“I don’t. And you’re angry.”
“She’s my sister, and you’re nothing to her!”
He rose and went to stand behind her. He hadn’t expected this. He’d thought she would be happy that Ema had found the courage to leave her husband. When Garnet straightened, he put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m nothing,” he agreed. “But what she found at the church is something real and vital, Garnet. Maybe you don’t understand it. Maybe I don’t—”
She turned. “What? You’re going to say you don’t understand it, either? Come off it. God’s what you do for a living.”
They were married, yet she didn’t know him at all. That fact had never been more apparent to him. Nor had it ever been more apparent that he could never share his heart with her.
He grasped her shoulders again. “I’m trying to say that your sister found the strength to do what she’s needed to do for a long time. She found it in her own way. I’m sure if you hadn’t stood by her for so long, supported her, spoken your heart to her, she never would have found it at all. But now she’s made the break. Be happy.”
She couldn’t pull her gaze from his. Little by little the anger drained away, until finally she spoke. “Damn it, Thomas. I’m sorry. What’s wrong with me? Of course I’m happy for her. I was just thinking about myself. I’m selfish and vain and envious. Now that Ema’s gone, you’ll have to work on changing me.”
“I don’t want to change anything about you.”
As she often did, she found a refuge in audacity. “No? I don’t have any of the qualities a man like you needs in a wife. I’d need to be docile.” She lifted her arms and pulled her hair from her face in the semblance of a bun. “Self-sacrificing.” She lowered her eyes. “Reverent.” She began to hum something that sounded like “The Old Rugged Cross” with a reggae beat.
He felt a stab of irritation. “Since you can’t be any of those things, then just be yourself.”
“Well, at least there won’t be any danger that someone might take this marriage seriously.”
He was beginning to take it seriously. He realized it before her words had stopped echoing through the kitchen. He had offered her the charade of a marriage for complex reasons, but he had never expected it to profoundly change his life. Now he saw that nothing could be further from the truth.
His hands dropped to his sides. He had kept himself from her in all the important ways. She was, for all purposes, married to a stranger. And most of the time she had kept herself from him, as if by open agreement. Yet somehow she had crept into his life, into his thoughts, into...
“Don’t tell me you’re taking it seriously,” she said, when he didn’t answer. “Thomas, I’m closer to the boy who delivers clean linen for the clinic than I am to you.”
He turned away. “Don’t let me keep you from making dinner.”
“Answer me!”
“You didn’t ask a question.” He felt her hand on his arm.
She was still riding the wave of emotion that had crested with the news of Ema’s flight. Humor, irreverence, repression. None had brought her to firm emotional ground. Now she couldn’t control her words. “Here’s the question. Are you taking this marriage seriously? Or are we just playing house like a couple of preschoolers?”
“You cared about Ema, and now she’s gone. You’re feeling a lot of things. Don’t take them out on me.”
“Cool, Thomas. Collected, rational. Thank you for the objective analysis, but I’m still waiting for an answer to my question.”
He turned. She was only inches away. The mocking light was gone from her eyes. She was awash in emotion. He understood why. The last weeks had brought so many changes in her life. Even Garnet could only shrug off her feelings for so long.
He understood so much, but he felt so much more. She moved closer to him.
“You don’t tell me anything about yourself,” she said, eyes narrowed. “You don’t share your feelings. You don’t touch me. You don’t even smile very often. Maybe we agreed to all this. Maybe it’s best this way. But don’t go looking at me like the rules changed and you forgot to mention it. Don’t go looking like I’ve wounded you because I said out loud what we both know. This marriage is not serious. I’m nothing to you, and even if you get just the teeniest twinge of desire for me sometimes, the Reverend Thomas Stonehill is too much of a god himself to be tempted by someone as lowly as Garnet Anthony.”
“We were both wrong to think we could pull this off without it affecting us.”
“I’m not affected. I sleep in that bedroom and I cook in this kitchen. Sometimes I talk to the God-fearing robot who passes through these rooms.” She stopped. Slowly her hand dropped from his arm. “Damn!” She faced the refrigerator.
He understood turning points. There had been some so crucial in his life that, after them, nothing had been the same. He recognized this one. Every part of him screamed that he should back away and give her time to compose herself.
Instead he put his arms around her. She was as tense as he had expected; he could feel the tension everywhere he touched. She was also warm and enticingly female, and immediately his body cried out for what hers had to offer. She didn’t yield easily, but he pulled her against him. “Maybe you’re not affected,” he said. “But I am.”
She was very quiet. For a moment he wasn’t even sure she was breathing. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked at last.
“A very difficult situation.”
“What’s so difficult? You’ve given me a place to stay, protection, your name—just in case it helps to scare off the little boys with the guns! How can that be difficult?”
“Because we’ve taken a sacred institution and made a mockery out of it.”
