The Testimony

by Laura London

  “Christine, édesem…” He hardly knew the soft whisper as his own, nor recognized that he had translated the endearment into his first language. Christine, my sweetness, he had said.… “Make me feel it, édesem. I need you.”

  “And I need you.” She flushed and began to smile. “My heart is racing.”

  “Show me.”

  She didn’t remove her gaze from his face as she drew him to the bed until he sat with his worn denim jeans brushing her unclad thigh. She carried his hand to her body, pressing his palm to her tearing heartbeat. The upper curve of his hand barely teased the tender weight of her breast, and her eyelids closed and then drifted slowly open at the heavy spur of pleasure.

  He bent closer, bringing his lips to the place she had laid his hand. Soft kisses explored the slippery fabric, the hot contours beneath. Nuzzling, he buried his face in the undercurve of her breast, feeling her chest jerk sharply as she absorbed a dry breath.

  “Oh, yes, love. Show me,” he whispered, letting his lips move swiftly lower in a rough traverse of her ribs, her belly, slipping his hand under her, spreading his fingers low on her back, lifting her into him.

  He wanted to prolong each burning caress, to imprint it deeply on his senses, but the ecstasy of being close to her was so rich that he felt unable to reach its deepest import. He wanted to stop each second mid-beat and ride inside its open ellipse for eternity, and he had to fight back the tidal wave of sensation that was dragging him toward an immediate deep possession of her.

  He lifted his head, smiling crookedly with hazed vision into her overbright eyes. “I’m an open fire, dearest love. God knows what you must be thinking…”

  “Jesse, it’s the same for me.” Her laugh had a captivating huskiness. “What have I been doing for six months? Gnawing the bedpost…” With fluent grace she began to edge apart the buttons of his shirt cuffs, and he shuddered as her fingers swept against his skin.

  “If you could go to my cell block and look at bed five, you’d see an iron bedstead reduced to a pile of slivers,” he said, not thinking about, not knowing how enchanting he was to her in his intoxicated passion. His palm curved a second time over her wildly beating heart and held there under her breast, making for her a warm, safe area of sensation as she took off his jacket. For a moment she dropped her face into the jacket’s scarlet lining, inhaling the minty scent of the leather and of him.

  But with a slow intense smile that made a tingling weakness spread through her legs, he pushed the jacket lower and gently freed the first button of her nightgown. Drawing apart the bodice, he placed his parted lips on the valley between her breasts and tasted the milky softness with his tongue. Then he drew back and slowly found and freed the second button, and his lips lightly touched and rested above her navel. The stroke of his uncovered arms against her skin left tiny hot and cold shivers in its wake, and when he began to play a massage of openmouthed kisses over her belly and feather her skin with his tongue, his hand dropped to her inner thigh and found the pulse there with his thumb, stirring over it in a slow circle.

  He answered her low whimper of desire, whispering against her skin, “You taste like sunshine. I can feel you all through my body, Christine…”

  The glossy nightgown fell away from her, and her skin glistened in the candlelight, the freckles dappling her like pollen across a cherry blossom.

  “Gilt-tipped ivory,” he murmured, lifting his lips to hers, his hand never leaving its easy voluptuous motion inside her thigh. His other hand cupped under her neck, lightly kneading the smooth softness of her as his head descended to capture her mouth, pressing into it. After a clingingly soft beginning, his lips parted over hers. His tongue tipped the inside of her lips, and then entered her deeply. Her fingers, unsteady, dissatisfied, hasty, laid his shirt the rest of the way open, and the light abrasion of his fleecy chest hair against her aroused nipples shot ice-hot eroticism spiraling through her flooding nerve streams.

  “Jess…” she murmured weakly as he roamed over her inner thigh with his fingertips and over her throat with his mouth. “It’s been a while. You may have forgotten… you have to take off your pants.”

  So he was kissing her, laughing at the same time, shrugging out of his shirt, his shoes, the rest, and then more gently freeing her from the bikini pants of her nightgown. And then he lowered his head to her breast, riding the tip softly with his lips, relearning its distended beauty.

  “You’re so warm for me—I need you to warm me, Chris. I’ve been so cold.” His mouth made blind, fevered trails over her body, capturing pulse points in her temples, her throat, stroking his tongue over the inside of her elbow.

