The blast was shrill. It was instantly followed by two more. Then a pause. Then another three blasts. The pause made it unmistakable. This wasn’t a kid playing. This was the international distress signal, coming from somewhere across the lake. A moment later Jack was in a canoe, sweeping it through the water. He knew how to paddle a canoe alone. You sit in the bow, facing the stern. His dad had told him that when he had been canoeing in Boy Scouts.
The blasts sounded again. He could hear shouts from the campsite, but he was already off, following the sound. It was coming from behind a pile of brush on the shore. He grew closer, saw the canoe. He called out. “Hello?”
“Dad?” It was Ellie.
“No, it’s Jack.”
He rounded the brush heap. Nick was at the shoreline, tangled in the brush, slumped over, and Ellie was in water to her knees. “The pile gave way. He’s caught on something.”
Jack pulled the canoe next to her and splashed into the water. He felt along Nick’s leg. It was clear what had happened. Some idiot had dropped an open knife. It had wedged in the brush and Nick had fallen onto it. His leg was clammy with blood.
Jack pulled off his shirt. “Okay, when I lift him, you get this underneath. Get it on top on his cut and hold it there. Really keep the pressure on.” Ellie was nodding. She understood. “You won’t pass out or anything?”
She shook her head. He got his arms under Nick’s knee and around his shoulders. He lifted, and Ellie slipped her hand underneath. “I’ve got it.”
Another canoe was coming; Jack could hear the splash of their paddles. “What happened?” It was Phoebe; Amy was with her. “What can we do?”
“Get that canoe out of the way.” He nodded toward Ellie’s canoe; it was full of firewood. “Then can you get into this one and hold it steady?” Jack had already turned with Nick in his arms. Ellie was bent low, still holding her hand in place.
Phoebe swung herself in the empty canoe. The thwarts kept Jack from laying Nick in flat, so he let Phoebe cradle him in a crouch. She reached out to place her hand over Ellie’s; the pressure on the wound never let up. As Ellie pulled her hand away, Phoebe gasped sharply.
“We need to get him to a hospital, don’t we?” Jack asked.
Phoebe nodded.
Before they left, Ian had spent what had seemed like hours discussing with the outfitter what to do in an emergency. Jack had taken it as a typical Ian make-everyone-else-wait power move. But to give Ian credit, it was good to know that there were ranger stations equipped with radios that they could call in little airplanes whose pontoons could land on water.
Ellie was now in the bow in the canoe. The legs of her jeans were dark and wet; a watery red trail ran down her arm. Phoebe was keeping pressure on the wound.
“What can I do?” Amy asked. She was still in the smaller canoe.
“Go back,” Phoebe said. “Tell Giles to start cutting butterfly bandages about an inch and a half long.”
“And tell the others to take down the pup tent and put together a trail pack,” Jack added as he got into Nick’s canoe. “We’re going to have to go to the ranger station.”
Amy nodded and quickly pivoted in her seat so that she too was in the bow facing the stern. Jack gave her a helpful shove.
He leaned over Phoebe’s shoulder to look at Nick. The boy was ashen, and if Phoebe took the pressure off, the bleeding would start up again. Jack told Ellie to start paddling.
“Do you know how far we are from a ranger station?” Phoebe asked. “Is it closer than where we launched?”
“By about an hour, and remember, there may not be anyone at the launch. We could still have to drive for another twenty minutes and then figure out who to call.”
“Are there portages?”
“Yes.”
“Then Giles shouldn’t go. You and Ian will have to.”
Jack grunted. He supposed it made sense, but he certainly would rather go with Giles. They would need to go fast, and Ian would want to check the maps, think, deliberate. He would want to be in charge. He would want to tell Jack what to do.
Everything was ready for them at the campsite. A poncho was spread out, and all the first-aid supplies were lined up. The butterfly bandages were cut and ready. Joyce and Maggie were over at the kitchen packs, apparently making sandwiches, preparing a trail pack. Ian was taking down the little pup tent. Amy had made good time across the water.
Of course she had. Pound for pound, who was the single strongest person here? It wasn’t any of the men; it was Amy, beautiful, delicate-looking Amy. Even if you dropped the pound-for-pound requirement, she had more brute strength than anyone but Jack himself. And her endurance was probably better than even his. Why was he for one second even considering going with Ian?
