When Kathleen woke up she did something she probably should have asked Martha to do months ago: she picked up the phone and called her Forever Friends, one by one. Helen Sullivan and Maxie Corban cried at the news, but B. J. Corban, who had always been the take-charge member of their group, gave Kat a piece of her mind.
“Kathleen Shaw, I ought to fly down there and whip your butt. Do you have any idea how much we’ve mourned for you?”
“I’m sorry, B. J. I know I should have let you know I was alive. But, remember, I was fighting for my life. And I’ve only just now recovered my hearing.”
“Somebody should have called us. This is the Forever Friends you’re talking about. My Lord, Kat, we were just getting ready to plan a memorial service for you.”
“What took you so long?”
“Helen’s baby gave us all a scare.”
“Oliver?”
“No, Gloria…Oh, my Lord, you don’t even know! She was born after the explosion.”
“Four children?” Helen had been crying to hard she hadn’t even mentioned she had another child. “If I didn’t love her so, I’d spank her for not telling me. And then I’d be jealous.”
“Not me. I’ll leave the kids up to the three of you.”
Kat spent the next five minutes catching up and another ten talking B.J. out of assembling the Forever Friends so they could all fly down and stand by her side while she regained her dancing skills. By the time she finally said goodbye, they were laughing.
Kat made her way to the kitchen where Martha had a hot cup of coffee waiting.
“How’d your friends take the news?” It was no surprise that Martha asked. Kathleen now counted her as a good friend, and had discussed calling the Forever Friends with her last night.
“They were predictable. Helen and Maxie are soft touches and spent most of the time crying, but B.J. chewed my butt out.”
“She sounds like a woman after my own heart. When will I get to meet her and your other friends?”
“Not yet. I’m just not ready.”
“Mark my words, hon. You will be. Probably sooner than you think.”
Kathleen was on her second cup of coffee when the kitchen door opened. She knew it was Hunter even before Martha spoke. The electricity of his presence sent shock waves through her.
“Lordy, Hunter, I didn’t expect to see you so bright and early in the morning,” Martha said. “But you’re always a welcome sight. Do you want coffee?”
“No. I want Kat.” Kathleen stood up, her skin humming with excitement. “I have something to give her.”
His measured, relentless steps made her think of a stalking panther. When he was close, he reached for her hand. “Come with me.”
“Not like that.” She removed her hand and put it in the crook of his elbow. “Like this. That way I feel whether you are stepping up or down, turning right or left. You become my guide dog.”
“Should I bark?”
“Only if you want to.”
Breathless, filled with laughter, she waited. Tension zinged through him and made her fingers tingle.
“When the right moment comes, perhaps I’ll howl.”
He had once, standing up in their small boat in the bayou, his beautiful body naked and slick with her sweat. Involuntarily she squeezed his arm.
“Ready?” A deep, rich undertone of passion vibrated in his voice.
“Where are we going?”
“You have to learn trust, Kat. This is your first test. Are you coming?”
Intrigued, alive as she hadn’t been in years, she’d be a fool to say no.
“Yes.”
The screen door popped shut behind her. He shortened his stride because of her, but not enough to make her feel as if she were holding him back.
They were on the worn path between their houses. That much she knew. The smells were familiar, and the beaten smoothness of the ground.
“I should be dancing.”
“You’re pushing yourself too hard, Kat. You need a break.”
What he said was true. The day before, after they’d made their pact, she’d pushed especially hard, perhaps in an attempt to show him that she could make a comeback on her own, that she didn’t need help from him or anybody else.
He hadn’t tried to stop her. Instead he’d watched from the sidelines, calling his encouragement the way he used to when they were young.
Suddenly she felt herself being lifted off her feet.
“Hang on to your hat,” he said.
“Put me down.”
“Do you want to fall through the back steps and break your leg?”
“No.”
“Then allow me to help you across.”
Being in his arms felt wonderful. She had a weak, self-indulgent moment of hoping he’d make some lame excuse to keep holding her. She was even trying to think up a gracious way to accept without losing face when she felt herself being set on her feet.
“Here we are,” he said. “Home sweet home.”
She smelled the old wax on the linoleum and heard the distinctive tick of the cuckoo clock Janice Smith aka La Farge had kept on the kitchen wall.
“You haven’t changed anything,” she said, adjusting her veil.
“No.”
He didn’t have to explain further. She was his soul and he was hers. Neither of them dared change a shrine. The ramshackle cottages where they’d grown up together were almost sacred.
“You won’t need your hat in here, Kat. I’ve closed all the blinds.”
She reached for her hat, but his hands stopped her.
