The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [70]
“Or Wiccan. But, I assure you, I’m neither.”
“John said you’re a shaman.”
“I’m not sure John knows what that means.”
“But you are something.”
Reseda sipped her mulled cider and seemed to be contemplating her answer, as if she weren’t precisely sure herself. Emily was struck by the woman’s eyes, which, in the candlelight in the kitchen, looked almost black. Weren’t they usually blue? Her lipstick was the color of a ripe fig, and her face was shaped like a heart. Emily realized that she wanted to kiss her, which struck her as odd because she hadn’t kissed a girl since she and a friend experimented at a sleepover in ninth grade. But she and Chip rarely made love now. Perhaps that explained her desire. Between his catatonia, her exhaustion, raising the girls, and the logistics of the move, she guessed that they had had sex perhaps a half dozen times since August 11 (and not once since moving to New Hampshire), and each event had been a rather rote affair. It had felt to her—and, she presumed, to him—like they were going through the motions because they were supposed to. They were married, they were in love; they were supposed to have sex. Before the crash, they had always had a rather interesting sex life, fueled by the three- and four-day absences that marked what he did for a living. Alas, romance, it seemed, was another casualty of Flight 1611.
“When I was a teenager, something happened to my sister and me,” Reseda said finally, stepping over to Emily so that Emily felt her lower back pressed against the counter. Reseda placed her cider on the marble. “It was violent and horrifying. But I learned something very interesting. Someday I’ll tell you.”
“But not tonight, I gather,” Emily said. She found it difficult to speak with Reseda so close, and her voice was barely above a whisper.
“No. Not tonight.”
The woman was standing right in front of her now, and suddenly all Emily could smell was the unrecognizable but absolutely heavenly scent of her perfume—the aroma of the lamb and the rosemary and the candles seemed to have vanished completely—and then the woman was closing her eyes and leaning into her, and pressing those lips the color of figs against hers. Emily was startled, but she closed her eyes, too, and accepted the woman’s warm tongue as it explored first her lips and then burrowed gently between them and started teasing the inside of her mouth. She felt Reseda’s hand reaching between her legs and massaging her firmly through her jeans; almost involuntarily she started to move her hips, to grind against the woman’s fingers.
And then Reseda was pulling away, her eyes open, smiling in a vague, absentminded sort of way. “Sweet,” she said softly, and she turned and took a pair of pot holders off the counter and went to remove the lamb from the oven. “This looks perfect,” she said.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Emily said, embarrassed, the words catching in her throat, but already Reseda was placing the great yellow pan with the meat on an ivy-shaped trivet and bringing one long, slender finger to her lips. In the kitchen doorway Emily heard her husband and Alexander Jackson, the two of them laughing about something, and Reseda said to the pair, “Ah, men. Lovely. Could one of you start pouring the wine in the dining room? We’re just about ready.”
Hours later, Emily woke up in the night when she felt Chip’s hands on her rear. She had been asleep on her side, and he had pulled her nightgown up and over her waist, and now his fingers were sliding down the crevice and rubbing her. She felt his erection against her thigh, and her mind moved between images of Reseda’s closed eyes and the taste of her tongue and the feel of her husband hard against her leg. When his finger entered her, she was shocked at how wet she was. She pressed her ass against him and heard herself purring ever so slightly. She couldn’t recall the last time she and Chip had made love in the middle of the night. No, wait, she could. It had been four and a half years ago, when he had gotten home from a deadhead leg at two or two-thirty in the