by Sharon
"Merry Christmas in the summer," he said, gathering her in his arms.
"Merry Christmas," she whispered, and kissed him.
They were both smiling so hard, it was difficult to kiss properly. He lifted his head, his mouth so tempting only inches from hers. "Chloe said to ask you about the present she gave you."
"Chloe?" So many new and difficult names.
"Dash's daughter, the oldest one. She helped you dress."
"Oh, yes, that! Is it safe here? Do you think anyone will come in?"
Vivid images materialized in his overheated imagination. Heaven have mercy, there are too many hours before I can be with her alone, he thought, and began to laugh.
"No one will come in without warning us, no."
She sat down on the broad edge of a low brick wall around a raised bed of deep purple fuchsias, her eyes bright with ah excitement that caused a powerful sensual arousal inside him. Her hands went to the base of her cloud of skirts, the tip of her hair brushing her lap as she , bent those beautiful shoulders forward. With her gaze warm on him, she uncovered white satin slippers, tossed them off with her legs comfortably outstretched and toes slightly pointed, and then bared her legs clear to her thighs.
"Fancy stockings!" she said. And they were: sheer frosty silk embroidered in semitransparent pale, dewy roses, her legs lovely beneath. She seemed to read something in his expression; a bit of a smile stretched her mouth. She leaned back on her elbows into the mound of blooms that billowed up to caress her arms and bare neck. One blossom nodded, barely skimming the upcurve of her breast only a finger's width above where its delicate peak must be.
His heart slammed into his ribs. One of her feet arched. Her toe drew slow, wide circles on the sunny stones. Her smile got bigger.
High on his own adrenaline, he came down beside her, up to his elbows in a profusion of fuchsias, his hand on her thigh, tracing up and down on the smooth silk and the long, firm muscle beneath. He bent and kissed the far upper edge of her stocking.
"You like them then," she said in a tight whisper.
"I envy them. I want to be where they are." His fingers kept up their play, higher.
She took a breath, and whispered, "I want you to be where they are too." His fingertips traced just higher. "Oh, Alan," Her eyes squeezed tightly shut. "Would you like to know something else? Something about this dress?"
His fingers followed the edge of the stocking, slipped up and under, caressing the skin beneath. "I'd like to know every one of your secrets."
"Look, then." She made a slight movement with her shoulders, half a shudder and half a shrug, and drew the lace down her upper arms. As he watched, the exquisite frothy bodice fell, and she was bare to the waist but for the transparent silk that lay over her arms and chest like a mist falling from the pearl-and-lace necklet at her throat. Her skin was the softest, prettiest pink; her breasts, snowy slopes with a dainty, deeper pink at the tip.
"Oh, you are so…" His hand curved around her waist, moved upward, stroking all over her, between her breasts, over her stomach, and she pulled his head blindly downward until he enclosed one of her nipples in his -mouth, his tongue pressing her through the ethereal fabric, making it wet against her, and he was lost as he pulled her under him, like lying on a cloud. "Sweetheart, sweetheart…"
He kissed her, tasting the lace at her throat first, then that soft, responsive mouth. He kissed every part of her face; he rubbed his lips gently over her eyelashes, stroked her brows with his mouth, planted soft, open kisses on her temples. He chanced to look down at her face, and it was like seeing a vision—the dark, love-hazed eyes, the dusky wet-cherry lips that were slowly reshaping themselves into a crooked, sleepy grin.
"You feel married, Alan?"
"I've felt married from the first moment I saw you," he whispered against her mouth. He would have kissed her then—he wanted to kiss her again—but her grin persisted, and he found he was wearing a drowsy smile of his own, and the floating, blurred images in his mind settled in a moment on the thought that he was about to begin his married life making love to his bride in a fuchsia bed. And maybe she had the same thought, because she began to laugh, a breathless sound as contagious as her smile. He couldn't help it; he began to laugh with her, in sheer shared joy. They lay in each other's arms, drowning in hilarity, wild desire, and euphoria.
Presently she murmured, "Party."
With desire, with amusement, he agreed. "Party."
