Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  The full sleeves of her gown ended in a cuff at her wrists, but an open top seam bound in satin ribbon ran from wrist to shoulder, exposing glimpses of her flesh. One by one his fingers discovered and released the slippery bows, and the fabric slid away to bare her arms. His hands came to her unclad arms, moving gently up and down, and the rhythmic caress heated her blood.

  His breath came more rapidly and mingled with hers, and his mouth came to hers again, fuller this time, more searching, his tongue delicately touching her to openness. His fingertips curving under her chin gently altered the tilt of her head, deepening his access until she could only hold onto him tightly to experience over and over the sensitivity of his mouth. Urgency sang its hard, bright notes in her blood. The surface of her skin burned. She found herself twisting closer, seeking the sating hardness of him.

  His arms prevented her. "Not here, Susan." She could hear the unsteadiness in his breath, feel the unsteadiness in his hands where they curved around her naked shoulders. Not here. Her drifting descent ended in a soft jolt. Not here, not here… not ever in this life. A shudder passed through her, thrumming like light fingers in her middle, a cool spot in the heat of her desire. Gazing into the pagan iridescence of his eyes, she reached up a shaking hand to thread her fingers wonderingly through his hair, feeling the fine silk stream like spring water against the inside of her fingers.

  "Tonight, Amish?"

  She couldn't answer him, because none of the bewilderment in her mind could take form in words. And so quickly it became too late for answers, for she heard the others begin to return.

  Her confusion was obvious as she stared at him, as though the enormity of his question might eat her alive. She didn't have to give him an answer; he knew it would have been no. He knew also that each time she told him no, she faltered more.

  Not tonight. But soon.

  He hadn't planned the kiss, and he swiftly came to regret it, because it left them both raw and in the worst possible state to film a love scene. Susan was shaky and stoic, flushing when David curled one of her untied satin bows around his little finger and looked askance at her. And Wilde had to regear himself so dramatically to tease her into relaxing for the camera that he did a poor job of burying his own unsteady emotions, which kept resurfacing. Four times, and for trivial reasons, he interrupted the scene just before David could kiss her. The fifth time, he realized what he was doing, and saw by the quizzical glances and astonished silence around him that others did also. David, clearly, had had about as much as he could take. The actor's eyes promised retribution.

  And later, when an excruciating headache came, Alan had no choice but to retire to his suite. He could barely see. Feeling like an idiot, he was sunk in a chair by an open window, with his forehead buried in an ice pack Joan had discovered for him in the prop room. David came in without knocking. Alan looked up at him, wondering with the detachment of agony whether or not he was going to be able to placate the actor, when he saw the harsh temper lines around David's mouth begin to loosen. Another minute of the star's hawklike scrutiny and the mouth relaxed totally.

  "So how do you feel?"

  "Like someone's tried to flambé my skull."

  "You look like bloody hell. You know, don't you—that thing isn't going to do you a bit of good." David's smile touched on the ice bag. "Because you've got it stuck on the wrong part of your body."

  Chapter 11

  After three hours he. was able to work, which was a relief and an escape for him.

  Joan came much later. Finding him at his word processor, she slapped her cheek in mock despair, stored his text, and switched off the power. Bending over to shake his shoulders, half-smiling, she said, "Rest, Alan. Rest." She poured him a glass of Chivas Regal and slid it into his tense fingers. "Have you had dinner? You know, food? It's not just for breakfast anymore."

  He had no memory of whether he'd eaten, so, shaking her head affectionately, she phoned in an order for him. Putting down the receiver, she said, "There you are, wunderkind. Let the brain waves wane. Go to your piano and play. When your food comes, consume it."

  "If you leave a schedule taped to the mirror, I'll do my best." He was less than his most pleasant self because although he had the vague instinct that she was right, it was often tearingly hard for him to stop working. He tended to resist the moment of letting it go. Typical compulsive personality trait.

