Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [58]
He tilts his head and considers her for a long moment, as though he might be going to paint her portrait, as though he were seeing planes and lines and curves rather than a face.
But there is expectation in his features, too. Definitely expectation.
“Olympia,” he says.
He unfolds his arms and walks toward her. He puts his hands to the back of her neck. He bends her head toward his chest, where she rests it gratefully, flooded with an enormous sense of relief.
“If I truly loved you,” he says, “I would not let you do this.”
“You do truly love me,” she says.
He trails his fingers up and down her spine. Tentatively, she circles him with her arms. She has never held a man before, never felt a man’s broad back or made her way along its muscles. She no longer has fear, but neither does she have the intense hunger she will know later. The sensation is, rather, a sort of sliding against and sinking into another, so that she seems more liquid than corporeal. She brings her hands to the front of his shirt and lays her palms against him.
He seems to shudder slightly. His body is thicker than she has imagined it, or perhaps it is only that his tangible physical presence, under her palms, is more substantial than she has remembered. And it seems to her then that everything around her is heightened, emboldened, made larger than in her dreams.
“Olympia, we cannot do this.”
She is taken aback, unprepared for discussion.
“It is already done,” she says.
“No, it is not. We can stop this. I can stop this.”
“You do not want this to stop,” she says, and she believes this is true. She hopes this is true.
“I am a married man. You are only fifteen.”
“And do these facts matter?” she asks.
“They must,” he says.
He takes a step back from her. Her hands drop from his body. She shakes her head. She feels a sudden panic that she will lose him to his doubts.
“It is not what we are doing,” she says. “It is what we are.”
He briefly closes his eyes.
“I thought you understood that,” she says quietly.
“We will not be forgiven.”
“By whom?” she asks sharply. “By God?”
“By your father,” he says. “By Catherine.”
“No,” she says. “We will not be forgiven.”
An expression of surrender — or is it actually joy? — seems to wash over his features. She sees the strain of resistance leave his body.
“This will be very strange for you,” he says, trying to warn her.
“Then let it be strange,” she says. “I want it to be strange.”
He tries to unbutton the collar of her blouse but fumbles with the mother-of-pearl disks, which are difficult to undo. She stands away from him for a moment and unfastens the collar herself, impatient to reenter that liquid world that is only itself, not a prelude, nor an aftermath, nor a distraction, but rather an all-absorbing and enveloping universe.
There is a change in tempo then, a quickening of his breath and perhaps of hers, too. They embrace awkwardly. She hits a corner of the settee with the small of her back and stiffens. Her clothing seems clumsy and excessively detailed. He sheds his jacket in one sinuous motion. Her blouse is undone, open to the collarbone.
“Let me lie down,” she says.
If nothing is ever taught, how is it that the body knows how to move and where to place itself? It must be a kind of instinct — of course it is — a sense of physical practicality. Olympia has never had the act of love described, nor seen drawings, nor read any descriptions. Even the most ignorant of farmers’ children would have more knowledge than she.
She goes into the bedroom alone, into the room where Haskell and his wife have so recently lain together. The bed is unmade and rumpled, its occupant having left it in haste. There are no traces of Catherine now, nor of the photographs that were on the bureau. Olympia takes off her dress and her hose, her corset and petticoat. Wearing only her steps-ins and her vest, she lies down and covers herself.
Haskell