Saving Susannah

by Beverly Bird

  She pushed the suspenders off his shoulders, and didn’t even stop to think how amazing it was that she could want someone who wore suspenders. He shrugged one arm to help her, but his other was taking his weight and that side got tangled. So they rolled, and the hat that had fallen off his head in the first moment they came together was crushed beneath him.

  Joe didn’t realize it. He was riding a wave, and he wanted to tell himself that it didn’t allow him time to think. But the truth was that he had thought. He had thought well and carefully about this for days now. He had thought about it when she looked at him with those blue-violet eyes, and when she didn’t. He’d thought about it when she passed close to him, and when she stayed steadfastly on the opposite side of the room. When she laughed and when she scowled. When she fought with him and when she smiled. He’d thought and thought.

  He was alive. He hadn’t died with Sarah. He was only a man, only human. And he needed to give as desperately as he needed to take. They both did. And if there was something deeper than physical gratification in that, then they would both ignore it. For now.

  He pulled his hand out from beneath her sweater. Something in his chest nearly exploded when she grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back.

  “I need this,” she murmured. “I need—”

  “Wait,” he told her. “Just wait a minute. Let me—”

  “No.”

  He thought that, in spite of everything, her independence was alive and well. And he heard himself laugh, though he would have sworn it was impossible. Or maybe it was just a groan that trembled.

  He pulled his arm free of her grip and managed to push the leather jacket off her shoulders. She hadn’t zipped it. He wasn’t sure he could have gotten it undone at the moment if she had.

  She dragged his shirt free of his pants and wondered if she was going to regret this. She decided not to give herself the opportunity. When her fingers fumbled with his buttons, she jerked at the fabric, frustrated, until they popped free. They hit the hay soundlessly.

  She wasn’t sure how he had ended up on his back, how she had come to be straddling him. Even as she finally, finally, skimmed her hands over his hard chest, threading her fingers through that fine vee of dark hair there, she realized that she was too far away, cold, needed to be closer to him.

  He saw it in her eyes—a vague flickering. He reached up and caught her hair again, pulling her down to him. Their mouths met again, clung. And he rolled again, driving her back against the hay. His hands streaked under her sweater again, and this time she grabbed the hem herself to pull out of it.

  He’d liked her jeans from the start. The lacy scrap of her bra nearly undid him. He fell to it like a starving man offered bounty. He caught her nipple through the fabric, and she seemed to arch up off the hay. The cry that escaped her was like nothing he had ever heard before. A plea, a promise. She drove her hands into his hair and held his mouth against her greedily.

  He ran his tongue over the fabric and fought with the zipper on her jeans. He was astounded by how tight they were, how hard to get off. Desperate, he rolled with her again, taking her weight on top of him, thinking that might make it easier. They teetered on the edge of the bales for a moment, then went over.

  “Ouch,” she gasped.

  He didn’t feel it. He’d gotten her jeans off.

  More lace. Little swatches of it, front and back. Glory. But gone before he could really appreciate it. She twisted against him, and he saw the small piece of fabric go sailing.

  In thirty-nine years, he had never before found himself on the floor of a barn, with a naked woman pressed on top of him, her mouth hungry and hot, her skin slick and smooth. He never would have imagined it possible. His hands found her hips, cupped her bottom.

  It was amazing, she thought, how instinct took over when everything else was gone. She’d never known before because she’d never let everything else go. Always, always, she kept a part of herself back. Warily. Cautiously. But she couldn’t find the barrier now or anything to erect it with, and she didn’t want to put the energy into searching.

  There were still things between them that kept flesh from flesh, and they both began homing in on them blindly. He dragged her bra away, filling his hands with her breasts now. She got his pants off, encountered boxer shorts, and made a delighted sound in her throat. She got rid of them, too. And somehow her legs were around him and they were rolling again. Her hands were fisted in his hair as she dragged his mouth back to hers.

  There were so many parts of him she wanted to explore, that she needed to explore, but now that she could, now that she had the opportunity, only his heat, her need and the void inside her that only he seemed to be able to fill mattered.

  “Now,” she murmured. “Oh, please. Joe, please.” She was begging. She didn’t care.

  He found her mouth again, instead. And he used his hands. They delighted, urged, tormented. She had never thought him imaginative. Intelligent, yes. Intuitive, certainly. Solid and strong, beyond question. But she would never have expected him to bring her to the brink again, yet again, backing away each time. Killing her with the wanting, the waiting.

  She’d had enough.

  She rolled into him with a strength that amazed him, forcing him onto his back. She’d always thought his body was so solid. He looked solid. But his muscles, his wonderful, hardworking muscles, rippled and moved under her hands. She closed one of them over his hardness. Then he went stone still.

  He felt something guttural and inarticulate rip from his throat. He felt himself unraveling inch by inch, felt the flimsy control he’d been clinging to slipping, sliding, as her hand moved, stroking. He reminded himself that he was bigger, stronger than she was. He could do something about this turn of events. But his muscles felt like putty. With one last effort that came all the way up from his soul, that was more willpower than strength, he caught her hips again and pulled her back on top of him.

