Wizard and glass - Stephen King [135]
She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him—or her ka.
She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman’s thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.
She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman’s hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.
Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here! Quickly! Before something terrible happens . . . before it really is ka, come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!
She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.
Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.
They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.
7
“Goodmorn, Susan,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again.”
She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.
Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.
“I cry your pardon,” he said.
“Do you?” Her voice was cool.
“What I said that night was unwarranted.”
At that she felt a spark of real anger. “I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me.”
A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn’t all cried out after all, it seemed.
She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.
“I fell in love with you,” he said. “That’s why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think.”
She laughed at that . . . but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. “Mr. Dearborn—”
“Will. Please.”
“Mr. Dearborn,” she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, “the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A sister’s kiss?” Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. “Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not.”
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.
“I cry your pardon,” he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubbornness in him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. “I don’t ask you to return my love, that’s not why I spoke. You told me