by Beverly Bird
He felt dizzy. She was incredible. He echoed her response of last week. “Do you believe that?”
“No, but at this point I’m willing to try anything.” Kim got to her feet again. “I’ll take care of the baby, Dinah. You go take some medicine yourself. It’s only for kids up to twelve, so you might want to increase the dosage.”
“I’ll make the tea, too,” Dinah said. “I can manage that much.”
“I’ll go get the pumpkin seeds,” Joe offered.
“Now we’re cookin’,” Kim muttered, heading for the stairs again, taking the baby this time.
“We’re what?” they asked in unison.
Kim closed her eyes for just a moment. “Never mind.”
Sometime after midnight, the worst of the crisis had passed. Kim wandered dazedly into the living room to find Joe sitting on the sofa, looking just as dumbstruck as she felt. At least he hadn’t gotten sick, either—so far.
The cradle had been moved back upstairs to Dinah’s room. Everyone was asleep. Kim dropped down beside him. “Do you hear that?” she asked, her voice a reverent whisper.
“What?” he asked, gazing at her dully.
“The silence.” It was broken only by the gentle ticktocking of the old German grandfather clock.
One corner of Joe’s mouth managed to lift into a smile. “Oh. Yeah.”
For several more long moments, they just appreciated it. Then Kim cleared her throat. “Susannah’s fever broke,” she reported. She didn’t think that the ibuprofen had done it. Suze seemed to be building up some kind of resistance to that now, too. The egg goop appeared to be the victor yet again. Kim shook her head in disbelief. “Assuming Matt or you or I don’t come down with it yet, we should be back on an even keel by morning,” she added.
“It is morning,” Joe grumbled.
She peered at the clock and wasn’t quite able to read it in the darkness. She’d take his word for it. “I made Adam swear he’d send Matt home at the first sign that he’s gotten it, too.” Matt was still staying with Bo.
“Matthew is an island,” Joe answered. “He spends more time there than here.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
They fell quiet again.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “I don’t know what I would have done if I had been here alone.”
She stared at him incredulously. “None of this would have happened if you had been here alone. You heard what Katya said. There’s not much in the way of communicable germs here. Susannah brought them.”
“Of course there are germs here,” Joe snapped. “We don’t live in a bubble.”
“Close enough.”
“Jake and Katya’s kids could have brought it.”
“They didn’t get sick and they were here for weeks before Suze and I turned up.”
He lifted his head from the back of the sofa to look at her again, cracking one eye open. “Why are we arguing about this?” he asked quietly.
“We’re not arguing.” Then she thought about it. “I have no idea,” she amended. “Maybe because I’m just not comfortable with you thanking me. I managed to do something today to earn my keep. That’s all.”
Joe stiffened and sat up. “Don’t start that again. I’m not going to transform into some kind of monster and make you pay for it if you take anything from me.”
“You might,” she said flatly, though she’d meant to be flippant. “You never know.”
Joe let out a strangled sound of disbelief. Kim rubbed her eyes.
“We’re tired, Joe,” she continued. “Just drop it.”
But he couldn’t. For some reason, he just couldn’t. Not this time. “I’ve never hit a woman in my life,” he said angrily. “Is that what you expect? That you’re here, in my debt, so I’m going to take advantage of it, use you to let out some kind of latent, truculent male impulses and—”
“I am not in your debt!” she shouted.
Her voice rang in the room. They stared at each other.
Their shoulders were touching. They both jerked away at the same time.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “You’re not.”
“Damned right I’m right. I mean, I’m not.” And if the comment was ridiculous, deliberately contentious, she didn’t care.
“Just for the record,” he added, “I have no truculent male impulses—”
“You’ve got male impulses raging all around your body or we wouldn’t be arguing like this! It’s called ‘frustration,’ Joe. How long did you think you could keep pounding at the barn roof, ignoring what’s going on between us?”
Joe jerked off the sofa as though she had slapped him. “Nothing’s going on between us.”
“And it won’t, either, if you keep biting my head off! Makes things safe, doesn’t it?”
“I’m trying to be a man I can live with!” he shouted back.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Joe! You’re the only one who thinks you should feel guilty!”
“I told you before, this isn’t your problem.”
“That’s my line. And it seems to me you’ve pointed it out a time or two!”
“Because you need help. I don’t.”
“Let’s look a few facts in the nose here, pal. I’m living here. I’m the one tiptoeing around your guilt. Me and Dinah. If you’ve got some misguided sense of responsibility for your wife’s death, don’t take it out on us!”
She knew in an instant that she had gone too far. His face became mottled. He took a step toward her and threw his hands up in frustration. She didn’t see the emotion in the gesture, only the jerk of his arms. Terror—old, instinctual, never far away—simply bloomed. It billowed up from the bottom of her soul. It was irrational and she was powerless against it, had always been powerless against it. Next there would be pain. And humiliation. The humiliation, the demeaning crouch to ward off the blows, was the worst. She hurtled up off the sofa with a squeal of pure horror.