  In a shaken whisper, she answered, “I’ve been so empty, Jesse. I—” Her breath stopped as his hand began a lazy tracery of the hollow inside her thigh and then entered her with unerring gentleness. Hot convulsions rippled through her limbs and she gasped out, “Jess—”

  The sensitive fingers shifted, relieving the intensity. In a husky soft whisper, breathing painfully, he said, “Too much electricity, Chrissie? Is this better? Yes? Oh, love, you feel so good, oh, love. Say that you love me, Chris.”

  “I love you,” she breathed. “I’ve been so empty, Jess. I need you to—” She paused, gathering oxygen. “I need you to fill me.”

  His hand dove into her frothy curls, gripping her, pulling her toward his mouth, and their lips met in a long, deep, driving kiss. Tiny gasps rose in her throat as his lips tore at hers, and the aching need in each panting respiration was a welcoming call to the dark heat within him. Her eyes looked brilliantly blue, centered by dark love-opened pupils, her lips wet and parted, her breath coming rapidly, the rhythm broken by his touch inside her. He had stopped thinking, not by conscious choice but because his love-need for her had carried him to a plane beyond thought. For this moment, he experienced the total release from care he desperately needed. With his eyes closed, with her liquid desire shimmering on his lips, sustaining their kiss, he brought himself into her body.

  The penetration was not easy. But he knew that only dimly. Nor did he really grasp her quivering tension. All he knew was the euphoric rapture of her softness, her tightness closing around him. Her trembling arms wound about his shoulders and she held on to him hard. Moving with downy lightness, his hands began to cover her, to trace her features, her breasts, her lower stomach, her buttocks, the backs of her thighs; but the exploration reached his brain as one word—Christine. My love. Dimly again, he realized that she had relaxed against him, that their bodies had become a single pulse. She filled his mind like honeyed cream. She was a mist of pretty dappled colors to him, like a winsome autumn day. His voice whispered scattered passion words, sex words, to her, but he could not hear them—it was the rushing voice of his love, as natural as a waterfall.

  He was breathing in soft rhythmic murmurs that mingled with her own, her exhalations stroking his lips like a warm breeze. His desire was a pounding thing, searingly hot, stripped of everything but the sweetness of her, feeling her sleek body beneath him, the smooth damp flesh over lean fine muscle, with exquisite curves and hollows that seemed made for the fit of his lips and tongue. They were as one body—as if their search for spiritual union had worked a strange medieval magic, recreating them as one soul. He gathered her face to him and brought his mouth back to hers in a last nourishing kiss, and the meter of their breathing broke in a final delicious, panting, clutching surge that lasted and lasted, and he hung within it, suspended like a sun ray.

  He covered her with his body then, and from far away heard her contented chuckle, felt her nibble on his earlobe, felt her hand stroke his hair. He wanted to tell her he loved her, to tell her how beautiful it had been and that he loved the yellow ribbons, but he was so far removed into a warm red restful place in his mind, a restful den filled with the scent and the sound of Christine, that speech was impossible for him. Sleep came like a sonnet.

  * * *

  After sleep had rested on him awhile, his dreams began—pleas
ant gray sprites at first, will-o’-the-wisps that danced and laughed among themselves, twisting in patterns that grew ever so subtly more sinister. The sprites stood up and stared at him, then turned cold, turned hard and cylindrical, and surrounded him, edging closer, crowding him, pushing in around him, pressing down on his chest, smothering him. Flickering data from his brain told him this wasn’t real, that it was a nightmare and would pass, but he must not scream, must not cry out, because terror screams in the night threw the cell block into panic. Subliminal strength took over, and as the gray sprites became the bars of his cell, he began to fight. He fought not the inanimate deadly bars but his own fear and loneliness, fighting his own desire to scream and struggle, his own resistance. He made himself as rigid as the bars and gripped the steel edge of his cot, forcing his mouth to stay closed, clenching his jaw as his fingers crushed into the steel like a life net, making it hurt to distract himself—squeezing the steel—squeezing the steel—

  “Jesse, no! Stop it!” It was a cry of pain. Christine’s voice brought him to awareness, and at the first unfocused level of thought it seemed like the steel under his fingers was frail and animate, and he let it slide from his grasp. The poignant comfort of the airy cotton bedclothes and smooth mattress murmured to him that he was at home and no longer in prison. He came partly awake, not opening his eyes, breathing deeply, trying to shake away the closed-in feeling, the lingering suffocation, the sickening uplift of nausea. His arms and legs were leaden in a trance paralysis, but then he thought, No, I must have been holding on to Chris and I’ve let her go, so some part of my will must function. He forced himself through the stinging agony of sleep needles to sit and put his face in his hands.

