Night Over Water - Ken Follett [45]
He thought of how much he loved her, as he stood the grounds of the Langdown Lawn Hotel, staring at the bark of the oak tree. He was in a nightmare, one of those hellish dreams in which you start by feeling safe and happy, but you think, in a fit of idle speculation, of the worst thing that could occur, and suddenly you find that it is actually happening, the worst thing in the world is actually, unstoppably, terrifyingly happening, and there is nothing you can do about it.
What made it even more terrible is that they had quarreled just before he left home, and had parted without making it up.
She had been sitting on the couch, wearing a denim work shirt that belonged to him and not much else, her long, suntanned legs stretched out in front, her fine fair hair lying across her shoulders like a shawl. She was reading a magazine. Her breasts were normally quite small, but lately they had swollen. He felt an urge to touch them, and he thought: Why not? So he slid his hand inside the shirt and touched her nipple. She looked up at him and smiled lovingly, then went on with her reading.
He kissed the top of her head, then sat down next to her. She had astonished him right from the start. They were both shy at first, but soon after they returned from their honeymoon holiday and started living together here in the old farmhouse, she had become wildly uninhibited.
First she wanted to make love with the light on. Eddie felt awkward about it, but he consented, and he kind of liked it, although he felt bashful. Then he noticed that she did not lock the door when she took a bath. After that, he felt foolish about locking the door himself, so he did the same as she did, and one day she just walked in with no clothes on and got right in the tub with him! Eddie had never felt so embarrassed in his life. No woman had seen him naked since he was about four years old. He got an enormous hard-on just watching Carol-Ann wash her underarms, and he covered his dick with a washcloth until she laughed him out of it.
She started walking around the farmhouse in various states of undress. The way she was now, this was nothing. She was practically overdressed by her standards. You could only just see a little white triangle of cotton at the top of her legs where the shirt did not quite cover her panties. She was normally much worse. He would be making coffee in the kitchen and she would come in wearing nothing but her underwear and start toasting muffins; or he would be shaving and she would appear in her panties, with no brassiere, and just brush her teeth like that; or she would come into the bedroom stark naked with his breakfast on a tray. He wondered if she was “oversexed;” he had heard people use that term. But he also liked her to be that way. He liked it a lot. He had never dreamed he would have a beautiful wife who would walk around his house undressed. He felt so lucky.
Living with her for a year had changed him. He had gotten so uninhibited that he would walk naked from the bedroom to the bathroom; sometimes he did not even put on his pajamas before getting into bed; once he even took her here in the living room, right on that couch..
He still wondered whether there was something psychologically abnormal about this kind of behavior, but he had decided that it did not matter: he and Carol-Ann could do anything they liked. When he accepted that, he felt like a bird let out of a cage. It was incredible; it was wonderful; it was like being in heaven.
He sat beside her, saying nothing, just enjoying being with her and smelling the mild breeze coming in from the woods through the open windows. His bag was packed and in a few minutes he was leaving for Port Washington. Carol-Ann had left Pan American—she could