by Joan Wolf
Wrapped in a blanket, she crawled out of bed and went to hide in the corner of her bedroom. She was huddled there, shaking uncontrollably, when she heard a voice from the sitting room calling her name. She tried to answer but a crack of thunder drowned her out. Her bedroom door opened and Kit stood there, dressed in jeans, and a sweat shirt. He saw her almost immediately. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said gently. He crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside her. “You’re perfectly safe, you know. If it hits anything it’ll be one of the trees, not the cottage.”
“I-I know,” she stuttered, turning with a great rush of gratitude into the warm safety of his arms. “But somehow knowing doesn’t seem to help.”
He held her closely, drawing her into the shelter of his body, knowing from past experience that this more than his words would comfort her. She closed her eyes and pressed against him, not even noticing the wetness of his shirt under her cheek.
The storm lasted for about twenty minutes, during which time they stayed huddled together on the floor. Then it began to abate, the thunder sounding more distant, the lightning flashes less bright. Finally all that was left was the rain, beating steadily against the roof and the windows.
“It’s all over,” said Kit’s voice gently.
“Yes.” Her tense, cramped muscles relaxed a little. She tried to laugh. “I feel so stupid, but I can’t seem to help it.”
“I know.” His hand was moving slowly, caressingly, up and down her back. His cheek was against her hair. She closed her eyes and rested against him.
“You knew I’d be a basket case.” It was a statement not a question.
“Yes. I thought I’d better come over and check on you. It was a nasty storm.”
“Mmm.” It wasn’t fear she was feeling now but something else. His hand continued its smooth rhythmic stroking and she drew a deep uneven breath.
“Mary,” he said and she looked up. He bent his head and began to kiss her, a deep, slow, profoundly erotic kiss. She lay back in his arms, her head against his shoulder, her arms coming up to circle his neck. His lips moved from her mouth to bury themselves in her neck. His hand slid under her pajama top and cupped her breast. “Mary,” he muttered, “my princess, my Irish rose ...”
The love words, the touch of his mouth, his hand, shattered whatever resistance she had left. “Let’s get into bed,” he murmured.
Her will to deny him had totally left her; she felt herself giving up, giving way. “All right,” she whispered, and he got to his feet, pulling her up with him. He picked her up and laid her on the bed and stood beside it for a minute as he stripped his shirt off and undid the buckle of his jeans. She had left a lamp on and she watched him in its dim glow. Then he was beside her, his long fingers undoing the buttons of her pajama top, going to the elastic at her waist.
He touched her bared flesh and she felt him as a flame of desire, a flame that burned deep within her; and deep within her rose the urge to answer him, to satisfy him, to give to him and hold nothing back for herself. “Kit,” she whispered, and he kissed her again, his long lean body hard and heavy now on hers. Her own body remembered the feel of him all too well, and quite suddenly she wanted him as badly as he wanted her. There was no one like him, nothing else in the world like this. “Kit,” she said, urgently now, and then “Ah . . . h” as he buried himself deep within her. She shuddered as the piercing, quivering, throbbing tension began to mount within her. Her fingers were pressed deep into his back, white with pressure.
“Mary, baby, love.” As one they moved together in profound, shuddering, ecstatic passion.
Afterward she was utterly still, lying quiet under the weight of his body, and he was still with her. After a long time he stirred and shifted his position. “I’m too heavy for you.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not.”
He looked down at her with dark, warm, peaceful eyes. “Go to sleep. Princess.” he said, and turned her over on her side, the way she liked to sleep, and pulled her into the warmth of his body. She closed her eyes and in two minutes was deeply asleep.
Mary woke early the next morning to the sound of the birds. She turned to find Kit lying beside her, his chin propped on his hands, his brow lightly furrowed. He turned his head slightly when he heard her move and his eyes, meeting hers, were uncertain and wary.
He had taken advantage of the situation last night and he was evidently unsure of what her reaction would be in the clear light of the morning after. If I had half a brain, Mary thought, I’d tell him to get out. She felt her lips curving in a smile. “I knew I’d be like King Canute,” she said.
His face dissolved into laughter. “Why King Canute?”
“He was the fellow who ordered the tide not to come in.”
He was still laughing. “God, Mary, I love you. There isn’t another woman alive who would drag in King Canute at a moment like this.”
“He’s very appropriate. Alas.”
“Don’t say ‘alas.’ ” His face had sobered. “It’s been such hell, being around you, wanting you ... It reminded me a little of when we first met, only this was so much worse.” He moved closer, put an arm across her and buried his face between her breasts. “Wanting and wanting and not having,” he said, his lips moving on her bare flesh as he spoke. Then, deeply, fiercely, “Wanting what was mine.” He rubbed his cheek against her and she protested a little as the roughness of his beard scratched her tender flesh. He rested his head on her breast and she gently ran her fingers through his tousled black hair.
“It’s not like this with anyone else,” he said.
“I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment,” she replied a little acidly. “I haven’t got your standard of comparison.”
He chuckled. “Thank God for that.”
