For the first time in his life, Todd understood what it meant to fuck your brains out. He felt as if he had come in his mind as powerfully as he’d come the usual way.
His head felt as heavy and limp as the rest of him. It would take more energy than he possessed at the moment to roll off her—and more willpower, too, because God, her body felt good under his. Had he actually thought she was chubby? Round, yes—in all the right places. Her breasts were pillows designed to give a man wet dreams, and her bottom filled his hands perfectly. She didn’t have a fashionably sleek look, but it appealed to him just fine.
Despite his exhaustion, he forced himself off her, afraid he’d suffocate her if he didn’t move. She inched back, giving him enough room so he wouldn’t fall off the bed, and he settled on his side facing her.
Her hair. That was another wet-dream feature. Sally was spectacular.
“How many times do you not plan to get cut?” she asked.
The words resembled English, but they made no sense. “Huh?”
“Well…” She traced the veins and bones on the back of his hand. “You said you brought Band-Aids along even though you didn’t plan to get cut. I was wondering how many times you didn’t plan to get cut. How many Band-Aids you brought.”
Understanding, he laughed. “I think it was a six-pack.”
“A six-pack. Hmm.” She moved her hand up his arm. He watched her fingers as they traveled over his skin. Her unmanicured nails were short, giving her hand an almost childish appearance. It didn’t feel like a child’s hand on him, though. It felt magnificently womanly as it reached his shoulder and then wandered down onto his chest. “So you aren’t planning to do this five more times?”
He laughed again. Even in the aftermath of glorious sex, Sally could drive him crazy. Not just with her words, either. Her hand, exploring his nipple, was also driving him crazy.
At last he understood how Paul could have wound up in an affair with her, despite the fact that they were all wrong for each other. He’d probably slept with her once and become hopelessly addicted, a risk Todd was facing right now. She stroked up and down his sternum and a circuit closed between the skin beneath her fingertips and the nerves in his groin, which began to stir from its lethargy. What he couldn’t understand was how Paul could have had an affair with anyone else when he’d had Sally waiting in his bed at home.
Her hand ventured lower, stroking the fine hairs below his stomach, and his penis twitched. He really didn’t have the strength to make love again so soon. But she let her hand scoot lower and all the blood in his body flowed south like a tidal wave.
“Sally,” he sighed, then gave up and covered her hand with his, guiding her onto him, knowing this playful skirting-the-issue stimulation wasn’t going to get them where she obviously wanted to go. He leaned forward to kiss her, and her mouth opened for him. He brought his other hand down and her legs opened for him, too, those warm, smooth thighs spreading to welcome him. He recalled how tightly they’d sandwiched his hips, how they’d flexed when she climaxed, and the memory turned him on so much he began to wonder whether they’d use up the damn six-pack before midnight.
The phone rang. It sat on the nightstand right next to his head, and its bell was so shrill he flinched. Sally’s eyes flew open and she bolted upright.
It rang again. Todd ran through a few expletives, then reached for the receiver. “Yeah?”
“Hello! It’s Claude!” The guy’s voice vibrated with exclamation points.
“Yeah.” Todd cleared his throat. “Hi.”
“I thought you’d want to know—Laura has emerged.”
“Oh. Okay.” He pushed himself up to sit and rubbed his forehead between his eyebrows. The blurriest part of his brain seemed to be located somewhere around there.
“I didn’t tell her you were here. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”
“Okay, well, great. Thanks. So, she’s in that big building?”
“She’s in the kitchen right now. Once she’s done there, she’ll probably go to the game room to watch the twins play backgammon. She doesn’t play it herself, but she loves to watch the twins.”
Todd bet she did. Now that Paul wasn’t around, maybe she liked to make a threesome with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Watching them play backgammon might be her idea of foreplay. “We’ll find her,” he assured Claude. “Thanks.”
He set the receiver back in its cradle and gazed at Sally. Her hair looked too inviting spilling down her back. Her breasts looked larger when she was sitting up. Her thighs…He’d never been a thigh man before he’d met her. But hers were amazing.
Sally Driver. Hard to believe she could have such an effect on him, but she did. His groin clenched when he remembered the feel of her hand on him just moments ago, as he remembered the feel of her all snug and wet around him a few minutes before that. Hard to believe—but the truth was in his body, in his nerves, in the blood pumping through his veins. He wanted her again. And again. He couldn’t imagine ever having enough of her.
