The Horse Whisperer (42 page)

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said.

“I can’t believe I ever went.”

He took her by the hand and led her past the Chevy, with its door still open and its lights now finding purchase in the fading light. The sky above them domed a deepening orange till it met the black of the mountains
in a roar of carmine and vermilion cloud. Annie waited on the porch while he unlocked the door.

He didn’t turn on any lights but led her through the shadows of the living room where their footsteps creaked and echoed on the wooden floor and penumbral sepia faces watched their passage from the pictures on the walls.

She had a longing for him so powerful that as they climbed the wide staircase it felt almost like sickness. They reached the landing and walked hand in hand past the open doors of rooms strewn like an abandoned ship with discarded clothes and toys. The door of his room was also open and he stood aside for her to go in then followed her and closed the door.

She saw how wide and bare the room was, not how she’d imagined it those many nights she’d seen the light at his window. Through that same window now, she could see the creek house, shaped black against the sky. The room was filled with a waning glow that turned all it touched to coral and gray.

He reached out and drew her to him to kiss her again. Then, without a word, he started to undo the long line of buttons at the front of her dress. She watched him do it, watched his fingers and then his face, the little concentrating frown. He looked up and saw her watching but didn’t smile, just held her look as he undid the last button. The dress fell open and when he slid his hands inside it and touched her skin, she gasped and shivered. He held her by her sides as before and bent his head and gently kissed the tops of her breasts above her bra.

And Annie leaned back her head and closed her eyes and thought, there is nothing but this. No other time, nor place nor being than now and here and him and us. And no earthly point in calculating consequence or permanence
or right or wrong, for all, all else, was as nothing to the act. It had to be and would be and was.

   Tom led her to the bed and they stood beside it while she stepped from her shoes and started to unbutton his shirt. Now it was his turn to watch and he did so as if from some reaching crest of wonder.

Never before had he made love in this room. Nor never, since Rachel, in a place that he could call his home. He had gone to women’s beds but never let them come to his. He had casualized sex, kept it distant that he might keep himself free and protect himself from the kind of need he’d seen in Rachel and which now he felt for Annie. Her presence, in the sanctum of this room, thus took on a significance that was both daunting and wondrous.

The light from the window set aglow her glimpsing skin where her dress fell open. She undid his belt and the top of his jeans and pulled his shirt clear so she could roll it off his shoulders.

In the momentary blindness as he pulled off his T-shirt, he felt her hands on his chest. He lowered his head and kissed again between her breasts and breathed the smell of her deep into his lungs as if he would drown in it. He eased the dress gently from her shoulders.

“Oh Annie.”

She parted her lips but said nothing, just held his gaze and reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. It was plain and white and edged above with simple lace. She lifted the straps from her shoulders and let it fall away. Her body was beautiful. Her skin pale, except at the neck and arms where the sun had turned it a freckled gold. Her breasts were fuller than he’d thought
they’d be, though still firm, her nipples large and set high. He put his hands to them and then his face and felt the nipples gather and stiffen at the brush of his lips. Her hands were at the zipper of his jeans.

“Please,” she breathed.

He pulled the faded quilt from the bed and opened the sheets and she laid herself down and watched him take off his boots and socks and then his jeans and shorts. And he felt no shame nor saw any in her, for why should they feel shame at what was not of their making but of some deeper force that stirred not just their bodies but their souls and knew naught of shame nor of any such construct?

He knelt on the bed beside her and she reached out and took his erection in her hands. She bent her head and brushed her lips around the rim of it so exquisitely that he shuddered and had to close his eyes to find some lower, more tolerable key.

Her eyes, when he ventured to look at her again, were dark and glazed with the same desire he knew glazed his own. She let go of him and lay back and lifted her hips for him to take off her panties. They were of a pale, functional gray cotton. He ran his hand over the soft bulge within them then pulled them gently down.

