O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [133]
Well, vintage Amanda. She rambled on.
“At first I thought I’d make a list of things to explore, then I began to realize it could be never-ending, so I thought about keeping a diary to recall every detail, but I’ll remember what is to be remembered and until such time as I can give and receive with equal skill and ardor. I am at peace with the fact that you are experienced in these matters . . . and so forth and that you can introduce special pleasures you have experienced, but I don’t want details of with whom you discovered them and I have read the Marquis de Sade, and although I want no part of pain I want you to know I have been a sophisticated reader . . .”
Zach bolted the door and she drew the curtains.
“Undress, Captain,” she commanded. “I will see you buck naked now. I wish to see your cock.”
“Well, it’s really nothing, Amanda.”
He unbuttoned and undressed down to bedrock.
“You call that nothing!”
“It’s pretty much a standard issue.”
“Can I touch it?”
“Well, sure, but you see these things have a mind of their own and no matter how willful a man may be, he may not be able to suppress, I mean—did your girlfriends tell you about—”
“Premature ejaculations!”
“In a situation like this”—his voice went squeaky—“if the Marine finds relief once or twice, then he should be able to settle into the same . . . mode of his lover . . . girl.”
“We will go wild from time to time?”
“Depend on it.”
“And new things?”
“I don’t think we’re going to run out of ideas.”
Each square inch of the body gives off a different song. And their lips and fingers discovered them all, touching and feeling until the lover’s fingernails came alive with sensation . . . lips counting eyelashes.
. . . slow it down
You gaze, so sweetly dazed. Minutes, then hours of staring, until they could read each other’s prints and everything opened and welcomed them to hallelujah land.
All that night they floated on a pond of incredible calm. And became ready before daylight.
With exquisite care they mated, and even the pain of it was a hurt gladly acquired.
They were total lovers!
. . . good-bye, world . . .
“Your tummy’s churning,” Amanda said.
“It’s just the tide changing.”
Footsteps outside. They sat up in the feather beds. A firm knock.
“Who’s there?”
“Ned Green.”
Ned could hear them scurrying about. In a few moments they opened the door sheepishly. They could see Pearly on the other side of the creek.
“I been putting your plates at the door for four days now like you was in a zoo. You get over to the house and get some nourishment.”
Ned poked his head inside and called to Pearly. “Just what I thought. There was a shipwreck and two white people was washed up on the shore. They seem in terrible shape!”
“Leave them children alone!” Pearly called.
“Notice he ain’t carrying her around no more. Hell, he’d fall in the creek.”
Light-headed and wobbly, the lovers faced daylight, hanging on to each other for balance. Though lust was undimmed, it was overtaken, for the moment, by hunger.
Zach devoured four slabs of ribs smothered in enough beans for a squad and a quart of apple cider and corn bread troweled with strawberry jam, and Amanda wasn’t all that dainty, either. They waddled to the fireplace and curled up and cooed and listened to its crackling and heard distant voices come and go. “So they finally come out.” “Sure are powerful for white folk.” “Don’t you be getting no fancy ideas, Ulysses Green.”
By the end of the week they found themselves lured to Pearly’s table at main mealtime. Folks visited them and they took walks about the fields of Nebo. Amanda taught in the classroom for a time each day, or hung about the kitchen, or brightened up Veda’s cabin, or sat in the back of the Abyssinian Baptist Church holding hands with Zach and listening to choir practice.
Zach earned his keep at the boat shed, where the men repaired clam rakes and oyster diggers and mended nets and sails, sanding, caulking, and painting the hulls of the skipjacks.
Here Zach got drawn into the Nebo soft sport of arm