Sweet Everlasting (27 page)

After a few aghast seconds, Carrie had to admit to being pleasantly surprised.
Well, what did you think, silly,
she scolded herself,
a—a snake!
She didn’t really know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this warm, silky stalk, thick as a tree limb and throbbing with life. Then she looked at Ty’s face. She softened her hand instinctively and stroked him as she would any wild creature she wanted to gentle—a bird, a fawn. “Is it right?” she whispered. “Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

Even she could tell that this was an understatement. He had an expression she’d never seen, half rapture and half torture, his heavy-lidded eyes following the slow movements of her hand as if she was hypnotizing him with it. She smiled, and all her trepidation vanished. The big dread—which she hadn’t even known was there, not for sure—was suddenly gone. This was Ty’s body, and this amazing part of him could be touched by her in a way that thrilled him. What had she been afraid of? It was only him, and her, loving each other with their bodies. So simple! She’d known it already on some deeper level, and now she knew it straight out, bone deep and wholehearted.

“Oh, Ty, I do love you,” she had to tell him. “I love you so much.”

He came out of his trance and stopped the provocative slide of her hand with his. The thought crossed what was left of his mind that he ought to stop everything now. It was humbling to discover that he couldn’t. “Sweetheart,” he began, some fraudulent, grandiose sentiment taking shape on the tip of his tongue—

“Oh, you don’t have to say it back,” she assured him hastily, winding her soft arms around him.
“That’s
not necessary.”

God, she meant it. She was offering her lips to him, generous as always, still slightly too shy to kiss him first. His heart turned over. Covering her, he took her mouth in a rapacious kiss designed to deprive her of reason, and him, too. Lost, blind, his heat-seeking fingers found her again. “Carrie, darling, let me—”

“Yes—”

But he could feel the tension quivering in her stomach muscles, and it gave him the grace to enter her carefully.

Alive to everything, intent on every nerve ending in her body, Carrie got another surprise: it didn’t hurt. He’d said it wouldn’t, and she’d believed him—until the last second. Then the perverse memory of her stepfather’s battering cruelty had come swimming up out of nowhere, soaking her with anxiety. Ah, but this, this was Ty and he was her lover; he rode high inside her, swelling and filling and completing her. And yet how amazing!—already she was almost used to him there. When he moved in her, just a little, she couldn’t keep from crying out from the unbelievable pleasure, coming from a place in her own body she hadn’t even known existed. Minutes ago she’d imagined she would lie quiet and passive in his arms when this moment came, while he did something to her vaguely resembling this, after which they would be “lovers.” But it wasn’t like that at all. She was
in
on this, the most intimate and intense experience of her life; every tiny movement, every beat of his pulse sent sparks of exquisite sensation glittering through her. Just then he pushed his hand beneath her thigh, pulling it up and then pressing her knee out to open her even more, make her feel even more—
possessed.
How could he know what she wanted before she knew it herself? She gasped out her all but unbearable pleasure, clutching at him with clumsy hands, hardly able to return his slippery, ravenous kisses. Flexing both knees to brace her feet, she arched up at him, frantic.

The effect was electric, and he was perilously close to the brink already.
Slow down,
he commanded his body. But she was so very tight, and her hot sheath nipped the tip of him in an innocent but incredible way he associated with women who took money for this and knew everything. Muttering fervent endearments, he buried his hands in Carrie’s wild hair and tried to hold her still, stroking her shallowly to regain control, kissing her to divert her.

Carrie didn’t know anything about control. Subtlety was lost on her. She writhed and twisted, pressing his buttocks, the small of his back, wanting him deeper, lost in the urgency, so close, so close. Something intense and inevitable launched her striving body out into space; she floated there weightless, saturated in perfect pleasure. It was excruciating, it was too much—it was over. Too soon she slid over another edge and toppled into a different space, a black one shattered in pulses with brilliant bursts of light. Each one lifted her up for a second, then dropped her gently down to the next. Everything thrummed and vibrated; when her body came back to her, her blood was singing.