The triangle of revealed hair was deep and thick and of the darkest amber. Its curling tips trapped the last glimmer of the light. Just above it ran the paled scar of a caesarean. The sight of it moved him, though he knew not why, and he lowered his head and traced its length with his lips. The brush of her hair on his face and the warm, sweet smell, he found there moved him more powerfully and he lifted his head and leaned back on his heels that he might catch his breath and see her more fully.

They surveyed each other now in their nakedness, letting their eyes roam and feed with an incredulous, suspended, mutual hunger. The air was filled with the urgent synchrony of their breathing and the room seemed to swell and fold to its rhythm like an enclosing lung.

“I want you inside me,” she whispered.

“I don’t have anything to—”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s safe. Just come inside me.”

With a little frown of need, she reached for the tilt of him again and as she closed her fingers on it, he felt she had possession of the very root of his being. He came forward again on his knees, letting her steer him in toward her.

As he saw Annie open herself before him and felt the soft collision of their flesh, Tom saw suddenly again in his mind those birds, wide-winged and black and nameless, soaring below him against the green of the river. He felt he was returning from some distant land of exile and that here, and only here, he could be whole again.

   It seemed to Annie, when he entered her, that he dislodged in her loins some hot and vivid surge that swept slowly the entire length of her body to lap and furrow around her brain. She felt the swell of him within her, felt the gliding fusion of their two halves. She felt the caress of his hard hands on her breasts and opened her eyes to see him bend his head to kiss them. She felt the travel of his tongue, felt him take her nipple in his teeth.

His skin was pale, though not as pale as hers, and on his rib-furrowed chest the cruciform of hair was darker than the sunbleach of his head. There was a kind of supple angularity to him, born of his work, which somehow she had expected. He moved on her with that
same centered confidence she’d seen in him all along; only now, focused exclusively on her, in this new domain, it was both more overt and intense. She wondered how this body that she’d never seen, this flesh, these parts of him she’d never touched, could yet feel so known and fit her so well.

His mouth delved the open hollow of her arm. She felt his tongue slick the hair that since coming here she’d let grow long and soft again. She turned her head and saw the framed photographs on top of the chest of drawers. And for a fleeting moment, the sight of them threatened to connect her to another world, a place which she was in the act of altering and which she knew she would find sullied with guilt if she were to let herself but look. Not now, not yet, she told herself and she lifted his head between her hands and quested blindly for the oblivion of his mouth.

When their mouths parted, he leaned back and looked down at her and for the first time smiled, moving on her to the slow rasp of their coupled selves.

“You remember that first day we rode?” she said.

“Every moment.”

“That pair of golden eagles? Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what we are. Now. That’s what we are.”

He nodded. Their eyes locked into each other, unsmiling now, in a growing preoccupied urgency, until at last she saw the flicker in his face and felt him quiver and then the spurt and flood of him within her. And she arched herself into him and at the same time felt in her loins a shocking, protracted imploding of flesh that rushed to her core then jolted and spread in waves to the furthest corners of her being, bearing him there with it, until he filled every place within her and they were one and indistinguishable.

H
E WOKE WITH THE DAWN AND FELT AT ONCE THE SLEEPING
warmth of her beside him. She lay along his body, nestled in the shelter of his arm. He could feel her breath on his skin and the soft rise and fall of her breasts against him. Her right leg was tucked over his. He could feel the gentle prickle of her belly on his thigh. The palm of her right hand lay on his chest above his heart.

It was that clarifying hour when normally men left and women wanted them to stay. He’d known it many times himself, the urge to slip away like a thief with the dawn. It seemed prompted not so much by guilt as by fear, fear that the comfort or companionship that women seemed often to want, after a night spent more carnally, was somehow too committing. Maybe there was some primordial force at work. You sowed your seed and got the hell out.

If so, this morning, Tom felt not a trace of it.

