‘No.’
Her hand swept across her eyes.
‘No eyes.’
‘No.’
‘Then it went well?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now you are safe.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does this make you happy?’
‘Yes. No man should feel like a hunted animal.’
‘Or woman.’
He bowed slightly. ‘Or woman.’
She looked away from his face, down at his feet and there were tears in her eyes. Her hands moved very slowly: ‘Your bath is ready.’
She turned and went back into the tub room. He followed her in and turned her around, facing him.’ Has something changed? Is it not our bath?’
And he kissed her very lightly on the lips, caressing her neck with his fingertips, and moved his hands down her smooth skin and out over her shoulders and slipped the silk gown free and it dropped at her feet and he slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his shirt and quickly pulled it over his head, breaking their kiss for only a second.
He moved closer to her until the tips of her nipples were touching him. And she moved closer, felt him growing hard against her and his hands slipped around her and he very lightly began stroking her back and she began to move her body under his fingers and he got harder and she moved back slightly and began to caress his thighs and his stomach and his memory tumbled back in time to the night she first came to him: dressed in her mother’s red- and-white silk kimono, she had entered his dark room, lit the single candle near his bed, and kneeling beside him, had told him with those wondrously poetic hands that she loved him.
She had closed his eyes with her fingertips and then traced every muscle in his body with a touch like feathers, humming in that gloriously soft and delightfully off-key voice, and then she had retraced his body with her lips until finally she took him in her mouth without touching him with her fingers, and the memory aroused him even more and he began to rub her buttocks, moving her very subtly closer to him and she rose on her toes and he felt her hair crush against him and he bent his knees and let his penis slide against her and she arched her back slightly so her clitoris was against him and for several minutes they stood together, moving slowly to the rhythm of her humming and then he bent his knees a little more and he felt himself enter her and her wet muscles closed around him and she wrapped first one leg, then the other around his waist and he slid his hand down between their stomachs and found the trigger of her senses and felt it harden as he stroked her, and the humming became a sigh and the sigh became a tiny cry in her throat and she stiffened and she stopped breathing for several seconds and then she thrust herself down on him and cried out and she began to shudder and the response of her passion was so overwhelming that all his senses suddenly seemed to rush out of him and he felt a spasm, and then another, and another, another, another, and he exploded, and his knees began to tremble but he held her close and stayed inside her and slowly went up the steps and got in the tub and the hot water swirled around them and she cried out again and this time her response seemed to renew him and he felt himself growing longer again, growing deep inside her and she moved up and down, sliding him against her and she felt herself building again, she felt almost electrified, lost in time and space, and the waves began again, building, building.
When it was over, he tried to tell her that he had to go back, had to leave her. But she closed her eyes, for she knew this time the hurts would be harder and the memories would be realities, and this time perhaps the gods would not send him back to her. So she closed her eyes, and that way he could not talk to her. But she spoke to him, a phrase she had practised many times with Sammi, and although she still was not pleased with the way she said it, it was time.
‘I ruv you, O’Haya,’ she said, and with her eyes still closed, she laid her wet fingertips against his lips.
It was a strange sight. No, O’Hara thought, it was beyond strange, it was bizarre.
O’Hara stood on the deck of the l2-foot yacht as it muttered in the sea a couple of hundred yards offshore. He was wearing blue jeans, a white raw silk shirt and a fur jacket, its collar turned up against the cold off-shore breeze. The heavy field glasses through which he was studying the deserted beach had been offered to him by the first mate, a lean, immaculate ex-Navy commander in his mid-forties named Carmody.
As O’Hara’s eyes swept the desolate Cape Cod shoreline, a couple emerged from a gorge in the bleak, soaring dunes speckled with sea grass that stood sentinel along the beach. The woman, tall and erect, was wearing a tweed jacket over her shoulders, her brown hair tossed by the heavy wind that sent mist from the roiling surf swirling past them.
The man beside her was built like a wrestler from the waist up, his biceps bulging, his shoulders and chest enormous, muscles lumped around a neck as thick as a telephone pole. His head was as bald as the beach except for tufts of white hair that caressed his ears. In jarring contrast to his torso, from the waist down he was a wasted human being. His legs were atrophied into spindles, mere twigs, and he walked in a laborious, shifting gait, swinging one leg in front of the other while supporting himself by two bright-red ski poles.
The man wore dark-blue swimming trunks and an open yellow windbreaker that flapped in the chilly morning air. No shoes. He shuffled painfully past long shadows, cast in the white sand by a sun which had risen only an hour or so earlier, while the woman, ignoring his deformity, kept pace beside him.