  Joan's smile said she wasn't intimidated. "The body parts aren't bionic, Alan. Feed them. Refresh them." Before she left, she wrapped him in her arms and held him very tightly, as if she were trying to protect him from something.

  Alone, he played the piano, drinking, hearing his own errors, substituting one task for another until his food came, another duty.

  He had just begun to eat when the first scatter of sound hit his window. Rain? The sky had been clear earlier. He hadn't noticed it himself, but Dash had remarked on it. The showering sound was repeated several times before it occurred to him that someone was throwing gravel against his window. He didn't react immediately, because he registered it as a minor detail and he was used to having assistants deal with such things: Get me some black-and-whites to preview the shots; backlight the monster; find out who's throwing gravel at my window. After a second or two of hesitation, he went to the window, opened it, and looked outside.

  There was nothing to see. Leaving the window open, he went back to eating. When something round flew into his wooden salad bowl with enough force to scatter its contents, he jumped. Scraps of lettuce littered the white tablecloth.

  "Okay. Tossed salad." He picked a sliver of cucumber out of his hair and then peered under the overturned bowl. A softball with a message tied to- it. Sense of humor piqued, he unwrapped the note, and between the vinegar spots he read, "Alan, I must speak with you. Please come outside. Susan."

  He felt momentary disbelief before he recognized her handwriting. He had seen it on the notes she made so conscientiously on her script.

  Smiling, he experienced a thrill of feeling, although he knew it was a bad sign that she had not come to his room. Juliet awaited him without, and with winsome hesitation. Go out, Wilde, and get another headache.

  Susan saw him approach from where she knelt beside a lilac bush. He was tossing the softball slowly in his hand, and when he was close enough to speak, he said cheerfully, "I'm sure it would have been immoral for you to have used the phone."

  "I don't have one. Besides, I didn't know which numbers were yours."

  Adoring the originality of her self-expression, he knew his eyes were soft with it. He put down a hand to help her to her feet. "We get high marks for discretion, at least. Don't worry. Your message will self-destruct in ten seconds."

  "Pardon?"

  She felt a little shaky about the whole venture, and it didn't help when he pulled her into his arms, fitting their bodies with disturbing accuracy so that she could feel all of him against all of her and she couldn't think straight for how good and hard and warm he felt. His mouth arrived on the base of her throat, pressing softly, and made an upward path to her ear.

  "Our images are all different, have you noticed?" he asked. "We don't think in a common cultural dialect. Do you know Yoda?"

  "Who?" His whisper traced tingling, exciting patterns on her skin. Her respiration came quick and light.

  "As I thought. Know Garp?"

  "No. Alan—" She took a sharp breath as he laid a hand on her side, and moved it gently up and down.

  "Carl Bernstein… ? Valium… ? George Carlin… ?"

  Exquisite searching kisses made slow strokes on her ear, then just below it, tenderly marking each question, and she said no, no, no, and finally, "Alan, no" Shaking with unwilling laughter and from the stimulation of what he was doing to her, she put him from her with a reluctance she could hardly admit to herself. "Alan, I came here to say—"

  "Sigmund Freud?"

  She picked up his hand and held it between both of hers to halt its unsettling massage of her waist. "No."<
br />
  "I was afraid of that. We may have to go back to the Enlightenment and start there." His fingertips rubbed lightly on the inside of her wrist. "Would you tell me, Susan Peachey, just what was the point of having the twentieth century if you don't even know about it?"

  She withdrew her grasp from his hand, feeling breathless, trying to ignore the temptation of his beautiful mouth, with its charming contours and tender corners. His eyes, in the soft light from the distant window, were bright, coaxing, promising pleasure beyond her imagination. She gazed wistfully into them for a minute and then said, "You've been drinking?"

  "For medicinal purposes only." The hand that had been so light and knowing at her waist drew invisible bisecting lines on his own chest. "Cross my heart."

  "Don't." She caught up his hand, stilling the long, aesthete's fingers. "I don't want you to forswear yourself to me. Oaths are serious things." This time instead of releasing his hand, she wove their fingers together. "Come with me." Tugging gently, "A walk will clear your head, and we can talk then."

