Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [10]
She bent to see, aware of her own breathing as she touched the small, raised knob where this orchid would force its pollinator to drag his abdomen before allowing him to flee for his life. She felt a sympathetic ache in the ridge of her pubic bone.
How could she want this stranger? How was it reasonable to do anything now but stand up and walk away from him? But when he bent his face sideways toward hers she couldn’t stop herself from laying a hand on his jaw, and that was enough. The pressure of his face against hers moved her slowly backward until they lay together on the ground, finally yielding to earthly gravity. Crushing orchids under their bodies, she thought vaguely, but then she forgot them for it seemed she could feel every layer of cloth and flesh and bone between his body and her thumping heart, the individual follicles of his skin against her face, even the ridges and cracks in his lips when they touched her. She closed her eyes against the overwhelming sensations, but that only made them more intense, in the same way closed eyes make dizziness more acute. She opened her eyes then, to make this real and possible, that they were kissing and lying down in the cold leaves, falling together like a pair of hawks, not plummeting through thin air but rolling gradually downhill over adder’s tongues and poisonous Amanitas. At the bottom of the hill they came to rest, his body above hers. He looked down into her eyes as if there were something behind them, deep in the ground, and he pulled brown beech leaves from her hair.
“What about that. Look at you.”
“I can’t.” She laughed. “Not for years. I don’t have a mirror in my cabin.”
He pulled her to her feet and they walked for several minutes in stunned silence.
“The head of the jeep road’s here,” she pointed out when they came to it. “My cabin’s just up ahead, but that road runs straight downhill to the little town down there. If that’s what you were looking for, the way out.”
He stood looking downhill, briefly, then turned her shoulders gently to face him and took her braid in his hand. “I was thinking I’d found what I was looking for.”
Her eyes moved to the side, to unbelief, and back. But she let herself smile when his hands moved to her chest and began to part the layers of clothing that all seemed to open from that one place above her heart. He peeled back her nylon jacket, slipped it off her shoulders down to her bent elbows.
“Finding’s not the same as looking,” she said, but there was the scent of his hair again and his collar as he laid his mouth against her jawbone. That wool intoxication made her think once again of thirst, if she could name it something, but a thirst of eons that no one living could keep from reaching to slake, once water was at hand. She worked her elbows free of her jacket and let it drop into the mud, raised her hands to the zipper of his parka, and rolled the nylon back from him like a shed skin. Helping this new thing emerge, whatever it was going to be. They moved awkwardly the last hundred yards toward her cabin, refusing to come apart, trailing their packs and half their nylon layers.
She let go of him then and sat down on the planks at the un-sheltered edge of her porch to pull off her boots.
“This where you live?”
“Yep,” she said, wondering what else needed to be said. “Me and the bears.”
He sat next to her and brought his finger to her lips. No more talking about this, he seemed to be saying—but they had never talked about this, she was still not sure it was real. He guided her shoulders to the floor and lay next to her, stroking her face, unbuttoning her undershirt and touching her under her clothes, moving down, finding her, until it was only his mouth on hers that stopped her from crying out. She arched her back and slid her weapon gently out and away across the floorboards. This was all much too fast, her pelvis arched itself up again and she did cry out then, just a woman’s