At the party David Thorne took her aside. Glamorous, unfamiliar in a gray suit and red tie, he kissed her cheek. "What in heaven's name do you think of Los Angeles?" he asked.
"Well… It has a thousand different kinds of water taps that I can't make out how to work. It's a beautiful place, but it's hard to get over how big it is. But I guess I'd be happy knee-deep in a bog if I could have Alan with me."
"I'm not sure I buy that. There's a lot you haven't seen yet. It's hard to believe Alan's done anything so irresponsible as to drag you into the twentieth century."
"I suppose you've told him that?"
"You have the most magnificent eyes. I can't count the times I've purposely aggravated you to make you flash them at me. No, I didn't tell him. He knows. But I have things I'd like to tell you. First, about that day in my room. I've let you know I regretted what happened there, what you saw, the things I said. But I didn't let you know how deep my regrets go. I felt idiotic; I took it out on you. I'm sorry in italics."
"I wasn't so happy with what I said to you either— about other ways to make you feel good. It maybe sounded like preaching. No wonder you felt like giving me the dickens. You get preached at about something, it just makes you want to go and do the opposite."
"Yes, there were my delicate agnostic sensibilities to be considered. What's funny?"
"Joan. One time she told me that agnostics think that when you die, you go to limbo and do the limbo. That's a dance, Alan says."
"My closest brush with a religious experience was having my I Ching cast once. Did you know that Alan and I met when we were both working in Japan?"
"He's told me. He lived in Paris, then, spent three years in Japan."
"I have a wedding gift for you from Japan. I left it back at your home. You might not know what it is. Alan will be able to tell you about it."
"I'm sure he will." She smiled mischievously. "You'd be surprised at the good ideas about some things I get on my own."
His expression became suddenly kind full of the goodness in him that she'd only glimpsed when he showed it as her lover before a camera. Then he said, "I think the closest Alan's come to having a religious experience has been loving you."
After David, she was folded up again into the gaiety of Ben's party. All around her were white columns and flowers and statues, colorful tile-work, sunlit spaces, and the scents of champagne and perfume and food she'd never seen before. The food—she couldn't even tell what some of it was; it was strange and wonderful, like things your lost loved ones must be eating up in heaven. Everyone was beautiful here. She'd never seen anything like it. Everyone wore fabrics like rainbows and had tanned skin and soft hands with polished nails and perfect, perfect teeth.
Alan's animal-trainer friends came with their cockatoos. They had one bird dressed in sunglasses, like a movie director, and the other in a tiny Amish bonnet—the movie director courted the one in the bonnet and gave kisses, and then they both did tricks and made her laugh.
She met another friend of Alan's, who was a "comedian." She'd never heard of that before. He was a man who made his living by making people laugh. It was a wonderful thing. The English would get together in a theater or in front of the television and watch something called comedy and laugh and laugh. Alan's friend sat with her for a long time and told her stories, and she had a very good time, about the best time she could have had.
There was music at the party, too, on instruments she didn't know, which made the most amazing, thrilling sounds. Alan taught her to dance, and it was wonderful bei
ng clasped in his embrace, catching the sounds with the rhythm of her body, glancing down to mind her feet and watching instead her knee moving in and out of her skirts as they danced.
He took her home as soon as it was decently possible and he saw that her eyes said, "I'm tired." She was ebullient by nature, but he'd learned that his culture—or the newness of it—wore her out much more quickly than her own. He tried to place himself in her mind, to understand the maze of stimuli, the kisses from urbane strangers, the abundant strangeness of sounds and manners and races. She'd met all that with great charm, and now she was tired.
"I want to go to the plain house, please," she said.
Then they were together, alone with each other in the small Japanese house in his garden, and he thought, I want you now, Susan, right now, with your big, tired eyes and meters of pristine imported lace and fancy stockings. He'd often imagined life as having a sound track, and he was hearing the Pachelbel "Canon" played by a vast, spectacular string orchestra.
She sank down on the clean tatami floor mats in the exciting mound of her skirts and closed her eyes. He knew that look, that backing-up-from-a-too-fast-world look.