“Let me,” he said. He removed the hat, then cupped her face and slid his fingers through her hair. “At night I dream about the way your hair used to fall like a curtain around our faces when you were on top.”
She didn’t trust herself to speak, for she’d be making her own confessions, telling of how he came to her in dreams, and of how she awakened with desire hammering at her until she had to cram the pillow in her mouth to drown out her screams.
His animal heat swept through her like a brushfire as he leaned down and kissed her hair.
“Soon, Kathleen, soon, my love, your hair will curtain us once more.” Abruptly he released her. “Now, I have something to show you. Come.”
He placed her hand in the crook of his elbow and led her down the familiar hallway to his bedroom. It was filled with his scent, the spicy soap he used, the minty toothpaste, and the heady mix of air and sun and earth that belonged exclusively to Hunter. Even without the smells, she’d have known. How many nights had they lain tangled in his bed while Janice worked the night shift at the factory? How many lazy afternoons had they spent romping in the sunshine while Janice and Karen took their Sunday stroll down St. Charles?
She heard Hunter rambling around in his closet, shoving coat hangers aside and rattling boxes.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting your clothes.”
“I’m wearing clothes.”
“They won’t do. What would people say if they saw my kid brother wearing a dress?”
The simplicity of his plan struck her as brilliant. Hunter was going to pass her off as a boy: that would be her freedom.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself,” she said.
“You were concentrating all your energies on dancing.” He handed her the clothes, a pair of pants with a button-front fly, a big shirt, athletic socks, sneakers, and a soft cap like those worn by newsboys in the twenties.
“Do you think it will work?”
“All I can say is it’s a damned good thing you’ve got ballerina breasts.”
“Are you saying I’m flat chested?”
“It’s been a long time since I had the privilege of knowing. Why don’t I check them out?”
There was laughter in his voice, and more, ever so much more. She sought to hold on to her resolve.
“Why don’t you get out of here and let me dress?”
“I was hoping you needed some help.”
“Hunter...”
“All right. I’m going.” She heard him pause in the doorway. “Pick a name.”
“What?”
“We can’t be Shaw and La Farge. Pick something else.”
“Who is to know?”
“Do you want me to pick one? How about Arbuthnot?”
“How about Bearinski?” How easily they entered the old games.
“Or Cranksnow?”
“Dragonitzin?”
“I prefer Frankenstump.”
She fell back against the bed, laughing so hard that tears streamed down her face and she had to hold her sides.
“Oh, Hunter,” she said, gasping.
Suddenly he was there, kneeling beside her, tenderly cupping her face.
“It will be you and me, Kat,” he whispered, “two against the world. Just the way it used to be.”
She closed her eyes, seeing him better that way, picturing how he would look with the sun sliding in from the cracks in the blinds, streaming across his dark hair and touching his black eyes. Like some fine sleek animal, all taut sinew and rippling muscle and raw power. She breathed in his scent, slowly, as she would inhale the aroma of a forbidden dessert. A sudden melting sensation made her body go slack, and she felt his hands tighten on her cheeks.
Unable to prevent herself, she reached for his face and pulled it fiercely toward her. His tongue slid into her hot mouth, gathering her essence as a beekeeper might harvest honey. Her blood hummed along her veins like a river of fire, and she was totally helpless against the onslaught of passion... helpless and exultant. The blindness had stripped her of light and color. It had taken away great paintings and glorious sunsets and flower petals floating across placid waters on spring breezes. But it had not taken magnificent hunger and the delicious sense of flying.
“Yes,” she whispered, “yes.”
Still kneeling, his mouth never leaving hers, Hunter spread her legs and slid between them, crushing her against his body so that she felt melded to him. His tongue plied relentlessly, its assault fierce and tender and so highly erotic that it was not a prelude to love, but love itself, melting her bones and taking away her will.
His mouth left hers, and he licked the side of her throat, murmuring her name over and over, like music, just as she had remembered.
She caught his hair and wrapped her legs around his body.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “If you stop now, I’ll die.”
“I won’t stop until you tell me to.” He unfastened her blouse and slid it from her shoulders, then lifted her breasts from their lacy nests.
His mouth closed over her, and she was flung backward and forward at the same time, caught up in sensations from years gone by and sensations entirely new. She felt as if she’d been caught in a swiftly moving current that stripped her of everything except clawing emotion and screaming need.
She arched her back to give him better access, then floated on the currents, reborn.
“I don’t plan to tell you stop for a very long time.”