Her fingers continued to move caressingly through his hair. “You’d better go,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to see you leaving here.”
“Why not? We’re married.”
“Yes—I know.” Her fingers stilled and he raised his head to look at her. His nostrils looked suddenly tense.
“I thought you were coming back to me.”
“I . . .” She looked up into his face. It was hopeless, she thought. She was weak with love for him. “I suppose I am,” she said helplessly.
His face relaxed and the eyes that looked down at her were so dark, so unbearably beautiful. “Then I don’t give a damn who sees me,” he said and began to kiss her again. He didn’t leave for another hour.
She lectured that morning on Hamlet, and as she talked about the problems of the play and the characters she kept seeing Kit’s face. What had he meant, she wondered, when he had said that to play Hamlet well he would have to reveal himself?
She did not want anyone at school to know they had gotten back together again. “Please, Kit,” she had said just before he left her that morning. “I need a little time to adjust myself. I can’t bear the thought of all these people looking at me the way they will look if they know.” Color had stained her cheeks and her voice had trailed off.
He had frowned. “If it was up to me, I’d simply move right in here. There isn’t any need for explanations. We’re married.”
“I know. But I’m not ready yet. Please, Kit,” she had said again, this time a little desperately, and he had given in.
She didn’t quite know herself why she was so reluctant to make public the fact of their reconciliation. It had something to do with the fact that she was hardly reconciled to the reconciliation herself.
She knew how she felt about him, but she didn’t quite trust his feeling for her. He wanted her and he was very adept at getting what he wanted. But would he continue to want her or would it be, as it had been before, a case of out of sight out of mind.
She would have to move to California; she had reluctantly come to that conclusion. He might do an occasional stage play, but the bulk of his work was in the movies and the movie industry was in California. She wanted to be separated from him as lit
tle as possible; she remembered all too vividly what had happened the last time they were separated.
She should see a doctor about birth control; that thought crossed her mind a few times during the week that followed. If they kept on the way they were going, she was sure to get pregnant. She would love to have Kit’s baby, but she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. She was afraid to ask him. That topic by unspoken consent was taboo between them.
She should send in her resignation to the university as well, but she procrastinated about that too. She felt as if her whole life were off balance and a little unreal; the only reality was the night, when her bedroom door opened and Kit came in.
“It’s the strangest feeling, hearing people talk about Chris Douglas,” she said to him as the dawn came up on Saturday morning. “I keep thinking, That’s Kit they’re talking about, my husband, the man who neglects to shave before be comes to bed and scratches me all up with his beard.”
He gave a warm, sleepy chuckle. “Poor love. I’ll shave tomorrow night.”
She kissed the top of his head where it lay pillowed on her breast and then went back to her original thought. “I just can’t seem to reconcile that person, Movie Star Christopher Douglas, with you. It’s very peculiar.”
“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Everyone else sees the facade, the reputation, the good nose and the straight teeth. You see me. You always have. That’s what I love about you. You see right through to the heart of people. Phoniness and sham simply collapse in front of you.”
She was silent for a long time. “I think that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me,” she said at last.
“Um.” She felt his eyelashes against her skin as his eyes closed. Outside the birds began to sing.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “I hear the birds.”
“ ‘It is not yet near day,’ ” he answered sleepily. “ ‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.’ ”
“Kit!” She laughed and shook him a little. “Stop quoting Romeo and Juliet and get up.”
“No,” he answered simply.
“ ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn; no nightingale,’ ” she quoted back severely.
“You’re a spoilsport.” He sat up, yawned and stretched. “For how much longer do you mean to keep me creeping in and out of your bedroom in the dead of night? I’m getting too old for such exploits.” He got out of bed and picked his jeans up from the bedside chair.
“Until after the play opens,” she answered, pushing her hair off her forehead. “I know you think it’s silly of me. I even think it’s silly of me. But I can’t help it.”
“For a smart woman you can be awfully illogical.” He pulled a shirt over his head.
“I know,” she replied a little glumly.
“Look, Mary.” He sat for a minute on the edge of the bed. “You and I have got to talk. It’s no good thinking we can talk at night; I’ve got other things on my mind when I come in here.”
“I’m a little distracted myself,” she murmured.
He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “Let’s go out somewhere for dinner tonight.”
“Kit, I would love that,” Mary replied fervently. The endless bridge game had gotten on her nerves this last week, but she hadn’t known how to get out of it.
“Great. I’ll find some quiet spot and make a reservation. Not, I hasten to add, in my own name.”
“Will it be all right?” she asked as second thoughts struck her. “What will you tell George?”
“I will tell him that I am taking my wife out to dinner,” he said with wicked simplicity, got up off her bed and left.
Chapter Ten
Mary took her time dressing for dinner that evening. She had spent the whole afternoon in the library, hidden away from the press of people she was feeling so acutely this week. It was difficult to behave around Kit as she had last week, when she had been determined to keep him at a distance, and she was afraid her changed feelings were obvious. She felt, with what was perhaps hypersensitivity, that everyone was looking at them, and wondering.
