Hush, Little Baby

by Judith Arnold

  He dipped his head and kissed her mouth, a sweet, gentle kiss. “I have a bed,” he whispered.

  She smiled. “Now you tell me.”

  He smiled, too. His face was so close to hers she felt the curve of his lips against her cheek. Slowly, cautiously, he disengaged from her, waiting to make sure her legs could support her before he released her completely. He pulled up his jeans but didn’t bother to close them. Then he gathered their scattered articles of clothing with one hand, folded his other hand around hers, and led her down the shadowy hall to the room at its end.

  The first thing she noticed was the fireplace. Constructed of unrefined blocks of granite, some rounded and some squared, it resembled the stone edifices of the house’s exterior. She recalled Levi’s theory of architecture—that the outside should be brought indoors—and figured he must have designed this fireplace to echo the outside of the house.

  The fireplace’s mantel shelf was a stretch of wood, lacquered but rough-hewn. Three kerosene lamps stood on it, one with a ceramic base, one of clear glass and one of stained glass. After tossing their clothing onto a chair, he crossed to the mantel and lit the gas lamps. The room glowed.

  “I guess you don’t build fires in late June,” she murmured.

  “I’ll build one if you want one.”

  “Please don’t.” The last thing she needed was a roaring fire. She still felt overheated by what had happened in the hall. Standing up, she thought, dazed at the realization. Against a wall. What had she been thinking?

  She hadn’t been thinking at all. And she didn’t regret the mindlessness of it. The old Corinne might have been shocked, but to the new Corinne, making love with Levi the way she had seemed as natural as singing D.J. a lullaby.

  Levi lifted one of the gas lamps and carried it to a night table. Following him with her gaze, she noted the simple, modern bureau standing on one wall, the doors leading to a closet and a bathroom, the velvety gray carpet, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the woods behind his house, and the wall hanging, a textured weave of natural hues—brown and tan and gray—in an abstract pattern of geometric shapes. His sister had made it. It was beautiful.

  Finally Corinne turned to the bed. It was extra long—he needed that length to accommodate his height—and invitingly wide. With Levi standing beside it, the flickering flame of the lamp washing across his bare chest, the bed looked even more inviting. With his jeans gaping at the unfastened fly, revealing a wedge of dark hair, the bed looked better yet.

  He must have figured out what she was thinking, because a slow, irresistibly sexy grin tugged at his mouth. “I’ll be right back,” he promised, sauntering across the room and disappearing into the bathroom.

  Alone, she could have turned on a light and given the room a more diligent inspection. She could have studied how he’d managed to fit all the necessary furniture into his room even though one wall had been sacrificed to the fireplace. She could have taken mental notes to share with Gerald once she was back in New York.

  She didn’t want to think about Gerald or New York, or her job as the person who made everything work out. She was sure something somewhere needed to be fixed, but she didn’t want to be the one fixing it. She just wanted to wait for Levi to come back.

  He did, carrying a box of condoms, which he dropped onto the night table next to the gas lamp. Then he kicked off his jeans and pulled Corinne down onto the bed beside him. Rolling onto his back, he brought her with him until she was balanced on top of him, straddling his waist. Her hair fell forward in a fringe around her cheeks, but he tucked it back behind her ears and gazed up at her, smiling, as if he couldn’t imagine a more satisfying sight.

  “Levi,” she murmured, a tiny scrap of the old Corinne niggling at her.

  “Yes.”

  She wished he wouldn’t keep combing his fingers through her hair. The backs of her ears had miraculously turned into erogenous zones. Or maybe it was just that when she was with Levi, every square millimeter of her body became an erogenous zone. The insides of her knees pressed against his sides, her insteps brushing his thighs, her palms flat against the pillow framing his head—every part of her tingled, eager and alert.

  “I’m not usually like this,” she finally said because he was waiting for her to complete her thought.

  “Like what?”

  “Like any of this.” A nebulous answer, but it captured the enormity of her feelings.

  He nodded, toyed with the blunt-cut ends of her hair for another moment, then rolled onto his side, once again bringing her with him. She landed on her side facing him, her head resting on the pillow where her hand had just been. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  At first she thought he was teasing her. But he looked earnest, his eyes dark and searing as he studied her face. “I’m a marketing specialist from Manhattan. I live a tame life. I work late and eat take-out and fall asleep during the eleven o’clock news. I don’t…” She sighed, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

  Levi finished it for her. “You don’t have sex standing up.”

  A blush warmed her cheeks. “Well, that, too. I don’t diaper babies. I’ve never diapered a baby before in my life.”

  “You did a damned good job of it for a rookie,” he said solemnly.

  He was definitely teasing her. Scowling, she gave him a gentle poke in the ribs.

  He captured her hand with his own and held it between them, just below his chin. “When you came to Arlington today—did you come for D.J.?”

  She opened her mouth to say no, then reconsidered. She honestly wasn’t sure why she’d come, so she didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t come to hassle me about Mosley’s house, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you come to seduce me?”

  She blushed again. “No.” Not that she was complaining about how things had worked out.

  “Then you must have come for D.J.”

  “I think I came for you both.”

