Season of Storm (40 page)

Shulamith was dripping wet. Her hair had been in a ponytail, but the wind had whipped the elastic away, and now it hung in sodden tendrils all down her back and in her face. Her jeans and jacket and shoes were soaked through, but she didn't care. "Because I say so!" she stormed.

She had set off across the choppy strait in an open speedboat, and when the storm blew up it was fierce.  

And after half an hour in the cold driving rain it was almost an insult to come in and find Johnny so warm and lazy in his kitchen. She didn't even wait to greet him. She simply shouted that he was not to build a house for her father.

Johnny chewed for a moment. "Where's the problem?" he asked. "You don't have to live in it, do you?" His voice sounded casual, but there was that familiar bleakness around his eyes, as though something she said had reminded him of some old hurt.

She glared at him. "I don't—" She broke off, shivering violently, and her teeth began to chatter. Watching her, Johnny shook his head.

"You look like a drowned hen," he observed. "Shouldn't you take off those clothes and get into the bathtub?"

"I'm not cold!" It wasn't a lie. Inside she was burning up. "And I want to have this out r—"

He slung his bare feet off the chair, stood and walked to the stove, and Smith fell silent. He turned the oven on full blast behind her, then reached to draw her closer to its warmth. And to him. Smith clenched her jaw and shivered as Johnny's hands touched the neck of her jacket. "Will you stop that and listen to me?" she demanded, pushing away his hands. But he merely brought them back again, and this time she let him unzip her soaked clammy bomber jacket and slide it off her shoulders.

"Thank you," she said. "Now—"

Underneath she was wearing a navy cardigan and a blue shirt, and without a pause Johnny's hands moved to the buttons of her sweater.

"You're soaked through," he said. "Why didn't you put on a mac?"

"I forgot to bring one," Smith muttered. The oven was fast; its warmth was already reaching her. "I was in a hurry."

He chuckled in his throat. "In a hurry to see me? Oh, Peaceable Woman, I'm honoured!"

It had been a long time since she had heard that endearment on his lips. Her breathing checked and then resumed. Johnny slid the wet cardigan from her shoulders and dropped it, too, on the floor. His hands moved to the top button of her shirt, just above her breasts. He looked into her eyes as he undid it.

"Johnny," she whispered, half longingly, half afraid. His hands slid down between her breasts and found another button, but his eyes never left her face.

Her breathing shifted. She opened her mouth, and her breath came audibly through her parted lips, and then the flame was there between them, and they were caught in its heady heat. She could not move; she could only gaze into his eyes and wait for him to undress her and pray with all her being that he would love her then.

He pulled the blue shirt from the waistband of her jeans and dropped it on the floor, and then his dark warm hands found the catch of her lacy bra between her breasts and opened it.

Johnny closed his eyes and dragged in a shaking breath, and the warmth of his hands cupped her breasts and the heat of his mouth was a caress, and she had waited so long for this. A long sob of need came from her throat, and Johnny looked into her eyes and smiled as though he were on the rack.

"You, too," she whispered in discovery, although she should have known.

He smiled and brushed her cheek with his fingers. "Every day," he said quietly. "Every hour. Every minute."

It had been like that for her, too, though she had tried her best to conquer it. She realized with a dim foreboding that after today she would have to start all over again with a broken heart. She wondered where she would get the strength to bear it again.

He slipped her bra off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, and then, as though this were some kind of torture test, he let go of her and bent to pull off her soaking shoes and socks. Over his head she gazed out at the increasing fury of the storm that smashed in angry gusts against the trees and clawed vainly at the house. The icy rain drove against the broad expanse of glass in bursts of a frenzy that was almost frightening, as though she were out there in the storm, as though she were in danger from it.

The cold clammy denim of her jeans slid down her thighs then, and she was naked. Her hair was cold on her scalp and her back, and droplets of icy water dripped from it. In spite of the warmth from the stove, she shivered. Johnny took a small towel from a drawer and massaged her head dry, then took another and wrapped her head in it.

