Found: One Marriage

by Laura Parker

  The startled look on her face doubled his remorse. She stood five feet away, the Indian gauze skirt she had put on before they left the hotel lifting and floating in the breeze. She stood there straight and slim and hugging a greasy burger bag to her breasts. Such soft warm sweet breasts, breasts he had slept so soundly upon, breasts he longed to touch and kiss.

  “I’m damned sorry.” The words made three percussive sounds in the late evening air.

  “It’s all right.” Her shoulders shimmied as she shook her head. “I was pushing again.”

  He took a step toward her. “You weren’t pushing. I’m just not good company tonight. Okay, more than usual bad company. It’s the eye. Aches like the devil.”

  He reached up and stretched fingers gingerly over the lump on his brow. “My Good Samaritan routine is going to cost me more than time off the job. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can see well enough to drive us safely back to our hotel. Maybe we should call a cab.”

  She released the death grip she had on her much squashed food bag and let it dangle from her hand. “I have a better suggestion.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  Joe chuckled. “Sweetheart, you can’t drive.”

  She grinned back. Even with only one eye cooperating and the umber of evening to hamper its efforts Joe knew that smile was genuine. She had forgiven him. He knew he didn’t deserve that. But Halle had never been one to hold a grudge...until she was convinced he didn’t love her anymore.

  “I know I don’t have a driver’s license,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “But we might cheat just this once, don’t you think?”

  Joe made an emphatic gesture with his head. “No. In any case, that wasn’t my point. You can’t drive because you don’t know how.”

  She look as insulted as if he had said she wasn’t smart enough to drive. “How do you know?”

  “I know.” He grinned at her. “Does it ‘feel’ like you can drive?”

  Halle cocked her head to one side. “I don’t know. But, how hard can it be when fourteen-year-olds and ninety-year-olds do it all the time?”

  Joe handed her the keys. “Have at it, sweetheart.”

  The truck bucked like an aggravated mule, causing Joe to nearly bite his tongue as the engine died for the twelfth time.

  “Oh rats!”

  “Try again,” Joe said calmly. “You’re supposed to give it a little more gas as you let up on the clutch, remember? Both together. A little more gas, a little less clutch.”

  Halle shook her head miserably. It was now completely dark. She had managed to lurch them exactly six blocks from the burger place and into a deserted school parking lot where Joe said she could practice. But after half an hour of trying, all her confidence had vanished. There was driving and then there was driving. She had not been certain when she got behind the wheel whether or not she had ever driven a stick shift before. Now she was positive she hadn’t.

  At least she hadn’t caused an accident. None, that is, if she didn’t count the tiny bump that occurred when she backed into the garbage can at the far end of the pavement. Her hands were sweaty and her nerves were so tightly wound her movements had become as jerky as a puppet’s.

  “Try again, sweetheart.”

  With a moan of misery, she leaned her head forward against the steering wheel. “I don’t think I can do this after all.”

  “Sure you can. You just need a little more, uh, practice.”

  “You mean I need a month of daily lessons.” She straightened and looked at the calm man beside her. She had expected him to jump all over her pathetic efforts. “You were right. I don’t know how to drive.”

  He drew up a leg, wrapped an arm casually about it, and braced his booted foot on the bench seat. “Well, then, it’s time you learned.”

  Unconvinced she muttered, “I don’t see why.”

  “It’s every American’s right to drive. Not to is kind of unpatriotic.”

  She stared out through the steering wheel and over the dashboard at the pavement lit by her headlights. “I don’t feel very patriotic.”

  “That’s because you’re feeling crowded by circumstance. But, I ask you. Look around.” From the corners of her eyes she saw him make an expansive gesture with his free arm. “Anything is possible here. You’re in God’s country and don’t know it. That’s because you’re unaccustomed to the wide open spaces.”

  She swiveled her head toward him. “You mean I’ve never been to Texas before?”