  “Jesse, are you all right?” Christine snapped on the bedside light.

  He felt bitter, bitter shame. Yes, he had his own weaknesses, flaws here and there in his mental fabric that he would as soon have done without, but damn it, they had never been this juvenile. Nightmares. Claustrophobia. A short attention span. They were random neuroses that he might have sympathized with if he had discovered them in another human being. In himself they aroused only self-disgust and anger. He had told himself that his months in prison were over and that he could stop reacting to them. Why this strident aftertaste?

  Her hand came, a tentative pressure on his shoulder. He lifted his face from his hands, blinking against the light, and turned to her. Her eyes were sleep shadowed, her voice strained.

  “Is everything okay, honey?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I woke you.” He forced reassurance into the words. “A nightmare, I think. It’s gone now.” He lifted her hand and kissed the firm ridge of her knuckles. “I must have grabbed your arm. Did I hurt you?”

  “No. But I was startled.” She smiled at him lovingly, and, winking into the sudden light, he never guessed that she was acting too.

  Chapter Five

  Dance studios, by strict tradition, tend to be utilitarian, if not downright shabby. No frills. One school where Indiana took daily class in New York had been so cold that half the class was usually out with the flu. Once he had banged his skull on an exposed water pipe during one of his bravura leaps and spent the night in a hospital with a concussion.

  When Christine had started her own ballet school, she didn’t want stark or pristine or shabby. She wanted to teach very little girls, and stark didn’t seem to suit very little girls. She had given one wall a mirror, of course, because serious students had to become accustomed to one. There was a beautiful teak barre. She had asked her first students to choose the wallpaper, and now a bright print of rainbows, stars, and clouds gave three sides of the room an appealing play-school quality. The floor was the best, with a basket-weave undercushion to soften the shock of each landing. It was a luxury that even professional dancers rarely enjoyed. Most theatrical stage floors were made for symphony, chamber music, or drama—anything but ballet, though ballet companies had to use them too. They were so darn hard that prolonged exposure left dancers with tendonitis, bone spurs, bruising, and a complex about their beat-up feet. Indiana had once remarked to Jesse that when you took a dancer to bed the last thing you could coax off was her shoes.

  While Indy approved of the floor in Christine’s studio, his first glance at the wallpaper had held the pained amusement of the topflight pro looking at a dabbler. “This is no place to turn out dancers,” he had said.

  And Jesse, who understood that side of Christine so well, had shot back, “She’s not trying to turn out dancers. She’s trying to turn out human beings.”

  It was fortunate he did understand, because the way she did things, this wasn’t what anyone would call a lucrative proposition. Turning an old health food restaurant into a dancing school had taken a good chunk out of the trust fund of hers that Jesse tried so hard not to have any Old World male hang-ups about. She remembered the only argument in their courtship about her money and his lack of it: the row had ended with her emptying her wallet into her food processor and making it eat fifty dollars while the man who was sixteen before he owned a pair of pants without knee patches stood gaping at her like she had just shot him in the foot. It had seemed to do something for him, because when she asked him with a flaming look if he was happy now, he had whispered that she was a crazy, crazy girl and had made love to her on the kitchen floor. With a sack of potatoes by her head and Jesse’s lips a fiery pressure on her throat, he had told her for the first time that he loved her.

  The dancing school had been a tactful place to get rid of a little money—well, to be honest, a lot of money.