It was slow torture, the waiting.

Johnny's warmth enveloped her at last, and he lifted her up in his arms and bent to kiss her.

Neither of them spoke. There was no need for speech. This had been inevitable from the moment Smith walked in the door. Johnny turned to carry her to his room, knowing that she had no protest to make.

***

She lay against his chest and gave herself up to the feeling of rightness. For a long moment she listened to the rain. She would have to pay for this, she knew, but not now. She would pay tomorrow.

Johnny stroked a tendril of hair from her forehead, and she lifted her head to smile at him. Their lovemaking had been burningly tender, a gentle giving and taking that made her lose herself, made her deaf to the voice that warned her not to give too much. She had given him everything, except the words. She had not said "I love you", but he must have felt her love, he must have heard it in her loving cries.

''Why don't you want me to build a house for your father?" he asked softly. Her heart contracted.

''Do I have to spell it out?" she wailed. "Don't you know?" He shook his head, and for the first time since she had known him his eyes were afraid of what she could do to him.

''Johnny," she said helplessly. "Can't you understand? You'd be there all the time, you'd be a business associate, at his parties. He'd talk about you...and the house—Johnny, I'd never be able to visit him without remembering."

It would kill her. She could live without Johnny if she could create her own little world around her, a world in which no one said his name. How could she survive a life where her father lived in a house Johnny's hands had shaped?

"It would kill me," she whispered. In the silence she could feel his heart beating.

"You told me you once wanted a house of my design," he said, and there was a sound of pain in his throat that she did not understand. "When your father approached me I thought it was...I thought you were behind it."

"No," she said.

"I nearly refused. I nearly told your father that if that was the kind of house you wanted you would have to come and live in mine."

His hand stroking her naked back pressed her briefly. Smith started and then froze into stillness.

"What did you say?" she asked hoarsely.
 

"But for all I knew, your father...I decided instead that I'd make a deal with you. You'd have to come and be my wife till the house was built, you'd have to give me the chance to...."

Smith's throat closed up, and her breathing stopped. Johnny's hand clenched her arm.

"Well," he said, in a voice so filled with pain it hurt her, "you have to take the chances fate gives. I'll promise not to build your father's house, Shulamith, if you'll come and live with me for six months. After that, if you still…after that, if I have to, I'll let you go."

He rolled her onto her back and bent over her, and his black eyes met hers, and there was no gentleness in them. "That's my best offer," he said. "If you turn it down I'll build your father's house, and I'll build the Concord building, and I'll get every commission I can from your friends and your father's friends, and you'll never be free of me. I'll refuse to divorce you. I'll hang on like death till I've made you love me or hate me."

Her heartbeat was loud in her ears, and wherever he touched her, her flesh ached with need.

She swallowed. "Do you love me?" she asked.

His lips stretched into a line. "I love you." His voice cracked. "Don't you know it? You're my life."

She closed her eyes. "What would it mean, if I learned to love you? Would it mean you could stop loving me?"

"No!" he whispered. He looked shaken.

She said, "I couldn't go through it again. I loved you. I let myself love you, and you—you looked at me as though you hated me. You said...you said, 'My God, what have I done?'"

She remembered the horror of that morning with a sudden clarity that brought a choking lump to her throat. "I was nervous that morning," she said. "But if you hadn't looked at me like that, if you'd loved me then....It wasn't temporary insanity or Stockholm Syndrome for me!" she cried. "I loved you! You asked me to love you, and when I did you threw it back in my face!"

"I know. I was a fool. Forgive me," he said.

There were tears on her cheeks. "And now you want me to love you again, but you don't say why." She sobbed once. "You want me for six months. What will happen then? You obviously think you'll have it out of your system after six months, but what about me? I'm better off where I am, Johnny. I'm halfway through it, I can see the light now." What a lie. She would never stop loving him, but at least he would never know. "What do I do when it's over for you? What if I can't stop loving you to order?"