He kissed her fingertips, and the smoothness of her skin against his mouth set his senses on fire. Only once, he stroked his hand over her hair, and then made a bath for her in a pool of azure tile in the small courtyard. On the clear, shining water he floated gardenia blossoms from her bouquet.
He waited for her just outside, on the wooden veranda that overlooked the arched sod-covered bridge separating the bamboo-fenced Zen garden from the rest of the grounds. His gaze touched on the fine white gravel placed here and there, and the islands of uncut stone encircled in starlike moss. The house itself was low, the corners uptilted, the walls made of translucent shoji.
The sun fell, blazing, in the west, and light struck the latticed paper, turning it into leaping sheets of scarlet, and he thought, the way the paper seems to burn, I burn.
In the gathering shadows, the gaslight inside the courtyard where she bathed grew stronger, and he began to see her, a magically darkening silhouette upon the rich ocher paper, her beautiful nudity exposed in profile. Half-seated on the edge of the pad, her legs extended, she was patting dry her thighs. Putting back her head, her hair fell behind her, giving her the look of a Beardsley sprite, and she touched the towel to her throat, to the soft curve of her breasts. His pulse became like running water.
He watched her until she came into the open doorway in a shaft of rosy-blond light to lean her head against the frame. She had wrapped herself in a silk robe of brilliant embroidered crimson, and her hair was cast over one shoulder in a rippling cascade. His expression made her tip up one side of her mouth in a smile. She plucked at a fold of the robe.
"From David," she said.
"It's a kimono. A special one for brides."
"Brides wear red?" she asked.
"It's traditional."
Ah, tradition. That she understood.
A breeze lifted over the bamboo fence, and she saw how it tumbled his hair like teasing fingers. Behind him the moolit garden had become soft and dusky and mysteriously fragrant. He was half-reclining in an easy way against one of the porch supports, but she sensed he was not so relaxed inside as he looked, and the knowledge excited her. The nearby glow of a stone lantern made an orange line on the severely handsome curve of his cheekbones and spread like a flame along his clean white shirt sleeves, down his legs to his long, tanned bare feet. His trousers were rolled up at the cuffs, so she could see his legs. He'd opened his shirt collar and discarded his jacket.
After all the times she'd thought of him as her husband, she could hardly grasp now that he really was. He didn't look like a husband. He looked like someone she'd hardly dare to let herself dream up. "Domestic" was not the word that came into her head, not when she looked at him, not with his ease and elegance, his sensual, strong-boned body and erotic smile and clever mouth and pleasure-giving hands and his soft, hypnotic manner of speaking. No, "domestic" wasn't the word that came to mind.
The thought hit her that she'd like to make him drop his veneer of poise and handle her in that wild way he had that could make her drift in a sea of sparks.
She was breathless, her voice languid with the quality of a woman speaking to her lover, as she smiled and indicated the Japanese garden. "It's like a child's sandbox."
"It's more. Look closely. It becomes a small world outside of time. Do you see the patterns in the gravel? The rocks might be islands rising from a tranquil sea. They might be mountain peaks above a field of clouds. If you let your thoughts wander through it, it gives you a rest." His eyes never left her face, though he'd set a gardenia on his thigh and his forefinger absently, repeatedly stroked one curling petal. "When I work, I look at things all day. Sometimes I have visual fatigue, and I come down here to see symmetry. There's nothing to stop my thoughts. It's meant to purify the soul."
"I see. It's the plain way. Like Amish."
His finger continued to gently prod the petal. "Just the same."
"Maybe you have a little Amish in you."
"One little Amish in particular. I have one little Amish way down inside me." Ever so slowly, his thumb was moving over many petals, barely touching, rubbing them, and a new feeling of weakness came over her, a dizziness that took her in the throat, the legs, the stomach. Her gaze dropped from his face. She seemed able to watch only his finger in its unhurried exploration of the flower.
His voice came again, softly touching her skin. "In China, the poets write that one should enter a garden in a receptive mood."