  Her preballet class of four year olds made a straggling line in front of her. Smiling at the tiny faces, she stretched out her arms. Imitating her, they stretched out a little space around themselves. It was perfectly useless, of course. By the time she finished their warm-up, they would have bunched themselves together in a space two feet square and very likely backed her against a wall as well. How she loved them—the round tummies and sturdy legs, the plump shoulders and tumbling barrettes. Heather, in grubby pink tights and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, was hopping up and down ecstatically for no discernible reason. Kelly was wearing a leotard of a particularly startling and iridescent lime, pulling her gum out of her mouth in a slack line that dipped heart-stoppingly close to Megan’s pigtails. Robin and Melissa were trying to stomp on each other’s toes, and Jamelle had deserted the line and was licking long streaks into the clean mirror with the flat of her pink tongue. As her sister in New York, who had one of the critters herself, said, you can always tell a four year old but you can’t tell ’em much.

  They were too young to learn ballet. In fact, classical ballet was a highly refined discipline that required a very specific musculature, and careless training on an undeveloped body was likely to produce a child with faulty skeletal alignment. However graceful ballet might appear to an audience, its unnatural positions were an ungodly strain on the body. When a teenager in her advanced class had confided that she wanted to be a doctor, not a dancer, Christine had said, “Good!” But one of her students had gone on to the corps de ballet of a prestigious Pennsylvania company, and that had put an end to Indy’s remarks about plie parlors, tutu worship, and lightweight methodology.

  Her own career as a dancer had been over at eighteen, when, after her adolescence had been sacrificed to daily classes, her mother had dragged her to auditions at every major ballet company in the country. Twelve companies had rejected her before the nervous breakdown (her mother’s), and Christine had tucked her tail between her legs and taken her not-quite-good-enough-to-make-it body off to college like a whipped puppy. Four years at college and three spectacularly lousy attempts at romance later, just when she was becoming convinced that she was being punished for the sins of a past life, God had changed his whole attitude toward her and sent Jesse. Not that Jesse had been the man of her dreams. Oh, no. Her dreams had never been that lavish.

  Warm-ups came first. It was important to start good habits early. Then she spent a mom
ent or two teaching her imps some basic ballet terms. After that they played dance games, anything she could think of to pass on to them her joy in moving to music. Except that she never had to pass it on. It came naturally to the little pixies at this age.

  Christine had started to put on the music when she noticed Kelly poking the gum strand back into her mouth, with hairs attached.

  “Kelly! Do I look like a ballerina?” she asked, making a little backward bourrée and, at the same time, exaggerated gum-chewing motions with her jaw. She got a sardonic nursery-kid’s grin from Kelly for that, and while her tiniest pupil went off to toss her gum in the wastebasket, she put on the CD and asked what the music made them think of.

  “It’s like springtime.”

  “Like flying things—butterflies.”

  Knee-high ballerinas filled the room, leaping, balancing on one leg, arms flowing. Small fingers fluttered, small limbs waved like petals.

  She joined them, going up on pointe, raising one foot in passé, feeling a tug in the sore thigh muscle that she had earned herself last night in her well-meant enthusiasm for wrapping Jesse up in her legs. The memory gave her a dumb grin, and flying butterflies danced inside of her as well as out. Last night’s climax had left her fluttery all morning. Even now her body could recreate shadow sensations of him against her that would turn her blood into hot oil. Her eyelids began to droop. Feeling springtime and melodies inside, she began a drift dance, sweetly erotic thoughts of Jesse floating through her mind like brilliant white clouds.

  Jesse, standing in the doorway, saw her flowing and lithe in her slick blue leotard and cranberry leg warmers. Her hair was falling out of its ponytail in a dusting of cherry-colored curls on her cheeks and temples. Her face, composed in reverie, was a study of innocent and powerful sensuality. Virginal. He smiled. As far as she was concerned, that was the ultimate insult. She detested her youthfully dewy prettiness. Whenever anyone told her that in twenty years she’d appreciate her jeunesse, she’d only roll her eyes in exasperation. When she’d dropped off their newspapers for recycling at a drive at the high school, the principal had demanded a hall pass. The first night he’d introduced her to his brothers, Sandy had given him a sparkling grin, lifted an eyebrow, and said, “She’s a nice girl, Jess—but she sure does look like a minor.” That, of course, had been before Sandy saw her in a leotard.