He drew her deeply into his mouth, not in the gentle manner of Earl Lennox but with the magnificent hunger of a rampaging lion devouring his first kill in days. Hot coals tore loose in her belly and spewed fire throughout her body, so that she writhed in the heat.
Reason told her to stop while she could, but she wanted nothing to do with reason, no part of discipline and denial. She was in the middle of a holocaust and only Hunter could save her.
“You will leave me,” she whispered as he made long, sweeping forays with his tongue down the length of her torso.
“Never.”
He shoved her skirt up and pushed aside the tiny triangle of silk that covered her. She could feel the heat of his breath against her naked thighs.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. I need you, Hunter. Ravage me.”
The first thrust of his tongue was high and hard, jerking her upward like a puppet on a string. He held her there for a screaming eternity, plying his deep magic, while she gripped the edges of the mattress and held on. Then he lifted her onto the bed and braced himself over her, his elbows pinning her arms to her sides.
“This is more than need, Kathleen. It’s love. I love you.”
“Don’t make me say I love you, Hunter. Don’t make me beg.”
“I would never force you to beg for something that’s yours, that has always been yours.”
She didn’t need to see the truth in his eyes; she heard it in his voice. Selfishly she shoved the truth aside. It took all her energy to deal with dancing in the dark; she had none to spare for Hunter.
“Take me, Hunter. Now. Before I die of wanting you.”
He understood what she was asking for, not the tenderness of love but the rage of eroticism that would obliterate everything except the hot invasion of swollen flesh and the brimstone that coiled and writhed in her belly. His zipper whispered in the never-ending darkness and the first velvety touch of him wrung a cry from her. It echoed around the still room like the mating call of some wild animal.
“This is not about need, Kat. It’s about love.”
And then he was in her, wringing the cry from her once more. There was something almost bestial about the way he took her, something raw and primitive that answered the pleas wrenched from her very soul. But underlying it all was tenderness, shining through as plainly as if he’d lit a beacon next to her heart.
“Don’t make me love you,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
“You will love me, Kat.” His zipper raked against her skin as he slid deeper into her, so deep, he cracked the wall that sealed her heart. “But for now, this is enough.”
She arched upward to meet him, trapping him in the cradle of her thighs and rocking with a dizzying rhythm that felt like flying. Holding her tightly around the waist, he flipped onto his back. Her skirt tangled around her midriff, and impatiently she twisted it into a loose knot.
She reached for Hunter’s shirt buttons, then leaning over, she stroked his chest with her tongue the way she would the pelt of some fine sleek jungle cat. Her long hair tumbled downward, hiding them in its dark curtain.
He kissed her curtain of hair, laughing softly.
“How did you know, Hunter? How did you know it would be so soon?”
“Because I know you, my love. You’re the same as you were when you were sixteen, unbridled and untamed.”
“But not as naive.” She curled her hands into the fine hair sprinkling his chest and pulled so hard, she wrenched a groan from him. “The old demons still drive you, just as new ones drive me. We’ll have our time together, Hunter, nothing held back, nothing denied. Then you will go your way and I will go mine.”
Her hips began a slow, seductive dance that brought him off the bed.
“Never.” He gripped her waist. “I will never leave you again.”
But she knew he would. The restlessness thrummed through him with the force of voodoo drums, and his skin carried the scent of far-off, secret places, of deep rivers and raging waterfalls and jungles rich with diamonds and ripe with decay.
The cadence of the drums beat through Kathleen, and she threw back her head and rode to their rhythms, rode until the drumbeats stilled and there was nothing except the velvet heat of flesh against flesh and the sweet, slow death of love.
Even as she sought to hold the driving secret forces at bay, she realized that Hunter had once more handed her the reins, given her the choices. With a subtlety born of instinct and genius, he’d passed the control to her. Heady with power, lost in passion, she carried them to the edge, so that their cries of release rose up simultaneously like two exotic birds taking flight.
She fell across his chest, hiding both their faces under her long hair.
“I didn’t have to muffle my cries in the pillow,” she said.
He caught her face between his hands and licked the sweat from her upper lip.
“You’ve dreamed of me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me your dreams. I want to make them all come true.”
“Today?”
“This very minute. All of them.”
“My dreams are more sophisticated now than they were when I was sixteen.”
“I’m up for the challenge.”
He didn’t need words to tell her that. She could already feel him growing big inside her once more. She’d always marveled at his capacity for love, and it delighted her to know that in that area at least, he had not changed.
“Have you had many lovers, Hunter?”
“They were poor substitutes for you.”
“Who were they?”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except you.”
“I’m jealous of them all.”
“I have ways of driving the jealousy from your mind.”
