Gaffney, Patricia (17 page)

And that was all her doing. Touching her like this wasn't
allowed—as long as they'd known her, she'd made just this kind of thing
off-limits. And yet tonight she'd given permission, and Jesse was the lucky
man. They envied him, naturally. But they didn't despise him, and they
respected her right to choose. Because they respected
her.

Conversations started up again gradually. Jesse kept Cady's feet
as long as she let him, massaging her insteps, grinding his knuckles into her
heels, doing his best to drive her crazy with how good it felt. But eventually
she drew away. She didn't get up, though. She said, "Thanks. That was
great. You've got good hands," and stayed where she was. Neither of them
said much. They sat and listened to the talk, the singing, the jokes, the
drunken horseplay. They smiled and nodded at the others, throwing a word or two
in occasionally. For cover. So nobody would realize how completely wrapped up
they were in each other.

Joe Redleaf stood up, holding onto the table for balance.
Staggering but dignified, he approached them and made a wobbly bow. "Good
night. Goodbye. Until we meet again, my friends."

Jesse got up to shake hands. "You don't have to go. I mean,
you know. Leave town. That was just talk."

"Yes, I know. But I was going anyway."

That cracked them up; they slapped each other on the shoulder,
chuckling and laughing.

Cady stood, too. "I'll walk out with you, Joe." They
moved away together. At the double doors, she turned her head to look back at
Jesse. Her expression calmed him.
Wait,
it said.
I'll come back.
He
sat down, feeling peaceful. No jealousy.
You're the one,
she might as
well have said out loud. He knew it as well as he knew anything. Tonight was
the night. Inevitable. It couldn't have happened sooner or later, only now.
Everything that had happened on this long, perfect day had led up to this
night.

Cady came back. Moving toward him, she looked calm, too, he
thought. Calm and sure. She came straight to him.

He said, "Want to go for a walk?"

She bent and picked up her shoes. "I'll just tell Levi."

Jesse told his friends good night, and went outside to wait for
her.

He looked tall and lanky in silhouette, backlit by the moon. Cady
paused just outside the swinging doors to look at him. He had his weight on one
leg, hip cocked at a loose angle, one long arm braced against the upright porch
post. He was watching the moon. Its platinum face had that openmouthed,
anguished look it took on at three-quarters full. He slipped his hand in his
pants pocket; his shirt opened, and the white of his ribs, his side, flashed
for a second. Then he turned his shoulder a fraction of an inch, and he was
covered up again.

Cady shivered. Just that quick whiteness, that gleam of pale bare
skin, silver-on-black, Jesse's skin, had her chest tightening, her heart
pounding. Anticipation. Such a deep-boned lust, and so
fast:
she could
hardly believe it.
I'm not like this.

He turned. Had she made a sound? When he didn't smile at her or
say something funny, the breathlessness inside her grew fuller, harder to bear.
She came toward him casually, as if nothing was happening. "Doesn't the
air smell good?"

He nodded. "You smell good."

She blew a laugh. "I smell like cigars."

He shook his head. Facing her, he finally did smile. She grinned
back, relieved, keeping her eyes away from his naked chest. She'd seen it off
and on all night under his open black shirt, but that was different. Now it was
just them, standing by themselves in the moonlight. Jesse without his shirt
felt as intimate as... as her without her blouse.

She said, "Joe told me what you did." He rubbed the
bridge of his nose, as if he couldn't recall, didn't quite know what she meant.
"You gave him money."

"Ah." He looked slightly annoyed. He must have told Joe
not to tell.

"That was awfully nice of you."

"Oh, yeah." He dismissed it, turning back to squint up
at the moon.

"He's so poor, you can't imagine. It'll help him so much. And
you don't even know him. Jesse, that's just... so..."

He gave a rough laugh, not wanting her to finish. "Yeah,
well, I'm rich, so I won't miss it. Plus I was drunk when I gave it to
him."

He was not. But she only lifted an eyebrow at him. If that was the
way he wanted to play it, fine with her. He touched her fingertips with his,
just a gentle clutch of knuckles, and they stepped off the sidewalk and into
the street.

The hard dirt felt cool under her bare feet. She looked down,
watching Jesse's white feet flash under his dark trousers, her white toes swish
out from under her skirts. How companionable, being barefooted together.
Playful. Like two kids, holding hands while they headed for the swimming hole.

But they turned together, without any hesitation, into the path
that led through the blueblossom bushes to her back door, and her
childhood-playmates image disintegrated. Adult games, that's what they were
going to play tonight. The pent-up, breathless feeling returned. She couldn't
get enough air.

"I thought you were going to lock this."

"Forgot. I should. I do sometimes." She hadn't even
closed
the door, she saw as they walked up the two steps to her minuscule porch.
It had been hot this afternoon; she'd left the door open for air. What a long
day this had been. She thought of Ham, coming into her office to tell her Joe
was here. Had that really been
today?

"Want to come in?" She flushed. What a dumb thing to
say.

"Thanks." She saw his lips quirk, and felt even
stupider. But she was happy, too. In fact, she felt on the verge of laughter.
Hysteria? Not exactly. More like... euphoria.

"So." She went to the bureau and struck a match to the
oil lamp. "This is where I live." As if he'd never been here before.
"But you knew that," she added inanely. Where was all that confidence
and calm she'd felt a few minutes ago? It had deserted her the moment she'd
seen Jesse in the moonlight. My, but she was a silly girl. "Do you want a
drink?" She pivoted away from him, pressing her hands to her hot cheeks.
They'd just come out of a saloon, and she was asking him if he wanted a drink.
She didn't even have anything in here anyway, no bottle, nothing.

Fortunately he said, "No, I've had enough." He wasn't
drunk, though, she could see that. If anything he looked the opposite. Alert,
focused. Focused on her.

