“What happens when you get tired?”
“Then you go to sleep,” he said. “But I’m not tired yet.”
“Neither am I,” she said happily. “The way I feel now I could do it forever.”
“Drink wine and make love?”
“Not both of them forever,” she said. “After awhile I’d get tired of drinking all that wine.”
The wine was as bad as he had said it was, if not worse, and although she had never partaken of the urine of a goat it seemed logical that what they were drinking wasn’t far removed from it in taste. But the wine accomplished its intended objective. While its effect on Don wasn’t noticeable, it got her higher than a space platform.
It was funny, she thought, the way the room was spinning so strangely. It was just a little after five in the morning and the sun wasn’t up yet, and that was one hell of an hour for the room to be spinning.
“Hell of an hour for room-spinning,” she warbled.
Don put down the bottle and kissed her.
“We should drink out of glasses,” she said after the kiss ended, which wasn’t right away.
“Why?”
“More civilized.”
“Who wants to be civilized? We’re pagans.”
“Pagans?”
“Mad foolish pagans waiting for the sun to come up so we can worship it in the proper manner. Put down the bottle and kiss me, pagan.”
She put down the bottle and kissed him. Her head was spinning like a top.
“Stand up, pagan.”
When she stood up she had to lean against him for support. She clutched him and her mouth reached up for his. Her tongue darted at once into his mouth and his arms went around her to hold her.
Her blood was pounding and she felt as though she was coming apart at the seams. The wine was having a definite effect on her and it was doing more than making her dizzy. Her whole body seemed to be alive, alive and demanding, and she wanted him with a desperate passion.
“Don—”
“Take off your clothes.”
He let go of her and with some effort she managed to remain on her feet. He was undressing quickly and deliberately, letting his clothes fall wherever they landed. He didn’t look at her while he undressed.
She began taking off her own clothing. It was great fun, she discovered, to take off a blouse and just throw it on the floor instead of hanging it up. It was even more fun to do the same thing with a skirt.
And with a bra.
And with panties.
“Don,” she said happily, “I’m naked.”
“So you are,” he agreed. “So am I.”
She looked at him from head to toe. “Yes,” she said. “I guess you are.”
He was about three feet away from her but he made no move toward her. His eyes caressed her as efficiently and as effectively as hands could have and under his gaze she began to grow hot and passionate, aching with desire for him.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Hurry up.”
He leaned over and picked up the wine bottle. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “There’s still some left. I thought we killed the bottle.”
“Who cares?” she demanded. “Forget the wine.”
“Can’t forget the wine.”
Her passion mounted and she rubbed her thighs together, impatient, wanting him.
“Lie down on the bed,” he ordered. “On your back.”
She did as he told her. He walked over to the side of the bed, the wine bottle in his hand.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to drink the wine,” he said gravely.
“Later—”
“I’m going to drink the wine in a new and improved fashion,” he said. “You shall be the glass.”
Before she could ask him what he meant by that he had tilted the bottle and the wine spilled onto her body. Most of it splashed on her breasts but some of it trickled down over her stomach and below. It was very cold and the sudden contact served only to excite her still more.
“You make a lovely wine glass,” he told her.
Then he was beside her on the bed. Now she saw what he meant about drinking the wine with her for the glass. His tongue began to lick up the wine from her body, starting just below her throat. The effect of the wine on her brain and his tongue on her smooth skin was enough to drive her wild from the first second, and when he reached her breasts it was more than she could bear.
Some wine had spilled lower.
On her stomach.
Below her stomach.
He didn’t miss a drop.
Then, when her passion was higher than it had ever been before, he took her quickly and savagely and exquisitely, tormenting her with the sheer beauty of his love, thrusting her higher and higher to the very pinnacle of love until she had to cry out at the moment of fulfillment.
Then her arms tightened around him and they slept like twin corpses.
She was happier than she had ever been, happier, she felt, than she had any right to be. When she was with Don nothing mattered, nothing seemed important. It wasn’t just their lovemaking, though that was something that seemed to be better every single time. It was everything that passed between them. Walking down the street, sitting over coffee, proofreading copy for him while he worked on the tiresome business of editing the paper — everything was equally exciting to her. It was as though she had stepped into a new and different world, the world Don lived in. It was a world of hard drinking and hard living and hard loving, a world where the moment was vitally important and tomorrow could watch out for itself.
She couldn’t help worrying about Don some of the time. He didn’t seem to have any plans, didn’t seem to know what he would be doing after he graduated. He didn’t have to worry about the army; a trick knee that he referred to as a million-dollar wound would keep him 4-F. But he didn’t plan on going to graduate school and he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea where he would go or how he would go about earning a living.
“Maybe I’ll grab a newspaper job,” he said once. “I was glancing through a copy of E & P — you know, Editor and Publisher — and there are jobs all over the damned place.”
But when she would try to get him to talk about a newspaper job he would shift the subject.
“Hell, who wants to write news-copy for a lifetime? Boring goddamned job, Linda. Maybe I’ll try free-lancing or something. Or publishing work — go to New York and hunt up some kind of editorial assistant work. That might not be bad.”
What it boiled down to, she knew, was that Don didn’t want to do much of anything. He refused to make plans for the future and he refused to worry about it, and this attitude didn’t make her any too happy.
For one thing, she had a feeling that whatever plans Don had didn’t include her. Time and time again she told him how much she loved him, and although he didn’t exactly dodge the issue she knew that he had never told her that he was in love with her. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but he didn’t say anything to her one way or the other.
It wasn’t hard for her to tell that he meant more to her than she meant to him. She tried to tell herself that this was natural — that she had never had a lover before while Don had had many women. But she couldn’t help feeling there was more to it than that.
And it scared her. If anything happened between the two of them, if suddenly he didn’t want her any more, she didn’t know what she would do. He was her whole life — nothing else mattered to her, and not only didn’t she see how she could live without him but she had trouble remembering how she had managed to live before the two of them were together. She couldn’t imagine sleeping without him sleeping at her side, couldn’t imagine living through an entire day without seeing him and talking to him. And she knew that this was dangerous.