He lay quite still so as not to wake her. And it occurred to him that maybe he was afraid to. Never in the night, not once in the long hours of their tireless hunger,
had she shown any sign of regret. But he knew that with the dawn would come, if not regret, some colder new perspective. And so he lay in the unfolding light and treasured the slack and guiltless warmth of her beneath his arm.

He slept again and woke the second time to the sound of a car. Annie had turned over and he lay now with his front molded to the contours of her back, his face tucked into the scented nape of her neck. As he eased himself away from her, she murmured though didn’t wake and he slipped from the bed and silently gathered his clothes.

It was Smoky. He’d pulled up beside their two cars and was inspecting Tom’s hat, which had stood all night on the hood of the Chevy. The worry on his face changed to a grin of relief when he heard the clack of the screen door and saw Tom heading out toward him.

“Hiya, Smoke.”

“Thought you was upped and gone down to Sheridan.”

“Yeah. There was a change of plan. Sorry, I meant to call you.” He’d called the man with the colts from a gas station in Lovell to say sorry he couldn’t make it, but had clean forgotten about Smoky.

Smoky handed him his hat. It was damp from the dew.

“Thought for a minute there you’d been kidnapped by aliens or somethin’.” He looked at Annie’s car. Tom could see he was trying to figure things out.

“Annie and Grace didn’t go back east then?”

“Well, Grace did, but her mother couldn’t get a flight. She’s staying over till the weekend when Grace gets back.”

“Right.” Smoky nodded slowly but Tom could see he wasn’t altogether sure what was going on. Tom glanced
at the Chevy’s open door and remembered the lights must have been on all night too.

“Had some trouble last night with the battery here,” he said. “Maybe you could help me give it a jump?”

It didn’t explain a whole lot but it did the trick, for the prospect of a task seemed to drive all lingering doubt from Smoky’s face.

“Sure,” he said. “I got some leads in the truck.”

   Annie opened her eyes and took only a moment to remember where she was. She turned over, expecting to see him and felt a small leap of panic on finding herself alone. Then she heard voices and the slam of a car door outside and felt a larger leap. She sat up and swung her legs out from the tangle of sheets. She stood and walked to the window and, as she did so, had to stem the moist run of him between her legs. She felt a bruised aching there that was also somehow delicious.

Through a narrow gap in the drapes she saw Smoky’s truck pulling away from the barn and Tom waving after him. Then he turned and headed back to the house. She knew he wouldn’t see her if he looked up and, watching him, she wondered how the night might have changed them both. What now might he think of her, having seen her so wanton and shameless? What now did she think of him?

He squinted up at the sky where already the clouds were burning off. The dogs came bounding around his legs and he ruffled their heads and spoke to them as he walked and Annie knew that, for her at least, nothing had changed.

She showered in his little bathroom, waiting to be seized by guilt or remorse, but neither came, only trepidation at what he might be feeling. She found the sight
of his few simple toilet things beside the basin oddly touching. She used his toothbrush. There was a big blue toweling bathrobe slung by the door and she put it on, wrapping herself in the smell of him, and went back into his room.

He’d opened the drapes and was looking out of the window when she came in. He heard her and turned and she recalled him doing the same that day in Choteau when he’d come to the house to give her his verdict on Pilgrim. There were two cups steaming on the table beside him. She could see the apprehension in his smile.

“I made some coffee.”

“Thanks.”

She went over and took the cup, casing it in her hands. Alone together in the big empty room, they seemed suddenly formal, like strangers arrived too early at a party. He nodded at the robe.

“It suits you.” She smiled and sipped the coffee. It was black and strong and very hot. “There’s a better bathroom along the way there if you—”

“Yours is just fine.”

“That was Smoky dropped by. I forgot to call him.”

There was silence. Somewhere down by the creek a horse whinnied. He looked so worried, she was suddenly afraid he was going to say sorry, it was all a mistake and could they just forget it ever happened.

“Annie?”

“What?”

He swallowed. “I just wanted to say, that whatever you feel, whatever you think or want to do, it’s okay.”