  “That’s a relief.” His smile undercut the sarcasm in his tone. “I’m not used to competing with a kid in diapers for a woman’s attention.”

  “Well, you both got my attention.”

  He twirled a strand of her hair around his finger while he ruminated. “Do you have anybody back in New York?”

  Not just “anybody”—he was asking if she had a boyfriend. And she didn’t, not really. Gerald wasn’t a boyfriend. He was her friend, her colleague, her closest buddy. And he was a man.

  But definitely not a boyfriend.

  “I guess you do,” Levi said quietly.

  “No.”

  “It took you an awfully long time to answer.”

  “I don’t date much,” she told him, then chuckled. “That’s an exaggeration. I don’t date at all.”

  “Why not?”

  She thought of all the easy explanations: she didn’t have the time, she didn’t have the energy. But Levi deserved the whole truth. “I don’t have much faith in it.”

  “In what? Dating? Men?”

  “Relationships.”

  “Really? Why?”

  He looked genuinely interested. She never discussed her background with Gerald—but then, he never asked. Levi had asked, and his curiosity touched her in an unexpectedly personal way. “I’ve got, at last count, one father, two step-fathers, one mother and three step-mothers,” she told him. “I’ve seen first-hand that most relationships don’t last. You can date, you can make commitments, you can get married—but nothing comes with guarantees. Promises get trashed. Vows get tossed aside. Why knock yourself out trying to create something that’s just going to fall apart?”

  Again he mulled over his thoughts before speaking. “Okay,” he said, propping his head up on his hand as if the higher elevation would enable him to think more clearly. “First of all, dating and getting married are two different things. Why can’t you just date without worrying about how it’s going to end in the long run?”

  “Because I don’t have the time
,” she said, then cringed inwardly. That was the easy answer, but it didn’t ring true to her. “Because where else is dating going to lead to? Sex, a commitment, or a break-up.”

  “Sex is good,” he suggested, a hint of mischief illuminating his eyes. “Even if you’re standing up.”

  She felt yet another blush burn her cheeks, but before she could recover his smile was gone, his gaze solemn. He obviously didn’t want to talk about sex. He wanted her to explain what seemed patently obvious to her. “Even if sex is good,” she said, “it’s going to lead to either a commitment or a break-up. And most of the time, the commitment’s going to end in a break-up, too. The whole thing seems pretty pointless to me.”

  “What makes you so sure a commitment is going to end in a break-up? I’ve seen relationships that lasted a long time. My parents have been married for forty years.”

  “Are they happy?”

  A wry smile twisted his mouth. “If you asked them, they’d say they were.”

  “And if you asked them whether they loved each other?”

  “They’d say…” He sighed. “They’d say love isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.”

  “See?”

  “They’re just two people, Corinne. Your parents are two more people—or maybe, what was it, six? Seven?”

  “Seven at last count.” She rolled onto her back and watched the flicker of the gaslight’s flame reflected on the ceiling above the bed. “My mother and father, Norman, Clark, Betsy, Cynthia and…I forget the wife between Betsy and Cynthia. She didn’t last long.”

  “It sounds as if none of them did.”

  “She was the shortest. Maybe two years, tops. I didn’t see her too often because she and my dad lived in Los Angeles. I spent a few weeks with them one summer, but she was hardly ever around. I was supposed to spend the whole summer, but I was so miserable I made my dad send me home. After that, he’d fly to Phoenix to visit me. Jeri—that was her name. Jeri Ann or Jeri Lynn.”

  Her peripheral vision caught him shaking his head. “That’s so different from what I grew up with.”

  “You might have felt stifled by your parents’ home, Levi, but at least you had some stability in your life. I never knew where I was going to be living from one year to the next. Or who I was going to be living with. My parents called it shared custody, but it amounted to me having so many different addresses I didn’t know where I was supposed to be, most of the time. I had step-sisters and step-brothers, but they came and went. I always thought, if I kept the house neat and made sure everything was where it was supposed to be, at least something in my life would be orderly. Something would be the same in the evening as it was in the morning. I never got too attached to any of the ‘steps,’ because I knew that sooner or later they would leave. Or else my mom and dad would leave them. Someone was always leaving.” She twisted her head to look at him. “Do you realize how lucky you were to have your sister Ruth? I know she’s gone now, but not because someone got tired of someone else and left.”

  Levi ran his fingers through her hair again. “Some relationships are forever,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter if I got tired of D.J. That one’s forever. I couldn’t walk away from him, even if I wanted to.”

  “Some parents walk away from their kids.”

  “Bad parents.” He sighed. “I don’t mean to pass judgment on your parents, but—”

  “But you just passed judgment on them.” She grinned. “They aren’t bad people. They’re very human. They’re just fickle, and searching for happiness.”

  “They’re self-centered and undisciplined.” A faint laugh escaped him. “Six weeks with D.J., and I’m acting like an expert. Sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t pass judgment on them.”

  But he was right, too. Her parents were self-centered and undisciplined, and they’d taught their daughter not to place her faith in long-term love, because their own behavior had proved that it didn’t work.