“Sacred? Maybe in the world you come from. Here marriage is just an institution, like prison or the closest psychiatric hospital. My mother was married to Ema’s father. It lasted six months before he left her pregnant and alone. She thought she was married to my father until she discovered he was already married to somebody else. She didn’t bother fooling herself about Jade’s father.”
“It’s a sacred institution.”
“Was your marriage sacred, Thomas?” She turned in his arms. “Your real marriage, not this one. Did God bless it? Did He honor it? When Patricia died, did you have that to comfort you?”
“I had nothing to comfort me.”
She saw pain in his eyes, a pain so deep, so powerful, it threatened to suck her into its vortex. She had been prepared to taunt him again, but she found she couldn’t. Somehow she knew there was nothing she could tell him that he didn’t tell himself every hour before dawn.
“I could give you comfort,” she said softly. The words came from nowhere, yet she didn’t want to call them back. “Maybe it wouldn’t be enough, but it would be something.”
Her breasts pressed against his chest; her scent enveloped him. As he stood with his arms around her, powerless to release her, she smoothed her hands up them. He felt the cool slide of her palms on his neck, against his heated cheeks. Her fingers burrowed into his hair, and she pressed his mouth to hers.
The taste, the feel of her lips against his, was as pleasurable as he remembered. His arms tightened around her. She was soft and giving; her warm flesh was as pliant as her spirit was not. She was his wife before man and God.
His hands traveled to splay against the curve of her hips. With a helpless groan he delved into the secrets of her mouth. She was everything womanly and desirable. Their tongues moved together giving and taking pleasure; their bodies moved together, too. They were married strangers, yet her touch, her curves, her taste were familiar, as if he had always partaken of them with this heady rush of desire.
He had partaken in his dreams. Thomas knew it as surely as he knew he had never touched her in these ways before. He had dreamed of her in the hours when dreams aren’t remembered, when sleep is so deep it buries all thoughts and feelings, all desires.
All desires.
Garnet drank in
the heady pleasure of his body against hers. She had not indulged in fantasies about him. She had admired his body, saucily assessed the potential of his hands and lips, but she had not allowed herself to imagine being in his arms. Now she knew why. There were realities so potent that fantasy was too poor an imitation. She had known, before she had been conscious of knowing, that passion with Thomas would be light-years beyond imagination.
“Come to bed, Thomas,” she whispered against his lips. “If the rules have changed, then come to bed and make this marriage real. Even your God couldn’t object.”
She had said nothing of love and commitment, but he knew if he took her to bed everything would change. And still, he was helpless to say no.
Garnet unfastened the top button of his shirt as she kissed him. The second was as easy, and the others followed in quick succession as her trembling fingers would allow. She smoothed her hands over his chest, murmuring provocatively. She did not give herself easily or casually. She had always been wary of relationships that bound her too tightly. She was too enamored of freedom to give control of her life to anyone.
But Thomas hadn’t asked for control. He had given her freedom when he married her, given her the chance to continue doing what she had to do, to continue walking the streets of the only neighborhood she would ever call home. He wanted nothing, asked for nothing. And in return, because he made no demands, she could give him what little she had to give.
There was more, though, and as desire swept her away, she was compelled to face it. Her gift wasn’t unselfish. At that moment she wanted him with an urgency no other man had ever provoked. She wanted him inside her, where intimacy would destroy all mystery. She wanted all barriers lowered, all defenses exploded. In every way, she wanted to know the man she had married.
He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, and clasped her closer. She pressed her knee between his legs and felt his response. He wanted her, too. There was no mystery there. He was a man desiring a woman. He was not the minister, the husband of Patricia, the slayer of the Corners’ dragons. He was simply a man, like every other, a man aroused enough to enter a woman and make her his.
“Come to bed,” she repeated huskily as she started to slip his shirt over his shoulders. “It’s time, Thomas. It’s right.”
He felt her knee stroking the sensitive flesh between his thighs. Thought, doubt, creeds and rules melted away. He was nothing but a man, a man alive and hungry and aching for a woman. He felt himself growing to meet her, growing with need, bursting with desire, throbbing and aching to bury himself inside her.
And then, as strong as his response had been, as potent as his need, he was no longer ready.
If the world had depended on their joining, if all the stars in the heaven had decreed it, he could not have made her his.
Garnet felt the new tension in Thomas’s arms, in the muscles of his back. It was no longer the tension of a man bursting with passion. It was no longer the tension of a man denying himself what he most needed.
It was the tension of a man who no longer wants nor needs the woman in his arms.
She felt his response to her disappear. She shifted her weight so that she was no longer against him; then she stepped back and stared at him.
“What is it?” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head.
“I...” She didn’t know what to say. Humiliation washed over her. She had forced this, read signals that weren’t there. She had believed he wanted her, and she had admitted how much she wanted him. But somewhere she had gone desperately wrong.
He saw her confusion and shame. He touched her hair; it seemed to singe his skin. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t think any of the things you’re thinking.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what? For acting like a married woman? Sorry because I can’t act like a married man?” He turned away and straightened his shirt. “Can we go on like before?”