Giles was doing the actual bandaging while Phoebe was holding the skin together. They were wearing rubber gloves from the first-aid kit, and the smell of alcohol rose from their hands. They had sterilized them even before putting on the gloves. Joyce and Maggie were still working, and the kids were sitting quietly, out of the way. Whatever else Jack might think of this family, they knew what to do in an emergency.
“I’m going to take Amy,” Jack said to Phoebe. “She and I are going to the ranger station.”
“Amy?” Phoebe glanced up, startled. “Why? What good will she be?”
“Muscle. She’s stronger than Ian. Her endurance is probably better than mine. We’ve already paddled for six hours today, and the ranger station is another five. She’s the only one with that kind of conditioning.”
“You’re right about that.” Phoebe looked back over her shoulder. “Ellie, I think Amy is in Jack’s tent, finding dry socks for him. Go ask her if she’s willing to go to the ranger station with him.”
Ian overheard. “Wait, wait.” He set the rolled pup tent on the ground. “Let me get this straight. You can’t be thinking of sending Amy?”
Jack wanted to hit him.
It was Phoebe who answered. “No, Ian, we aren’t going to wait, not while you get this straight, not for anything. Face it, Amy’s stronger and in better shape than any of the rest of us.”
“But Amy? She has no outdoor skills.”
“Jack has enough for the both of them. We need muscle. That she has. We always think of her as having sequins on her brain, but she is a professional athlete.”
Argue with that, Jack dared him.
He couldn’t; he wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t say that he was in better shape than Amy; he wasn’t. He tightened his lips, not liking anything about this. Then he spoke. “Your boots are wet, Jack. I’ve got an extra pair of really good wool socks if you’d like to take them.”
Jack wasn’t sure he had heard right. Ian was being decent about this. Jack supposed he needed to be gracious in return. “That would be nice.”
I don’t want your stupid socks even if they are wool.
But wool socks were great. Jack didn’t own any because he could never bring himself to spend that kind of money on comfort.
Ian went off to get the socks, and Jack knelt by Nick. Nick was biting his lip, struggling not to cry out. Jack touched his arm. “Hold on, kid. You’ll be fine.”
Jack did believe that. If the butterfly bandages didn’t hold, Phoebe and Giles would keep pressure on the wound all night if they had to. They were that sort of people. Nick wouldn’t bleed to death, but he did need to have the wound stitched and a doctor check his tendon.
Ian handed Jack the socks, and they were thick and light and soft, exactly what you wanted when your boots were wet. “Thanks,” Jack said.
“My younger sister’s usually the one in the family with all the right clothes. She and I seem to be changing places.”
When the stakes were high enough, apparently even Ian could be a good sport. It was the nickel-and-dime stuff that made him impossible.
Amy was already down by the canoes. They were taking the smaller one. They had two packs, a bulky, light one with their sweatshirts and sleeping bags, a smaller, heavier one with the tent, the food, and a few pieces of equipment. Jack changed his socks while Amy went to get an extra paddle.
It was five-thirty; their light would hold until nine. Jack glanced at the map. They could camp about an hour from the ranger station and then reach it just after dawn the next morning. It would be a long haul, but he was sure they could make it.
“Ready?” he asked Amy.
“Ready,” she answered.
The person in bow sets pace, and Amy set a swift one. If it had been anyone else, Jack would have said something about the need to pace themselves, but Amy had to know her strength. She must know more about her body than anyone he had met. So he kept quiet. They shot through the water, their paddles digging deep, then lifting and circling through the air in perfect unison. Drops of water danced off the end of the paddles, arcs of ripples splaying out on either side of the canoe. They didn’t speak as their muscles warmed and loosened.
Amy pulled off her sweatshirt. She was wearing her black bathing suit, the one that was cut surprisingly high in front, almost to her collarbone, but then swooped low in the back.
Jack had never seen anything like Amy’s back. He had noticed it the first time he had seen her in a bathing suit. Her muscles were lightly, even delicately defined, curving across her back in graceful arcs, but they were so well developed that it was almost as if she didn’t have shoulder blades.