Her heartbeat was strong in her throat, making her ache. The wanting became suddenly like an illness, leaving hot patterns on the surface of her skin, radiating deep within the vital parts of her.
"You're cautious when we love, aren't you?" she said. "I mean, sometimes in your practices, because I'm not worldly?"
His finger went still. "Yes."
"I know you'll only give me good things. Teach me," she whispered. "While I was bathing,, I could see you in the garden light. I knew you could see me. I wanted you to." She relaxed her arms and let the silk robe fall, caressing her breasts and back, settling in whispers around her legs, and the night air breathed over her skin, making a light, sensual sting where it wasn't quite dry.
She heard his involuntary exclamation, a soft and passionate word, and then she had the fleeting impression of him as a shadow, big and dark with the full moon over his shoulder before she was pulled hard into his arms, her mouth crushed under his, the flower pressing forgotten against her cheek. Fervent sensations filled her head along with the lush gardenia scent. She felt the rough pressure of his body, and the fire of his mouth moving against hers, opening her, his tongue tracing her lips, penetrating her mouth, making her gasp and gasp.
He swept her up, the robe tangled in her legs, and carried her inside to a wide, airy room with lattice-and-paper walls, his breath harsh and seductive against her ear. Under his feet the thick hay-colored mats of woven rush gave off their half-heard creak and sweet grass smell. He aid her down on a flat floor cushion, the red silk of the kimono spread out under her. His hand was firm on her jaw as he lay beside her, and his thumb began to rub against the swollen surface of her lips and a little inside. His skin had the scent and taste of gardenia, luscious, distinctive.
She felt like something that reminded her of bubbling water. "It's written in the Bible about two together," she said, "that they shall have good reward for their labor. The words go on—again, if two lie together, then they have heat; but how can one be warm alone?"
Between the slow, open kisses he was pressing in a descending strand upon the side of her face, he whispered, "Where is it written?"
"In—" she drew a sharp breath as his tongue followed the inward swirl of her ear, "in… in Ecc—Ecclesiastes."
"Very wise. Shall I tell you something too? What would you like to hear?"
"I—I…"
"About
the kimono?" His hands had moved under her, under the silk, stroking it against her back, massaging the slippery lining against her spine. His mouth arrived above hers and hovered there. "This golden crane and her mate mean happiness, long life, and faithfulness." He spoke the words with his mouth on hers, each one becoming a hungry caress. "The star shapes are maple leaves." They were low on her back, under her buttocks, and he lifted her silently, sliding his open hand beneath the fabric, shaping it to her. "And these are plum blossoms…" Under her thighs, his hand moved there, and she shivered. There were pine boughs, also, long curves that he followed across the fabric, pulling it over her ribs, the silk a sensual tickle on the underside of her breast.
Her fingers sought his shirt and began with the clumsiness of desperation to open it. She needed to feel his skin, she needed its nourishment; it made her blood a new, richer mixture.
"Cover me with yourself," she breathed.
Clear blue-green eyes alight, he laughed softly, the laugh husky and charming, as if he'd been running hard, breaking in an involuntary murmur when her hands brushed over his chest as she pulled off his shirt. "I can't," he said. "I'm sorry. Not yet. It would be…"
"No fun?"
He half-laughed, half-groaned. "Too much fun, too quickly. Oh, dear God, your sweet little mouth. I can't get enough of it…" Touching no other part of her, he took her face in his hands and brought his mouth down on hers and kissed her until the breath was painful in her throat and her ribs hurt and she moaned each time his mouth came down on her and each time he entered her mouth with his tongue.
He lifted her hand, spread her fingers wide apart, and stroked with his forefinger on the center of her palm. "This," he said hoarsely, "put this on my skin."
"Yes, yes…" Under her hands, with their heightened sensitivity, she discovered the erotic tension in the muscles of his shoulders, the drive of his pulse, the uneasy contractions of his rib cage as he breathed. She relearned his skin, supple firmness underlaid with iron, and every flexure of muscle when he moved drew a sensual response from her, the feeling that her body was rising and sinking at the same time.