Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [168]
“I was more afraid this time than on our wedding night,” I murmured, my eyes fixed on the slow, strong pulsebeat in the hollow of his throat.
“Were ye, then?” His arm shifted and tightened round me. “Do I frighten ye, Sassenach?”
“No.” I put my fingers on the tiny pulse, breathing the deep musk of his effort. “It’s only…the first time…I didn’t think it would be forever. I meant to go, then.”
He snorted faintly, the sweat gleaming lightly in the small hollow in the center of his chest.
“And ye did go, and came again,” he said. “You’re here; there’s no more that matters, than that.”
I raised myself slightly to look at him. His eyes were closed, slanted and catlike, his lashes that striking color I remembered so well because I had seen it so often; deep auburn at the tips, fading to a red so pale as nearly to be blond at the roots.
“What did you think, the first time we lay together?” I asked. The dark blue eyes opened slowly, and rested on me.
“It has always been forever, for me, Sassenach,” he said simply.
Sometime later, we fell asleep entwined, with the sound of the rain falling soft against the shutters, mingling with the muffled sounds of commerce below.
* * *
It was a restless night. Too tired to stay awake a moment longer, I was too happy to fall soundly asleep. Perhaps I was afraid he would vanish if I slept. Perhaps he felt the same. We lay close together, not awake, but too aware of each other to sleep deeply. I felt every small twitch of his muscles, every movement of his breathing, and knew he was likewise aware of me.
Half-dozing, we turned and moved together, always touching, in a sleepy, slow-motion ballet, learning again in silence the language of our bodies. Somewhere in the deep, quiet hours of the night, he turned to me without a word, and I to him, and we made love to each other in a slow, unspeaking tenderness that left us lying still at last, in possession of each other’s secrets.
Soft as a moth flying in the dark, my hand skimmed his leg, and found the thin deep runnel of the scar. My fingers traced its invisible length and paused, with the barest of touches at its end, wordlessly asking, “How?”
His breathing changed with a sigh, and his hand lay over mine.
“Culloden,” he said, the whispered word an evocation of tragedy. Death. Futility. And the terrible parting that had taken me from him.
“I’ll never leave you,” I whispered. “Not again.”
His head turned on the pillow, his features lost in darkness, and his lips brushed mine, light as the touch of an insect’s wing. He turned onto his back, shifting me next to him, his hand resting heavy on the curve of my thigh, keeping me close.
Sometime later, I felt him shift again, and turn the bedclothes back a little way. A cool draft played across my forearm; the tiny hairs prickled upright, and then flattened beneath the warmth of his touch. I opened my eyes, to find him turned on his side, absorbed in the sight of my hand. It lay still on the quilt, a carved white thing, all the bones and tendons chalked in gray as the room began its imperceptible shift from night to day.
“Draw her for me,” he whispered, head bent as he gently traced the shapes of my fingers, long and ghostly beneath the darkness of his own touch.
“What has she of you, of me? Can ye tell me? Are her hands like yours, Claire, or mine? Draw her for me, let me see her.” He laid his own hand down beside my own. It was his good hand, the fingers straight and flat-jointed, the nails clipped short, square and clean.
“Like mine,” I said. My voice was low and hoarse with waking, barely loud enough to register above the drumming of the rain outside. The house beneath was silent. I raised the fingers of my immobile hand an inch in illustration.
“She has long, slim hands like mine—but bigger than mine, broad across the backs, and a deep curve at the outside, near