They sped through the portages. Amy could carry both packs at once, the bulky one on her back, the smaller one on her chest while Jack carried the canoe. At the end of each portage, he stepped to the water’s edge, hoisted the canoe off his shoulders, and flipped it into the water. It landed with a splash and a little aluminum echo. Amy unloaded her packs directly into the canoe, took up her paddle, and was ready to go.
They traveled on, making excellent time. The rhythm of Amy’s strokes was nearly perfect, never wavering, never intensifying. He felt completely in tune with her, with his body, with hers. The hours passed. Their shadows on the water lengthened as the sun fell. They approached the spot where he had planned to camp; they paddled beyond it.
It was as if time had disappeared. There was no past, no future, just the moment and the tightening and lengthening of muscle, the movement of arms and back. The task, the moment, was all that mattered, not the goal, not the reason, just the doing, the now. This was what Jack lived for, moments like this. The tool in your hand, whether a hammer, a drill, or a canoe and paddle, became a part of you, an extension of yourself, and every motion sang with the harmony of you and your task and your tools.
And to be out here, away from phones, beepers, and clients, answerable to no one but himself and his partner, it was—
Was it how his dad had felt? He had commanded a fast-attack submarine, and most of his missions had been covert. Jack used to bug him for details, and his father would give him only vague answers. Jack now supposed that the missions involved things like slipping into a Soviet port to photograph its fleet, the kind of thing that you couldn’t have your kid bragging about on the playground.
When the boat was on these missions, it would be alone, out of even radio contact for days. Its C.O. would be answerable to no one for anything except the safety of his men and the result of his mission.
Maybe that’s what his father had liked about his career, not the deskwork or the ranks and saluting, but being out on a submarine, deep underwater, the one place you didn’t have the admirals breathing down your neck every instant. And all that caution, that insistence on doing everything right, on never using duct tape for anything, maybe that was one of the ways you kept the admirals off your back.
Did you hate authority as much as I do, Dad?
Jack suddenly and with complete certainty knew the answer. Yes, his father had hated authority, had hated it maybe even more than Jack did.
Mom occasionally mentioned how his dad had been one of the few enlisted men at the Naval Academy, a tough coal miner’s kid with a few years’ service under his belt. The other midshipmen would have been suburban college boys.
That couldn’t have been easy.
But you don’t get ahead in the military by rebelling. All his career John T. Wells, Sr., had played the game and followed the rules.
Then what had happened? They went and made him an admiral, stuck him behind a desk so that he was breathing down the necks of the guys who were having all the fun.
I couldn’t have choked it back that long. Jack knew that about himself.
But he wasn’t a tough coal miner’s kid. He was an admiral’s son. It was probably a whole lot easier to take risks and make changes when you had a little privilege in your background.
Jack shifted uneasily in the cold aluminum canoe seat. He didn’t like to think of himself as being privileged, but he had been. And it wasn’t fair to his dad to pretend otherwise, not when the guy had struggled for so long.
The sky had darkened, and they were traveling by the moon, its pale golden light marking a highway across the black water. They were only fifteen minutes from the ranger station, but there was another portage, rocky and steep.
“I hate to stop when we’re so close,” Jack said, “but it’s too hard to carry a canoe in the dark.”
“We have a flashlight.” Amy looked back over her shoulder as she spoke. Before he could shake his head, she went on. “My sense of balance is good, and I’m very used to falling. I know how. Let me carry the canoe.”
Jack paused. Let her carry the canoe? He always took the hardest jobs, he always carried the heaviest load even among other men, and Amy was a woman.
Okay, Dad, what would you have done? You didn’t have girls on your boats.
His father would have done what was best for his crew and the boat. Amy’s sense of balance had to be better than Jack’s, and she was plenty strong. Her sex was irrelevant. She should carry the canoe.
They went slowly. Leaving the packs behind, Jack walked sideward, pointing the flashlight at her feet, his other arm up to steady the canoe if she stumbled. But she never wavered.
At the end of the portage, he helped her lower the back tip of the canoe to the ground. He lifted the front end so that she could slip out from underneath. He flipped it into the water, and they went back to get the other packs.
“You’re very strong,” he said.
