The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [79]
She touched his scar. Ran the tips of her fingers lightly along its edges.
If there were words now, they were just names, exclamations possibly. Whispers of astonishment that they should be together at all. He held her face close to his and wouldn’t let her go, though she made no effort to release herself. Either he was crying or she was — it was to be expected — and he was astounded at how profound was his sense of relief. He thought the words drinking her in even as he was, his mouth so thirsty, so greedy, he could not even take the time to speak to her. There would be hours later when they could talk, he thought, but for now it was simply skin and breasts and long limbs and the awkwardness of needing to pull back to lift a dress overhead or to unbuckle a belt. And it was as though they were again teenagers inside a Buick Skylark convertible. Not needing to be anywhere else. Unable even to conceive of being elsewhere.
The sheets were rough but clean, a thick, textured cotton. He felt lust, but distantly — not as with Regina, when lust was essential to accomplish the act, when lust was necessary to blot out resentment or even fondness. In the canopied bed, there wasn’t room for anything but an exultant sense of love regained and of a finite amount of time reserved to them. And that sense of time increased sensation, increased meaning, so that for an hour, possibly two, the bed, with its rough sheets, was all there was of the known universe.
______
He woke with the sun in his eyes. It was hot inside the room, and the sheets, so newly crisp just an hour earlier, were limp and damp. He moved, causing the top sheet to slide off the bed. He and Linda lay naked, covered only by the thin canopy above them that billowed in the slight breeze. He shifted his face from the direct sun and woke her as he did so. The jasmine petals had been ground into the pillows, and her hair and their perfume mingled with the musk of their bodies. They lay, as he had dreamed them, with her head on his shoulder, his arms around her, a leg curled up and over another. It was a simple posture, accomplished thousands — no, millions — of times a day, and yet so serious he could hardly breathe. He wondered how much time was left to them: an hour, a day, a year? And so he asked her. Determined not to leave before she did, no matter when that was. His body incapable of abandoning her, of walking away.
—I have a day, she said.
—One day.
—A day and a night, actually.
The sense of time so stupefying that he had to repeat the allotment aloud. The sun moved overhead; they hardly moved at all. As if, not moving, time might forget about them altogether. Until thirst compelled her to ask for a glass of water. He pulled on his trousers, reluctant to leave her, and went in search of a water source, encountering Mr. Salim reading at a kitchen table. Thomas explained, in Swahili, what he wanted, and instantly Mr. Salim produced from an icebox that looked to be from the 1930s a pitcher of cold water. The servant, seemingly pleased to have been consulted, added delicate confections of honey and nuts that he didn’t name. Thomas took the tray upstairs, noting the two glasses instead of one.
She might never have drunk before. She sat upright, entirely naked, and he admired her breasts and the shallow curve of her stomach as she tilted her throat. In similar fashion, she devoured her portion of the sweets, which made him laugh, so that he offered her his, which she took with little hesitation.
—Sex makes you ravenous, he said, and immediately hated himself for it. Reducing what