She read Bartram’s Travels for a while. It was lovely reading by the light of the oil lamp. The room smelled reassuringly like camp when she was a girl: pine straw, old blankets, unpainted wood. Harold remained out on the deck for while, drinking, she supposed. Then he clomped around downstairs putting things away. Finally, she heard his footfalls on the creaking stairs. For an electric moment, she held her breath wondering if he might come into her room and what on earth she would do if he did. But then she heard his door open and shut and his bedsprings creak as he shifted this way and that and then silence. Maggie didn’t know whether to feel grateful or cheated.
She awoke sometime later in the darkness to feel him in her bed pressing up against her back spoon-wise, a large hand cupping her shoulder. Oddly, her first thought was, This is not Kenneth. She feigned sleep a few moments longer, trying to think tactically. In fact, the sensation of the large warm presence behind her, and her own mammalian response to it, quite hampered her thinking. Moreover, her head felt uncomfortably hollow from all the drinking, like a cored winter squash. Harold buried his nose behind her ear and kissed her as he had earlier. A tremendous chemical rush quickened the nerve endings throughout her body and urged her to surrender to sheer sensation. Harold moved his hand strategically to her hip, pausing to caress it before moving on to the complicated topography of her right breast, exploring the nipple at its eminence and emitting a little groan of longing to which Maggie could not help but reply in kind. Moments later, she had swiveled around so they were face-to-face, lips-to-lips, and hips-to-hips until she opened to him like a great night-blooming flower. She made love with him without a word being spoken.
He was powerful and deliberate. In his lovemaking he had the quality of a master musician playing a sonata on a rare and valuable instrument, sure yet careful, and he displayed that paradoxical stamina of the older man who can soldier stolidly through a long and elaborate piece of music, never flagging, without reaching the highest pitch of emotional intensity too soon. In their heavings and pantings she lost track of time and gave herself to him repeatedly, each time thinking, strangely, that the very galvanic power of her pleasure might infuse him with enough vitality to battle and perhaps even vanquish the molecular monster that threatened his existence. Finally, she felt him release himself with a plangent sob, and they both sank wordlessly spent into a cool, pine-scented oblivion.