TWO

After her bath, Elizabeth was slipping on her flannelette nightgown—smiling to herself that it was only “a four-­five blanket” night—when she heard the noise. It had not sounded in this house for a long time. Typing. Peter Hubbard at his report. The thought of his leaving in the morning was painful to her.

On impulse, Elizabeth opened her door and went across the hall. In the days this house was built, her conduct would have been unthinkable, but these prim walls too had to accept modern ways.

“If I’m not interrupting, I’d like to talk to you, Peter.”

The man looked up from his papers and smiled. “I’m not typing too well with one hand, anyway. Come on in, Liz.” Standing shyly in the doorway with her black hair wetly plastered on her head she looked like a mermaid out of her element.

And to Elizabeth, Peter Hubbard in his pajamas, seemed a sweet boy at bedtime rather than the Harvard instructor always in steady possession of himself.

He asked amiably, “What do you want to talk about?”

The woman said gravely, “I just took a long bath and a lot of questions kept bubbling into my head.”

“Such as?”

“If you’re too tired, we can talk tomorrow.”

“You relax me,” he smiled. “Go on.”

“My question isn’t relaxing,” she said. “Do you really think all the roaches were back in that nest?”

“No. I’ve said there are bound to be strays. The volunteer firemen are watching, and they have the dry ice . . .”

“Aren’t the strays just as dangerous?”

“No,” he said again. “Without the central brain, they’re just bugs, Liz. They’re big and nasty and they can do some damage, but not in the organized way they did before.”

“Won’t they start another nest?”

The scientist regarded her doubtful expression soberly. “Not likely. This phenomenon was the result of a very unique combination of environmental and evolutionary forces. The odds are way against a repetition. We did destroy all the brain cells—that’s the important thing.” He added firmly. “Even if there should be a phylogenetic thrust again, it would take years and years.”

“So you really don’t see any more danger?”

“Isolated incidents, maybe. A general problem, no.”

“The people here owe you a great deal, Peter.”

“I’m glad your father sent me over.”

“So am I.” Elizabeth Carr looked at the man, her eyes clear windows. “I want to go back with you tomorrow,” she said straightfowardly. It sounded as she hoped it would—honest, not bold; truthful, not brash.

He responded in kind. “I want you to, Liz. But your grandfather needs you here right now. This has been awfully rough on him.”

“I know,” Elizabeth squinted. “Peter, can you please put out that light?” The desk gooseneck was shining directly into her face. Hubbard obliged. The room sank into its shadows, illuminated only by the small lamp next to the double bed. Elizabeth Carr was standing between the lamp and Hubbard’s eyes. The man grinned like a schoolboy. “I can see right through your nightgown, you know.”

Her ingrained impulse was to duck, but her smiling eyes invited the man to enjoy her. “What do you see?” she openly teased.

He laughed back, “All the way to Chatham.”

“Chatham? I thought biologists knew female anatomy.”

“The difference between anatomy and life is amazing . . .” Hubbard got up from the desk, took a step toward Elizabeth, and stopped. “You had better go back to your room.”

Elizabeth let her answer come from the rum in the switchels she had drunk. Giddily she whirled around, and her nightdress tightened around her body. “I feel wonderful!—Why do I frighten you?” She stopped so close to Hubbard she could feel his breath on her cheek. “I do frighten you, don’t I, Peter?”

He said huskily, “Because I’ve been falling in love with you.”

“That’s not frightening, that’s supercaledi­cious-­whatever!” She followed him in her bare feet as he moved prudently away.

He answered, “You have had too many whatever you call those drinks.”

“So do I think so! And I’m glad!” With one soft motion, Elizabeth went into the man’s arms and was kissing him passionately on the lips. When she felt his answering embrace, she was sure beyond all doubt of her destiny with this man. Leaning her head against his chest, she murmured, “Peter, I have been in love with you for so terribly, terribly long.” She reached up to stroke his face. Now he did need a shave. She enjoyed the sandpapery sensation, his skin real and masculine with the promise of his own passion.

He bent his head to her. “I have loved you for too short.”

She gave him her lips without restraint. Their tongues played wetly in each other’s mouth as they freed their hunger for their love.

Her hand went of its own accord to the hardness she felt rising against her body. Her moistness down there was as wet as her mouth, sweet with his kisses. She wanted, was glad at, his fingers seeking her other wetness gently, strokingly. She parted her legs a little to his hand. In a little while they turned together to the bed.

She lifted her nightgown off over her head and watched with a pounding heart his eyes take in all of her body and its heat.

He shed his pajamas and stood naked before her, with his aroused sex lifting to her own ardent gaze.

They were both panting when they lay back on the soft quilt. Elizabeth breathed against his cheek, then his mouth was on her nipple. The electricity of his tongue on her erotic flesh shot through Elizabeth’s nerves to her center. It was an unexpected, galvanizing shock that arched her back and brought her thighs wide open for him. She had “made it” before, but she never felt anything like this torrent of sensation.

Sex swept over her and sent her spinning in a riptide of a discovered ocean without end. Her body surged like a breaking wave itself, a curling spume and lacy foam of sheer, breath-­catching delight. Peter Hubbard’s sex pressed between her legs and she spread herself wider, welcoming, wanting, lusting for him now. She felt Peter Hubbard enter her body. He was full and strong and straight. She uttered one small cry which gave way in a moment to a gasp of ecstasy.

She held him fast inside of her as the deck of her life listed in the sudden storm of emotions she had never sailed before. She clung to him harder as her body became a skimming craft on swelling seas. She rose and fell, bobbed and turned and wheeled and heeled. She was a ship running before the wind of love; she was its sails; he was its keel. She was a bird; he was its wings.

Then suddenly she was the wind itself, and scudding clouds filled up with thunder and with the lightning he was charging up in her, and charging up in her. Until she could contain it no longer. Like a storm sky she split, the thunder crashed out of her and the burst of her orgasm shook the world.

They came crashing to release together, both riven to the core. Then the tempest passed, easing, easing at last to let their hearts clear and quiet in the fading wind, quieted to deep-breathing in a sleepy peace in each other’s arms.

Elizabeth Carr woke later and stirred against Peter Hubbard. He tightened his hold on her warm flesh. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

He rubbed his eyes like someone coming out of a dream. He looked at her with eyes that could not believe Elizabeth Carr was lying beside him. He stated, “You have to go in to Bonnie.”

“No.” She lifted herself on an elbow. “She guesses where I am, Peter. She knows how I’ve felt about you.” Sudden tears spilled out. “Poor Bonnie. She was truly falling in love with Craig Soaras, I know.”

“I guessed,” he nodded slowly.

It came to Elizabeth Carr in that moment how right it was for her to have come to Peter Hubbard’s bed. Bonnie had lost the lifetime of happiness she might have known—lost it so suddenly, so meaninglessly, so uselessly.

Elizabeth counted the blessings of her own discovered love, not stolen like Bonnie’s.

It came to Elizabeth Carr that what she felt was what men and women in wartime had known. With death all around, you grasp what you can of life. She and Peter had been in a war together; they could have been killed as wantonly as Wanda Lindstrom, as Craig Soaras, she could as easily be as bereaved as Bonnie. She understood what had given her the courage to cross the hall.

But it was not a time for thinking. Peter was pulling her nakedness to his own ready body, wonderfully importunate again.