She wore her white linen suit, the dressiest outfit she had brought with her, and took pains with her hair, blowing it dry carefully so it feathered softly back off her face and curled smoothly on her shoulders. At precisely seven o’clock she heard a horn toot outside, and she picked up her black patent leather purse and went out the door.
“How crass,” she said as she got into the car. “Honking the horn for me. You might have knocked on my door.”
He grinned. “When I was a kid I always longed to pick up my date by blowing on the horn. Unfortunately, I could never afford a car.”
“Poor deprived darling,” she murmured sympathetically. “Well, if you want to enact your adolescent fantasies, who am I to stop you?”
“Do you want a punch in the nose?” he asked amiably.
She laughed. “Not really. Where are we going?”
“A place George suggested. The Elms, it’s called. He said the food is good and the customers are mostly local people.”
“Good,” said Mary. “You can usually count on New Englanders not to bother you.”
It was her first experience of going out with Kit since he had become famous. He parked the car himself in the restaurant lot, and they walked up the stairs of the old clapboard inn and into the lobby. “Mr. Michaels,” Kit said pleasantly to the hostess. “I have a reservation for seven-thirty.”
The woman’s eyes widened as they took him in. She looked nervously at her reservation chart. “Yes, c-cer-tainly,” she stuttered. “Come right this way, sir.”
Mary was thankful to see it was a corner table, but the walk across the room seemed endless to her. One or two people glanced idly up as they passed and then froze as they recognized Kit’s face. It was not a face, Mary thought ruefully as she sat down and regarded him across the table, that one was likely to mistake. He had picked up the menu and for a minute she regarded him, trying to see him as others must, as these people throughout the dining room, all peering surreptitiously at their corner, must see him. She looked and saw a tall, very tan, leanly built man in a lightweight gray suit. His hair was black as coal, black as night, black as hers. He looked up and she smiled a little to herself. She could never see him dispassionately; it was impossible.
“Do you know, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in a suit,” she said. “It becomes you.”
“That’s true. I didn’t own one when we were married, did I?” The waiter appeared at his elbow and he asked her, “Do you want a drink?”
“Yes. I’ll have a vodka martini on the rocks.”
“I’ll have a whiskey sour,” Kit told the waiter.
When the man returned with their drinks he put the martini in front of Kit and the whiskey sour in front of Mary. They exchanged a glance of secret amusement, and after the waiter had gone, Kit changed the drinks. “It’s so embarrassing, having a hard drinker for a wife,” he said mournfully.
She sipped her martini. “I can’t help it if you only like sissy drinks.”
“I wasn’t brought up in a nice alcoholic middle-class family. I developed a taste for beer at an early age, and I haven’t changed.”
“You like milk even better,” she said.
“Good God, Mary, don’t ever let that get out,” he said in mock horror. “Think of my rough-and-tough reputation.”
She smiled at him, a warm and beautiful smile. “I’ll protect your secrets to the death.”
“Will you?” He put a hand over hers on the table. Involuntarily she glanced around. At least half the restaurant was looking at him. She pulled her hand away and felt the color flush into her cheeks. “Ignore them,” he said. “They’re behaving very well, really. After a few minutes they’ll stop looking.”
She sat back and tried to relax. “I suppose you’re used to it by now.”
“You never really get used to it. It’s just s
omething you have to live with.” He glanced over her shoulder. “Ah,” he said. “Here it comes.”
A man appeared at their table carrying a pad and a pencil. “Mr. Douglas,” he said a little nervously and with a definite New York accent. “Would you mind giving me your autograph? It’s for my daughter. She just loves your pictures.”
As Mary watched, a still and guarded look of cold courtesy settled over Kit’s face. It was the mask, she realized, behind which he must have learned to hide from a continual public scrutiny. “I’m sorry,” he said coolly, “but I don’t give autographs when I am not working.”
The man looked nonplussed and backed away a little. “Sorry,” he said. Kit nodded coldly and after a minute the man turned and left.
“You were rather brutal,” Mary murmured after a minute.
He looked at her. “If I had signed that paper, we’d have had the whole damn restaurant over here for autographs. Now they’ll leave us alone.”
“Yes,” said Mary, a little unhappily. “I suppose that’s true.”
He smiled at her expression. “You were brought up to be polite. I wasn’t. Actually, I don’t believe in being polite.”
Mary sighed. “I’m learning, believe me.”
“Let’s order,” he said, and handed her the menu.
The meal was delicious and Mary felt herself relaxing as they ate and drank the bottle of wine Kit had ordered to go with it.
“I’ve decided I’ll move to California with you,” she said as she savored a perfect filet mignon.
His face blazed into happiness. “Do you mean that?”
“Yes. I can probably work at the UCLA library without any trouble. I don’t know about teaching, though. I’d better keep flexible so I can adjust to your schedule.”
“Listen to me, Mary.” He was deadly earnest. “I want you to have your own life. I do not want you to sacrifice what you want to do for me. If you want to teach, teach. It’s what you’re trained for.”
