Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [43]
“No, I mean, nowhere important. From a wildlife-management point of view.” From anybody’s point of view, probably.
“Well now, pretty lady. Does that mean you’re off duty?”
She caught her breath, wondering at his power to manipulate her desire. She wanted to stop and tear him apart on the trail, swallow him alive, suck his juices, and lick him from her fingers. “It’s just a place I like,” she said evenly. “More a thing than a place. It’s right up here at the top of these switchbacks.”
The trail was extremely steep from this point on to where it lay, the great old friendly hollowed-out shelter she was headed for, a hundred more feet up the mountain. She could hear his footsteps and breathing right behind her, synchronized with hers.
“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” he asked.
“Vegetable. Dead vegetable. Since way before we were born.”
“Is it…a big old hollow tree?”
She froze but didn’t turn around.
“About ten feet long and yea tall, so you just have to duck your head when you walk into it? Nope, never seen it.”
She wheeled to face him, her braid flying. “That’s my place!”
“Don’t you think a few other people might have run across it? It’s been lying there about a hundred years.”
“No! Nobody else ever comes up here.” She broke into a run, but he overtook her from behind, a little faster than she was at an uphill sprint. With his hands on her hips he pulled but mostly pushed her, and before she could dodge him they had reached the tunnel tree, there was no turning back from it now. There it was, and lodged in the shadows inside of it, stashed neatly away from the rain, were his things: his pack, his tin cup and coffeepot, his whole Eddie Bondo life.
“I can’t believe you’ve been here,” she said, still denying it to herself.
“Lots of critters been here, don’t you think?”
“No,” she said, and nothing more because his mouth was on hers and his body was pushing her inside. He moved his pack aside, moved her backward into the delicate darkness toward the tunnel’s very center, the safest place.
“It’s mine,” she whispered.
“Who cut it down, then?”
She could see nothing but his face, feel nothing but the exquisite grain of his skin against her cheek and his hands on her buttons. “Nobody. It’s a chestnut. Blight killed all the chestnuts fifty years ago.”
“Nobody chopped it down?”
She knew it was possible. Her dad had told her how people had watched the chestnuts mysteriously dying and rushed to take what was left standing since they needed the lumber so badly. But no, if somebody had gone to that trouble he’d have taken the wood, not left it lying here for dead. She started to say this, “No,” but found she couldn’t form the word against Eddie Bondo’s lips. It became nonsensical beside the fact of her naked back pressed against the soft black crumbling curved inside wall of this womb she had never shared with any twin. He held her breasts in his two hands, looking down at her. She couldn’t bear how much she loved that gaze and that touch, those palms on her nipples and those fingertips tracing her ribs and enclosing her sides, pulling her against him as if she were something small and manageable. He kissed her neck, then her collarbones. Stopped briefly then and stood up on his knees to fish for the crinkling packet in his jeans pocket, that premeditation. Of course, he knew she was fertile. He’d be careful.
She sat curled with her back to the wall and her chin on her knees. The tunnel was wide enough that he could kneel in front of her, facing her, to untie her boots and slide off her shorts and his own clothes. It was warm enough for nakedness, a rich, dark warmth full of the scent of sweet old wood. He pressed his face against her knees.
“The full moon?” he asked, against her skin. “That’s the secret of everything?”
She didn’t say yes or no.
His hands climbed her like a tree, from ankles to knees to waist to shoulders until he cupped her face and looked into her eyes like a Gypsy trying to read the future in tea leaves. He seemed so happy, so earnest. “For that, men write stupid