by Sharon
In a seaside town, he took her to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Teaching her to eat with chopsticks—feeding her, mostly—he thought she had the prettiest mouth he'd ever seen. Outside, she became entranced by a Christmas shop, one that carried ornaments year-round. The Amish didn't have Christmas trees—she'd seen very few—and although she could hardly bring herself to leave, she only allowed him to buy her one ornament, a little skunk in a Santa hat. Maybe it startled her more than it might have someone non-Amish, coming, as she did, from a culture that didn't sentimentalize animals, or maybe it was simply the incongruity, but it made her laugh. She laughed in that way she had when she was utterly charmed by something but couldn't figure it out, and in the car on the way to his oceanside house, she took it out of the bag to look at again and was sent off into fresh streams of laughter.
"Why is it so funny?" he asked.
"Well, it's a skunk. As a decoration! A skunk!"
She was tired by the time they neared the beach house, and she slept part of the afternoon in his white-walled bedroom, with the sea making its clean sounds outside an open window. He walked on the sand while she napped, and was back by her side when she awoke.
She didn't know how she looked to him, opening her eyes, smiling lazily, her limbs relaxed, her hair loose and curling over her upper arms and breasts. One dark curl crossed like a satin ribbon over her neck. Her lips were parted, just enough, and he wanted that mouth, wanted that taste on his tongue, those soft lips open and hectic under his. He hadn't made love to her last night; she was too sad, suffering, her senses numb and blind. But it hadn't shut off the need in him. All night, her breasts rubbing his flesh with the softest invitation when she breathed, it had been almost more than he could bear, and he'd put his hand on her breast once as she'd slept and held her, just lightly, and made himself crazy inside. And when he couldn't stand it anymore, when he'd been desperate to have her, to turn her on her back and press open her lips with his mouth and take the form of that soft breast again and again in his palm,. when he was at the far edges of control, he had only gently brushed back the hair over her ear and whispered to her in her sleep, "I love you."
It was right to wait—right for her. For him it was like giving up oxygen for a few days.
She sat up slowly. "I had such dreams. Have I slept long?"
"A little more than an hour."
"So many things have happened. So many events. I can't get it all straight." .
He picked up a curl and let its own weight pull it down, letting it slip over his fingertips. "Could you handle one more event, do you think?"
Her gaze fought free of his, and she stared at his hand, her mouth anxious; she seemed half-wary, as she'd been this morning.
"Hey," he said, "not a seduction."
She focused on his hand. "Why not?"
"Because you became ashamed," he said gently. "I don't think you wanted to, but it happened."
"No, I wasn't ashamed. Not that."
"Uncertain, then."
Her gaze returned to his face. She put her hand on his hair and began to stroke it. "If I am, then I must be all turned around in the head." Then she whispered desperately, "Fix me. Please."
His heart seemed to jump in his body. He was light-headed from wanting her. His smile was slow. "Oh, I will. I'm going to fix you so good."
Her flush could have come from pleasure or alarm, or a powerful and disturbing combination of the two. His need flamed, but he subdued it once more. He offered her his hand. "Come out with me. I have something to show you."
"On the beach?"
"Farther down the beach."
Outside there was a redwood deck, with steps leading down a cliff above the ocean. All around was the delicious splashing sound of the waves, water slapping on water over sand.
She stopped on the deck by a straw basket of shells and lifted one out. He had the impression that to her, shells were something rare.
"Can you really hear the ocean in them?" she asked.
"Try."
"I can hear it, yes."
He held up a tiny shell. "In this one you can hear the sink." Then he picked up two large conches. "Walkman headphones for whales."
She laughed and pushed at his chest, and he grabbed her wrists and held her hands there against him, moving them slowly, but his breathing was rapid. He had to force himself to release her.