“Of course I am,” she answered. “I don’t know why that always surprises people.”
“I suppose it’s because you’re pretty.”
How irrelevant that seemed right now—what she looked like. She was so like him, all instinct and motion. That’s what mattered, not her beauty.
He had made a hash of his conversation with her before the campfire last week, but it was probably better to have things out in the open. He would take honesty over dignity any day.
When they were on the water again, they could see a light halfway up the lake. It was the ranger station.
“We made good time,” she said.
“We made very good time,” he answered.
The ranger station was simply a little cabin with a big antenna. It was set up on a rise so that people could see it from anywhere on the lake. Jack turned the canoe toward the shore. There was a narrow strip of sand at the water’s edge. Amy hopped out of the canoe, and with his weight keeping the stern low in the water, she easily pulled the canoe onto the shore by the painter rope attached to the bow.
“I need to pee,” she announced as he got out of the canoe. “You go distract the ranger while I sneak into his biffy.”
Jack started off toward the cabin, and Amy went to the little outhouse at the edge of the woods. He saw a small campsite set back from the water. He whistled, caught her attention, and pointed it out to her.
The ranger was straightforward and affable, radioing for a plane immediately. “It’s great that you came in now,” he said. “They can get themselves organized tonight and then take off the minute it is even half-light. They should get to your people just as the sun is rising.”
Jack thanked him, took the lantern and pot of hot water the man offered, and went back to the little campsite by the water. Amy had unrolled the tent and had the first flickerings of a fire going. The tinder was flaming brightly, and the bigger pieces of kindling were ignited.
Jack hung the lantern on a tree. “And your brother said you had no outdoors skills.”
“I don’t. But I’ve got a visual memory. I conjured up a picture of what fires looked like before the match was lit and did my best to duplicate that.”
The technique had clearly worked. Jack started to assemble the tent poles. Amy began to unpack the food. He watched her. She had put on her sweater, and its chunky knit hid the clean, hard muscles of her arms and back.
Her fire was doing well. It was an A-frame with a little tepee built on the crosspiece. Her brother laid a tepee fire; her sister built a classic A-frame; he himself combined the two in the way Amy had done. Any one of them worked fine, but when she had “conjured up” an image of a fire, it had been his.
“You knew that you, not your brother, ought to come, didn’t you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “If no one else had thought of it, would you have said anything, or would you have just let Ian go?”
Her answer was immediate. “Oh, I would have let Ian go.”
“Why? If you were sure you were right…why not stand up for yourself?”
“To Phoebe and Ian? You have to be kidding.”
“Why not? If you know you were right.”
“Well, it wasn’t like they were completely wrong.” She poured some of the ranger’s hot water into their smaller pot, set it on the grate to reheat, and emptied packets of dried soup into their cups. “Ian would have done all right.”
He started to unpack the sandwiches and dried fruit that was the rest of their meal. “Are you like this about everything?”
There was a chance that she wouldn’t even understand his question. She might be so passive about everything, letting agents, managers, whatever, make so many of her decisions that she didn’t even know that it was happening.
“You don’t stay where I am by being someone’s puppet.”
So she did understand. “Go on.”
The water was hot. Pulling the cuff of her sweater down over her hand for a pot holder, she poured water into the cups and handed him one. She took hers and sat down, leaning against a big rock. She told him about how she and these two other skaters had gradually accepted a lot of responsibility for their own careers, doing their own choreography so they weren’t dependent on other people’s ideas, now even planning their own tour. “You don’t have to be creative to do well as an amateur, you just have to be expressive. But to last for any length of time, you do need to be imaginative. And fortunately the three of us are.”
The broth was thin and salty, but the powdered stuff always was. “Go on.”
She sat down again. “Everyone says that figure skating is the one sport in which things get easier when you turn professional. Athletically that’s true. The Olympic-division skaters do routines that are technically harder than what we do. But there’s so much more to this than just the skating. If you’re going to keep selling tickets, you have to be a celebrity. The public has to love you.”