  Her touch did many things for him, but clearing his head was not one of them. Her small, boyish hand clasped his firmly, and he strolled beside her, their footsteps whispers in the grass.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," he said presently. "Is there any way for us to make sense of each other? I come from a place where they paint the white roses red and you can only see cats by their grins. Have you read Through the Looking Glass?"

  Her sigh said, Oh, this game again, but she was smiling and unembarrassed as she shook her head.

  "For God's sake, give me something. Kermit the Frog? Louis L'Amour? The Mahara Ji?"

  Dropping his hand, she covered her face with her hands. Laughter made her voice delicious to him as she said, "You want proof, I suppose, that we come from the same planet?"

  "Does physical evidence exist? You see, I'd like the chance to be something besides strangers with you."

  She spun to face him, stepping backward on the black, starlit lawn, and gave him that smile again, the one he never quite expected from her features no matter how often he saw it. She had a smile that didn't understand its own power, and he was unaccustomed to beauty that made no attempt to charm. The humorous opening of her eyes and slight tuck of her lower lip cast off the classic look her features had in repose and made her smile puckish.

  "How about Laura Ingalls Wilder?" she asked.

  An unfamiliar sensation was building in his chest, a kind of skipping delight in her, in everything about her. "I'd call that a nice, sound start. I was afraid we might have to rewind to Eden, but if we're already up to the pioneers—"

  "Spiderman!"

  "Spiderman! Then we're practically blood br—take a hard right or you'll plant yourself into a tree trunk—blood brothers. I like this track. Twentieth century with a vengeance, and very funky."

  She halted, glanced furtively from side to side, testing the air for invisible spies, and whispered, "Winnie-the-Pooh."

  They had arrived at a high wooden fence where she had tethered her Belgian mare. Gently forestalling his attempt to take her again into his arms, she said, "So you see, it's hopeless. We're hopeless, you and I. Our ideas were shaped so differently."

  "You'd be astonished how many profound relationships are based wholly on Spiderman and Winnie-the-Pooh."

  "I could give you a dozen others I've heard since coming here that I don't know."

  "I triple-dog-dare you to."

  "Gatsby, Gucci, Spencer Tracy, post-Vietnam syndrome, Mr. Greenjeans, rolfing, middlebrow, Wagnerian, okay kemosabe…"

  "That was only nine."

  "Argyle socks."

  "I'll never wear them again."

  "And there's all those initials you use, like it's too much trouble to say out a whole word: SAG, NOW, TLC..."

  He smiled encouragingly. "TNT."

  That word she knew, and if she hadn't, she'd have been able to make a good guess from the way he was looking at her. "It's not good for you, to stay in your room having drinks instead of being out in the fresh air. You'll ruin your disposition."

  Disposition. He liked the word—funny, old-fashioned, practical. He spoke softly. "If you're interested in helping my disposition, I can think of something right now that would do me a wealth of good."

  "I don't know what shocks me more—the things you say or the fact that I'm beginning to understand what they mean. And I don't think it would do your disposition or any other part of you a bit of good for us to have carnal knowledge of each other."

  Another old-fashioned phrase, but he found this one a lot less charming. "Make love."

  She shrugged with fair-minded indifference. "Changing the word doesn't change the—"

  "I didn't grow up with sin and Satan hung like gall and wormwood over my head, so please coddle me. The words are 'make love.'"

  His abruptness and the intensity of his tone made her smile. "You use the words that are right for you and I'll use the words that are—"

  "No." He took hold of her shoulders. "I want you to say it. Say, 'make love.'"

  She cast a droll glance heavenward.

  Very softly: "Susan, say it."

  "All right, then." Her level voice sounded loud in the hush of night. "Make love." The wide, haunting eyes narrowed enchantingly, and she said more loudly, "Make love." Curving her flexed palms around her mouth megaphone-style, she said very, very loudly, "Make love. Ma—"

  He stopped her with the light pressure of his hand on her mouth. His palm caught the last stir of her lips as an inadvertent caress, marking his skin with her warmth and softness, igniting his senses.

