Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [44]
She held his eyes but couldn’t speak to tell him how far she’d left all that behind her, so far that even her obedient ovaries sometimes failed to be moved by the moon these days, these years in her middle forties. Some months, no heads turned. She’d been so sure that was what she wanted. How could this be, Eddie Bondo looking in her eyes, taking hold of her braid, and wrapping it around and around his wrist until he had her cheek pinned to his forearm and turned gently away from him? She lay facedown with her head on her hands and the full length of his body against her, his penis gently pressing her solar plexus and his lips touching her temple. Between the skin of her back and his chest she could feel small, prickly islands of chestnut dust. “Deanna,” he said in her ear, “I wanted you all the way from West Virginia. I was going to want you from here to Wyoming if I didn’t come back.”
He breathed on the skin beneath her earlobe and her back arched like a reflex, like a moth drawn helpless to a flame. She had no words, but her body answered his perfectly as he slid himself down and took the nape of her neck in his teeth like a lion on a lioness in heat: a gentle, sure bite, by mutual agreement impossible to escape.
By late morning the rain had stopped completely, setting free a moment of afternoon sun. It stretched into the tunnel’s mouth to lap at their naked feet and ankles as they lay side by side. The sensation roused Deanna from where she had been drifting, someplace near sleep but not quite in its full embrace. It was late, she realized with a start. She opened her eyes. This day was going. Was gone already, she might as well say it: to him, her time and all the choices she thought she’d made for good. Her gut clenched as distant thunder rumbled and echoed up the hollow, threatening more rain.
She stared at the man who lay flat on his back beside her, sleeping the untroubled sleep of a landlord. Flecks of soft wood and crumbled leaves, shreds of her forest, clung to his body, freckling his cheek and shoulder and even his limp penis. She filled up with loathing for his talkative cockiness, those placid eyelids and the dead careless arm slung across her, heavy as lead. She threw it off of her and rolled away from him, but he moved from sleep to partial wakefulness and reached to draw her back to him.
“No,” she said, shoving him, hard. “Just no, get off me!”
His eyes flew open, but Deanna couldn’t stop her fists from lashing out hard at his chest and shoulders. A bile rose up in her gut, a rush of physical rage that might have branded him black and blue if her arms had found the strength for it before he gathered back his hunter’s wits. She nearly spit in his face when he restrained her with a grip like handcuffs on her forearms. This fury had taken her like a storm and left her trembling.
“God, Deanna.”
“Let me go.”
“Not if you’re going to kill me. God, woman!” He held her forearms upright on either side of her face and studied her like a bad mistake. Like some mountain lion he’d accidentally caught in a leghold trap for squirrel.
“Just let me go,” she said. “I want to get my clothes on.”
Carefully he opened one hand, then the other, watching her arms as she moved away from him. “What?” he asked.
“Why did you come back?” She spat the words.
“You seemed pretty happy about it an hour ago.”
She shook her head slowly, breathed out through her nose, pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.
He persisted. “You didn’t want me to come back?”
She hated that, too, his not knowing. She couldn’t look at him.
“Christ almighty, Deanna, what?”
“I didn’t need you here.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t know anything. You never saw me alone.”
“I did, though.” There was a hint of that grin in his voice.
She turned to face him with an animal glare. “Is that it? You were watching me like some damn predator and you think you have me now?”
He didn’t answer this. She turned her back on him again.