She halted again at the base of the steps, staring over the ocean, her gaze sweeping over the horizon. What a grand thing, she thought. What a beautiful thing. The water was all different colors, not merely values of the same color, but color bands in blue-green, gray, green like new leaves, and deep blue. An opening broke through the piles of immense clouds and let down a shaft of sunlight that altered an area of blue-green into yellow. Far out, waves were bobbing white buds that appeared on the water like the delicate paw prints of a giant unseen cat. Waves chased one another to shore—a peak, a curve, white flowers blooming, then a shining smear on the sand. The wind was different from other winds she'd felt. It seemed to get inside her more, penetrating her hair and skin.
She dug her feet in the sand where it was warm and dry, filling up the spaces between her toes with warmth and luxury.
He linked her fingers with his. They walked on the beach with their shoes off. He rolled up the bottoms of his jeans so the water froth could flick at his ankles. Little sandpipers ran back and forth before them in front of the waves.
"I couldn't have left you in Wisconsin, Amish."
"Would you have hired kidnappers?"
"In L.A. they probably have a listing in the yellow pages."
"They probably have one that specializes in Amish."
He slid his arm around her back, pulling her closer to him, his hand just under her arm, his fingertips stroking ever so lightly upon the upcurve of her breast, his touch subtle and skillful.
"Shall I stop?"
There was a new tightness in her chest. "No."
"Hungry?"
She looked up. Smiling, he produced a gold-and-pink peppermint stick from the pocket of his jeans and handed it to her, then watched her as she licked it. The wind took her hair, and he wound it around his neck like a garment.
It spilled down his chest, blew against his cheek, rubbed against his mouth.
"I didn't think I'd like it so close to the sea," she said. "Years ago I saw this drawing in a book. It was a map of North America as it is; then right next to it was another map of how it would become if the icecaps melted and the sea came higher and covered up part of the land. It fixed the shore in my mind as a disastrous, temporary sort of place. Now that I see it, it looks like it could go on and on…"
They continued to walk on, keeping close, listening to the heavy percussion of the waves, her hair softly beating him in the wind. She had the sudden sense of being on the verge of learning a powerful secret.
"It whispers to you," she said.
"It's the same sound I hear in my head whenever I'm near you," he answered. He took her hand, wind-bound with his by her hair, and carried it to his lips. He kissed her fingers and then lifted it, indicating a crack in the cliff wall where a pillar of rock had split from the craggy face and tumbled in a hundred megalithic fragments onto the beach and into the sea, blocking the beach. It was made passable by a wooden bridge, ten sandy steps up, a small platform, and then a second set of steps that led down the far side to the interrupted beach.
He said, "Stand at the top, please."
She smiled curiously. "Is this what you brought me to see? What shall I do when I reach the—"
But she had reached the platform, and what she saw below on the sand made her draw a breath and stand as she was.
"MARRY ME, SUSAN," said great letters in sand, framed by a heart.
He watched her from below, capturing the image in his mind, wanting to keep it forever. Behind and around her, the sky and clouds had colors from Chagall. She was quite still, her feet apart. Sunlight glowed between her legs, making them glea
m in outline, cupping in light the prettiness of her buttocks. Sunlight sparkled in sand on her bare feet, on her long bare calves. Wind scattered her dark, gleaming curls.
Oh, so beautiful, dear God, she was so beautiful, so fine.
He said, "I love you."
She turned back.
He leaned over and in the honey-colored sand drew a sweeping question mark.
The smile in her eyes said yes. Yes yes yes…
He put out his hands and she ran down the stairs and stood on the bottom step, so that her face was level with his.
He took her hands. "I want to marry you the way your people marry. With all my life. For all my life."
She rested her brow on his and they stood so, her hair rubbing up and down his arms in slow, voluptuous caresses. Then she released his hands and in giant letters wrote "YES" in the sand.
He would have taken her in his arms, but she began to run backward, blithely, her heart jumping. She weighed nothing; she was nothing but joy, every bit of her buoyant with it.
She saw that he was looking at her that way again, part heat, part humor, the generous mouth tugged up at the corners as if he could taste her with his eyes, and the scary-shaky feelings she'd had that morning were gone, changed to shaky feelings that felt friendly.
