Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [175]
Downstairs, Roger dealt with the spilled and scalded soup, berating himself. Where did he get off, lunging at her like a crazed salmon en route to the spawning grounds? Ripping off her towel and grappling her to the floor—Christ, she must think him next door to a rapist!
At the same time, the hot feeling that suffused his chest wasn’t due either to shame or to heat from the cooker. It was the latent heat from her skin, still warming him. I want you to, she’d said, and she’d meant it.
He was familiar enough with the language of the body to know desire and surrender when he touched them. But what he’d felt in that brief moment when her body came alive to his went a great deal farther. The universe had shifted, with a small, decisive click; he could still hear its echo in his bones.
He wanted her. He wanted all of her; not just bed, not just body. Everything, always. Suddenly the biblical injunction, one flesh, seemed something immediate, and very real. They’d nearly been just that, on the floor of the hallway, and stopping as he had made him feel suddenly and peculiarly vulnerable—he wasn’t a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.
He dumped the ruined remains of the soup into the sink. No matter; they’d have supper at the pub. Best to get out of the house and away from temptation.
Supper, casual chat, and maybe a walk by the river. She’d wanted to go to the Christmas Eve services. After that …
After that, he would ask her, make it formal. She would say yes, he knew. And then …
Why, then, they would come home, to a house dark and private. With themselves alone, on a night of sacrament and secret, with love newly come into the world. And he would lift her in his arms and carry her upstairs, on a night when virginity’s sacrifice was no loss of purity, but rather the birth of everlasting joy.
Roger switched out the light and left the kitchen. Behind him, forgotten, the gas flame burned blue and yellow in the dark, ardent and steady as the fires of love.
18
UNSEEMLY LUST
The Reverend Wakefield had been a kindly and ecumenical man, tolerant of all shades of religious opinion, and willing to entertain doctrines his flock would have found outrageous, if not downright blasphemous.
Still, a lifetime of exposure to the stern face of Scottish Presbyterianism and its abiding suspicion of anything “Romish” had left Roger with a certain residual uneasiness upon entering a Catholic church—as though he might be seized at the door and forcibly baptized by outlandishly dressed minions of the True Cross.
No such violence offered as he followed Brianna into the small stone building. There was a boy in a long white robe visible at the far end of the nave, but he was peaceably engaged in lighting two pairs of tall white candles that decorated the altar. A faint, unfamiliar scent hung in the air. Roger inhaled, trying to be unobtrusive about it. Incense?
Beside him, Brianna stopped, rummaging in her purse. She took out a small circle of black lacy stuff, and bobby-pinned it to the top of her head.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you call it,” she said. “It’s what you wear in church if you don’t want to wear a hat or a veil. You don’t really have to do it anymore, but I grew up doing it—it used to be that women couldn’t go into a Catholic church with their heads uncovered, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, interested. “Why not?”
“Saint Paul, probably,” she said, whipping a comb from her purse to tidy the ends of her hair. “He thought women ought to keep their hair covered all the time, so as not to be objects of unseemly lust. Cranky old crab,” she added, stuffing the comb back into the purse. “Mama always said he was afraid of women. Thought they were dangerous,” she said, with a wide grin.
“They are.” Impulsively, he leaned forward and kissed her, ignoring the stares of the people nearby.
She looked surprised, but then rocked forward on her toes and kissed him back, soft and quick. Roger heard a faint “Mmphm” of disapproval somewhere nearby,