I threw back my head, let the earth's silver dowsing rod delve me like a dream lover, and howled my freedom to the star-sprinkled skies.
My face was turned into Ric's shoulder again. We were upright, I pressed against him, he against me, still joined.
What if you didn't know anything about yourself? Not really.
Like most people, I'd grown a protective shell, only mine was thicker than most. Hard as nails. The phrase meant the metal nails that won't bend under the hardest hammering, but I always thought of women's fingernails when I heard it: that odd growing part of us that is such slight protection, brittle enough to break at one wrong glancing word or gesture; tough enough, if we're driven enough or desperate enough, to wound.
Oh, some of us flaunt our fingernails, paint thin clear enamel carapaces over them, sometimes tinted as pink as rare meat, sometimes bold and red as a stoplight, sometimes glittery like jewelry. But they are still a fragile element of our bodies, no matter how thick the shell over the exposed nerves and thin-skinned flesh beneath, and pulling them out was an ancient form of torture.
My nail polish was neutral and effacing, but as impervious as shellac.
The Wichita, Kansas, TV studio had the usual food room: sink, microwave, dishes, silverware, vending machines. Although the on-camera women were supposed to be uniformly slender, the support staff brought homemade pastries and desserts. We gathered around the treats to nibble or gorge, depending on our metabolisms and moods of the moment. One time a woman had exclaimed that some hit of whipped-cream, chocolate-laden sugar was "better than sex." A quick poll named the top better-than-sex dessert: carrot cake. A lone vote for banana cream pie won a lusty group laugh, and the woman who craved those huge trans-fatty glazed donuts was told with giggles and knowing titters that she could combine the two. I'd laughed knowingly too, although I only got the reference now. My own fave had been lost in the hullabaloo: gourmet coffee and chocolate.
Now I knew that little office coffee klatch conversation for an exchange so shallow that even Irma at her ditziest was light years away from explaining the enormous risk and reward of having sex.
The wellsprings of trust involved dazzled me. The emotional liberation of feeling trust on such an intimate level left me with a peace and gratitude for being alive I'd never imagined. All the happy TV commercial couples, the hyper-passionate romance-novel couples, had seemed part of some elaborate play everybody else liked to pretend they were now starring in. What I felt here and now was real. Was it love? That fast and easily? I didn't know. I'd just have to trust that, whatever it was, it was right for us both. That, beyond the first-time mechanics and even though he whispered-warning, apologizing – that I'd be…tender, delicado…the next day, as long as I felt this inner conviction, I'd never be sorry. Trust. It meant that Rick would not hurt me, and if he ever did, I knew the pain would be mortal.
That's how I felt as I beached myself on Ric, feeling his body as a solid breathing wall behind me. His fingers were caressing my inner outer edges. A wall. A wave.
His shirt collar was still open. In the mirror I glimpsed a shadow, blue-black, the only dark place on him besides his hair and eyelashes. My open mouth swiveled to that sole entry to him.
He was still inside me, against me, behind and in front, fingers and one long, hard thick finger, so I felt deliriously surrounded. I let myself sag against him, held up by his invasive prongs like a paper doll on pushpins.
The shadow at his throat, his collarbone, teased my eyes.
My head lolled on his shoulder. "What's this?"
His face was close, focused down on me, eyes slit. I touched his skin under the slightly open collar.
"What do you think you feel, what do you see?" he asked.
I brushed his collar aside. Frowned. "You're…wounded."
He made a humming sound like a purring cat. My fingers pressed against the shadow. Puffy flesh, darkening as I touched it.
"Ric! Did…I do that?"
"Yeah. When you zoned out over the dead zone in the park. You…spasmed. All over. I felt every tremor. Then you turned your head into my neck and shoulder. And bit. You did that."
I stared at his bruised skin just peeking beyond the white starched corner of his shirt.
"I bit you?"
"Yeah."
"No! I'm not a vampire! I hate those bloodsuckers. I'd never do that."
He touched my lips, pushed his forefinger onto the ticklish top of my mouth until I panted with a strange sort of lassitude.
"Maybe you're a werewolf. I don't care. It's okay. It's a totally human thing, called a love bite, a passion mark, a hickey."
What was I?
"A deliciously passionate woman," he told me in the kitchen, where he applied an ice pack and antibiotic ointment to his neck on my insistence.
What I regarded as a scary untreated wound he seemed to consider a sensual trophy. Weird. But what did I know about any of this?
"But I need a little R &R until our next round. Waiting makes all the difference," he added, his eyes hot-fudge warm.
Not me! I resisted, not insisted. I feared, not dared. I was a…nice person.
Not hot.
Ric came close again, pulled me hip to hip. "We could…share a shower. A bed. Sleep. Or we could do what I really, really want to do."
"And that is?"
"I want to drive…you…home again."
Oh. The very thought of that low, leather-lined car with major vibrating road feel undid me. Ric's hands on the stick shift. Right. Drive me home. The reins were back in his hands. Drive me.
By now the semi-reclining passenger seat, sans seatbelt, would have been tolerable, but Ric didn't lower it. Instead, he pulled me down sideways once we were on the road, across the central compartment, my head pillowed on his iron-muscled thigh that any woman would have killed to have.
I was strangely out of it, dreamy. His fingers teased my skirt up over my bare hip, and then caressed my uppermost breast under the camisole. Again I was lulled by that easy, fringes sort of lovemaking, what pleased him as he steered the car and trifled with my body swaying to the drone of the engine, the motion, the fondling.
We made the same dreamy approach to my cottage door; only Ric stopped us at the bottom of the shallow steps to the front door.
"I hate to say this, believe me, but I've got to leave town again."
I didn't will it, but my fingers curled hard into his jacket lapels.
"Just a quick trip to D.C. to report on the Juarez situation. I'll be back in a couple of days."
"What'll I do for a couple of days?"
"Keep checking out the Sunset Park killings. That ought to keep you in the libraries and out of trouble. Besides, you'll be tender."
"So you want me on the shelf while you're gone?"
"I want you somewhere safe, Del, and thinking about when I come back."
"You got it," I said. Promised. I ran my hands along the smooth, silken edges of his lapels.
I was so besotted at that instant that I wanted to make love to his clothes, but I stopped myself from asking that he leave me the jacket. Now I understood why the public high school girls had coveted and worn their boyfriends' letter jackets. Or leather jackets, depending on what crowd they ran with. I had been so retarded! But Ric was catching me up fast. Hickeys. Letter jackets. Lust.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Quicksilver had given me the doggie third degree when I returned from my rendezvous with Ric. He'd not only sniffed my crotch and growled, but he sniffed my discarded clothes and growled even more. Then he curled up in the corner of my bedroom and regarded me accusingly while I began preparing for bed. At least I was home alone. Sort of.
That intent pale-blue gaze was enough to make me take my underwear off behind the closed bathroom door. Jeez! I escape having overprotective parents to answer to by being born an orphan and then I get a dog that thinks he's a duenna, which means chaperone in Spanish.