His smile carried a wealth of sensual meaning. He beckoned with a crooked finger.
Desire came at her as a thud in her stomach, making her feel tight and flighty there. He must have sensed it; his smile widened.
"Come here," he said. "I want to kiss you."
A new wildness seized her, and she turned and fled, anticipation delicious in her, her feet pushing down on the cool custard sand, her breath like a chant in her ears, her filmy skirts flying up to tease her thighs and belly.
He caught her from behind, and she gasped at the contact of his hips, remembering the hardness and leanness of them, their strength in love.
She turned in his arms, lifting herself onto his body, and felt him helping her, one hand between her shoulders, the other much lower in a sensuous caress that made her press into him of her own need. Her pulse came hard in her throat. His hand moved up and down her back, flooding her spine with shudders.
"Before I met you, I didn't know I could be like this," she said.
"How?"
"Passionate."
He smiled, a tender crook at the corners of his long mouth, and ran a finger in a slow line sinking from the very tip of her ear down her throat in a gentle stroke between her breasts. "How passionate?"
Heat followed his finger and went on its own into the low part of her stomach. "Very passionate."
The deep rhythmic rush of the sea filled her ears. She took in the scent of him, sunny, sandy, and laid her head back into his supporting palm to prepare herself for the descent of his mouth. His lips touched her throat, the tip of her ear, and then found her mouth in long, beguiling kisses that went on and on, massaging her parted lips, then going deep, and the low ache in her stomach became fiery for him.
He sensed it, she thought; or perhaps it was a response to some powerful need of his own that made him raise her higher on his body, and with gentle hands he drew open her legs and helped her to wrap them around his hips, clasping him. He held her that way, her arms around his shoulders, his arm under her skirts pressing her up and into him. The pressure of each of his hands drove her to an intoxicating surrender. She wanted to feel his hands on her flesh, to tear off the brief band of fabric that was his only barrier to her. She pressed herself more tightly to him, taking a sharp breath, another, another as the uncovered sensitivity of her thighs recorded the faint abrasion of his aged-cotton jeans, and then, beneath, the lovely pattern of him.
They clung together, the wind tossing her hair around them like many garlands. With scant breath, hardly knowing what she said, she whispered, "Am I heavy?"
"You don't weigh enough to donate blood." He kissed a tendril of hair on her cheek, nuzzled the corner of her mouth. "And you've got enough hair for three people."
Again a kiss, hungry, deep, hardly patient, shudderingly sweet.
She began suddenly to laugh. Against the curve of his throat she said, "Maybe you'll fix me up sooner than you thought."
Chapter 23
He married her in a week. He couldn't have waited longer than a week. A week had driven him half out of his mind because he'd decided—out of guilt, belated, misfiring chivalry, or some impulse of demented tenderness—not to make love to her until after the wedding. Denying himself that first afternoon on the beach had seemed a fate worse than death. But it had to be better not to be with her again in a state that was less than right to her. Nothing should hurt her. Not the faintest shade should touch her life again.
The problem was, he couldn't stop touching her. Kissing her, running his hands over her, engaging in endless hours of love play, he took himself right to the limit. Her too.
"You're so noble," she told him once, "it's terrible."
And then she lay back in the tumble of her disarrayed clothing and laughed hard at his expression, ruffling his hair with her hand. He could tell she was relieved.
She hadn't been to a wedding that wasn't Amish. She knew vaguely that it would be different. She'd seen the fluffy wedding dress in the window of Betty's Bridal Shop in Greyling. Years back Betty had passed away, and her husband had taken over the shop, grown peculiar in his ways, and let the window go. Sun and heat had turned the gown yellow and had faded the mannequins' red lips to a grimy pink. So over the years of half-noticing those dusty yellow gowns and bleached plastic flowers, Susan had come to see English weddings as rather forlorn and shabbily extravagant affairs. And so she told Alan pretty firmly that she didn't care to have a bridal dress. Except then she'd thought, well, maybe. Just maybe.