The sound knifed its way clear through to Joe’s soul. He realized at the same time she did that she couldn’t run forward because he was in front of her. Dodging around either side of him would mean moving close enough to him that he could grab her. Her eyes widened in fear.
Before he could move to get out of her way, she scrambled over the back of the sofa. It was freestanding, in the middle of the room, facing the hearth, and she put it between them, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
He’d thought he’d learned all about a woman’s fear, all about the special vulnerability of the fairer sex, from Katya. But Katya had spent her adult life dodging a man’s blows, he realized. The early part of Katya’s years, where fears were formed, had been blessedly normal.
Not so here.
“Kimberley,” he said finally, very carefully. His voice was raw with shock. “I would never hurt you.”
Everything seemed to go right out of her. She gave another little cry, this time of embarrassment and confusion. She sank to the floor where she stood. He lost sight of her behind the sofa.
He didn’t know what to do. He circled around it warily, the pull of her sobs stronger than his wariness against getting too close to her right now. She was sitting on the floor, hunched forward, her hands covering her face. He stopped just short of her.
“God, I am so stupid,” she said at last. Her voice was muffled, thick.
“No.” He sat on the floor beside her.
She lowered her hands. Her arm throbbed, as though he had struck it. Just memory, she thought bitterly.
“I was angry,” he confessed. “But I would never take that out physically on you or anyone else. Kimberley, it’s against my religion, if nothing else.”
She finally looked at him. “You’re still angry,” she whispered.
He felt the heat simmering in his gut. “Yes,” he admitted.
Her chin came up. “I won’t take back what I said.”
“No. I don’t imagine you’d ever do that.” He thought that for everything that had just happened b
etween them, she still had a kind of ferocious courage.
“It had to be said,” she snapped. “You’re hurting Dinah.”
He opened his mouth to argue yet again that it was none of her business. But of course it was. She was right. She was living under his roof, in the thick of it.
She opened her mouth to tell him again that nobody blamed him, but that wasn’t quite true. Dinah did, if only in her own confusion and innocence and pain. And he blamed himself relentlessly.
They spoke each other’s names at the same time, then they broke off, embarrassed. Joe was the first to clear his throat.
“This...this cohabitation business would be difficult under the best of circumstances,” he said at last. “Two people, two strangers, coming together in the same house.”
Except that he had never really felt like a stranger, she thought, her heart kicking.
“Add to that all the emotional baggage we both carry, my problems and yours...” He trailed off.
And Kim thought, add to that the fact that we like each other anyway, we want each other, and we’re really lost.
He’d said once that they needed each other, she remembered. And maybe they did, for so much more than comfortingly holding the other’s hand.
Their mouths came together before either of them could say anything more. It happened fast, with explosive release. Suddenly, with raw and emotional need. His hand caught her long hair, the hair he had wanted a handful of from the first moment he’d seen her. He used it to drag her closer, like a barbarian, he acknowledged helplessly, like a man out of control, like everything she seemed to think he was moments ago.
She didn’t fight him. Her hands were no longer clenched into fists. That, a part of his mind thought, might have saved them. Might have stopped what he was too weak to prevent. Then there was no more room for thought because tasting her for the first time was like something igniting in his head—white-hot lightning shattering all sense. The heat of her hit him first, as he had always known it would.
Something happened to her when their mouths made contact, and it obliterated any rationality Kim might have possessed. She caught the pine-forest scent of him again. It filled her head now, leaving room for nothing else. He was holding her hair so tightly it hurt, but oddly, it didn’t frighten her. His mouth bruised hers. His tongue moved through her mouth with deep and searching sweeps, as if he sought salvation.
With each plundering of his tongue, he drew back a little, as though for breath. With each breath, he kissed her again, relentlessly, encompassingly. He was all smooth motion, a steady, constant assault. She heard a groan, and didn’t know whose throat it had come from. She found her fingers threaded into his hair, tightly, fiercely, as though to hold him, dragging his mouth back each time it slid away.
And then something changed. Some of the wildness ebbed, and pure pleasure crept in. Her hands slipped down to his shoulders, then around to his back. And he was so broad, so male, the warmth and solidity of him alive and real. How long? she wondered. How long since she had felt so wanted, so necessary? How long since she had touched something that was so fascinating, so good? How long since she had needed so completely and without fear?
He finally let go of her hair and dragged her still closer. Filling himself greedily with the pure essence of her—femininity and strength, temper and tears. Needing it, the way he needed air to breathe. In that moment, if only in that moment, there was no sense in fighting it.
He found himself lowering her to the floor. Someone’s foot—he didn’t know whose—hit the sofa. He was vaguely aware of the scraping of its legs across Sarah’s burnished oak floor. But he didn’t think in terms of Sarah this time. She was only a hazy image at the back of his mind.
Immediate, much more immediate, was the realization that he had been right. Kim’s soft body gave beneath him, accommodating him, as his own strained. And he kissed her again, thinking that if he tried hard enough he could find his way clear to her soul and everything would be good there. His hands searched and sought to find the path, one under her thigh, lifting it against his hip so she could accommodate him more fully, then up to her own hip, to the side of her breast.
