The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [10]
Bigelow stares as the bodice of her dress opens to show her body underneath. She folds it, then takes off her underclothes and folds them, too, unhurried. He follows her into the other room, bringing the lamp so that he can see her face, search it to confirm that this is what he hopes it is, an invitation.
She raises her eyebrows; he lifts his shirt over his head without bothering to unbutton it. Eager, not greedy. He’s rehearsed this scene more times than he can count, and he intends to be as polite as he knows how.
But he’s barely felt his way between her legs when she takes his wrist and pulls his hand away.
Okay, he thinks, all right, and he scoots down, his legs right off the bed, to insinuate his tongue in that spot.
She pops straight up. Grabs his ears like jug handles to remove his head from her crotch.
“What?” Bigelow says uselessly. “What do you want?”
The woman lies back down and he sits next to her, looking at the smooth, unreadable flesh of her stomach. “Icta?” he translates into Chinook. What?
She closes her eyes and opens her legs a few inches.
He doesn’t move.
She bends her knees, and he arranges himself over her body.
With one hand planted on the bed, he uses the other to guide himself inside her, keeping his eyes on her face to make sure he’s not doing anything she doesn’t like, watching the effect of each careful thrust.
He doesn’t want for her to have escaped behind the lids of her eyes—it seems as if he can see her there, in the dark, folded in a place too small to admit another occupant. He’s getting what he hoped, he tells himself, but it isn’t at all what he expected, and a desolation seizes him. He’s not joined to her, he can’t reach her.
Like a key, the thought of her eluding him turns in his flesh.
He stays hard, his ears ring, a new taste floods his mouth, and he keeps moving, following the thrust of his cock, determined to find her.
WHEN HE TEARS the side of his parka, it is the woman who repairs it, unfastening the coat and taking it from his shoulders as she did on the day he followed her home, then stepping outside her door to shake the dry snow from the fur.
As he watches, she unwinds a length of heavy black thread from a spool and cuts it with her teeth before drawing it back and forth over a bar of yellow wax. Then she coaxes its end through the eye of a long needle and begins, using the heel of her hand protected by a disc of bone to push the needle through the skin. While she works, he holds the wax, rubbing his thumb over its scored surface. His eyes follow her industrious fingers. There is an impersonal quality to her labor; it seems not so much a gift to him as it does a habit of northern housewifery. Furs must be kept in repair. A torn parka, otherwise valuable, is next to useless.
Her stitches are small. The needle makes slow progress. Oddly, when its bright point emerges and then disappears back into the dark fur, he feels a tightening in his chest, and he gets up from where he is sitting silently next to her on the bed and paces, yawning and sighing, until she has finished.
Contrary to what prejudice has taught him to expect, she is not uninhibited. He’s heard how native girls mature earlier than whites, how mothers and fathers send their daughters off to be initiated by uncles or friends. But she does not betray the evidence of such an education. There is a whole list of affectionate gestures she will not tolerate.
While she keeps still for a closed-mouth peck, if he attempts a more penetrating kiss she quickly turns her head, leaving him licking her cheek. She moves his hands away from her neck, her feet, her hair, and her genitals. But, once he’s inside her, she lies under him with a rapt smile, eyes closed and fingers busily agitating her own flesh without regard for the rhythm he’s established. When she comes, her arousal is keen—she arches her back, she cries out—but private. He cannot induce her to sit astride him or to allow him to enter her in any manner except what is understood as missionary. And perhaps this is the explanation, as the Aleutian