She held her hair back from their faces and arched her back, driving herself closer to the heat, offering herself like a willing sacrificial goddess in some timeless love ritual.
“Drive it from my mind, Hunter,” she whispered.
He rolled her onto her back, then stripped off her clothes, slowly, as if he were unwrapping a package he’d waited years to receive. Flushed and languid, she spread herself upon the bed, twisting her body at impossible angles to accommodate his questing tongue.
“I’ve always remembered the taste of you. Like clover.” His voice was thick, drugged, as he tore aside his own clothes. “I can never get enough of you.”
Spasms rolled over her like waves from the sea as he delved deep into her once more. Like the sweet red clover blossoms, she gave up her nectar and he sucked it with magnificent greed.
“I shall die of this pleasure,” she whispered.
“Not yet, my love. Not yet.”
He surged over her, ocean-like, covering her with breakers that tore her loose from her moorings and set her adrift. She caught him to her breast, content to drift through the sunlit morning and into the lazy afternoon, never giving thought to time or place. For her there was only the reality of Hunter and the explosive journey of the senses they’d embarked upon.
o0o
She lay curved against him, the sun through the blinds making patterns on her skin. Exhausted and flushed from an excess of love, she slept.
Hunter lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck, careful not to wake her.
You will leave me, she’d said.
Somewhere deep in the Congo was a faceless, nameless man who was his father. Hunter felt the old familiar tugging inside, heard the siren song beckoning him. He’d been so close, so many times. But each new lead had proved to be a wild-goose chase, a dead end.
The man who had given him life would never give him a name. Hunter would never know who he was, only that he bore a fictitious name his mother had found in a novel.
“Hunter?” Kathleen awakened slowly, her beautiful eyes focused on a point just beyond his face. Slowly she reached out and touched his cheek. “Thank you.”
He caught her hand to his face and held it there. “This is only the beginning for us, Kat.”
“Let’s not talk about the future.” She stretched with the languid grace of a cat, totally unselfconscious in her nakedness. “Let’s get dressed and prowl around the French Quarter in the sunshine. It is still shining, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ll be Jack and Eddie Archibald.” She grinned wickedly at him. “Just brothers.”
“Which one are you?”
“I’m Jack. Remember Carl Sandburg’s Jack?”
They used to sit under their tree and take turns reading poetry to each other. Sandburg had been one of their favorites.
“I remember everything I ever did with you.”
Even in repose she had a ballerina’s grace. He traced the line of her body from breast to hip, delighted with the shivers that ran through her.
“Hunter, please.” She held his hands against her breasts for a moment, then forcefully pushed them away. “Would you keep me here in this bed all day?”
“Yes.”
“Next time, perhaps. But you have to bring food. Right now I’m hungry, and I want to go out into the streets and be a swarthy, swaggering son of a gun... and then I want to go down to the river.”
She felt the stillness in him. He knew without being told that she wanted to confront one of her demons.
“You’re certain?”
“I’m certain.”
Hunter left the bed, and she heard him scuffling around on the bedside table. “We’ll start with the mustache.” The bed creaked once more under his weight. “Allow me.”
On her knees in the middle of the bed, she puckered her lips and presented them to Hunter.
“Ready,” she said.
His kiss was swift and thorough. Her response was wanton and wild.
“You certainly are,” he said. “We could wait until tomorrow to go down to the river. Or next week.”
“Hunter!”
“All right.” He applied the mustache, spending more time than was absolutely necessary.
“How do I look? Will I pass for a boy?”
She scooted off the covers and paraded around the bed. So sassy and self-confident was she that he’d never have guessed she was blind.
“Not with that body.”
“Well, I don’t plan to go down to the river naked.” With hands on her hips she faced him, full front. “But I make no rash promises about what I’ll do once I get there.”
Hunter laced his hands behind his head and leaned back on the bed to watch her dress. Safe in the cocoon of his cottage, he felt eighteen again. But somewhere deep inside was the nagging certainty that he could never be eighteen again, that no matter how hard he tried, he could never recapture the youthful dreams, never remold the present into the past.
Kathleen leaned over and twisted her tumbled hair into a knot, then tried to stuff it under her cap. Dark glossy curls escaped around her face. With the mustache, she looked like a beautiful Botticelli painting that someone had tried to desecrate.
“Did I get it all tucked in?”
“Not quite.”
He left the bed and carefully tucked all the stray hair inside the cap. Then he leaned down and kissed her lips one last time.
“Hmmm,” she said. “You taste good, Eddie.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
Her laughter buoyed his spirits as he put on his clothes. Perhaps, after all, they could recapture the dreams.