“Like before.” Something new boiled up inside her. She wanted to laugh or cry, but she choked down both. She wanted to reach out to him, but she had already learned what a mistake that would be.
“Can we go on like before?” he repeated.
“Yes. I guess... No! Are you saying we’ll pretend this didn’t happen? That one minute you wanted me and the next you thought better of it?”
“Thought?” He faced her. “Thought had nothing to do with it! Were you thinking? Was either of us thinking?”
“I was thinking that I wanted you. And somewhere along the way you were thinking you didn’t want me.”
“No!”
“Then what happened?”
“You ran up against the truth. This marriage is a charade. It can’t be real.”
“For a few minutes it felt real. It felt real to you, too. You can’t deny it.”
“It was a few minutes of dreaming.”
“Then let’s dream a little longer. Maybe we’ll wake up and find out we weren’t dreaming at all.”
“Maybe we’ll wake up and find out that we’re in the middle of a nightmare.” He put his hands on her shoulders. His eyes were bleak. “I can’t make love to you, because I can’t. Not because I don’t want to. Because I can’t.”
She stared at him, then she shook her head. “What are you saying? I don’t believe you.”
“You’re wasting your vote of confidence. I haven’t made love to a woman since Patricia died. And this isn’t the first time I’ve tried.”
“But you wanted me. I know it. It’s not something you can hide.”
“Wanting has nothing to do with it.” He dropped his hands.
“Thomas, I-”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. I just didn’t factor in-”
“What?”
“How desirable you are.”
“If there’s something wrong there are doctors, medication, clinics—”
“I've been to doctors. There’s nothing physically wrong with me. It's all in my head and even little blue pills can't solve that.” He turned away again. “You didn’t sign on for this. I married you to keep you safe, not to make you my sex therapist, Garnet. I’m not going to try to keep you here. If you have a better alternative than this farce of a marriage, go. I’ll understand. I’ll wish you well.”
There were better alternatives. She knew that now. She could have found a more acceptable plan for her life than marriage to a man she hardly knew. But she had let Thomas rescue her, not because she had no other alternatives, but because...
“I married you because I needed your strength,” she said after moments had dragged into more. “And because I felt something for you. I don’t know, maybe just curiosity, but something.”
“Now you don’t have to be curious anymore.”
“I’ve never met anyone who was more of a man.”
His laugh was short and bitter.
There were no words in any language to reassure him. She knew that instinctively. And she knew that there were no words to reassure her. All that was left were words that should have come naturally, words like “goodbye.” And those words wouldn’t form.
“I’ll choose this over the other alternatives for now,” she said at last. “If you’ll still have me.”
“You’re welcome here.”
She wondered what it had cost him to say that. She knew she wasn’t really welcome. She would be a constant reminder of failure at the deepest level.
“I’ll make dinner,” she said.
“Don’t make anything for me.”
“Are you going out?”
“For a while.”
She watched him button his shirt and find his coat, watched as the door shut quietly behind him.
She was still awake long after midnight when she heard the door close again.
8
In his heart, Thomas was still married to Patricia. She had been gone from his life for three years, but obviously she was not gone from his heart. In every way that mattered to him, she was still
his wife. If he made love to Garnet, he was being unfaithful to Patricia.
It had to be as simple as that.
Garnet set the table for supper, even though Thomas wasn’t home. It was unusual for her to arrive at the apartment before he did, but tonight she’d had to let herself in with her key. There had been no note or phone call explaining his absence. He simply wasn’t there.
In the week since they’d nearly made love, nothing had followed the pattern set in the early weeks of their marriage. Thomas had taken pains to avoid her, and when he hadn’t been able to find an excuse to disappear from the apartment, he had drawn into a shell she couldn’t penetrate.
After a week of silent questions, of suffering alternately from anger and tortuous self-doubts, Garnet had come to a conclusion. The reason for Thomas’s impotence had to be a commitment, even after death, to Patricia. He was a married man, sorely tempted by an adulteress—never mind that the adulteress was now his wife in the sight of man and God. He must have loved Patricia beyond death, beyond his own ability to adjust to her passing. Even with the advantage of breath in her body and a beating heart, Garnet could never hope to prevail over Patricia’s memory.
Bested by a dead woman.
Garnet had failed repeatedly in her life, but the last few years had taught her the joys of being a winner. She had grown to like herself, to feel pride in what she had accomplished. She had learned to believe that she had much to offer. Now, a memory offered Thomas more than she could.
She bent and turned up the portable radio on the floor another notch to discourage more analysis. The station was Spanish-speaking, the music sensuously Latin. She hummed along, forcing herself to concentrate on the words. Her Spanish was as mongrelized as her heritage, but she eventually caught the gist of the musical story. A man had lost his lover, and all he could do was dream of her. He would dream of her until the day he died.
She snapped off the radio and kicked it with her bare toe. Pain shot up her leg.
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