  And found home. It had been gone so long, had been ripped from him, stolen from him, leaving him bereft. Back again, improbably, impossibly, just when he’d thought hell was all he’d ever know. If he hadn’t been a proud man, he might have wept.

  She was prepared for the physical pleasure. For the eruption of satisfaction when he finally filled her. Instinct took over again, her body seeking, needing, and she moved against him. She didn’t expect the way each thrust touched her heart, pummeling it, changing it, making her feel things she had never expected to feel.

  He took the upper hand back, rolling with her again. He braced his weight on his hands and pounded into her, but his eyes never closed, never wavered, looked straight into her soul.

  Climax barreled into her, making him swim out of focus. She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t dared hope for it. She turned her head away, gasping.

  He caught her chin and brought her face back. “Look at me,” he rasped. “This is us, together.”

  She couldn’t speak. She thought she nodded.

  He watched the wonder in her eyes, and felt a surprising rush of victory, though he had never considered himself a man who had to win. Then again, no one had ever challenged him before.

  He plunged one last time as something close to pain crashed into him. He’d never known release could hurt. Had never known how necessary it could be. Had never felt as though his very soul and every wit was emptying from him. It seemed crucial to find her mouth again. As he lowered himself on top of her once more, she wrapped her arms around his neck, the way she had when this had all started. And she whispered his name like a prayer.

  Dinah didn’t come into the barn. Kim considered that a very good thing. She wasn’t at all sure she was capable of movement. Maybe, she thought, maybe that was what had made it so good. Maybe it had just been the added little kick that they might have gotten caught. But she knew it wasn’t.

  Joe had finally rolled off to her side. His arms were flung out. He looked like a casualty of war.

  She tried to say his name, and somethin
g inarticulate came out. He turned his head to the side to look at her anyway. His eyes were questioning.

  Kim cleared her throat. “What would your deacons say?”

  Somehow, impossibly, his eyes got hot again. “I am a deacon,” he reminded her. “And I say it’s fine.”

  A single bubble of laughter burst from her throat. “And your God?”

  “Be fruitful and multiply.”

  His words echoed in the barn for an impossibly long time.

  Kim flinched. Joe dragged an arm up quickly to rest it over his eyes, shielding them. And still his words rang in their heads. They had to be addressed, she thought.

  Suddenly, something angry blazed through her. She would not let this be ruined. She would not let it be tainted. Not by his ghosts, nor by her own horrors. She suspected she was going to have little enough to remember fondly when this whole ordeal was over. She wasn’t going to lose the memory of this afternoon.

  She sat up shakily and grabbed his arm, pulling it away from his face. “Don’t hide, Joe. Please.”

  He caught her hand, then he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “You didn’t kill Sarah,” she blurted.

  “I know that.”

  “Getting her pregnant didn’t kill her,” she continued.

  “Technically, that’s not true.”

  “I just meant...it was God’s will. You keep throwing that at me. It works just as well for you. You didn’t kill her by making love to her. You didn’t kill her by doing...this.”

  “No. I never did this with Sarah. Not...like this.”

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly, then the enormity of that hit her. Her pulse roared.

  “Kimberley,” he said quietly. “I’m going to try very hard not to allow myself to regret this. I get tired of all the heartache, too. I just want something...good.”

  She nodded slowly. She decided to believe him.

  Chapter 16

  Things had definitely changed between them, Kim realized three days later. More often than not, it started to show in subconscious ways. Joe’s hand would find the small of her back when he came into the kitchen before supper to wash up. He’d peer over her shoulder to find out what she was cooking, and his little sounds of distress were far more honest than his quiet and grim consumption of Chinese food had been.

  She’d stopped creeping upstairs to her room at the first hint of darkness. They’d sit together in the living room. He’d read some agricultural magazine, and she’d scribble in her journal or do a crossword puzzle from the newspaper she bought religiously in the village every day. She bought them with his money, but she’d renewed her vows to pay everyone back just as soon as she could find another job.

  There was peace. And there was fear, because the community blood samples would be finished at any time now, and there was still no match. And there was a new kind of tension between them, coiling tighter with every day that passed, because they had not found their way back to the barn again.

  Joe told himself it was because there was just something so base and crude about making love on a barn floor. But he knew that excuse was just his last bastion of defense against the inevitable. What was he going to do when she left? Where, he wondered, was he going to find the calm sense to accept it? If they didn’t go over to that barn again, if they didn’t touch again, maybe he would find a way.

  Kim told herself that she didn’t follow him across the road and ambush him in the barn because there was no future in it. They had to draw the line here. Once had been necessary. Once had been vital. Twice, three times, four...well, that got into the realm of making things hopelessly tangled. Of creating a situation that was going to create a painful void when everything was fixed and she went home. She was just too sensible for that.

  “Kimberley,” he said as they sat on the sofa Monday night.

  She jumped a little as his voice intruded into her thoughts. “What?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She relaxed. “Finish this puzzle, then I guess I’ll go upstairs.”