The exquisite contractions tapered away; she felt herself softening, going liquid all around him. She felt Ty’s mouth on her closed eyelids, and the sweetness of it almost made her cry. She might have—but he hooked his hands around her shoulders then and rasped against her cheek, “Carrie, hold tight.” She did, and felt him surge and plunge inside her. He went still for an unending moment, buried deep; everywhere she touched he was hard and tense and straining. His breath came out in a whoosh and a second later his body convulsed, driving into her with a force that ought to have been painful but wasn’t. And now she did weep, because her impossible love was too big to hold inside. Offering herself, arms and legs banded tight around him, she took what he could give, and counted it enough.

But in the sweet, whispering aftermath, while he rested in her arms and gave her his slow, lazy kisses, the shadow of a fear ghosted across Ty’s heart—that he would never have enough of her.

Carrie was singing. Ty finished shaving his top lip before letting himself smile at the novel sound, a gravelly but lovable contralto not perfectly on pitch. “What is that?” he asked, glancing at her in the mirror over the sink.

She leaned back in the bathtub and stuck her big toe inside the spout of the cold water spigot. “It’s called ‘Wild Mountain Gal.’ ”

“I’ve never heard it before. It’s very …” He searched for a polite word. “Soulful.”

“It was one of my father’s. I think he made it up. He liked to make up tragic songs, but he couldn’t sing any better than I do. My mother was the one with the beautiful voice in our family. Ty?”

“Hmm?”

“Have you, um—” She paused, sitting up to study her knee. “Have you done what we did with lots and lots of women before me?”

The razor nearly nicked his jaw. He took a long time swishing it around in the basin, considering how to answer. “Lots” was such a relative word. Compared to Carrie, he was a veritable Don Juan. “Why would you want to know something like that?” he asked, delaying.

“Oh, well, you know. I was just wondering.”

“No,” he decided to say. “Not lots.” And certainly nobody like her. There had been prostitutes and “loose girls” in college, and in medical school he’d had affairs with women who were in “the arts”—actresses and opera singers, and a woman who’d fancied herself a sculptor. But the young, single women in his own social set were usually too respectable—or too discreet—to jeopardize the brilliant marriages their families had been planning for years, certainly not for anything as frivolous as mere physical passion.

Carrie listened to the silence after his answer and assumed he was remembering an old favorite.
Well, you had to ask, didn’t you?
she jeered herself. And then came another question she ought not to ask, bubbling up like a spring in March. “How do you … Why don’t you …”

He turned his head to look at her. “What?”

“I was just thinking, since you see ladies all the time and sometimes they’re naked and you have to, um, you know, look at them and touch them and everything, how do you …” She squinched all her toes, exasperated with herself because she just couldn’t seem to get past that.

“Keep myself from ravishing them?”

Glancing up to see him grinning, she put her hands over her face and giggled.

“I’ll tell you, it’s not easy. A man needs nerves of steel.”

“Really?”

He sent her a mock disgusted look and went back to shaving.

Oh, he was joking. “No, but really,” she prodded. “Why isn’t it the same? I’m sure it’s not, but
why
isn’t it?”

“The same as what
we
did? Oh, Carrie.” He shook his head at her in the mirror. “Think about it.”

She didn’t have to think for long, the answer was so obvious. But now she wanted to hear him say it.

Tyler set his razor down and came to sit beside her on the edge of the tub. The bath towel around his waist slipped; he retied it absently, his mind on the alluring spectacle Carrie’s bobbing breasts made, her nipples just breaking the top of the sudsy water. Her long, lithe, angular body inflamed him now; he wanted her incessantly. But she was soaking away her bruises and soreness in hot water and epsom salts on doctor’s orders, and it would be unprofessional, not to mention ungentlemanly, to interrupt the treatment solely for the doctor’s pleasure. Not for a little longer, anyway.

“How did you get this?” he asked, tracing an old, double-sided white scar at the top of her trapezius muscle.

“I’ll tell you,” Carrie said softly, after a little pause. “But you didn’t answer
my
question yet.” She was thinking how beautiful he was, like a statue of a god or a king in a book. He had a gentleman’s occupation, and yet he was strong and muscular—not brawny like Artemis or Eugene, but fit in a refined, athletic way that suited her much better than beefy strength would have.

“Move your feet,” he warned, reaching for the faucet nozzle and turning the hot water on again. “Well, if you must know, I’ve never had a lady patient as beautiful as you are.”