  His white smile glowed faintly in the dashboard light. “Exactly. When I knew you, you hadn’t been much of anywhere, not if you discount London, Paris, the Riviera, and Rome.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s what you told me. When you were younger your folks would fly you over to visit them for major holidays, or at their convenience. Still, your education in culture is definitely lacking. You’ve never had what I’d call a proper vacation.”

  Halle lifted her head. “What would that be?”

  “A visit to the Grand Canyon, tour of our nation’s capital. Heck, you haven’t even been to Disney World.”

  She fixed on him a jaundiced eye. “And this, to you, is a measure of culture?”

  “It’s a measure of being part of the great crazy quilt we call America. Regular people go fishing, camping, hiking, tour the country by car. They visit the national monuments and the national parks. You can’t judge the real world from the penthouse suite of a grand hotel, sweetheart.”

  Halle bristled. “I’m certain I must have done something average in my life. I must have been camping, at least.”

  He guffawed. “You once told me your idea of roughing it was to take a cab through Central Park.”

  Halle laughed with him, pleased to see his dimple on display. “Was I really that bad?” He nodded. “Why then, did you ever agree to be my roommate?”

  “Oh, it had its compensations.” He said it lightly, too lightly for her to miss just how careful he was to keep it light.

  She looked in his eyes, his one good eye and the battered, swelled-shut one. “Joe, I’ve been wanting to ask you something. Now I think it’s time.”

  He made no sudden move but the loose-bone quality of his pose disappeared. “Shoot.”

  Halle licked her upper lip which had suddenly become stuck to her teeth. “Were we ever lovers?”

  The truck cab was cradled in a darkness so deep as to make indistinct their features yet she had the impression he blushed. A shy man. Her instincts were right. “What do you think?”

  Halle found she could not draw a decent breath. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you feel?” He reached out and tapped her blouse just above her heart. “What does this tell you?”

  Now that was a very dangerous question. She looked down at where his fingers hovered just above the swell of her left breast. If she moved just a little his thumb would brush the nipple budding behind her bra cup. A sharp jab of hunger struck her low down. But it was useless. He wasn’t going to assuage that hunger. He had proved that during the afternoon’s debacle. Yet if she didn’t want to talk to him about it, she shouldn’t have brought it up.

  She glanced up straight into one good brown eye drinking her in. “I feel maybe we were.”

  “And how does that make you feel?”

  “A little afraid, a little embarrassed.” Her lashes seemed suddenly to weigh a ton for her lids drooped over her eyes. “And a little pleased.”

  “Only a little pleased?”

  She glanced up to find him smiling again. “Don’t preen. It doesn’t become you.”

  He lifted his hand from the area of her breast to touch her cheek. “Everything becomes you. Only do me one great big favor?”

  “What?”

  “Stop dyeing your hair. That brown color makes you look, well, tepid.”

  She smiled, a foolishly happy smile for no reason at all. “What color is my natural hair?”

  “G
old with silver highlights and sepia undertones. It’s silky as hell and twice as sexy.”

  His fingers had found and twined in the hair that grew behind her right ear and was filtering through it. The subtle tug of his callused fingers was much like a caress.

  “Why do you think I dyed it?”

  Joe didn’t miss the faint hint of doubt entering her expression. “If you’re still worried about someone being after you, you can forget it. When I knew you, you changed your hairstyle as often as the season.”

  “Why?”

  “Beats me. All your friends spent a good portion of their salaries on their looks. Cellophaning, body wraps, facials, massages and so forth. Some of them needed a little help but I never understood why you did half the things you did to yourself when you were already the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  Halle let those words sink in, her psyche sucking them up like drops of rain on parched earth. He thought she was beautiful. He thought she was sexy. He thought...but he didn’t act.

  She wanted to grab him by the ears and haul him in for a kiss. She wanted to set his eyelashes on fire and make smoke rise in alarming columns from his ears. She wanted to make him greedy and dizzy and desperate with need. She wanted him to toss aside manners and caution and reserve. She wanted him to get out of control—way out—and take her with him into the blistering heat of mutual desire. Yet she knew the first move must come from him. He knew what she did not. If he thought their past too great a chasm to cross she must accept that, too.

