Seventh Wonder (24 page)

Meg nodded, although in reality she found it difficult to decipher her aunt’s cryptic warning.

They said their goodbyes, and Virginia drove away, her sunglasses glinting in the sun and her headscarf puffing and snapping in the wind. For a long moment, Meg simply stood in place, attempting to clear her mind before returning to the house.

John was waiting in the foyer when she walked in the front door. He hugged her around her shoulders and kissed the bridge of her nose and her mouth. When he pulled back a moment later, she was laid bare by his discriminating gaze. He frowned with worry, evidently having sensed her confusion, but before he could speak, Meg grabbed his hand. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said quickly.

“Where would you like to go?”

“Away, for a few days. Just anywhere.”

His eyebrows hiked up. “A few days? Really?”

“Why shouldn’t we?” she asked. “I’m not bound to stay here for any reason, and I know you’re not. Let’s get in my car and just...drive. We’ll drive until we find a place we might like to stop.”

He brushed her hair away from her forehead and stared straight down into her eyes, a smile creeping over his face. “All right. How long do you need to get ready?”

Meg packed quickly while John sat on her bed and leafed through one of her high school yearbooks. She penned a note for her parents, which she folded in half and left on the side table in the front hall. Then they left.

First they drove to Redondo Beach, where they watched a matinee of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. (Meg pretended to swoon over Paul Newman, while John pretended to act hurt.) Next they drove south to Laguna Beach, where John bought her a bouquet of lilies from a flower cart and they collected shells and sand dollars and combed the shore for sea glass.

They wound farther down the Pacific Coast Highway, edging closer to Mexico. The sun was drowning in a pool of butterscotch light when they stopped for dinner in Torrey Pines and decided to stay.

It wasn’t until John was paying for their room at a motel one block east of the beach that Meg began to feel her stomach clench and her jaw tense. She hadn’t been this nervous about being alone with him since he’d taken her to visit Cape Royal months ago: their very first evening together. The past months of longing and yearning and fretful wishing seemed to have culminated in this moment, pinpoints of light speeding toward a common point on the horizon - a horizon she’d never really expected to reach. The pressure was almost more than she could bear. Was she more afraid that she’d fail to meet his expectations, or that he would fall short of hers?

Their room was on the sixth floor; through the front window and across the street, the water was visible between palm trees and buildings. John dropped their bags. “Be right back,” he said quietly before slipping into the washroom.

Meg felt a tingling paralysis spreading through the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. She flexed her fingers in an attempt to coax blood into their tips as she walked across the darkening room to the window. There she propped her forearm horizontally against the glass and leaned her forehead into it.

The sky had turned bleak, as if the sun had sunken straight past the horizon and slipped off the edge of the world, and luminescent streaks of indigo and fuchsia blotted out the places where the stars should have been. It was what her father would have called stormlight: that strange coexistence of light and shadow that so often precedes a storm of Neptunian proportions. Beneath it, the sea was in upheaval, pounding indignantly against the shore as if in an effort to dismantle it.

John’s footfalls were muted by the carpet, but Meg knew his presence by the riot of goose bumps that chased up her bare arms. His hands slid around her waist, and he pressed himself up against her, cradling her. The utter rightness of it forced every ounce of disquiet and doubt to the back of her mind; she nearly collapsed from the relief of it.

He rained kisses on the back of her neck, just above her collar and across her shoulder. Before there had been the sound of water in the pipes and ticking from the clock on the nightstand; now there was only the sound of his lips brushing against her skin, lightly sucking.

Meg drew back and placed her palms against the glass, then laid her cheek flat against it. Meanwhile, John’s fingers dug at the bottom of her shirt, untucking it from her skirt. He touched the sensitive flesh just above her waistband, enticing from her a hum of complacency.

When she reached behind her, her hand brushed against his crotch, prompting a soft growl from the base of his throat. “Do you feel what you do to me?” he whispered just behind her ear.

She nodded, unable to force actual words past her lips. She felt for his fly, but before her fingers could find the zipper, he trapped her hands in his, arresting her movement.

Dizzy and confused, she glanced back to meet his brooding eyes. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked carefully, feeling the strength of his grip and seeing the rise and fall of his shoulders as he drew in a series of ragged breaths.

“No,” he replied in a strangled whisper. “Never. You’ve never done anything wrong.” Touching her face: “At least not with me.”

