Wild Midnight (37 page)

“Oh, God, Rachel,” he rasped. “Oh, God, woman—how much I want you! How damned beautiful you are like this, wanting me, letting me touch you. I dream of it. I can’t get you out of my thoughts.”
 

He came back to her then to hold himself above her on his elbows, his body shaking to match her own fevered trembling. “Now touch me, Rachel. Do the same thing to me.”
 

Her hands began to follow every taut, straining line of his powerful body that he laid open for her to do as she wanted, and she was as gentle as he. He took her hand and put it, against his inner thigh, and the muscles jumped spasmodically under her light touch.
 

“Touch me now,” he managed, his eyes closed. A rough sound, almost a sob, broke through his lips as she took him in her hand and stroked him, adoring his bursting power with every touch.
 

“I miss your red hair,” he grated. “Ah, babe, that’s heaven, don’t stop. Your hair—beautiful red hair that used to wind around me like a net, holding me. Like the women in Homer who sang.”
 

“Sirens.”
 

“Yes, sirens. Oh, Rachel—” His voice cracked. “You were never supposed to be here—I was never supposed to find you. Never in this life.”
 

He rolled over her slowly, gathering the coiled power in his aroused body with deliberate care. He kissed her deeply, murmuring urgent words against her wet, opened lips that she hardly heard. Then, very softly into her ear, “Do you still love me, Rachel?”
 

With her arms twined tightly around his neck she could only nod.
 

“Keep saying it to me, honey, I want to hear it.” He pressed against her slowly, powerfully, entering her as she murmured the words, watching her with gleaming eyes. He kept pressing, his body following in a continuing thrust that filled her until she moved under him, easing around him, taking him more and more, until she gasped.
 

“Take me, my beautiful darling.” The choked words were shaken. “And move for me while I’m like this, inside you. I want to remember this, how much you want me.”
 

Rachel was sobbing as she moved, twisting her body with increasing wildness under him in a flooding ecstasy of love and desire. He held himself still, his forehead pressed to hers, his face contorted with pleasure and pain. Her hands roved over him with a sort of madness, caressing the broad wet expanse of his back with the muscles rippling under smooth skin, the tightly contracted strength of his buttocks and waist, his satiny powerful arms, until he was trembling violently. When he began to move, long, forceful strokes that demanded her strength and her passionate endurance, a blackness swept over her. She sank her teeth into the skin of his shoulder and heard him moan raggedly.
 

“Ah, love ... ah, love.” His husky rasp was tormented. “Give me this to remember!”
 

Then there was only the sound of her name over and over as deep, drugging madness overtook them, out of control, their hearts thundering, violent desire claiming them as time and the world fell away. They were the only ones in the darkness, hovering between heaven and hell; they had found each other, possessing each other, and there was nothing more.
 

After the violence, the mindless ecstacy of desire, they lay for what seemed like a long time in exhausted twilight, travelers no longer lost, spent with their seeking. Beau rolled away and lay perfectly still beside her, his chest rising and falling with slow, shuddering gasps.
 

Trembling now with tiredness, Rachel tried to sit up.
 

“Where are you going?” His voice was rough.
 

“I only wanted to turn out the light.”
 

“Leave it. You’re not going to stay.”
 

He pulled himself up to his elbow, lifting his forearm to wipe his wet, glistening face. He put his long legs over the edge of the bed. “Get your clothes.”
 

She drew back a little, staring at him. He was not angry, not cold or withdrawn. He simply sat, his beautiful naked body as still as a hunting animal’s, waiting, calmly dispassionate.
 

“I ... I wanted to stay a little,” she stammered. “I thought—”
 

“Do you still love me?” He didn’t look at her; his voice was even, expressionless.
 

She only wanted to get back in bed with him, to feel his arms around her, but he’d said she wasn’t going to stay. The windows were dark; it was night.
 

“Yes,” she whispered.
 

“You’re a liar, Rachel.” The sibilant words fell quietly. “I’m just finding out how much of a liar you are. It’s disillusioning as hell.” He reached to the floor and lifted her dress. “Put it on,” he ordered, handing it to her.
 

She took the dress out of his hand and could only stare. “What have I done?” Her voice broke. “What are you punishing me for now?”
 

He pulled her from the bed and made her stand before him as he sat on the edge. He handed her the bra and panties and waited while she put them on.
 

“You know what you’ve done better than I do.” The empty voice was dangerously quiet. “But spare me the details. I don’t want to hear them right now. Put on your dress. Such a pretty dress, I suppose it’s new.”
 

“No, it’s not.” She hardly heard her own words. She lifted the dress and he helped smooth it down as she slipped it over her head. She looked down at the top of his head, fine, thick hair falling in glistening strands over his forehead, but his face was shut, adamant.
 

“What have I done?” she repeated, staring at him.
 

It was as though he wasn’t listening. “Rachel, this is a tough world,” he murmured, staring at the silk folds of her skirt and the little embroidered flowers. “You were on the right track—coming here tonight looking beautiful for me in the pretty dress, the sexy undies—but you haven’t quite got the hang of it. I don’t guess you ever will. It takes more than looking beautiful and knowing that I want you—that I can’t keep my hands off you and that I’ll go to bed with you any time I can—to play a winning game. I hate to tell you this,” he said, lifting his gaze to her face, “but you’ve just been aced. It was a good try, though.”
 

“Don’t do this to me,” she begged. “You’ve got to tell me what this is all about!”
 

“I’m telling you. Why the hell don’t you listen?” Something flickered in his eyes, bright as a match flame, then it was gone. “I want you so much, Rachel, I don’t think even you know how much, but that has nothing to do with it. You’re not tough enough to play this sort of game—any sort of game—and win. For one thing, you always have to be on the lookout for the unknown factor. It’s like military strategy-count on the surprise that you don’t even know about, what you least expect, because it will always get you. I didn’t, once, and I paid for it on a path in the jungle. You didn’t, here tonight, and you just blew it.”
 