  "I'm sorry, Alan. The guards will come."

  "I don't think so. They know I'm here. I told them I'd forgotten something on the set."

  He was amused, because he couldn't help it, but his body was serious, so serious that wanting her was stinging him everywhere and the fingers he had loosened to let her speak drifted upward, following her cheekbone. Reaching her temple, he put one fingertip under the rim of her bonnet. Slowly he slipped his finger deeper under the bonnet and around, tracing the edge of her hairline. Soft, soft…

  "Let me take this off you, Susan," he whispered.

  She put her hands flat on his chest, shaking her bent head. In a light, endearing gesture, she rested her brow against his chest, rubbing her face against his sweater, the gesture unconsciously sexy, affectionate.

  Her lifted face then was poignantly optimistic. "I think it would do us both good to get some exercise. Fresh air and exercise."

  He bypassed the easy, juvenile comment on what kind of exercise he thought they needed, only pointing out mildly that they'd already had plenty of fresh air.

  "We need mare fresh air."

  This time the determination in her voice made him laugh. But the side of his thumb continued to stroke her ear. "Maybe, then," he murmured smiling, "we should try breathing faster."

  That was too risqué for her, and she didn't want to smile at it. He could see the didn't want to, could see her shut her eyes and tense her facial muscles, fighting the pull of her lips; and he encouraged the smile, the lightness, with the gentlest of sweeping caresses, toying with her ear, lightly tugging on the corners of her mouth with his thumbs, and this time he said, "What we need is to make love to each other."

  "There are other things, you know." Her words were arrhythmic because of her uneven breath. Her unwilling smile hovered, wary and appealing.

  Amusement coursed through him. Are you trying to distract me, Susan? "What others?"

  "Riding is good. Do you go horseback riding?" 'As he watched, her smile fixed itself and tried to become sensibly encouraging, as though that overcame the mist of yearning in her eyes. Such wonderful eyes. Her emotions found graphic expression in them. Unknowingly they pleaded. Unknowingly they touched him. It was a temporary reprieve only, but he allowed the distraction.

  "I've suffered the experience. Dash has a stable in Arizona of pampered Arabian horses who live better than I do
and are probably worth a lot more. Once upon a time he convinced himself that it would do me good to get out in the country and have the healthful and spiritually uplifting experience of galloping across the majestic desert sands with the wind in my hair. I got on one of his overpedigreed animals and it brushed me off under the first tree limb."

  "You should have gotten right back on again!"

  "So Dash said. I did, and the beast threw me off into a saguaro. I had one broken ankle, two cracked ribs, a sunburn, and thirty-seven puncture wounds."

  "It happens that way when you start riding. You've got to take a knock or two."

  So Dash had said also. He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned forward confidingly. "Susan, I don't know how to tell you this, but I don't like animals."

  She smiled, not believing him. "See, Alan—these great, soft eyes…"

  He had been politely ignoring the Belgian, but now he gave the animal a studious once-over. "Are you sure it's a horse? I thought it was a dinosaur."

  She was too honest and straightforward to see the trap, the conscious challenge; when she volunteered to take him riding here and now, she had no more on her mind than to soften what she had come to say with an act of kindness and friendship, and perhaps to bring some fun into what she saw as his sterile existence. He resisted, though he fully intended to go with her, because her efforts to urge him into it were delightful. But when she finally was convinced she'd talked him into it, and linked her fingers to make a stirrup and cheerfully offered it to help him, he began to laugh.

  "Thanks. But I think I can manage. Please, after you."

  It had a strange, fairy-tale feel, watching her take a handhold in the dense mane and clamber onto the mammoth back, extending a hand to help him on behind her. Loose bonnet ribbons made pale tracks upon her breast. Distant light formed soft tails of muted brightness on her bare feet and legs, where her dark gown rode back to expose her flexed knees.