Holding her breath, she bit the inside of her cheek. She stared straight ahead, out at the stormy sea, as he placed his hands against the glass on either side of her, caging her with his arms. His elbows hinged as he leaned forward, until his mouth was right next to her ear.

His voice was deep and rich, familiar but foreign, too, like a piece of clothing she’d owned forever, worn by someone else.

“You know I love you, right?”

She sagged against the window, touching her forehead to the cool glass, while John stepped closer. She could feel his heart hammering through her shoulder blade, but she couldn’t hear his breath.

“You love me?” she whispered. She was in some degree of shock: while the functioning part of her brain cried out that her dreams had come true, that this was cause for the most riotous of celebrations, she was rather incapable of doing anything about it.

She allowed herself to be swept along as John pulled her gently toward the bed. With one arm wrapped behind her, he guided her down toward the mattress, laying her back. She watched as he lay on his side next to her, angling his body so that he could properly see her face. When he slid one hand beneath her neck and pressed the other against her cheek, she let her eyelids flutter shut.

“Meg, look at me.” His tone was tender. “You have to look at me when I say it now, so you’ll know it’s real.”

She complied. She was both above and below him, within and without.

“I’m so in love with you,” he said: firm and clear, without trace of doubt. “I’ve loved you for months, and I’m so sorry I haven’t told you before now.” Here his tone thickened, and his eyes clouded with emotion, paralleling the drop in Meg’s stomach and the shear force of tears pressing at the backs of her eyes. Holding her tighter he said, “I missed you every single day. You’re not just - you’re not just some passing whim for me. You mean something.” He kissed her forehead, then kept his lips planted against her brow as he murmured, “You mean everything.”

* * *

She lifted her chin and kissed him hard on the lips: once, twice, three times. His heart swelled until it filled the entire capacity of his chest and caused his ribs to ache.

“I love you, too,” she said through a smile so large it touched every part of her face. Seeing her happiness was both heartening and difficult, because he couldn’t bear to utter another word that would threaten to abolish it.

Intuitive as always, her grin quickly faded; he could almost feel her struggling to reign in her unbridled glee. “Is there more you wanted to say?” she asked. “Something you need to tell me?”

Christ, where to begin?

How could he make her grasp that
this
is where it would end? That they would have this week together - this one week of arcadian bliss where they could love each other fiercely and perfectly and without restraint - and then he’d be gone? And that he refused to take a piece of her with him, because doing so would mean leaving her less than whole? How could he explain any of it in terms she would understand?

Slowly he shook his head. They had an entire week: this conversation needn’t happen right now, not when they were both so radiantly happy.

“I was just nervous, that’s all,” he said with a smile that was only slightly forced. “I was overthinking it.”

She grinned, mollified for the time being. “I love you, Meg Lowry,” he reiterated. The words felt so natural, like he’d been saying (and not merely feeling) them forever.

She rolled up onto her side, leaving only an inch of space between them. Kissing the corner of his mouth, she breathed, “Show me.”

Chapter 13

Torrey Pines, California

November 1969

Through the dingy fog of sleep, John was only dimly aware of movement. His arm felt cold, no longer wrapped around the warm body beside him.

Then a hand gripped his semi-hardened shaft, and - suddenly - he was as fully awake as if he’d just been doused with a bucket of ice cold water.

His jaw tensed, but instead of opening his eyes, he squeezed them more tightly shut, memorizing the feel of fingers and then a mouth as they closed around him. It was a form of self-imposed sensory deprivation: a feeble attempt to isolate the sensation of touch, undiluted by the neural onslaught of sight.

Ultimately he reached a point where maintaining blindness was no longer an option. He peeled his eyelids back slowly, allowed his surroundings to slide into focus. His first vision: a brunette head, bobbing up and down, a warm tongue lapping at the tender, swollen skin.

“Meg.” He spoke her name, but no sound came out: his voice hoarse from lack of use.

“Meg,” he tried again. This time she lifted her gaze but didn’t bother removing her mouth. Seeing her bright viridian eyes peering up at him while her lips wrapped around the tip of his erection nearly put him over the edge - and he wasn’t ready for that yet. He let his head fall back onto the pillow, allowed himself another second or two to renew his stamina.

“Up,” he said, more firmly this time. He placed his hand lightly on the back of her head and only narrowly kept from urging her onward.