“I don’t understand you,” she wailed.
 

“I didn’t get you pregnant, honey.” The low, quiet words were relentless. “Because I can’t. They gave me a vasectomy, part of the patch-up job, while I was still in the field hospital in ‘Nam. They told me it was routine, considering the area of damage.” His hands gripped the front of her dress as he said, “I’m sorry, angel, but I’m not the one. I’m sterile. I’ll just have to refer you back to Jim Claxton.”
 

O cloud in the west, like a thought in the heart
 

Of pardon, loose thy wing, and start
 

And do a grace for me.
 

Marsh Song
 

Chapter Twenty-One
 

The full complement of the Draytonville High School band—including the eight pretty twirlers in orange and white miniskirted uniforms who also doubled as the cheerleading team in football and basketball season—played and marched for an exciting and noisy half hour on the upper end of Main Street to mark the departure of Rachel Goodbody Brinton, who was returning to Philadelphia.
 

The band had turned out also, unofficially, for Til who had announced that he would not seek a renewal of his contract for the coming school year. He would be moving his family to Atlanta to accept a position as community liaison with that city’s government.
 

While the co-op’s potluck picnic lunch was being spread out in the parking lot behind the storefront office, and pickup trucks were still arriving with the members’ families, the sizable crowd of townspeople and other visitors was urged by Billy Yonge, the cooperative’s chairman of the board, to tour the new offices and see the exhibit of historic photographs of DeRenne County arranged by the county librarian’s office in Hazel Gardens. Some of the library exhibit’s old black-and white pictures had been taken almost a half a century ago by WPA photographers; their scenes of rice and cotton fields and turpentine operations in the midst of the Depression aroused great interest, especially among those who could recognize some of their relatives. The viewers, staring at the faces of the county’s tenant farmers and the smalltown rural poor in these pictures, commented that in general things had certainly changed. In the 1930’s there had been no 1-75, the huge north-south interstate expressway along the southern coasts; Hilton Head had only been a half-deserted hunting preserve for wealthy northerners; and even Savannah and Charleston existed as small southern cities whose fortunes were still in decline. In the last rows of pictures, as the crowds exited through the back door, were photographs of fresh-faced young men in uniform posed with the military bombers that had been stationed at the Hazel Gardens World War Two Army Air Force Base, now the familiar DeRenne County airport.
 

Just beyond the office’s back door Theo Turner and young Bubba Faligant handed out an impressive, newly printed brochure that explained the work of the Ashepoo River Farmers Cooperative and its projected expansion into several hundred leased acres of soybeans to be planted in some of Draytonville’s unused farmland. The Draytonville Bank, the booklet went on to say, was proud to be the financial supporter of agricultural renewal in the area, and a large Draytonville Bank advertisement filled the back page. In the parking lot crowds were invited to inspect the John Deere tractor, grain drills, and other equipment leased under the new funding to further the expanded work of the co-op.
 

“Where’s Til?” Loretha Bulloch asked Rachel as the slender black woman paused, holding a platter of fried chicken just delivered by a co-op family. For once Loretha looked harried; there was even a large greasy stain on the front of her lime-green linen skirt that complimented a perfectly taibred flowered shirt and a huge choker of white beads.
 

Rachel had just directed the mayor and two city councilmen through the exhibit, and she wasn’t sure where she’d last seen Til.
 

“Sugar,” Loretha said, looking around her distractedly, “we’ve got too
much fried chicken.
Nothing but fried chicken and pecan pie—I’ll never live it down!”
 

Rachel looked at the long folding tables donated for the afternoon by the AME church, and saw that Loretha was right. By some strange miscalculation the co-op members were bringing in mounds of delicious fried chicken and pans of syrupy pies, their very best, most expensive dishes in honor of the occasion, but not much else.
 

“Didn’t you make a list?”
 

They were jostled by perspiring crowds coming out the co-op’s back door, and Loretha quickly held the fried chicken platter out of the way as she flashed Rachel a resentful look. “Well, Til didn’t tell me to do that. Last time I saw him he said, ‘Oh, it’ll work out, honey, don’t worry about it. You’re just lucky it isn’t all turnip greens.’ But Rachel, every one of those children is going to be sick, and their mamas are going to blame me! Nothing but chicken and pecan pie—I think I’m going home.”
 

“Don’t do that,” Rachel said quickly. She grabbed Loretha’s arm and managed to get her fingers greasy. Loretha looked wonderful, as though she’d just stepped out of
Vogue
magazine in her chic outfit with 1940’s-style padded shoulders, but Rachel had never seen her quite so flustered.
 

Loretha was trying to keep her eye on the hordes of children, both black and white, racing between the cars and pickup trucks and picnic tables. “Til’s making my life miserable. ‘Go be a politician’s wife,’ he tells me, ‘it’s good practice. Pretend you’re out campaigning for me.’ Hunnnh,” she snorted. “He just puts the whole thing on me!”
 

“But Til’s right, you know. This is sort of the nitty gritty of any kind of organizing, community or political—getting the food together and keeping things moving. I know you can handle it.” Rachel took a deep breath. “Maybe we can organize a game for the kids.”
 

Loretha stood quite still, her expression changing as she suddenly stared at her. “Oh, honey, we are going to
miss
you,” she said softly. “In all this ruckus here today I’m just overlooking the important part, that you’re going to leave us.” She juggled the platter, trying to put her hand on Rachel’s arm, and gave it up. “What fer you goan away, Miz Rachel?” she said softly, imitating the Gullah speech, leavin’ all of us here? We goan be mighty, mighty sad.”