“Christopher . . . my God, you did it!”
“It seemed the wisest thing to do in today’s world. But I don’t want you to feel pressured because I did. The choice is still up to you.”
She pressed a palm to her right cheek, then her left. “Mercy, am I blushing?”
“Yes, you are, and it’s quite becoming.”
“I can’t believe you actually did it!”
“Why? I told you I would.”
“But . . . but that was just . . . just speculation.”
“Was it?”
She let her eyes be held by his. Her tone softened. “No, I guess it wasn’t.” And after a pause, “I didn’t do anything like that though. Do you want me to?”
“Not if you and Bill were monogamous, and I think you were.”
“Yes, we were.”
“And there’s been nobody else since, so I was the only one in question. Now that question is answered.”
She took both his hands again. “That’s quite an act of faith, Mr. Lallek.”
He looked down at her knuckles while rubbing them with his thumbs. “That’s what good relationships are built on, and I want ours to be the best.”
She studied him with a loving expression in her eyes, then asked softly, “Would you mind very much if I got up, right here in the middle of this restaurant, and came over there and kissed you?”
He let a grin spread up one corner of his mouth . . . slowly. “You wouldn’t sling your leg over my chair like you did that other time, would you?”
She grinned back, picturing herself in the red dress and high heels sitting astride him in this fancy restaurant with its candlelight and real linen. “I’ll try to control myself.”
He pulled on her hand and she got up to do as promised, surprising herself and him with her lack of compunction, even though they weren’t sitting precisely in the middle of the restaurant, and even though the waiter wasn’t anywhere in sight, and even though neither of them saw anyone they knew among the clientele.
She held his face in her two rough hands and put her mouth on his for only the briefest second. When their lips parted she kept her face close and whispered, “Do we really have to go dancing?”
And made him smile.
* * *
HEcould do the Texas two-step! She watched the couples circling the floor counterclockwise, and balked as he tugged on her hand.
“But I can’t do that!”
“How do you know?”
“Christopher, I’ll embarrass you.”
“Never. Come on, give it a try. We’ll go out in the middle where we’ll be out of traffic and I’ll teach you a move or two.”
She relented and let herself be taught, noting that there were others out there in the middle of the floor struggling through basic steps, too. Christopher told her, “They give lessons here a couple nights a week before the band starts playing, so there are always beginners.”
As she’d told him, she did have rhythm, and it turned out to be less difficult than she’d imagined. Soon she was swinging under his arm, he was dipping under hers, and they were performing basic moves—the promenade and the wrap—quite smoothly as they circled the floor.
“I wouldn’t have taken you for a dancer,” she said while the shh-shh-shh of cowboy boots sandpapered the floor all around them.
“The last girl I dated—the one who moved to Texas—wanted me to learn. She and I took lessons together.”
“I should thank her. This is fun.”
“Ready to try something new?”
“Is it hard?”
“Naw, you can handle it. Now, get ready, I’m going to take you ‘Around the World.’ ”
He lifted his hands and led her around his body in a full circle, spinning her round and round.
She laughed breathlessly as she faced him again and resumed the basic step.
“I did it!”
His smile was uncomplicated, pleased, and filled her with happiness.
At the tables reserved for police department personnel there were a lot of celebrating cops and wives who were designated drivers. The mood was gay, at times raucous. Much to Lee’s surprise, she was accepted as Christopher’s date with none of the double-takes she’d expected. Pete Ostrinski asked her to dance and she followed him quite smoothly. Toni Mansetti inquired how her son was doing. The wife of Sergeant Anderson told her a ribald joke about panty hose that created a new round of laughter from all the other women who’d already heard it, and started them all casting dubious glances at their ankles, which played off the punch line and signaled more laughter. Christopher attempted to teach her an advanced move called the whip, but they got tangled up time after time and ended up laughing so much they gave up and decided they’d save it for next time.
The band struck up the Collin Raye song “Love Me,” and Christopher took Lee’s hand, sauntering onto the dance floor. “Come on,” he said, “let’s polish some belt buckles.”
The mood had shifted. Couples were locked together in fulllength embraces. The circling had stopped in favor of swaying in place and making gentle turns. The hall became dim with a bluish cast from the overhead canister lights trained on the band. A mirrored ball strewed reflected jewels of light across the faces and shoulders of the dancers. Christopher wrapped both arms around Lee, joining his hands on the shallows of her spine. She linked her fingers behind his neck, settled her hips against his and lifted her face to his happy one.
“Having fun?” he asked.
“Mmmm . . . you’re the most fun this life has had for a long, long time.”
He touched the end of his nose to hers, then tilted his head as if to kiss her.
“Your friends are watching,” she murmured.
“I don’t give a damn.”
He kissed her and put pressure on her spine until his body changed the shape of her own and seemed to become an extension of it. Swaying, he dovetailed against her while the chorus of the song called repeatedly, “Love me . . . love me . . . love me . . .”
He put space between their faces and looked into her bedazzled rust-colored eyes. “What would you say if I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s get out of here and get alone.’ ”
“Right now? Before the first set is even finished?”