Then he heard a hushed, confused voice from behind them, from beyond the sofa.
“Pa?” Dinah asked sleepily. “You in here? I thought I heard shouting.”
Everything inside him froze. But he was reasonable, sensible—so damnably sensible—after all. And as he felt Kim’s chest rise in a gasp, somehow he had the presence of mind to stifle the sound with his hand.
He felt her jump beneath him when his palm covered her mouth. They lay still, barely breathing. The clock ticked, then tocked.
“Guess not,” Dinah said finally. “Guess you went to roam around outside again.” Then came the blessed sound of her footsteps retreating.
Slowly, carefully, Joe took his hand away. Kim drew breath in raggedly—once, twice, then more easily. They stared at each other. He spoke first in an undertone, his voice as jagged as the pieces of self-restraint that had just splintered inside him.
“Sweet Jesus, what have we done?”
At least he had said we, Kim told herself as she approached the hated woodstove in the kitchen five hours later. This, at least, he wouldn’t take all upon himself. And though she wasn’t sure why, the relief she felt at that was too big to be contemplated.
Joe dressed in the bathroom as he always did. He listened to the sounds of her movements in the kitchen. The clanging sound of the woodstove door opening and closing. A frying pan hitting the top with a bang. A mutter here, a curse there. Outside of her occasional and mild swearing, something no Amish woman would do, they were all sounds of home and hearth as he knew them, so very misplaced and mixed-up right now.
He hadn’t slept. At least not much. He’d spent the hours of darkness, after she’d gone upstairs to his bedroom, prowling the house and outside as had become his habit lately. He’d told himself they could just go back, retreat, start over. But now, as he stepped into the kitchen door, as he took in the curve of her spine as she inspected the fire, he knew he was lost.
He cleared his throat. Kim jerked upright and hit her head on the little metal lip at the top of the stove. She swore and clapped a hand there, pivoting to find him, then a hundred shades of pink crept into her face.
They both spoke at the same time.
“I think I have it right this time,” she said hoarsely.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll just take some coffee out to the barn.”
Their eyes met briefly and slid quickly away again.
“I...uh, didn’t make any yet. Any coffee,” Kim explained. “I’m running behind this morning.” Then her face went beet red.
A sense of urgency rushed through Joe, not unlike what he had felt last night when he had finally done it, when he had finally kissed her. But this time it was a need to get them past this, around this. Dear God, they couldn’t spend the next weeks looking at each other and remembering, looking at each other and yearning. Somehow they had to move on.
Then he heard his own “thoughts and he was staggered. Each other... remembering... each other... yearning. That was when it truly hit him that everything that had happened between them last night had been entirely mutual. She had wanted him, too. Just as desperately as he wanted her.
He took a few steps into the kitchen without realizing it, without knowing what he intended to do once he crossed to her. She backed up a little, this time hitting the base of the stove with her heel. She swore again.
“Look, we had a rough day yesterday,” she gasped.
He took her cue. Grabbed for it like a lifeline. “It was just reaction,” he agreed. “To everything.”
“My nerves were all wired up,” she blurted. “I was so worried about Susannah.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll just put it behind us.”
“It didn’t happen,” he said.
The hell it didn’t, they both thought.
Neither of them heard the back door open and close. Mariah stepped into the kitchen doorway and felt it instantly—the heat, the frustration, the sizzling tension. Her eyes widened slowly. They slid between Joe’s back—his shoulders were rigid—and Kim’s face. Her sister-in-law’s eyes were huge. Just wait, she thought, amused yet somehow troubled as she read the situation. Just wait until I tell Adam about this development.
Mariah cleared her throat. Joe almost literally jumped in the process of jerking around to face her. Kim’s immense eyes darted to her face.
“Good morning,” Mariah said easily. “How’s everyone feeling today?”
They both spoke at once, a torrent of words.
“Better, much better,” Kim said. “Susannah’s still wiped out, but these things hit her so hard.”
“Dinah’s right as rain,” Joe said. “Gracie says she’s fine, but she looks pale.”
“The baby’s still steeping—”
“She slept most of the night—”
“And neither of us seem to have gotten it.”
Mariah smiled, amusement winning out. “Well, that’s good. I didn’t think Gracie would be going to school, but I stopped anyway to tell you that Matt came through fine, also. I thought it prudent to lend him some of Bo’s clothes. There was no sense in sending him back here until I was sure that the germs had settled down.”
“They have,” Joe said.
“I think so,” Kim echoed.
“Well, then.” Mariah turned for the hall and the back door again. “Oh, one other thing. If everyone’s feeling better, you’re invited to supper.”
Joe’s eyes lit. “Supper?”
Kim almost swayed with relief. “I don’t have to cook?”
Mariah grinned. “Five o’clock. Bye now.”
Joe moved after her as though someone had set his tail on fire. “Wait. I’ll walk you out. I’ll hitch up the buggy. I’ll give you a ride to school. I’ll...”