Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [11]
Carefully she took both his hands off of her, raised them above his shoulders, and rolled over him and pinned him like a wrestler. Straddling his thighs this way, looking down on his face, she felt stunned to her core by this human presence so close to her. He smiled, that odd parenthetic grin she already knew to look for. It’s that simple, then, she thought. It’s that possible. She bent down to him, tasting the salt skin of his chest with the sensitive tip of her tongue, and then exploring the tight drum of his abdomen. He shuddered at the touch of her warm breath on his skin, giving her to know that she could take and own Eddie Bondo. It was the body’s decision, a body with no more choice of its natural history than an orchid has, or the bee it needs, and so they would both get lost here, she would let him in, anywhere he wanted to go. In the last full hour of daylight, while lacewings sought solace for their brief lives in the forest’s bright upper air, and the husk of her empty nylon parka lay tangled with his in the mud, their two soft-skinned bodies completed their introductions on the floor of her porch. A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
It seemed to take forever, afterward in the thickening twilight, to recover her resting heartbeat. He lay looking past her into the darkened woods, apparently untroubled by his own heart. Thrushes were singing, it was that late. A wind kicked up, shaking more raindrops out of the trees to ring like buckshot on the cabin’s tin roof and scald the naked parts of their bodies with cold. She studied a drop of water that hung from his earlobe, caught in the narrowest possible sliver of a gold ring that penetrated his left ear. Could he possibly be as beautiful as he seemed to her? Or was he just any man, a bone thrown to her starvation?
With his left hand he worked out some of the tangles his handiwork had put into her hair. But he was still looking away; the hand moved by itself, without his attention. She wondered if he worked with animals or something.
Coming back from someplace he’d been, he moved his eyes to her face. “Hey, pretty girl. Do you have a name?”
“Deanna.”
He waited. “Deanna and that’s all?”
“Deanna and I’m not sure of the rest.”
“Now that’s different: the girl with no last name just yet.”
“I’ve got one, but it’s my husband’s—was my husband’s. Or it is, but he was.” She sat up and shivered, watching him stand to pull his jeans on. “You wouldn’t know, but it leaves you in a quandary. That name is nothing to me now, but it’s still yet stuck all over my life, on my driver’s license and everything.”
“‘Still yet,’” he mocked, smiling at her, considering her words. “That’s the male animal for you. Scent marking.”
She had a good laugh at that. “That’s it. Put his territorial mark on everything I owned, and then walked away.”
Amazingly, Eddie Bondo walked to the end of her porch and peed over the edge. She didn’t realize it until she heard the small, sudden spatter hitting the leaves of the mayapples and Christmas fern. “Oh, good Lord,” she said.
He turned to look at her over his shoulder, surprised. “What? Sorry.” His arc declined and dribbled out, and he tucked himself away.
She said quietly, “You’re still in my territory.”
Deanna had been chaste through her teens, too shy for the rituals of altered appearance that boys seemed to require and, lacking a mother, too far outside the game to learn. When she went away to college she found herself taken in and mentored by much older men—professors, mainly—until she married one. Her farm-bred worldliness, her height, her seriousness—something—had caused her to skip a generation ahead. She’d never before known what men in their late twenties had to offer. Eddie Bondo knew what he was doing