He nodded, holding her hips flush to his, swiveling in rhythm with the music.
“I’d say, ‘Let’s.’ ”
“Do you mean it?”
“Let’s just walk off this dance floor and get our coats at the coat check and not come back.”
“They’ll miss us and wonder where we went so early.”
“I really don’t care. Do you?”
“Not at all.”
They sealed their pact with a smile, turned and threaded through the dancers, across the light-speckled floor toward the entrance, knowing full well they had made a silent covenant to consummate this relationship before the night was over.
Outside, it was bitter cold. They walked to Christopher’s truck with their arms around each other. Inside, while he started the engine, he said, “Sit here by me.” So she ignored her seat belt and rode to his apartment sitting on one foot with her arm around Christopher’s shoulders and her cheek against the rough tweed of his shoulder. Once she kissed his jaw, once his ear. He found her free hand and pressed it upon his warm thigh beneath his own, where she could feel the muscles shift each time he moved his foot from the gas pedal to the brake and back again. He had the radio on, playing soft country songs that made conversation unnecessary. While they rode, he kept softly rubbing the backs of her fingers with the pads of his own.
At his apartment they parked in the garage and rode the elevator up. She watched with some residual amazement this young, virile man with his attractive close-cut hair as he bent to fit the key in the lock and open his door, knowing what would happen on the other side of it.
He switched on an overhead light, leaned his backside against the door, removed his cowboy boots and disposed of their coats. Then he took h
er hand and said, “Come this way.” She allowed herself to be towed down the hall to his bedroom while he hummed “Love Me” and loosened his string tie. In his bedroom, lit only by the negligent hall light that straggled around the doorway, he turned and kissed her, dipping his knees and circling her waist with both arms, then lifting her free of earthly ties and transporting her to the bed.
Their lives had been leading toward this for so long, and the decision to do it with full accord, thus they approached the next hour with both freedom and delight.
“Oh, Christopher,” she whispered, as he came down upon her. “I want you so much.”
“Then we’re even . . . but say it again. I’ve waited so long to hear it.”
“I want you so m—”
His mouth cut off her words and in the midst of the first wild and rolling kiss their hands dove straight as arrows to the objects of their desire. Through their clothing they petted the first time, telling one another with the curve and thrust of palms how it would be, how they wanted it to be, feeling warmth and arousal and the parting of limbs to give access. They were still for a moment, exploring, riveted by the combination of feelings beneath their own hands and the hands of the other. They lay apart, eyes open, faces tinted by the bisque light of the distant fixture that seemed to fall upward from their chins, highlighting their features as they went on accepting these gifts of feelings.
Her high-heeled pumps hit the floor . . . thump . . . thump. She closed her eyes and breathed “Ohh . . .” and rolled to her back, one foot flat on the bedspread, dress rucked up to her hips, giving herself over to the pure fleshly pleasure of feeling male hands upon her once again. He leaned over and kissed her breast, through layers of feminine apparel.
She said, “Please . . . could we get our clothes off, Christopher?”
He knelt in the middle of the bed and tugged her to her knees. “There’s not much grace in taking clothes off. I didn’t know how you felt about it.”
“There’s not much grace in having clothes on at a time like this. They do best on the floor.”
He took off some of hers, she took off some of his, and each of them managed the most difficult pieces of their own. When they were naked, still kneeling in the middle of his bed, she abruptly straddled him, much as she had on that kitchen chair, their bodies close but unlinked.
“Hey, what’s this?” he teased, surprised by how unceremoniously she took to his lap and flung both arms around his neck.
“I’m hiding.”
“From what?”
“From your eyes. Sometimes, since that day we decorated your Christmas tree, I’d lie in bed and think about this moment and long for it and dread it at once.”
“Why?” He leaned back and lifted a hand to touch her hairline with his fingertips.
“Because . . . I imagine the girls you’ve been with were young and perfect. Their skin was probably tight and tan and they didn’t have stretch marks or wrinkles or veins that show, or terrible beat-up hands, or any of the unsightly things that forty-five-year-old women have.”
“Lee,” he said, tipping her off his lap and arranging his limbs half on top of her. “You’re forgetting one thing.” He kissed her once, his hand moving up her body, and whispered into her mouth, “I didn’t love them.”
With such simple words he stole her self-consciousness, which, like their clothing, seemed relegated to a puddle on the floor, leaving her free to enjoy her femininity. He lay on his side, braced up on an elbow, brushing a widespread hand up her leg, stomach and ribs, capturing first one breast, then the other, dipping his head to taste them, naked, for the first time. When he wet her skin, she wet her lips and reached a hand down for him, took him in hand and learned, with much pleasure, his intimate shape. It took little for him to bring her to climax—mere touches after all the years of dormancy. She lay in the wash of weak light from the hall and allowed him the greatest trust of all: to watch her at his mercy while her body quaked and spilled, while she uttered a coarse note in her arched throat and gripped his tangled bedspread in two fists.