If they confronted Laura now, they probably wouldn’t get to spend the rest of the night in this little love nest tucked in among the trees. They’d meet the woman, say their piece, get Sally’s pocketknife, and then take off before Laura and her colleagues could engage them in a new Battle of Mondaga Lake.
Maybe he and Sally could spend the night in that motel an hour away, the infested place. Not a big fan of rats and roaches, he nixed that idea. They’d drive to Lake George—which was a tourist mecca, which meant all the hotel rooms would probably be booked. So they’d continue to Albany…and then Sally would say, We’re only a couple of hours from home. Let’s just go. And they’d drive through the night back to Winfield, and they’d never get to use the other five condoms he’d brought with him.
Shit.
Sighing, he turned from her and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Time to have it out with Laura,” he said.
Heading back to the main building, Todd forced himself to expel from his mind all thoughts of making love with Sally. He refused to acknowledge how much different her shapeless denim jumper looked now that he knew what was underneath it, how resplendent her hair was. She hadn’t been able to find her barrette, which he’d dropped on the floor, so her long auburn mane hung loose around her face and down her back, and seeing it reminded him of its herbal smell and its crinkly texture. He refused to remember how heavenly her arms, now swinging at her sides, had felt circled around him, holding him to her. He erased it all from his gray matter so he could concentrate on the task at hand.
Whoever Laura Ryershank was, he thought, she’d have to have been pretty damn spectacular for Paul to have risked what he had with Sally.
Of course, no matter how great Sally was in bed, she could be a pain in the ass. Paul had always been cerebral; maybe Sally’s lack of college degree had turned him off, and he’d needed an erudite poetess to turn him back on. Maybe that cloying claptrap Laura had written him had flicked his switch in a way lusty kisses and silky skin and exuberant passion couldn’t.
Maybe Todd would never understand what Paul had been up to. Maybe he had never really understood Paul at all. His best friend had kept so many secrets from him. He’d never even hinted at how sensual Sally could be. All he’d ever done was complain about her.
Todd felt cheated. He’d wasted his best-friendship on a deceitful prick.
He tried to remember his part in this mission: not to avenge Sally’s betrayal but to find out why Paul had been a deceitful prick, why he’d denied his alleged best friend access to the truth about himself. When Todd had started the search for Laura, he’d hoped that meeting her would exonerate Paul, that she would assure him Paul had loved him and never intended to shut him out from this part of his life.
Everything was different now, though. Todd had made love to Paul’s wife. Maybe he was the deceitful prick. Paul had been deceitful first, but still…Todd couldn’t shake the twinge of guilt nipping at his conscience.
They fled into the main building, escaping the cold mountain air, and Sally started toward the dining room. Todd let her lead; he figured that as a woman she would have special radar directing her to the kitchen. She halted at the dining room doorway, tilted her head and then shook it. “There’s no one there,” she guessed, just from listening. “Where do you think they’d be playing backgammon?”
From the far wing of the building came faint laughter. “That sounds promising,” he said.
Nodding, Sally swiveled on a sandaled foot—she’d donned blue-and-white striped socks, which looked strange with her sandals—and marched across the great room in the direction the laughter had come from. Her back was straight, her chin high, her gait purposeful. She’d walked the same way the morning she’d stormed into his office with the letters and demanded an explanation from him. It was her angry-woman-on-a-mission strut. She seemed to be suffering no aftereffects from their little romp at the cabin. That she could put that interlude out of her mind more easily than he unsettled him.
The laughter grew louder as they entered a hall, and louder yet as they neared a doorway. On the threshold Sally froze. Unable to stop so quickly, Todd bumped into her.
The doorway opened into a cozy lounge. The twins hunched over a table with a backgammon board inlaid in its surface. Each was armed with a leather dice cup. Nose to nose, their posture and attire identical, they reminded him of a Rorschach test.
But they weren’t the reason Sally had screeched to such an abrupt halt. She’d obviously reacted to the woman with them. She was slim and petite, clad in a purple tunic, black trousers and tooled white cowboy boots. Her hair dropped down her back in a long silver braid. When one of the twins glanced toward the door, so did she.