  She swallowed disappointment and reclasped her fingers around the steering wheel. “Joe, what are we going to do?”

  His hand drifted from her hair down over her shoulder, the touch of his lightly abrading fingers less a caress than a tease. “I don’t know. Go with the mood, maybe?”

  She stared doggedly forward. No more flirting with aborted desire this night or she’d succumb to dry heaves. “I meant about my inability to drive.”

  “Oh. I thought you meant this.”

  He moved very deliberately, gripping one of her shoulders and then the other, turning her upper body to face him. He stunned her with the knowing gentleness of his smile. He understood, no, shared her feelings. In that, at least, they were simpatico.

  Halle didn’t move, didn’t dare think because she knew that what she wanted was impossible. Yet it was so simple. She wanted, simply wanted, him.

  His lips found hers and gently pressed their satin surfaces.

  Slow sensuous streamers of heat curled up through Joe as he kissed her. This was Halle. He knew her taste, remembered the feel of her beneath his hands, recognized the smell of her. This was the one woman in the world who owned his heart and bore his love, the mate grafted to his soul and psyche in ways no court declaration could ever sever.

  The vines of desire branched out, wrapping sensuous tendrils about his mind and heart, creeping up through muscle and sinew, binding and subduing caution in heavy turgid ropes potent as a lover’s embrace. He closed his eyes, sheltered by the canopy of verdant green desire.

  He was tired of the struggle against his love for her. Just once, to submerge once more in Halle’s sweet wet warmth, he asked no more of life.

  He knew he wasn’t alone. He heard her catch her breath when his lips moved to the corner of her mouth, a gasp as eloquent as any cry for help. He couldn’t help her or save her. He could only go with her down onto the narrow bench, holding on to her with a fierce need not to be left alone in the steamy madness of their mutual need.

  Halle tasted in his kiss the smoke of bridges burning. She saw in the beauty of his expression, as he moved and lifted her onto her back, the desert trek he had made to reach her. She heard the sizzle of rain upon the vast seared wasteland that had been his life...for how long? Later, her heart whispered. Time enough later to learn the answers. Now there was only his hands on her, moving and removing clothing as they went, seeking out skin to caress and knead and shape in ways that gave pleasure to both of them.

  His hands, oh, his hands. How good they felt, on her arms, her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She turned in to meet them everywhere they strayed, unashamed of anticipating the pleasure they gave. He answered her sighs and soft murmurs with deep hard little sounds of hard-won joy, as if he were a little afraid of the pleasure she aroused.

  She kissed him wherever she could reach, a bare shoulder, his jaw, the tender spot behind his ear. She licked his wounded eye, murmuring soothing incantations to speed its healing. All the while her body basked in the heat of his, cupping the harder angles, gentling the urgent thrusts, accommodating his possession with a wringing caress of welcome.

  The end came quickly. It had been too long, how long she did not know. But much, oh, much too long away from this bliss.

  “I remember,” she whispered when at last they lay panting, just past the miracle of their own creation.

  He stiffened as the miracle shattered. “What do you remember?”

  “This.” She smiled in the darkness and clutched him tight as a security blanket. “I remember this. Oh Joe! How could I ever have left you?”

  Chapter 10

  “But you’re hurt!” Halle protested as he tried to draw her across his bruised ribs.

  “I’ll live,” he murmured and pulled her fully on him. He licked the column of her neck and then ran his teeth along the sensitive tendon. “As long as you don’t stop doing that. Oh yeah, That’s it.” He shifted his hips to better accommodate her reach. “That’s much better.”

  Halle laughed, amazed by his resilience and still a little shocked at herself. Half an hour earlier they had made love in a truck in a vacant parking lot in the middle of a great big city. Anyone could have come upon them, the police, a caretaker, anyone!

