The Invitation (26 page)

“Where is this?” Jamie asked, rubbing his eyes with his fist.

“This used to be somebody's house,” I answered. “There's an enormous spiderweb in the bedroom. Like to see it?”

“Any spiders in it?” Todd asked, his beautiful head still on his father's shoulder.

“One big spider and some dead flies.”

Tentatively I put out my hand, and Jamie took it. Then Todd held out his hand. Seconds later the boys were standing one on either side of me, and we walked into the bedroom.

They were lovely children: smart, curious, ready to laugh, full of energy. We talked about spiders and webs, and I described in detail how a spider catches flies and spins a web around them. We sat on the floor for a few minutes, a warm little boy wrapped inside each of my arms, and talked.

During this time I don't know what Cowboy Dad was doing. I think maybe he was standing in the doorway watching, but I wasn't sure, and I was too focused on the boys to care where he was. After a while Kane told the boys they had to go back to camp and go to bed, so the darlings jumped up and ran around the room making a deafening noise. After a few minutes Kane grabbed a shirt collar and reached for another, but Jamie ran behind my legs for protection and then Todd tried to run to me too.

“Todd,” I said, “you go with your father, and, Jamie, you come with me.”

As soon as I said it, I knew I'd made a mistake. I guess I wasn't supposed to be able to tell these twins apart either. But I am proud to say that I covered myself by saying that Todd had a grease spot on his shirt collar and that was how I knew one from the other. I got an odd look from Kane, but then he shrugged and picked up first one boy, then the other.

“Who are you?” Todd asked. I knew that Todd was going to be the businessman while Jamie was going to break hearts.

I considered my answer before replying. “I'm a storyteller.”

Both boys nodded.

As always, Kane thought I was stupid and had no understanding of even the simplest concepts. “I think he meant what's your name?”

“Jamie, what's my name?”

“Cale,” the brilliant child answered, and I gave Kane my most enigmatic smile before sweeping ahead of them and leaving the little house.

I knew the child knew my name but that he didn't know how I fit into his world. When you have a father like mine, a man who never allows you any independence, yet dumps enormous responsibility on your young shoulders, half of you is never a child and half of you never grows up. I understand children because about two and a half feet of me is still eight years old.

T
he next day Kane wouldn't allow me near his little boys. It was obvious that he wanted them to bond with Ruth, but it took no genius to see that Ruth didn't like children. The skinny one of the duet wanted to know what the boys ate just as Jamie popped a grasshopper into his mouth. I was pleased when he spit it out and it went sailing down the front of Ruth's silk blouse. I had to leave the campsite after Ruth smacked Kane's hands away from her blouse buttons and said, “Get those filthy beasts away from me.” I had to leave or I'd have died from keeping laughter bottled up inside me. I did have the satisfaction of meeting Kane's eyes just before I turned away and was able to give him a raised-eyebrow,
this
-is-the-woman-you're-going-to-marry? look. Grabbing an apple, I started walking toward the Templeton house.

Once I was in that old house I felt better and began to wonder when I could go back to Chandler and catch the first toy plane out. I wanted to get away from the entire Taggert clan. All of them were crazy, what with their twins who didn't look alike, and their quick hate and love. It was going to be great to be back in New York where people acted sane.

I went upstairs to the loft, sat on the windowsill, looked down the road, and ate my apple. I was certainly going to miss those children, though. Which was absurd, considering I'd known them less than twenty-four hours. Jamie had crawled inside the sleeping bag with me last night; then this morning Todd had cried because Jamie had spent more time with me than he had. That was when Kane took both boys away from me and steered them toward Ruth.

I was sitting there eating my apple when I saw Kane—alone, no kids—walking toward the cabin. He looked up, saw me, and for a moment I thought he was seeing the dead actor's ghostly face. Even from the second story I could see that he'd turned pale, and he began to run toward the house. The way he ran was almost frightening, as though he'd seen something terrible, terrifying.

As for me, I was paralyzed. I couldn't move as I heard him thunder into the house, then tear up the ladder to the loft.

He pulled me off the windowsill and we went tumbling to the floor where my back scraped the rough wood as all two hundred pounds of him landed on top of me. At first I struggled to get away from him, but I stopped when I realized he wasn't moving. He was sprawled on top of me, looking down at me as though I were some museum specimen. For a moment I glared up at him to give him the idea that I wanted him off of me.

God, but he was a good-looking man! He had short, thick eyelashes that actually curled, like mine did after I'd spent ten minutes torturing them with a curler. His lips were full and soft and just barely parted, and I could feel his breath on my face.

I guess we all think of ourselves as rational human beings, and we like to think that if faced with an irrational situation—a burning building, for example—we would act with calm and intelligence. But then something dreadful happens and we embarrass ourselves by acting just as we'd hoped we wouldn't.

That's what I did when this big cowboy was looking down at me from under those eyelashes with his sweet, warm breath touching me. I wanted to get away from him. Honest, I did. I could imagine rolling away from him and standing over him, hands on hips, cool, triumphant, unaffected by his beauty, and saying something like “Don't you ever touch me again.”