She had to be seventy years old at least, maybe older. Her face was a mesh of deep creases and fine lines. The skin beneath her chin pulled taut over the tendons on either side of her neck and her hands were as gnarled as some of the roots he’d driven over coming up the driveway to this building. Her pale gray eyes glinted with curiosity as she took them in. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Surprise!” Claude hollered, launching himself out of a chair at the far end of the room and clapping his hands. “They’re from Winfield, Laura!”
“Yes,” Sally managed to say. “We’re from Winfield. We came to see you.”
“How lovely,” the woman said, her wizened face breaking into a smile.
This was the goddess? The beautiful, charismatic poet? She was old enough to be Paul’s grandmother!
“Can we go somewhere and talk?” Sally asked.
“If you’d like. Perhaps we could have some tea.” She patted one of the twins on the shoulder and crossed to the doorway.
In the hall, he sized up the woman. Could Paul have possibly—? No way. Even though she had a pretty decent figure for a senior citizen…and maybe she’d qualify as charismatic. Beautiful, even, in a septuagenarian kind of way. Sexy enough to be elected prom queen at the Senior Center ball.
But Paul and her together? Merely picturing his young, healthy buddy with Granny Yokum made his eggplant lasagna do gymnastics in his digestive tract.
They returned to the dining room, strolled through it and entered a kitchen equipped with professional appliances—six-burner stove, aluminum-doored refrigerator, stainless-steel counters and large cast-iron pots hanging from racks along the walls. It seemed like much too elaborate a room to boil water in, but the slender silver-haired woman filled a kettle with water, set it on the oversize range and turned on the gas. Then she plucked some tea bags from a canister and dropped them into three mugs pulled from a cabinet.
Todd hated tea, but he was too stunned to say so.
None of them spoke while they waited for the water to boil. The old saying about watched pots floated through Todd’s mind as the minutes ticked by. He sneaked furtive glimpses at Laura Ryershank, taking in the slight droop of her eyelids and the pleats of skin around her eyes, the fine frizz of hair framing her heart-shaped face, the sagging flesh beneath her chin. No matter how deceitful a prick Paul was, Todd just couldn’t see it. Nope. Laura Hawkes he would have believed, but not this one.
As she steeped the tea in the mugs, he contemplated a way to get out of this, to say there must be a mistake, thank the woman for her time and leave. He wanted to go back to the cabin, to that big, solid bed, and resume what he and Sally had been doing before Claude had to spoil everything by phoning them. But he wasn’t even in the mood for that. He was pretty sure he could get back into the mood with a little help from Sally, but right now…
He realized he wasn’t even all that eager to return to the bed in the cabin. He just wanted to grab their bags, toss them in the car and get the hell out of here.
Sally clearly had other ideas. As soon as the three of them had carried their cups to the dining room and taken seats at one end of the long table, she started talking. Just like when they’d visited Laura Hawkes, Sally decided to turn this error into an interesting adventure. “You have such a splendid reputation at Winfield College,” she began. “We just had to come and meet you in person.”
“It’s a long way to come just to meet me,” Laura said with a crinkly smile. “I’ll be back in Winfield in a couple of weeks for my final visiting artist reading. You could have waited until then.”
“But we wanted to meet you here. My husband—my late husband, Paul Driver—always spoke so highly of you.”
Todd shot Sally a glance. Why was she hinting around? Did she actually think her late husband, Paul Driver, had slept with this woman? Did she actually think he could?
Evidently, she did. She observed Laura’s face as closely as a botanist observing a budding orchid while she waited for a response. Did she see a rival in the woman? A femme fatale? A superannuated nymphet?
“Paul—what did you say? Driver? I don’t recall ever meeting him. I’m so sorry for your loss, though, dear.”
Okay? Todd wanted to say. Are you satisfied? Can we go now?
But Sally didn’t want to go. “So how does that all work out, your teaching in Winfield and coming here to write?”
