“I miss it most after sex. In fact, it’s the best thing about it.”
His rueful laugh brings her eyes to his face.
“Oh Jesus, here we go again,” she says.
He clamps a hand over her mouth. “Please, don’t let’s start bitching on each other.”
She peels his hand off her mouth. “I’ll say what I want.”
For a quiet moment he just looks at her. Then he walks his fingers from her flank up over her hipbone to her stomach and begins to tickle her. Shrieking, she tries to wriggle away but he is still inside her. He pins her casually with his body and fills her mouth with his tongue to still her whooping. Her gasping into his mouth is as stimulating as her squirming body. When he stops tickling her, she continues to laugh, swept along with his foolishness, getting a kick out of his being turned on again by a childish bout of wrestling. The giggling fades except for an occasional shudder as they begin to move together again.
When he looks in her eyes, the widening pool of her pupils pleases him. The candleflames are gone; her eyes reflect him. He tugs at her headrag until her stubbled skull is cupped in his hands and he lays his cheek against it, listening to the shortening rhythm of her breathing, feeling the royal-blue pulse at her naked temple under his thumb. She surrenders suddenly with a strangled sound and begins to shudder. Burying himself deeply, he lets the churning rush take him.
“Did you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I guess I was close. It went away.”
“That’s good, then,” he encourages her. “Next time, maybe. Soon anyway.”
She might as well be wearing an ivory mask for all the reaction her face shows. He doesn’t want to let go of her. Her body feels rounder and sleeker to him, more female. He dips the tip of his tongue into the cleavage between her breasts. Go all night, he thinks. Working this sweet machine. By morning they’d be a puddle of sweat and come. Melted tigers. Bottle it up and sell it as an aphrodisiac.
“Meet me here tomorrow night? I’ll be out of work by ten.”
She shrugs. “Okay.”
As they tromp through the woods to the truck, she pelts him with a snowball, a challenge he cannot resist. She jumps him from behind, puts a handful of the cold wet stuff down the back of his neck and they tumble into the snow. She straddles him while they scrub each other’s faces with it. He begins to lick the trickle of melt down her face and they are in the midst of another make-out session.
“Oooo, Samgod, ‘it’s too frigging cold for this shit.’” She shivers violently against him.
“ ‘Come on, it feels good,’” he teases.
He helps her to her feet, then sweeps her off them and carries her, kicking and giggling, to the truck.
“I’ll walk from here,” she insists. “It’s only a little ways.”
All at once she’s gone, trekking off on her own with a peck on the lips for a goodbye. She’s so abrupt, so ephemeral, the way she changes and takes herself away at the very instant when things start to feel real between them.
The sky seems roofless to the whole frigid frozen universe. It feels like his lungs are being tugged inside out by a black vacuum. His skin is damp with cold sweat. The interior membranes of his nose tighten and crackle and his eyes sting as if they are trying to flash-freeze. It’s so beautiful and so heartless, this cold universe. No way to comprehend it, no matter how many planetary gears you map. Maybe that’s the point of it, to humble you. Just now, he feels his limits right down to the beads of water freezing at the tips of his eyelashes.
His father is on the couch in the living room, pillows under his head and covered with a quilt as if he is spending the night there. Clicking off the late news, Reuben flips back the quilt and sits up. He’s still dressed, except for his shoes. Hooking them out from under the couch, he peers at Sam.
“You’re late.”
It isn’t a reproach, just a comment inviting an explanation.
Sam shrugs.
Unease crinkles the corners of Reuben’s eyes. “Relax, Sammy, I’m not sleeping on this couch. I just stayed up to catch the news.”
Sam’s cheekbones grow warm. Was he so obvious, scanning the floor for dead soldiers?
“What’s wrong, Sam?” Reuben asks suddenly.
Sam makes himself look at his father directly. “Nothing.”
Reuben’s ironic smile acknowledges they both know Sam is evading.
“You did good, even if it was a loss,” he says shortly, and stops to kiss Sam’s forehead before he climbs the stairs to the second floor.
WEAVERS JAM GREENSPARK’S BIG MACHINE, banners the fold of the morning paper. The photograph that dominates the page is of Sam, at full extension and midair in that thirty-foot rainbow jump shot, captioned Shooting Star. A smaller one features the Weavers’ forward driving past Bither and Gramolini in the third quarter.
The sidebar speculates about the poor Greenspark performance. For this team to come apart so completely and so quickly, the sportswriter asserts, there is likely to be dissension in the locker room—a point illustrated by the anarchic game the Indians played. Indeed, only one of the Indians actually played a game and what a game it was—but it may be unfair to the rest of the team to cast Sam Styles as the unquestioned hero. After having been a star for his entire high school career, should there be any surprise if Styles’s head has started to swell? Or that the rest of the team may have accumulated some resentments?
The coverage on the overshadowed girls’ game is less fulsome. Deanie’s stats come after the usual cocked-eyebrow description of her appearance and style.
Why should it be such a big deal? So she’s not cut out of a paper-doll chain.
