Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [52]
She touches the cloth of his coat at his chest. It is damp from the rain.
Haskell hooks his arm around her shoulders and draws her to him with a powerful grip. She has a distinct sense of vigor. Not accustomed to feeling small, she is nearly lost in his embrace. Releasing an arm, she reaches a hand up behind his head and pulls him toward her, her actions as instinctive to her as it is to bat a fly away from one’s face. He opens his mouth, shocking her, for she has never had such a kiss. She tastes his tongue, the inner lining of his lips. Her head is tilted at an angle, and her neck is drawn long and exposed. Haskell slowly slides his mouth all along the skin there, and she shivers against him.
And then that is all. That is all the time they have.
He backs away, his empty hands forming a shape, his mouth seemingly wishing to speak a word. His tie has come undone, and unable to speak herself, she points to her own collar to tell him. She can feel the weight of her disheveled hair pulling itself loose. She tries to repin it as they stand there. Haskell’s face has turned an unnatural red, and her mouth feels raw.
Her father comes through the swinging door.
“So you have found her,” her father says amiably, looking at them but not really looking at them. “This is the volume I wanted to show you, Haskell. The photographs are astonishing.”
He glances from Haskell to Olympia and seems puzzled by his daughter’s immobility.
“Can I help?” he asks.
AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with Haskell in the kitchen, they sit on the porch, surrounded by the gray brocade of an unrelenting cloud cover. Haskell converses politely with her father, and how he manages to do that, Olympia cannot imagine. It seems incongruous — beyond incongruous — to be eating blueberry scones and speaking of photography and the new century, when only moments before, she and Haskell came together in the way they did in the kitchen. And as will happen often to her this summer, she is accosted by a moment of pure astonishment that such events can possibly be occurring in her life. If she but thinks about the kiss in the kitchen, she feels a fluttering sensation in her abdomen, and her face becomes suffused with color. She experiences the reality again and again and again, a series of brief shocks upon both her soul and her body. How can Haskell and she have done that? she wonders. They who have no right to have transgressed in that manner? And yet, in the way one may hold within the mind two separate and contradictory thoughts or theories, she believes in the next moment that they have no choice but to respond as they do, that what draws her to Haskell and him to her is as natural as it is to breathe.
She awakens the next morning to an oily green sea, the surface flat and reflecting no light at all, a pond covered with scum. She has spent a restless night and is not certain she slept at all; and she wonders if her perception of the color of the ocean isn’t a result at least as much of her sleep-deprived state as of Nature’s inclinations.
Since it is a Sunday, and her father does not consider it proper to interrupt one’s service to God with summer pleasures, Olympia knows they will all be going to church. She dresses in a benumbed state, so preoccupied that it takes her nearly twice as long as usual to complete a perfectly ordinary toilet. She descends the stairs in a distracted flurry and takes her cloak and bonnet from Josiah. He tells her that perhaps the sun will break through the cloud cover before the day is over. He is dressed for church himself and adds that he will be accompanying them.
“Your mother and father are in the carriage already,” he says, looking at her oddly. “You are not unwell, I hope?”
“No, Josiah, I am well enough,” she says, burying her hair within her bonnet and grateful that the hat’s wide brim will hide the confusion on her face. At the doorway, he extends his arm, and she is relieved to have someone at this moment to lean upon.
It is a modest brown-shingled church with its trim painted in yellow ochre. It has a tall, wooden