People didn’t understand fame, she said. When it first happened, you were too busy to know about it. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, she hadn’t realized that her face was everywhere. It would have thrilled her, there was no question about that; it was one of her dreams to walk into a store and see her face repeated again and again on magazine after magazine. But she hadn’t gone anywhere during those weeks; she had either been practicing or been holed up in a little conference room giving the interviews that were behind those cover stories. Even after the Olympics, walking through the airport to fly home, she had been surrounded by other people and too distracted to notice the newsstands. Of course, she had seen individual copies of the magazines later, but that wasn’t the same as seeing people buying them, reading them.
Then publicity became something to worry about—were you getting the right coverage? were the good photos used? how misleading were the quotes? Publicity brought no joy. The best possible feeling was relief.
“What’s the good part about being famous?” Jack wanted to know.
“You can get things done,” she said. When you were famous, you got your phone calls returned. “Amy Legend is on the line.” People noticed that. They opened their checkbooks, their hearts. An ill child got air transport to a bigger hospital, and a hotel chain donated a room to his family. A desperate blood bank suddenly had a hundred donors snaking a line down their hallway. A water-soaked school library received boxes and boxes of children’s books and plenty of volunteers to clean, catalogue, and shelf. “Henry still cares about winning the professional competitions. Tommy and I can’t make ourselves care about that anymore, but we’re more satisfied, we’re more content than Henry because we do more good.”
“Is that why you thought I ought to go work for the Red Cross?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Doing good works for me.”
Jack finished his sandwich. Amy shook open the little bag of dried apricots, took a few for herself, and handed him the rest. The little fire danced and flickered. The wind rustled in the pines. Jack sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely. Suddenly he felt a cool splash against the back of his hand. It was a raindrop.
Amy looked up at the sky. She must have felt the rain too. “Is it raining?” The moonlight was still bright. “It can’t be raining. The sky’s been clear all day. How can it rain?”
She did not want it to rain, she wanted to go on sitting by the fire, but what she wanted didn’t make any difference to Nature. It was definitely raining. Jack stuffed the last of the apricots into his mouth and stood up. He started kicking the fire apart; it would be easier to put out that way. “You can keep asking how all night, but you’ll be talking to yourself because I’m going to be somewhere dry.”
Amy hopped up. She started moving quickly, scooping up the trash, gathering the dirty dishes. “It’s okay just to give these cups a good rinse and call them clean, isn’t it?”
Of course it was. “Go in the tent. I’ll do this. There’s no sense in both of us getting wet.”
“Don’t be silly. I can do my share.”
The rain was increasing. A gusty wind blew clouds across the moon; the light grew dimmer. Amy dunked the cups into the remains of the hot water. Jack scrambled the rest of their equipment into the Duluth pack. He carried the pack back to the water’s edge, stowing it under the overturned canoe, quickly arranging their tin pot, cups, and plates on top of the canoe.
Amy helped. “Why are we doing this?” she asked, balancing a plate on the curving canoe bottom. “If we want the dishes to air-dry, this may not be the best spot.”
The raindrops were hitting the aluminum canoe with light metallic pings. Little puddles were already gathering near the rims of the plates.
“It’s in case of bears.” Bears weren’t too big a problem around here, not like in Yellowstone, where the bears had gotten so used to humans that they could open dumpsters and pop car trunks. “If a bear tries to get at the pack, the plates will rattle and scare him away. It’s good that your family still uses metal plates and cups. Plastic doesn’t make enough of a racket.”
“Two tin plates and a three-cup pot are going to scare a bear?”
She had a point. “At least it will wake us up and scare us.”
“I can’t wait,” she said.
Jack could feel the rain starting to bead up in his hair, but everything seemed to be packed. He prodded Amy, urging her to get under cover. He detoured back to the fire site to grab the lantern.
When he got to the tent, she was already inside. He lifted the flap and carefully passed the lantern in, not releasing it until he felt her grip it firmly. Then he crawled in.
He had to sit cross-legged. The tent was an old-fashioned pup tent with triangular ends and steeply sloping walls. It was no more than seven feet long and four and a half feet wide. Its center ridgepole was only a bit more than four feet from the ground.
Amy was holding the lantern at arm’s length. Its green metal shade was beaded with raindrops, and the whole thing was hissing. “Why is it making this awful sound?”
