemed that she heard, far away, the sound of God laughing as Jordan High. The best sound, the richest sound, a sound of safekeeping.
— 35 —
May 1, 1945
Dear Angel,
After all these months in battle and all the death and misery I’ve seen, I didn’t know anything could still shred my soul. But two days ago, we marched into Dachau, which is one of the death camps, and what I saw burned my faith right out of my soul. People so hungry you could see their whole skull, the cheekbones and the hollows for the eyes, and the bones at their wrists. Things I can’t even stand to tell you, things I’d want to cover your ears if other people tried to tell you. I’m sick. Sick.
Probably shouldn’t even mail this letter, but I’m gonna. I know you’re worrying.
War is over now, though, so don’t worry any more. Thanks for keeping me company.
Your friend,
Isaiah
June 2, 1945
Dear Isaiah,
&n
bsp; We have heard some of the stories, and I have no words to try to make you feel better, and maybe there’s nothing I could say anyway. I am so sorry for your sense of horror. You know, in your heart, that’s not God, though. God doesn’t live in evil and despair and loss. He lives in hope, in beauty, in courage and honor. All of which you have shown, so I know God lives in you, even if you don’t want to live with God. It’s okay. He’s big enough for a crisis of faith. I’m not going to stop praying for you.
Your friend,
Angel
June 25, 1945
Dear Isaiah,
I’m worried about you. You haven’t been writing to me or your mama or my daddy. Hope all is well.
Your friend,
Angel
July 21, 1945
Dear Angel,
It’s terrible here. Terrible. Ya’ll have heard the story by now. I got enough demobilization points to go home, but I’m gonna stay awhile in Europe. Mrs. Pierson wrote me about some family she got in Denmark and I’m gonna see for her is anybody left. I don’t hold a lot of hope, but no harm in looking. Not like I spent any money the past year. There’s time.
Tell your daddy I said hi, but that I ain’t gonna live in Gideon when I get back. He’ll be glad about that.
Isaiah
— 36 —
Dawn had not yet fully edged into the night when Isaiah left Angel with a last, lingering kiss, and headed home under cover of darkness. She had wrapped his ankle tightly and then he put on his boot and laced it up, as they’d done in combat many a time. She scrounged up a cane and he hobbled out the back door.
The Sleeping Night Page 23