moved it. He moved. She moved away, a sudden voice urgent in her ears: _you
can't do this you can't do this you can't do it you can't_.
He rose. The way he did it made it seem as though he was doing it for
the first time after aeons of repose, the way movement gathered in his muscles
to lift his heavy weight, the way his hands took hold of the couch to help him
up; it was like watching something inanimate come frighteningly, purposefully
alive in a dream. As he stood, his eyes somehow caught the fire's bight and
the pupils glowed brilliant red.
She was in a corner, holding hen glass before her breasts protectively,
her daring gone. "Wait," she said, on tried to say, but it was a sound only,
and he had hen: it was useless to struggle because he was helpless. She was
swallowed up in his strength but he was helpless, taking her because he no
longer had a choice: and she had done that to him. An enormous odor came from
him, dense as an attar, mingling with the smell of spilled brandy; she could
hear his quick breath close to her ear, and her trembling hand fumbled with
his at her belt. Her heart was mad, and another voice, shrill, drowned out the
first: _you're going to do it you're going to do it you're going to_.
"Yes," she said. She yanked at her belt. A button tore. "Yes."
She had thought that a single act of surrender was all she needed to
make, that having made it she would be deprived of all will, all consciousness
by passion, and that whatever acts followed would follow automatically. Her
heat hadn't imagined difficulties; her heat had only imagined some swift,
ineluctable coupling, bike contrary winds mixing in a storm. It wasn't like
that. He wasn't a man; they didn't fit smoothly together. It was like labor;
bike battles.
And yet she did find the ways, poised at times between repugnance and
elation, to bare herself to him; drowned at times, suffocated at times in him
as though he plunged her head under water; afraid at times that he might
casually, thoughtlessly kill her; able to marvel, sometimes, as though she
were another, at what they did, feeling, as though through another's skin, the
coarse hair of his arms and legs, thick enough almost to take handfuls of. For
every conjunction they achieved, there were layers of shame to be fought
through like the layers of their thick clothing: and only by shameless
strategies. only by act after strenuous act of acquiescence, her voice hoarse
from exertion and her body slick with sweat, did she conquer them: and entered
new cities, panting, naked, amazed.
She began to sob then, not knowing why; her legs, nerveless, folded
under his careless weight. She lay against his thick thigh, which trembled as
though he had run a mile. She coughed out sobs, sobs like the sobs of someone
who has survived a great calamity: been shipwrecked, suffered, seen death, but
against all odds, with no hope, has survived, has found a shore.
She dreamed, toward dawn, curled against him, of muscle; of the tensed
legs of his wives bearing him, of the fine bones and muscles of his hands, of
hen own slim arms wrapped in his, struggling with his. The soreness of hen own
muscles entered her dream, hen own sinews tightening and slackening. She
dreamed: _I did it I did it I did it_. She awoke exulting then for a moment
and curled herself tighter against his deathlike sleep. She dreamed of his
punning dreaming breath; it grew huge and menacing, and she awoke to the fast
tick of the searching helicopter growing quickly closer. She moved to awake
him, but he was awake already; all his senses pointed toward the growing
sound. It became a roar, and its wind stirred in the cabin. It had landed
outside.
He had a hand on her that she knew meant keep still. He turned, crouched
and silent, toward the door, which was locked. Feet came across the pine
needles toward the door with a sound they wouldn't have heard if they weren't
all attention. Someone tried the door, paused, knocked, waited, pounded
impatiently, waited again, then kicked in the door with a sudden crack. For a
moment she could see a man silhouetted against the morning, could see him
hesitate, looking into the shuttered gloom of the cabin, could see the gun in
his hands. Then Painter, beside her, exploded.
She didn't see Painter move, nor did the one at the door, but there was
a cry from his throat and a flurry of motion and he had seized the intruder,
who made one sound, a sound Caddie would never forget -- the desperate, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]