Jack had no idea. “Because it is. But don’t worry. It’s not about to blow up.” He looked around the tent for something to do with it. A shiny metal hook on a ribbed tape was sewn into the center seam. He took the lantern and hung it up, letting go of it gently, hoping that its weight wouldn’t pull the tent down.
“You’re going to bump your head,” Amy pointed out.
The lantern was right in the middle of everything, and its base swung about three feet above the tent floor. “You’re just as likely to bump your head as me,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
She started unrolling the sleeping bags, spreading them out. She knew that he was watching her, waiting for her to bump into the lantern. So she started to make a show of it, flinging her arm, thrusting her shoulder, tossing her head, always coming within a half inch of the lantern but never touching it. And she did all this without ever looking at it. She simply knew where it was. What a sense of space she had.
“How do you do that?”
“I don’t know. I just do it…although this is easy, because there’s also a sound and a temperature change.”
That wouldn’t have helped him in the least. “But you could have done it without the sound or temperature change.”
“Probably.”
Which meant “of course.” Jack shook his head. He had thought that he had decent reflexes, but compared to her he had the reaction time of a large hibernating animal.
She waved him over to sit on the unrolled sleeping bag so that she could do the other one. To unroll the bag in such a small space, she had to flip it out in front of her, scoot over onto that part, and then turn and smooth out the rest. The lamp’s sharp light shone against the fine grain of her skin, and a faint woolly smell rose from her sweater.
It was time for a little conversation. Surely they were both on the same page here, both committed to their roles as noble rescuers, as fleet-footed messengers, but it probably did behoove him to make clear the purity of his intentions. You’re one hot number, babe, but I ain’t gonna put the moves on ya.
Also, she was hardly a “hot number.” She seemed remarkably unaware of her sexuality.
He took a breath. This wasn’t easy, but he had to do it. “Last time I tried to talk to you about anything”—he was referring to the disaster of a conversation they’d had before the campfire back at the lake—“I made a total hash of it.”
She smiled. “You did reveal more than you intended.”
That was no big surprise. “When I was a kid, I had this book about King Arthur and all those guys, and whenever a knight rescued a lady and they had to travel together, he’d always talk about sleeping with his sword between them. I didn’t get it then, but of course I do now and while I don’t exactly have a sword with me, I suppose we could use a canoe paddle, except that the paddles are even wetter than we are, and—”
He stopped. He was getting nowhere. “You know what I mean.”
Now, that made sense. You know what I mean. That was all he needed to say. She knew what he meant.
“I know what you think you mean,” she countered. “But I assume you did enjoy this afternoon.”
What did that have to do with anything? “I loved every second of it. You know that. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that close to a—no, not just to a woman, to anyone.” Oh, Lord, he was starting to do it again, starting to talk too much. He never talked about himself. So why did he keep blathering on? “But that’s probably only because I didn’t have a dog as a kid. I might have higher standards for companionship if I had had a dog.”
“And when the bear comes, I’m sure it would be better if I were a dog, but in the meantime, don’t you think there are some advantages associated with the fact that I’m a woman?”
“No,” he said bluntly. That was good. No. You couldn’t get any simpler, any clearer, than that. “It’s an incredible inconvenience, because all I can think of is that folded up over there is your nice dry sweat suit, and not only are you probably going to want to put it on, but you’re also going to insist on taking off your wet clothes first, aren’t you?”
“Of course, and it’s worse than you think.” Amy lifted her sweater to her ribs. Her midriff was covered in black. “I have my bathing suit on underneath this. I have to take everything off.”
“Oh, Lord…that is bad news.” Jack shook his head. “But I’m strong. You do your thing, I’ll do mine, and we won’t pay any attention to each other.” He crossed his arms in front of him, yanked his sweater off over his head, and promptly crashed into the lantern, sending it swaying.
Amy started to laugh. “Don’t laugh,” he protested. “That hurt.”
“Poor thing.” She reached over and started rubbing the spot where he had bumped his head. The knit of her sweater was brushing against his face. She was still laughing. “Are you rejecting me?”
“No,” he protested. “No, of course not.”
“Then what are you doing?” She mimicked his voice. “‘We won’t pay any attention to each other.’ If that’s not rejection, what is?”
She was still sounding happy and light. He was confused. “Why are you acting like this?”