Then he was above her on all fours, whispering into her mouth, “Do you want to put it on or should I?”
“What would you like?” she asked, realizing it had been a long time for him, too: there were parts of this ritual he’d undoubtedly spent time imagining.
“You do it,” he answered, and laid the tiny packet in her hand.
He rolled to his back, hands thrown above his head, small sounds issuing from his throat as she touched him and ministered to him.
“Two years is too damn long,” he said, his voice rumbly and deep while he lay with his eyes closed. “I can’t imagine how you went without it for nine.”
“Neither can I, now that I’m here.”
“Please hurry . . . I’m dying.”
“Oh, don’t die,” she begged, finishing, throwing herself across his chest, kissing his face. “Please don’t die just yet. I’ve got some other things in mind I’d like to do with you.” His arms scooped her in and he rolled at the same time, their limbs twining.
“Ah, sweet woman, you’ve just saved my life,” he said.
They were avid and eager, stumbling through these initiate steps with the uncertainties of all first-time lovers, calling on playfulness to get them through the precarious moments of unset precedent.
The playfulness vanished, however, as their roll across the bed ended and two lovers found themselves captured in one another’s eyes. A reverence stole their tongues. They could speak, at that moment, only with their eyes. Christopher centered himself above her, then in her, slowly and deeply.
“Lee . . . Lee . . .” he whispered against her lips. “At last.”
Then together they became harmony and rhythm. The beat of their bodies became the culmination of the loving friendship they had formed in the past half-year. The sorrows of those months slid away. All those tears, all those talks, all those consolations had been leading to this. This! Christopher and Lee, making something extraordinary out of their ordinary selves.
“You . . . you,” she said fiercely, gripping him with her heels and hands. “. . . All the time it was you and I didn’t know it.”
“I thought you’d say I was too young for you and you’d turn me away.”
“I thought I was too old for you and I’d look foolish for even thinking this could happen.”
“Never . . . I wanted this long before I first touched or kissed you.”
“You feel so good. I’ve missed this so much.”
“Tell me what you want . . . anything.”
She wanted nothing, for she had the best life had to offer. Still he touched her, kissed her, caressed her in myriad ways, whispering, “Like this? Like this?”
And she whispered, “Yes . . . like that . . . oh yes.”
She felt him stretch, and heard the snap of the bedside lamp. It brought her eyes flying open, staring up at him while his arm was still extended above his head.
“I want to see you. Do you mind?”
Shyness struck Lee. She wanted to say, Turn it off! In the light, their differences would be too boldly displayed, and all the faint cobwebbing of her age would leap out of hiding in the amber radiance from behind his shoulder. She wanted the room to remain dark, but while she was still caught by surprise, he settled astride her.
His crisp brown hair was disheveled by her finger tracks. His eyes loomed blue as oceans. By their insistent gaze he held her as he played with her breasts, reshaping them, stroking them, watching the backsides of his fingers circling round and round their florid tips, then beneath them, scribing half-moons before covering both mounds fully with his two broad hands.
“Say you don’t mind,” he beseeched in a husky lover’s voice.
“I don’t mind.”
He could see that she did, that she was still self-conscious though he—her lover now—found her body beguiling. He bent forward, running his palm up over her brow as if feeling for fever, pushing the hair back from
her face.
“Don’t mind,” he whispered, “don’t mind, Lee. Let me love all of you the way I love the inner you.”
She crooked an arm around his neck and drew his open mouth to hers, making a soft, acquiescent sound in her throat, wondering if the other man in her life had ever filled her with this much feeling, for at the moment, it hardly seemed possible. To kiss so, with tenderness tempering lust, yet lust an insistent accomplice, brought a luxuriance to their arousal. They had time and privacy and a healthy physical greed pressing them from within. “Oh, Christopher . . .” she murmured in a shaken voice. “You make me feel all the ways a woman wants to feel.”
Again, he began moving within her.
She stroked his legs, spread her hands on his hips, watched the lamplight shift over his firm hide, his brow become beaded and his face sobered by passion. When his breathing grew forced, he fell forward, hands spread, elbows locked, blinking so slowly she thought he did not see her across the inches separating their faces, but watched instead his own inner feelings playing within some gilded screen in his mind.
He made some sounds, unmusical to all but her, the source of his pleasure.
When he came, he shuddered and collapsed like a craft running aground, falling upon her. She collected his thick bulk in both her arms and laced her fingers into his hair, finding his skull damp. The scent of him came from it—cosmetics and warm scalp and a touch of dance hall smoke.
She ran her nails over his head again and again, slowly, and he shivered once with his face out of sight above her shoulder.
When his pulse had slowed and his breathing evened, he caught her behind one knee with his heel and rolled them to their sides. He found a pillow and stuffed it beneath their heads, then for a long, serene time they studied each other’s countenances, gauging their repletion in the tempo of their blinks and the laxness of their lips. She touched his lower one with a fingertip, then kissed him with a moth’s touch.
He smiled.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m not. I’m just being happy.”