She laughed gaily, genuinely amused.

“If I did, I’d probably lose control and take her right there on my examining table.”

“You would not.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

She beamed at him. “Because you’re strong. And honest.” She searched for the right word.
“Ethical.
But what makes you not even
want
to ‘take’ a pretty patient on your examining table?” she persisted.

“Because one thing has nothing to do with the other. A patient’s body doesn’t even
look
the same as a woman’s body to me.”

“No?”

“No.” He rested his forearm on his thigh, leaning in. “When I look at you, Carrie, what I see is silky skin and soft, luscious breasts. Tasty little nipples that pucker up when I kiss them. A flat belly to press mine against, thighs—such long white thighs, and they open for me with such lush, feminine eagerness.” Her lips were parted; she’d gone pink in the face, eyes wide and rapt on his. His hand went to her bent knee and rocked it softly—No, enough of that.

He leaned back, folding his arms. “Do you know what I see when I look at one of my ‘naked ladies’?”

She shook her head.

“I see the sweat ducts in her epidermis. I take careful note of her areolar glands and her lactiferous ducts. Her transverse colon fascinates me, but it’s nothing compared to her rectus femoris or her pharyngeal orifice, the graceful curve of her innominate bone—”

Carrie whooped with laughter. Cupping her hands, she splashed a wave of bath water over the side of the tub, drenching him.

Her took her shoulders and pressed her firmly back against the tub’s sloping end. “Understand?” Before she could answer, he gave her a loud, smacking kiss, that turned gentle before it was over.

“Yes,” she said, breathless, eyes glowing.

Back at the sink, Tyler smiled at his steamy reflection, pleased with his answer, even though it didn’t quite cover the whole truth. Occasionally his humanity got in the way of his professionalism, and he actually
did
see a woman as a woman, patient status notwithstanding. No need to bother Carrie with that little detail, though. Especially since there was no conceivable possibility that he would ever act on those feelings and touch a woman under professional circumstances in any other way but professionally.

Moistening the lather drying on his chin, he thought how easy it would be to get used to this domestic harmony he and Carrie were sharing. He was quite sure she had never enjoyed an intimate hour in a bathroom with a lover before; but the truth was, he never had either. It was an unexpectedly agreeable experience, nearly as seductive as lovemaking. She was a good companion, interested and interesting, unaffected, open and confiding, talkative but by no means the chatterbox he liked to tease her she’d turned into. He felt relaxed and mellow in the expanding silence between them now, content to let it go on indefinitely. So he was unprepared for the shock when Carrie broke it.

“My stepfather raped me when I was thirteen,” she announced in a low voice, crouched in the tub, holding one foot and staring fixedly at her toes. “It was about six months after my mother died. I was taking a bath in the kitchen of the house where we were living in Spaulding.” She gave a quick laugh. “It wasn’t a bit like this bathtub—it was a little wooden basin, you could kneel in it but you couldn’t sit. I didn’t think Artemis was coming back that night, because he was drinking a lot by then and most times not getting home till morning. I’d learned to be scared of him, and usually I could stay out of his way. Sometimes I wasn’t quick enough, though, and he’d slap me or hit me—but only if he was drunk, so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.”

There was a stool beside the tub, next to the wall. Tyler dried his face and sat down on the stool, just behind Carrie’s left shoulder.

“He’s religious, you know, in a peculiar way, so he’d always be sorry afterward, and beg forgiveness—God’s, not mine—for losing control of himself and hitting me. Anyway, on this night he came home early, while I was still bathing. He was drunk. When he saw me he started raving about how I’d tempted him long enough, quoting things from the Bible about Eve and Adam and the serpent. I didn’t know much, but I knew he wasn’t just going to beat me this time.”

She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her calves. “He grabbed me and pushed me down on the floor. I shouldn’t’ve bothered to fight him, I just hurt myself worse, but I couldn’t—help it. And I couldn’t stop screaming. He kept hitting and hitting, he bit me—there.” She reached back and touched the white scar on her shoulder. “But I still wouldn’t give up, and I kept on screaming. So he put his hands around my neck and started to squeeze. Then I stopped. But I was awake when he raped me. I didn’t pass out till he finished, still choking me. I thought sure I was dying.”