“I guess because I’m propositioning you since you don’t seem to be propositioning me. Or is it a seduction? What’s the difference between proposition and seduction?”
Jack had no idea. “Amy, are you out of your mind?”
She had both hands on his face, tracing her fingers down his throat. “All I know is that I had a wonderful day, a glorious day, and tonight is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often.”
“But what about the family? What about everything we were talking about at the campfire?”
“I don’t recall that I was saying any of it,” she replied. “Jack, my family never knows where I am or what I’m doing. Why should they know about this?”
That made sense. Or did it? Jack didn’t know…
“No one has to find out. We don’t have to go back to the lake and shriek it from the treetops. We can keep it to ourselves when we’re around everyone else, and then at the end of the summer, we can do whatever we want.”
Well, if no one found out…
“You said I don’t stand up for myself.” Her fingers were at the round neck of his T-shirt. “I’m doing it now. I don’t meet many people I can trust, Jack. And I can trust you.”
That was true. She could trust him. He liked her so much. Yes, she was beautiful and strong, but he also just liked her.
So if they trusted each other…if no one found out…
He put his arms around her and bent his head, kissing her. Everything about her was soft and fragrant. Well, almost everything. Her sweater was damp. It was one of those Icelandic things, in which the sheep’s rich lanolin caused water to bead up and stay on the sweater’s surface. She might be staying dry, but he was getting wet.
“Your sweater’s like hugging a barnyard. Take it off and then turn around.”
“Turn around? Why?” She pulled off her sweater and swiveled away from him, but craned her head over her shoulder so she could still see him. “Why did you want me to turn around? Are you being modest?”
“No. I want to look at your back.”
The delicate lines of her muscles ribboned down her back, framed by the deep U of her black swimming suit. The delts, the lats, the…she had muscles he didn’t know the names of. He couldn’t stand the way female bodybuilders looked, so bulky and bunchy, but her back was feminine, almost fragile-looking.
He blew on his hands to warm them, and then he touched her, stroking up and down, following the lines of her muscles. He leaned forward, resting his cheek against her.
He moved his hands down to her waist. She had said to his sister that she had no hips or waist, and indeed her body fell cleanly below her rib cage without the inward curves of most women.
She was leaning back against him now, her head resting back on his shoulder. His hands slid upward. Compressed under the Lycra of her suit were her breasts, their softness reined in by the tightly knit fabric. Her nipples were hard, but they wouldn’t be visible; her suit was keeping them flat. He pulled the shoulder straps down off her arms, and then against his palms he could feel the soft weight of her breasts, the tight bud of her nipples. She leaned back against him, her head in the curve of his neck.
She liked this. So did he.
But now what?
Jack considered himself a reasonably competent lover, no Don Juan by any means, but certainly someone who could maneuver his way through a romantic episode without a woman having to worry about logistics, about what happened next and what went where.
But at the moment the logistics were a problem. He was sitting sideways across a narrow tent, his back hunched to follow the slope of the walls, his legs pulled up because there was no space for him to stretch them out. Amy was sitting between his legs, facing away from him.
Normally a graceful pivot would solve everything, but there was no room for a pivot of any sort, and there was that goddamn lantern still swinging from the last time he had banged his head.
How long did he have before she got cold? You always had to figure that in, at what point a half-naked woman was going to get cold…although she was an ice skater; ice skaters were probably used to being cold.
Thank God for something.
Amy twisted her head again, trying to see his face. “What’s so funny? Why are you laughing?”
“Haven’t you noticed that we are stuck in this position?”
“No,” she answered and leaned back against him again, shutting her eyes. “Keep going. I’ll tell you when I notice.”
He looped his forefingers into the belt loop of her jeans, hoisted her out of his lap, and deposited her in a corner of the tent. Then he clambered to his knees and tugged on her feet, stretching her out, hitting his head only twice.
Her black bathing suit was bunched up at the waist of her jeans. He unzipped her jeans and gave them a good pull. A moment later she was naked.
Her body was sleek and compact, her hips narrower than her rib cage. Her pubic hair was dark gold, and she had surprisingly little of it, just a narrow triangle. He had never seen anyone with so little pubic hair.
“Do you do something to yourself down there?” he asked.