Much to his dismay, Laura Ryershank decided to tell them how it all worked out—the unabridged version, starting with her graduation from Winfield College with the Class of ’48. After college, she’d traveled to Europe and engaged in dalliances with assorted postwar types. She’d returned home, married three times, had her early works published in the Yale Younger Poets series, taught graduate students, taught second-grade students, hosted a salon in Greenwich Village, founded a small press, sold her small press to a major publishing house and retired on the profit she’d netted in that transaction. She’d spent most of her summers at Mondaga Colony, writing and savoring nature, as she put it, and ultimately she’d wound up on the board of directors. She’d been giving poetry readings and master classes at Winfield for years and was thrilled to have been named the visiting artist this year. She believed that artists needed to live in communities like Mondaga Colony, where they could nurture and support one another, because society truly didn’t nurture and support its artists, even though without those artists life wouldn’t be worth living.
At least she didn’t hearken to the muse, Todd thought sullenly, trying not to gag on his tea while Sally sat forward in her chair, apparently enraptured by the small silver-haired woman. He hadn’t noticed Sally’s earrings before—he’d had other things on his mind—but when she moved her head and her hair fluttered back from her face, he noticed that the items hanging from her earlobes bore an uncanny resemblance to gold-toned squids.
No more than a half hour ago—he discreetly checked his watch, unsure whether he’d been listening to the elderly poet for minutes or hours—he’d been craving Sally the way a dead man craved entry to heaven. Had sex with her really been so breathtaking? Had he really felt, in that endless moment when he’d completely lost himself inside her, that Sally had been the woman he’d been waiting for all his life? Now all he could see were her most irritating qualities: her intense fascination with nonsense, her infatuation with artsy types, her shallow attempt at depth—and her silly earrings.
He wanted to go home. Now.
But she had to hear more. She had to interrogate Laura Ryershank about the Battle of Mondaga Lake—“Oh, yes, it’s true about the tire getting shot out. But Hawley stopping a bullet with his shoe? Ha! Hawley is a novelist, don’t forget. Fiction is his life”—and about the creative process—“Trees are the poet’s greatest inspiration. Trees are God’s stilts. So when you surround yourself with trees, you can almost feel God teetering overhead.”
Maybe God ought to lose his balance and come tumbling down, crushing all the poets, Todd thought churlishly.
Eventually, his tea half consumed, he excused himself and left the two women jabbering. Laura Hawkes redux, he concluded. Sally obviously enjoyed making friends with Lauras who weren’t her husband’s mistress.
He hiked back to the cabin. A mean, selfish part of him sneered at the prospect of Sally getting lost trying to locate their cabin in the dark without him to guide her. Once inside, he saw the rumpled quilt on the bed, the head-shaped depressions in the pillows, and a low ache tugged at his gut.
Yes, she had been breathtaking.
But she was also Sally. Friendly to a fault. Intrigued by life. Hungry to learn, to see the world through other people’s eyes. Eager to break the rules, ignore the rules, hearken to her own muse, whatever that muse might be.
Damn. All those irritating aspects of her, the traits that set him to grinding his teeth—they were what made her breathtaking. Her enthusiasm. Her intensity. Her pushiness. Her boldness. She was juicy, and Paul had been as dry as stale toast, and Todd…
Todd was dying of thirst.
He wanted Sally. Even though she’d rather spend an evening interviewing an old lady about what life had been like in postwar France or what exactly she’d meant when she said trees were God’s stilts, or what it felt like to hold an actual book you had written in your hands—even though she’d prefer that to wrapping her legs around Todd and letting him bury himself inside her until they were both sweating and writhing in ecstasy, he wanted her.
So instead of tossing his things into his suitcase, he pulled out the box of condoms and left it handy on the night table. Then he took a shower—a quick one, because the hot water ran out while he was soaping his chest. He ran his razor over his cheeks and chin, brushed his teeth and climbed into bed, knowing she’d be worth the wait.
And when she returned to the cabin sometime later, awakening him with her exuberant chatter about how Laura had given her an autographed copy of her most recent book and Claude had given her the recipe for the vegetarian lasagna they’d had for dinner, and damn but she wished she could write because these people were just so amazingly talented and complex—babbling the whole time she was in the bathroom, even when she was brushing her teeth and her words came out unintelligible….
He didn’t have to know what she was saying. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was there, spiky with energy, vibrant with the sheer joy of having met new people with new ideas.
When she slipped under the quilt beside him and her joy filled the bed, he knew she was worth the wait.