She turned away again. She thought about stalling, of saying,
Would
you like to see my photograph album?
Luckily he caught her hand just then
and tugged on it, forcing her to face him. "I like it when you look like
this," he told her.

She melted. "I'm a mess."

"Yeah, I know."

They relaxed into smiles. He lifted his hands and slipped them
into the hair at the back of her neck, and she unbent a little more, tilting
her head back, resting it against his palms. He had a cowlick now, from where
Doc Mobius had clipped the hair away from his head wound. A black slash of
hair, onesided, cut across the high white of his forehead; she ran her fingers
through it, neatening it. His heavy eyelids dropped, hiding his eyes. He said,
"I've been looking at you all night."

"I know. I could feel... I could feel it."

"Couldn't take my eyes off you. Kept thinking about this.
Kissing you."

"You can kiss me."

But just before their lips met, she said, "Jesse."

"Yes?"

"You know... some people think I do. But I don't."

"What?"

"This."

Before he leaned his forehead against hers, she saw understanding
flicker in his dark gray eyes. He took her hands and squeezed them. "Then
that makes it even better. Makes me even luckier."

She put her arms around him, standing on tiptoe to hold him.
"Oh,
Jess."
When he kissed her, she saw white lights pop and
shimmer behind her tight-closed eyes, little silent explosions echoing the ones
going off in other parts of her body. Why had she waited so long for this? She
tilted her head to get closer; she wanted to kiss him deeper, stronger. His
hands rubbed under her arms, down her sides to her waist, lower, sliding to the
back of her and pulling her up against him. He started backing up and she
followed him blind, not letting go. She didn't want to stop kissing him even
for a second.

He banged into the back of the bed, though, and they separated,
both of them panting and shiny-eyed. They sat on the edge of the mattress,
embracing again immediately. But they didn't kiss. They just held each other,
and she could feel the faint, subtle shake of his body with each heartbeat.
With hers.

"I slept... I sl... What is that?"

She let go of him to see what he was looking at. "Oh."
She smiled, closing her eyes while he pulled a strand of hair back and kissed
her temple. "My mother sewed them. Words to live by." On two pillow
shams at the head of her bed; she'd taken them with her wherever she went for
the last fifteen years. Not because they were pretty, or nice, not because she
even liked them. But because they were all she had left of her mother.

"What do they say?"

She hadn't realized how faded and torn the embroidered threads had
grown—Jesse couldn't even read the words. " 'I Slept and Dreamed That Life
Was Beauty.' And the other one says, T Woke and Found That Life Is Duty.'"
She laughed softly. "Mama's philosophy."

Jesse looked at her, not the pillows, peering at her in the
semidark to see if she was sad. "I don't know anything about you," he
said, a wondering note in his voice. "You know more about me than I do
about you, Cady."

"Oh, well. I'm not so interesting." Ha ha. She thought
she was very interesting. She was getting more interesting by the day.

"Well, I want to know everything about you."

"Okay. I'll tell you my life story. Right now. It's very
long."

It broke him up. He fell over backward, chuckling and snorting.
She lay beside him, laughing in sympathy, feeling the bed shake under them. Her
heart felt huge, too big for her chest. "I've always wanted this,"
she confessed to him, wiping away a laugh- tear gliding into her hair. He
didn't ask what she meant, so she didn't know if he understood or not. She
didn't mean just a lover. More than that. Someone she could play with. She
hadn't thought it through—in fact it had never occurred to her till now—but it
seemed to her you could trust a lover that you could laugh in bed with.

He rolled toward her, propping his head on his hand. He put his
other hand on her stomach. Her giant heart, the one too big for her chest,
jumped into her throat. Such an intimacy, this hand on her stomach, and it was
only just beginning. He kept her gaze while he spread her little checkered vest
away from her right breast, spread the other half back from her left. He took
hold of one end of her loose black cravat and began to pull it out of her
collar. Slowly. She listened to the high swish of taut silk pulling, pulling,
felt it making the circuit around the back of her neck.

"I'm stripping you. I'm taking off every stitch of your
clothes. You'll be nude in two minutes."

"Yeah." That was all she was capable of saying. He
started sliding buttons out of the buttonholes of her shirtwaist, and she
followed his dark fingers as they crept lower and lower. He tugged the blouse
out of her skirt and folded the sides back, uncovering her chemise. Plain white
cotton today. Drat. It wasn't as if she didn't have plenty of smart, sexy
underclothes, a drawer full of them that nobody ever saw. Just her luck.

Jesse didn't seem to mind, though. He came up on his elbow and
hovered over her, his longish hair falling around his face. "So
pretty." He tugged on ribbons, unsnapped snaps. "Aha. And now a
corset. Sometime—not now—would you explain to me why women like you wear these
things? Women who don't need 'em, I mean."

"So men like you will take them off of us."

Click. Chink.
Corset hooks coming unhooked. She felt
cool air on her chest, then warm skin—Jesse's hand.
Click, snap.
She was
free.

"Ahh," she exhaled on a high, deep sigh. He smoothed his
whole hand over her breasts, one and then the other, squeezing softly. Rubbing
them around, making them move. His eyes lit on the tattoo under her left
nipple. He stroked his thumb over it, frowning, as if he wanted to erase it.
She thought he would say something, but he kept quiet, and she couldn't read
his expression. What was there to say, anyway?

He dipped his head and took a swipe of her nipple with his tongue,
and she squealed, clenching her toes. Then he started in earnest, tonguing and
sucking and nibbling on her. She felt her body getting longer and longer as she
stretched and strained under him. Electrical shocks. Sparks that wouldn't stop,
just kept jolting and zapping through her, lighting a fire deep down.
Should've
closed the door,
she thought through some kind of a fog.
I'm making a
lot of noise.