“Of course. Skating costumes don’t provide much coverage.”
“Do you shave?”
She shook her head. “Wax.” He must have looked puzzled for she continued. “They paint hot wax on your skin, and then when it cools, they rip it off and the hair comes with it.”
Ouch. Hot wax on your pubic hair? This was not something Jack wanted to think about. He was as realistic as the next guy, but really…did he have to know about this?
Amy was running her hands over the V-shaped crease at the top of her legs. “I haven’t had it done in a while. I’m getting a little stubbly. You want to feel?” Obligingly she flattened her back into the sleeping bag, raising her pelvis up. “Really short pubic hairs are like daggers; they can poke through a pair of tights.”
If there was anything on earth that would make Jack not want to touch her pelvis, it was this…and she knew it. “My sister said you were amazingly unself-conscious about your body.” She was chattering away stark naked while he was fully clothed. That would have given most women pause.
“I suppose I am. My body is what I skate with. I don’t usually think of it sexually.”
He wasn’t surprised. “Doesn’t that cause some problems?”
“Not in the least. Given that I have no sex life, it’s probably an advantage.”
“But you have had one at some point, haven’t you?”
“Occasionally, but it never seems to work out. You know how it is—sleep with someone and he thinks that gives him the right to control your publicity or produce your shows.”
“I think I can promise that won’t happen to me.”
“I know. That’s one of your charms.”
They had been talking a long time. Jack didn’t mind. He liked shooting the breeze with her. It seemed like a waste of time with most people, but not with her.
But he had to wonder if they were avoiding something by all this talk. “Tell me about yourself when you do have a sex life. What do you like?”
“Actually, I’m very efficient. A little bit here”—she gestured to her breasts—“a little there”—she waved her hand near her pubic region—“and I’m done.”
That did surprise him. He would have expected things to be more difficult for her. That was true of many women.
“Why are you surprised?” she asked…even though he hadn’t said anything. “I can focus, I can be in the moment, my muscle memory is great. It’s really just a physical thing, isn’t it? And I’m good at physical things.”
Just a physical thing. That seemed like a pretty stark way to describe sex. But maybe her encounters had been on the stark side—female orgasm, penetration, male orgasm, and then on to the good stuff, producing her shows. No wonder they were chatting away here; it was her way of prolonging what she assumed would be very brief.
“If you’re so efficient,” he asked, “does intercourse sometimes feel like an afterthought?”
She lifted her head, startled. “An afterthought?”
“Or something like that.” He tried to explain. “Sometimes when you make love, everything seems like it’s in very separate, defined stages, and—”
She interrupted. “I know what you mean. It’s just the word, afterthought. That’s how I used to think of myself, as an afterthought. Amy the Afterthought.”
He suspected that she was probably Amy the Mistake. “Well, do you? Think of intercourse as an afterthought?”
She sighed. “I suppose I do.”
He suddenly felt very…well, he wasn’t sure. She was like Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel, one of those fairy-tale ladies who was trapped inside a castle. Her profession made her very matter-of-fact about her body and left her surrounded by men who were uninterested in her sexually.
That didn’t seem right. Sex shouldn’t be efficient. It should be an extension, a continuation, a part of the way you lived. Its roots should thrust all the way down to the moist, urgent earthiness that connects your body to your soul. Despite all the frilliness in her life, the fancy clothes, the sequins and TV cameras, in her core she was like him, a physical person, someone who lived through her body, someone who expressed herself through her body, someone who loved the here and the now of sensation and exertion.
She shouldn’t be efficient in bed.
Tenderness…that was what he was feeling. Desire and tenderness—he hadn’t known that they could go together, but clearly they could. He wanted to help her escape from that castle…not because it was some big, macho challenge—the whole high-walls, pretty-girl thing—but because she shouldn’t be stuck in there, not when her body was so alive in every other way.
He wished that this could be perfect for her. But there was no way. There was no music, no soft lights, not even any cushioning under the sleeping bags. The tent was so cramped that in the end he was going to have put her underneath him in the most old-fashioned of ways, and since neither of them had come prepared, everything was going to have to be more incomplete than he liked.
It couldn’t be perfect. But maybe it would be a little better than what she had had.