“Come on, up,” he growled. “I can’t come yet, sweetheart. I need you first.”

She let him slip from her mouth with a loud pop, and he reached under her arms to haul her up. “Where the hell did you learn to do that?” he asked roughly, then inhaled sharply and added, “Never mind, don’t answer that.”

Meg’s laugh was throaty and deep. She stopped, however, when John swung his legs over the side of the bed and lifted her in his arms. “Where are we going?” she asked as he strode toward the window.

“I wanted to fuck you against this window last night,” he whispered in her ear, “but I got sidetracked.”

Her lips curled into a smug grin. “You mean when you told me you love me?”

He buried his face in her neck as he set her gently on the ground, breathing in her sweet, soapy fragrance. “I do love you,” he whispered.

Her grin remained as she stripped off her shirt, baring what were arguably some of the most beautiful breasts known to man. They were one of John’s favorite parts of her - along with several dozen other things.

She stretched up onto her tiptoes and placed her hands lightly on his shoulders. “I love you, too,” she breathed in his ear.

The wind rushed from his lungs as his hands trailed down her bare back to the waistband of her panties. He pushed them down over her bottom and let them slide down her legs, where Meg stepped out of first one side, then the other.

“Let me look at you,” he said, taking a step back. His eyes raked over her from head to toe - from her rumpled hair and flushed cheeks to her smooth, white legs and small feet. He leaned back in, pressing his cheek against the side of her face, and said, “You are astonishing.”

Meg grabbed both of his hands and walked backward, pulling him with her until her back was flush against the glass. Glancing over her shoulder, she asked, “Can they see us up here?”

“Doubtful,” John replied without looking. “Too far up.”

Meg bit her lip, and for a moment he pulled away. “Would you be more comfortable if we closed the curtains?”

“No,” she said, smiling. She tugged him closer and hooked one leg over his hip, guiding him toward her opening.

“Oh God.” He brushed her with his tip before pushing inside and hiking both of her legs up around his waist. “Hold on to me, beautiful,” he said. “Put your arms around my neck. Let me do the work.”

She dutifully laced her fingers behind his neck. Her head thumped softly against the glass as she arched her back, pressing her navel into his abdomen.

“Tell me how it feels, sweetheart,” he reminded her, panting into her neck.

Her response was the most delicious of moans - incoherent, but informative all the same.

Their bodies grew slick with sweat, and soon it was difficult to keep from sliding down the smooth glass. Careful to keep her anchored in place, John backed away from the window. He didn’t make it as far as the bed: collapsing to his knees on the carpet, he spread her out beneath him and lifted one of her legs to lay her over on her side. As he stretched out behind her, one hand cradling her head and the other squeezing her hip, their bodies aligned like they had always been meant to.

* * *

The days peeled back and dropped away, a mélange of moments, of words and looks and touches, littering the ground behind them. John rolling up his pant legs to wade into the surf; lifting Meg, despite her shrieks of protest, shucking off her shoes before hauling her in with him; holding hands and watching the sun set as the cool water swirls about their ankles. Watching
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Laugh-In
while sharing a hunk of coffee cake out of a cardboard box. Lying on the beach in the rosy light of morning; Meg reading Pablo Neruda aloud while John tosses pinches of crusty, day-old bread at the seagulls. John chasing Meg through the dense fog of a different morning, her laughter filtering through the vapor, softly echoing; catching her around the waist and kissing her until she’s no longer laughing, but clinging to him, letting him lower her onto the sand while her damp hair sticks to her face and neck. Driving up a winding, two lane road to the top of a cliff at one in the morning while the sky spits rain; making love against the hood of her car like a couple of kids; staying up the rest of the night, drinking hot chocolate at a truck stop while talking about anything at all. John drawing Meg; drawing the ocean and the stars and a washed up damselfish; drawing Meg again: sitting, standing, smiling, frowning. Memorizing every inch of her. Unrolling a tube of sketches from the Grand Canyon; filling them in with detail and daubs of color while Meg rests her feet in his lap, twirling a section of her hair around one finger, staring absently out the window. Visiting the San Diego Zoo; naming the animals as they pass by their cages, guessing their personalities; John holding Meg from behind as they watch the sea lions spiral through the water. Back at their hotel, drawing the curtains and silently undressing each other, feeling and tasting every last inch of skin. Still memorizing.