  Gazing up at Levi, she found herself contemplating the strangest thought: maybe, sometimes, it did work. Maybe, if a man could make such a strong commitment to an orphaned baby, he could make a commitment to a woman. That one’s forever, he’d said about his relationship with D.J. A man like him might be able to say that about a woman, too—and mean it.

  It was a frightening idea. If she let herself believe such a thing was possible, such a man existed, she’d have to rethink everything she’d ever understood about life and men and love, and she wasn’t prepared to do that. She’d found the stability missing from her childhood by creating it for herself. It was hers, and she didn’t want anything to threaten it. Levi, with his concepts of forever, threatened it in a big way.

  He ran his hand through her hair once more, this time trailing his fingers down to her shoulder. His fingertips were callused; even though he was an architect, plying his trade at a drafting table in his quiet second-floor office, she supposed he sometimes got his hands dirty at construction sites. She’d seen him in his hardhat that afternoon, and she could easily envision him helping his foreman, carrying tools, wielding a shovel, swinging a board into place. He’d learned how to work hard as a child, and he wore that experience on his hands.

  That was only one reason why they felt so good moving across her body. That, and his ability to read her responses, and his willingness to touch her not just in those few areas that men seemed to be obsessed with but all over—the underside of her chin, the concave stretch below her rib cage, the inner skin of her forearm.

  But the most important reason it felt so good to be touched by him was that he was Levi. He was like no other man she’d ever met. And even though she knew she would come to her senses tomorrow, tonight she wanted to believe in a man who could talk about forever.

  *

  ONE THING he’d always loved about women was how different they were from him. Not different in the limiting ways his parents had taught him—females in charge of cooking and cleaning while males performed repairs, scaled ladders and painted clapboard siding—but different in their minds and their bodies.

  Corinne’s body was a wonder, even lovelier than he’d guessed. Her skin was soft and supple, her breasts deliciously round, her waist taut, her hips generous, her bellybutton an incredibly sexy punctuation mark midway between her ribs and her crotch. And her legs…oh, God, they were amazing. He’d realized, once his crazed interlude with her in the hallway was done, that she wasn’t the sort who indulged in that kind of raw passion on a regular basis. She was mature, poised, sophisticated—but she always had a shyness about her, a reticence he hadn’t really understood until just now, when she’d told him about her upbringing.

  She did hold back. He hadn’t just imagined it. She was self-protective, reserved, wary. Yet when he’d made love to her in the hallway—totally unpremeditated and possible only because he’d optimistically slid a condom into his pocket before heading off to her hotel that evening—he’d stripped away all her defenses in a way that might have alarmed her if she weren’t so strong inside.

  He’d stripped away her defenses because she’d allowed him to. What happened had been her doing as much as his. Not only hadn’t she stopped him, but she’d encouraged him. She’d been as caught up in the craziness as he’d been.

  Now that he’d made love to her once, he understood her body a little better. She liked being stroked as much as he liked stroking her. She liked keeping her eyes open, watching him. Apparently she liked the feel of his shoulders; she’d clung to them in the hall and she was touching them again now, tracing the bulges of muscle and bone as he ran his hand along the arch of her ribs, the flare of her hips.

  He understood her mind a little better, too—but not well enough. What she’d revealed about her parents illuminated some aspects of her, but not the strange bond between her and D.J.

  It existed, as real as the bed beneath them, as real as the golden light that circled the kerosene lamp on the night table. When she and D.J. looked at each other, Levi could practically see
a cord of emotion running between them. When she held D.J., her body seemed to radiate an aura.

  Why? D.J. was just a baby. A good baby, a healthy baby, a baby as handsome as his mother had predicted he’d be. But also a whiny baby, a fussy baby, a messy, demanding, occasionally smelly baby—in other words, a normal baby.

  What was going on between Corinne and D.J.? What was that cord, that aura, that bond?

  She skimmed her hand forward, over the hump of his shoulder and down his chest, and he decided he didn’t want to think about D.J. any more. Right now, the only bond that mattered was the one between her and himself.

  She had astonishing hands. Soft and graceful, but what made them unique was the way his body felt beneath them. Her caresses short-circuited his nervous system, electrifying him. Every muscle in his body flexed at her touch; every nerve spiked. His blood sizzled, his skin hungered for her—and when she rose up and pressed a kiss to the center of his chest he felt that kiss everywhere, in his bones, his throat, his groin, his soul. He could have told himself his powerful reaction to her was because she was the first woman he’d been with since he’d brought D.J. home to Connecticut—but it wasn’t as if he had never before gone without sex for an extended period. He’d endured stretches of celibacy in his life, and they hadn’t affected him all that much.

  But this… This was Corinne. It was a transcendent connection. It was something that defied analysis, something that operated on a level he hadn’t even known existed. It was need and completion and magic.

  As their kisses grew deeper, their hands more eager, their bodies more desperate, he let his thoughts evaporate. Whatever was going on didn’t have to be rationalized. It could just be accepted, one more act of fate and faith in his life.

  Rolling Corinne onto her back, lowering himself into her welcoming arms, finding her and filling her and feeling her all around him, he gladly accepted what he simply couldn’t explain.