The wave broke over her, convulsing her with sobs that shook her very bones as she clung to him. He felt her quake and held her more tightly to him, burrowing his face to find hers, feeling the tears that streamed on her cheek and smoothing, soothing them with his lips. And when she felt the quaking subside, she slid her face through the pressing wetness and found his mouth.
He kissed her as he'd kissed her on the mountain, but with an urgency from which neither of them now would turn back. He held her face in his hands that he might kiss her more deeply and she moved her hands down his back and took hold of him below his arms and felt how hard his body was and so lean that she could lay her fingers in the grooved caging of his ribs. Then he held her in the same way and she trembled at the touch.
They leaned apart to catch their breath and look at one another.
'I can't believe you're here,' she said.
'I can't believe I ever went.'
He took her by the hand and led her past the Chevy, with its door still open and its lights now finding purchase in the fading light. The sky above them domed a deepening orange till it met the black of the mountains in a roar of carmine and vermilion cloud. Annie waited on the porch while he unlocked the door.
He didn't turn on any lights but led her through the shadows of the living room where their footsteps creaked and echoed on the wooden floor and penumbral sepia faces watched their passage from the pictures on the walls.
She had a longing for him so powerful that as they climbed the wide staircase it felt almost like sickness. They reached the landing and walked hand in hand past the open doors of rooms strewn like an abandoned ship with discarded clothes and toys. The door of his room was also open and he stood aside for her to go in then followed her and closed the door.
She saw how wide and bare the room was, not how she'd imagined it those many nights she'd seen the light at his window. Through that same window now she could see the creek house shaped black against the sky. The room was filled with a waning glow that turned all it touched to coral and gray.
He reached out and drew her to him to kiss her again. Then, without a word, he started to undo the long line of buttons at the front of her dress. She watched him do it, watched his fingers and then his face, the little concentrating frown. He looked up and saw her watching but didn't smile, just held her look as he undid the last button. The dress fell open and when he slid his hands inside it and touched her skin she gasped and shivered. He held her by her sides as before and bent his head and gently kissed the tops of her breasts above her bra.
And Annie leaned back her head and closed her eyes and thought, there is nothing but this. No other time, nor place nor being than now and here and him and us. And no earthly point in calculating consequence or permanence or right or wrong, for all, all else, was as nothing to the act. It had to be and would be and was.
Tom led her to the bed and they stood beside it while she stepped from her shoes and started to unbutton his shirt. Now it was his turn to watch and he did so as if from some reaching crest of wonder.
Never before had he made love in this room. Nor never, since Rachel, in a place that he could call his home. He had gone to women's beds but never let them come to his. He had casualized sex, kept it distant that he might keep himself free and protect himself from the kind of need he'd seen in Rachel and which now he felt for Annie. Her presence, in the sanctum of this room, thus took on a significance that was both daunting and wondrous.
The light from the window set aglow her glimpsing skin where her dress fell open. She undid his belt and the top of his jeans and pulled his shirt clear so she could roll it off his shoulders.
In the momentary blindness as he pulled off his T-shirt, he felt her hands on his chest. He lowered his head and kissed again between her breasts and breathed the smell of her deep into his lungs as if he would drown in it. He eased the dress gently from her shoulders.
'Oh Annie.'
She parted her lips but said nothing, just held his gaze and reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. It was plain and white and edged above with simple lace. She lifted the straps from her shoulders and let it fall away. Her body was beautiful. Her skin pale, except at the neck and arms where the sun had turned it a freckled gold. Her breasts were fuller than he'd thought they'd be, though still firm, her nipples large and set high. He put his hands to them and then his face and felt the nipples gather and stiffen at the brush of his lips. Her hands were at the zipper of his jeans.
'Please,' she breathed.
He pulled the faded quilt from the bed and opened the sheets and she laid herself down and watched him take off his boots and socks and then his jeans and shorts..And he felt no shame nor saw any in her, for why should they feel shame at what was not of their making but of some deeper force that stirred not just their bodies but their souls and knew naught of shame nor of any such construct?
He knelt on the bed beside her and she reached out and took his erection in her hands. She bent her head and brushed her lips around the rim of it so exquisitely that he shuddered and had to close his eyes to find some lower, more tolerable key.
Her eyes, when he ventured to look at her again, were dark and glazed with the same desire he knew glazed his own. She let go of him and lay back and lifted her hips for him to take off her panties. They were of a pale, functional gray cotton. He ran his hand over the soft bulge within them then pulled them gently down.
The triangle of revealed hair was deep and thick and of the darkest amber. Its curling tips trapped the last glimmer of the light. Just above it ran the paled scar of a caesarean. The sight of it moved him, though he knew not why, and he lowered his head and traced its length with his lips. The brush of her hair on his face and the warm, sweet smell he found there moved him more powerfully and he lifted his head and leaned back on his heels that he might catch his breath and see her more fully.
They surveyed each other now in their nakedness, letting their eyes roam and feed with an incredulous, suspended, mutual hunger. The air was filled with the urgent synchrony of their breathing and the room seemed to swell and fold to its rhythm like an enclosing lung.
'I want you inside me,' she whispered. 'I don't have anything to—' 'It doesn't matter. It's safe. Just come inside me.' With a little frown of need, she reached for the tilt of him again and as she closed her fingers on it, he felt she had possession of the very root of his being. He came forward again on his knees, letting her steer him in toward her.
As he saw Annie open herself before him and felt the soft collision of their flesh, Tom saw suddenly again in his mind those birds, wide-winged and black and nameless, soaring below him against the green of the river. He felt he was returning from some distant land of exile and that here, and only here, he could be whole again.
It seemed to Annie, when he entered her, that he dislodged in her loins some hot and vivid surge that swept slowly the entire length of her body to lap and furrow around her brain. She felt the swell of him within her, felt the gliding fusion of their two halves. She felt the caress of his hard hands on her breasts and opened her eyes to see him bend his head to kiss them. She felt the travel of his tongue, felt him take her nipple in his teeth.
His skin was pale, though not as pale as hers, and on his rib-furrowed chest the cruciform of hair was darker than the sunbleach of his head. There was a kind of supple angularity to him, born of his work, which somehow she had expected. He moved on her with that same centered confidence she'd seen in him all along; only now, focused exclusively on her in this new domain, it was both more overt and intense. She wondered how this body that she'd never seen, this flesh, these parts of him she'd never touched, could yet feel so known and fit her so well.