A voice in her that she didn't understand, that she'd never attempted to understand, made her want to try things. She couldn't even decide if the voice came from herself or was a spirit voice—and if it was a spirit voice, whether it was good or bad, God or demon. It was like voices she heard on the radio and didn't know where they were coming from, how far away they were, or even if the speaker was talking now or it was an earlier recording. She'd brought it up to Alan. Did he think Satan was holding the world toward her like an apple, whispering, "Come bite"?
And then she remembered that Alan didn't believe in the devil; in fact, that he didn't quite seem to approve of the devil, which seemed to her so naive and droll and rather haplessly rational that there didn't seem to be much to do but kiss him wildly and be glad all over again that she was here with him. Heaven knew what could become of someone who didn't believe in the devil. "What am I going to do with you?" she said.
It turned out he had a couple of good ideas. But he had willpower. Oh, boy, did he.
By the day of their wedding he had a permanent tightness in his chest and a body temperature that felt as if it were about a hundred and three. His head felt light, floating in a sea of happiness.
They married with his closest friends there, Joan, Dash and his family, and others Susan had gotten to know on the set. The ceremony took place in the garden, the acres of exuberant California flora and foliage that Alan had rarely spent time in and that had already become a boundless delight to Susan. They made their vows to each other under the canopy of an oak. Azaleas in luminous rose pink and ruffled lavender grew with pale green fern clusters, bordering the sweeping white lace of her gown as she stood next to him. She wore nothing in her hair. Her shoulders may as well have been bare under the fine, transparent gauze that fell into the lacy foam of her bodice. He could see the barest tease of the lush vanilla surface that began her breasts.
Ivory-colored light wove through the leaves to dapple her skin, her shoulders and breasts. Near them was the tile fountain he'd bought in Seville, and as they spoke to each other, the splashing water made peaceful music. Light caught in the water, and beads of reflected sunshine danced on her like a spray of silver at unexpected moments and playe
d at times upon her mouth. Desire rippled through him like the hard backwash of a wave.
Her way to marry and his were so different, so they each agreed to say what they felt, and that would be their vows.
She sang to him first, an Amish wedding hymn in German. She did not have a strong voice, or a trained one, but it had a bell-like clarity from the years of singing a capella in Amish services, and an affecting sweetness. It was the kind of voice he imagined murmuring a lullaby by the cradle.
Then she said, "Whether this is an Amish service or not, it makes no difference to me. I promise to you the same thing I would promise a man of my own faith." She took his hands, the words coming slowly, with care, and he understood she was translating them as she spoke, and hearing them for the first time in English. "I believe it was ordained by God for you to become my husband, and I promise before God that I will not depart from you in my life, and that I will hold you dear and care for you until God will again separate us from each other."
The love he felt for her was so intense, it bordered on being painful. "I love you, Susan," he said. "This is the strongest, most complete emotion I've ever experienced. Nothing else has ever come close. I didn't know I had this capacity. I'm going to make you happy. This is so new; we've barely begun. I don't know everything that it will mean. But whatever it takes, I'm going to discover it and do it for you."
"And I promise that I will not depart from you in my life."
Serene during the vows themselves, she became shaky the moment he kissed her, a long, hard kiss that made her lose her breath entirely.
There was to be a party, which Alan had tried with great tact to prevent, at Ben Rose's house, nearby. They had only a minute together, and she took him aside to give him the handkerchief she'd stitched for him, white on white, two doves carrying a furling banner with her name and his entwined. And he scooped her up and carried her to the atrium, where red and yellow rose trees grew in clay containers, and showed her another tree, a new one—a small evergreen. On the cheerful, feathery branches he'd hung every Christmas ornament from the shop they'd seen that she'd laughed over or admired—porcelain angels, wreaths of satin ribbon, crystal animals, camels wearing holly. Her first Christmas tree.