He kissed her. He kissed the tears from her cheeks, and then he kissed her mouth, and he looked at her and she knew suddenly that he did know, that he had read what she had tried to hide. And what did that mean? What would he do with the knowledge?

"Love me forever," he begged her softly. "Please love me forever."

"
No!"
she wailed on a high, pleading cry. "Please don't, please, Johnny, it will kill me! I can't live with you! I'll do whatever you want, but please don't, please don't make me—"
 

She began to sob in earnest, and he held her and let her cry. "You don't understand," she sobbed brokenly. "You don't know what it's like. It would kill me. I spent so long trying to make my father love me, and I couldn't do it, it's impossible, I can't make anyone love me. It wouldn't be fair to pretend I could, Johnny, don't make me think I could. He says he always loved me, but why didn't he tell me? Why did he act as if he hated me? And I kept trying to please him, Johnny, but nothing ever pleased him!

"I swore to myself I'd never beg you for your love, but if you made me live with you, I'd start trying. It would be the same thing all over again, Johnny, I'd be trying to make you love me! Don't!" she begged desperately, covering her face and knowing that she had told him everything, everything she had meant to keep hidden. Nowhere was safe now; she would never be safe from him again. "Please don't."

He kissed her and let her cry out her despair against his chest until at last there were no tears left. She lay still in his arms then, while her shuddering breath calmed, and all the pain of a lifetime was in her eyes.

In the silence the sound of wind and rain was loud. Johnny lay back and drew her onto his chest and stroked her hair with a tenderness that shook her.

"I love you," he said quietly. She moved, but he held her fast. "Just listen," he said. "Just let me say it. I love you, Shulamith. I loved you the first moment I saw you, when you burst into your father's room and started to give us all a piece of your mind." He laughed a little. "I felt as though some...it was as though my spirit and yours were suddenly bound together—I could almost see it. Looking back now I know I didn't take you with me because I thought you'd recognized my face. That was the excuse I gave myself. I took you because you were mine, because we belonged together.

"There was that legend in my family. Do you believe in race memory? Sometimes I thought it was happening again, that you had come to me to fulfil that legend. Other times I just thought I'd gone crazy. I did it all wrong, I should have gone away that night and found another way to meet you. And I knew that because I'd done it wrong, something was bound to separate us. I thought if I could get you to marry me I could prevent it from happening. I didn't know—I never imagined that the danger was from myself.

"What I told you about myself that morning was right. I had always felt the need to get my heritage back, to be accepted by my people. When I fell in love with you, it seemed to me that it was no longer important, that I had to accept what I had done with my life and go on.

"But in the morning—you know what happened in the morning. Everything I had thought unimportant came back to haunt me. I told myself that what I had done was irrational, that I had been possessed...but it was done, there was no going back. And I panicked."

"But you married me so I wouldn't be able to accuse you, didn't you?" Shulamith asked.

That shook him. "
What?
No!" he said. His voice trembled.
"No.
My God, is that what you thought?"
 

"Sometimes," she whispered. "Afterwards, when you told me—

"You thought it was all a lie? You thought I was lying to you from the beginning?"

"There were times I told myself you must have thought you loved me once. But on my black days, and there were plenty of those…."

Johnny closed his eyes. "The first lie I told you was the morning I said I didn't love you," Johnny said. "I lied to myself, too. Afterward I needed you so desperately I had to go to you—even though the police were as thick as flies around you—but I was still lying to myself. Lying to you. I don't know why. The day we were married I had no other thought than to make you mine forever."

Shulamith smiled and suddenly remembered to breathe.

"When did you stop lying to yourself?"

He breathed. "That morning you sat in the kitchen and sang your song to me and told me how many men you'd be waking up to say goodbye to in the future...something shifted then. There was a knife in my gut and you were twisting it, and you didn't even know. I told myself if I'd killed your love it was my own fault, and I told myself I'd have my heritage to keep me warm. I thought I could let you go."