  But no one had. Somehow when the world righted itself enough for them to be abashed and amused and thoroughly pleased with themselves, they had managed to make their way back to this motel room. While she gave directions and acted as an extra pair of eyes, Joe had done the driving.

  Giggling like teenagers with a guilty secret, they had paused every few feet in their journey from truck to motel room door to kiss and hug and caress. If anyone had seen them, they might have been shocked for Joe Guinn, once roused to action, had no reservations about showing Halle with mouth and tongue and hands just how much he enjoyed touching her. He had pulled her into the darkness of a walkway, dropped to a knee, lifted her skirt and run his palms up the backs of her thighs while licking the fronts. When he rose he whispered between kisses wicked suggestions of things he would do to her once they were inside their hotel room.

  Now they were here, stretched out on the bed as he pulled her astride his hips.

  “You like this?” he asked, stroking her from the nape of her neck straight down the valley of her spine to the very end which he massaged with his fingertips.

  “Yes,” Halle purred, arching her back so that her breasts spread out across his darker hairy chest and her hips lifted off his. When his hands slid back up her spine she reversed her arch. Pressing her hips into his hardness she arched up and away so that her breasts rose and swung free as tantalizing fruit before his eyes. He caught one tip in his mouth and pulled strongly on it.

  She gasped and giggled, then sighed as his tongue slid all around the puckered crescent before flicking the taut center.

  “You’re a maniac!” she whispered as he wrapped her arms around her back and pulled her down for a full body hug.

  “At the moment I’m your maniac.” He smiled up at her, his swollen eye giving him the squinty rakishness of a younger much handsomer Popeye. “Take every advantage of that fact.”

  “Don’t worry.” She dipped her head and caught his lower lip between her teeth and gently tugged. It felt so good, everything about him: his taste, his smell, his touch, the way he breathed as he entered her, deep and hard like the sound of a bellows fanning the flames of their passion. All of it aroused and pleased and delighted her.

  As he reached
down between them to stroke the most sensitive folds of her body, then guide himself home, she sighed and kissed him deeply. Here and now with him, the past and future did not matter. For this while in his arms, wrapped in his need and her need to give, they were perfectly matched. It felt right.

  Low down deep where certain knowledge dwells that cannot be uttered as words, she knew that Joe was meant for her and she for him. Whatever else had occurred, whatever memory might toss up on the shores of reality, this would remain true and real and indelible and she would not lose it again.

  Joe caught her cries of pleasure in his mouth, enjoying the undulations of her body over his. And when she slumped over him, certain she had no more to give, he gripped her hips hard and began surging upward in hard quick thrusts that wrung the concession of another series of joyous cries from her.

  His own release came as almost painful spasms. Too long, oh much too long since he had offered this perfect expression of love for his wife.

  Ex-wife

  She fell asleep before he did and for that Joe was grateful. He needed to be alone. Not separated from her, but isolated with his thoughts. She lay so trustingly against him. But for how long?

  In the past hour he had abandoned every rule he had set up for himself in this arrangement between them. He wasn’t sorry but he was wary. Where would it lead?

  This! I remember this! Oh, Joe, how could I ever have left you?

  His heart had stopped when she said those words in the truck. Was she recanting the anger, pain and rage that had blasted their marriage vows into oblivion? Had she remembered the love and the need, the unity of souls that had brought them together in the first place? Or was it something else?

  She rolled against him. Her lips, pliant in sleep, nibbled softly at the underside of his arm. She remembered this much, he thought. She admitted the recall of passion shared, the summation of mutual desire. She said she remembered that they had once been lovers. She admitted that much and no more.

  She did not remember the love he had brought her, the only chaste and unsullied emotion he still owned when they met. He had never loved before he met her. He had fancied, coveted, desired, lusted after, yearned for and chased women. But he had never loved a woman before Halle. That loving had conquered all the territory of his heart for all times. It was the reason he had not been able to get on with his life. Without her he was a man without a heart. He could perform all the tasks required to sustain his life but none of it had meaning without her.