  “I meant about your apartment. Your job.”

  She’d known that. She put the paper down carefully. “I guess I keep thinking that if I ignore it, it will go away.” She laughed shakily, self-consciously.

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It might all go away. You might lose it all.”

  She closed her eyes. “Yes.”

  “That medical insurance? Will you lose that, too? You said that was part of your job.”

  “I...probably. There’s something called COBRA...it’s this program that allows you to pay your own premiums for a while so you don’t abruptly lose your health insurance when you lose your work. But I have no way of paying it.”

  “How much would it cost?”

  “Off the top of my head? I just don’t know. Probably about three hundred dollars a month.” She opened her eyes again to see that he looked shocked.

  “So much?” he asked.

  “I think there’s a ceiling on it anyway.”

  “What do you mean, a ceiling?”

  “After Susannah’s medical expenses reach a certain point, the company won’t pay any more.”

  “Then how do they justify taking your money in the first place?”

  She grinned mirthlessly and lifted a shoulder. “That’s America.”

  He thought about it, then filed the information away for the moment. He’d deal with that later. “What will the apartment people do with your furniture?” he asked.

  Kim shrugged. “Nothing right away. I probably have thirty days before they’ll auction it to pay the rent for this month. Though they’ll likely only get a drop in the bucket, because I don’t own much. Then they’ll take a judgment against me for the remainder, and they’ll rent the place to someone else.” She’d been through this before, just after she’d left Texas.

  “That’s heartless,” Joe protested.

  “That’s life in America.” Suddenly her throat closed. She couldn’t pretend anymore. “It’s not the furniture so much,” she admitted, her voice strangled now. “It’s Suze’s baby shoes. It’s the pictures, the personal stuff, because if I lose her and that’s gone, too, then, dear God, Joe, there’s nothing left. It would be as though she’d never existed at all, and I can’t bear to think about that, can’t even push my mind in that direction, because I can’t stand it.”

  She threw the newspaper aside and jumped to her feet. Joe stared at her. He’d thought he knew her, that he was coming to understand her. But it staggered him that she was willing to lose all that before asking for help.

  He put his magazine down very deliberately. His voice vibrated with anger. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I can’t stop it!” she cried. “Haven’t you been listening? I can’t even afford to get back there and get the stuff out of there before it happens!”

  “Well, for God’s sake, woman, call these people and tell them to put the personal stuff aside!”

  “If I try to get it out of there, that’s like admitting she’s going to die!”

  There. She’d said it. She looked around wildly as the sound of her own voice rang off the walls.

  “It’s like admitting that that’s all I’ll have left. Baby shoes. Pictures,” she whispered this time. Then she began crying.

  Pain bloomed in his chest, along with the agony of indecision. To try to nudge her into collecting that stuff would be like making her admit that she was going to lose her daughter. Not to try would mean letting her lose such precious things. So he took another avenue.

  “And if you ignore the situation,” he said, “then you can always pretend you’re going back eventually, and everything will be fine.”

  She looked up, dashed her tears away. “Damn it, I am going back eventually. One way or the other.”

  “If you ignore the situation, you don’t have to make any decisions.”

  “What decisions? Everything’s been taken out of my hands!”

  “T
hat would make it easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “What are you saying, Joe?” she demanded.

  “Just that you have a third option, but it’s easier for you not to look that way. You’re ignoring it. You have people willing to help you, but you refuse to see that.”

  She stared at him as though he had somehow betrayed her.

  “What are you going to go back to, Kimberley?”

  She made a choking sound but said nothing.

  “Is it better than what you’ve found here? Family? Friends? A lover? Are you that scared of trusting anyone again that you’ll go alone to a place where you have no one, that you’d prefer to deal with this nightmare by yourself rather than accept someone else to lean on?”

  Damn him, she thought. Damn him! How could he know that the idea of that had suddenly become so uncomfortable?

  “She’s not going to die!” she shouted.

  “She might,” he said cruelly, trying to reach her. “Here you’ve got comfort, family.” Me. “Here you’ve got something to bolster you if and when it happens. What’s in California besides earthquakes and palm trees?”

  “What do you want from me?” she cried. “I told you from the start I wasn’t the kind of woman you keep thinking I should be!”

  “You’re a coward,” he said relentlessly. “You’re hiding behind your excuses.”

  She came at him like a bullet, all fury, all heat. He caught her wrists.

  “You’re not cold, Kimberley,” he continued. “You’ve given me pleasure and comfort and companionship. You’ve given me sensations I never knew I could feel.”

  “Don’t say that!” This was spiraling out of control. She had to fight back. She needed to fight back, to get this off her shoulders and onto his. She felt cornered, threatened. “I haven’t noticed you cuddling that baby, Joe,” she accused. “You haven’t put anything behind you. So don’t talk to me about excuses!”

  She had the pleasure of seeing his face go white. But only for a moment.

  “Fine,” he said, biting off the word.

  “Fine what?” she demanded.

  He let go of her arms. “I’ll stop avoiding Hannah if you go ask Adam.”