That's what I
wanted
to do. What I
did
was flick my tongue across his lips.

The gesture startled me, and it startled him. Well, I guess it more than startled him. Actually, it turned him on.

One thing I like about being female is that the evidence of sexual excitement isn't known to the world. Oh, a woman's face may turn red and her breath may get a little weird, but she can always say that she's having a hot flash. But men can't hide what they're feeling—or maybe “wanting” is the correct term. And right now I knew that that cowboy wanted me, because the evidence of his desire was about to cut into my left thigh.

Now, I thought, would be the perfect time to roll away from him and laugh at him. Ha-ha-ha, I'd say. You want me, but I couldn't care less for your passion.

But life never works out the way one plans it, because I wanted that man more than I'd ever wanted anything—except for my first book to be published—and there was no way I was going to roll away from him.

I think all first sex should be candlelight dinners, little kisses inside the elbow, that sort of thing, but there wasn't any chance of sex like that between this man and me. We didn't even kiss but started tearing at each other as if we meant to kill one another. It was like sex in those black-and-white foreign movies where the people talk and talk and talk and all you can think about is how full your bladder is; then suddenly he shoves her against the barn door and you forget all about your bladder.

We started on each other with all the fury and anger that we spoke to each other with. His shirt came open with one pull, and I found out what I'd always wanted to know: why cowboy shirts have snaps instead of buttons. Makes for speedy hayloft trysts.

I don't know how he got my clothes off. I was wearing jeans with one of those annoying short zippers that, in order to get them on, you have to stick your butt out and wiggle. But this time I didn't have to wiggle to get them down. He slid them over my hips as easy as you please and then, like a magician, he ran his hands over my lace-on boots and they fell away—just
fell
off, no struggles.

When he moved his hands back up, we were both naked, and God, what a body the man had! I couldn't see much of it, but I could feel it. Think beautiful athletes. Think about smooth, warm skin covering that body. When his skin touched mine, I drew in my breath as though someone had doused me with ice water—only it wasn't cold that sent that sensation through me.

Muscle wasn't the only thing interesting about the man. I've heard that the skin is the largest organ in the human body, but with this man, I thought some measurements were going to have to be taken to be absolutely sure.

He entered me with all the ease and expertise of a cat burglar slipping into a twenty-first-story bedroom.

Now came the part of sex I hated—not that I'd had that much experience, but three minutes seemed to be a man's limit. Sometimes I'd read the history of man trying to break the four-minute mile and wonder why a man didn't try for something important, like the four-minute screw.

At first I just lay there, ready to be disappointed when he grunted and collapsed on top of me and said, “That was good, baby,” then started snoring. But this guy didn't stop after three minutes. I'm not a good timekeeper in such circumstances, but it's my guess that after six minutes he was still moving in and out of me, slowly, smoothly, as though he didn't mean to stop before next Saturday.

I can't really explain what began to happen to me, but all I can say is that I began to wake up. It was as though there were this woman inside me—no, correction: this tall, blonde, beautiful goddess inside me—who began to unroll from where she'd been asleep all her life. Languorously she uncurled, stood up, rubbed her eyes, and looked around her. And when she was awake, she began to expand. She grew bigger and bigger and bigger until she began to fill me, fill me out to my fingertips and my toes. She filled my head so completely that for the first time since I could remember I didn't have stories inside my head. Instead of stories I had this man in my body, and I was awake, really, truly, fully awake, for the first time in my life. Every nerve ending, every pore, every cell in my body was alert and sensitive and
alive.

I'm not sure what I did. I mean, I don't remember where my hands went, where my mouth went. I remember at one point he turned me over and with two hundred pounds of male propelling me, I went sliding across the floor and had to put my hands on a hay bale to keep from moving.

I remember I was shameless. I remember I had no dignity, no thoughts. I remember I was closer to being an animal than to a thinking, rational human being. I remember that I at last understood what people meant when they said that sex was a basic need, like food and water. Up until that day in that loft with that man, I hadn't believed that old saw. I'd believed people
needed
food and water but they didn't
need
sex. I was wrong.

He turned me over again and pulled my ankles up around his shoulders and kept on. I think I was a cheering section. I don't think I was making sexy, ladylike little moans, and I can guarantee that I wasn't saying anything rational. On the food chain, right then I was way below the human level that had the ability to talk.

After a while I began to feel as if I were going to explode. Okay, I know that's a cliché. I know it's been said a million times, but the first time it happens to
you
it's almost scary. I guess it would be scary if the explosion were something you wanted to stop, but it was like those salmon fighting to go upstream. It was something I was driving myself toward.

I wrapped my legs around his waist while he was on his knees, and I began to move with more strength than I actually possessed. At that moment I could have moved a train with my pelvis, but I couldn't move this man who seemed to have the strength of a couple of ocean liners.

I'd read about orgasms and I thought I'd experienced a couple, but I hadn't. Not a real orgasm. It's not something that happens in one big flash. At least it isn't for a woman.

I'm so glad I'm a woman. How could sex be as good for a man when it happens
outside
his body? For a woman, it's all inside, deep inside, and it radiates from within.

I guess an orgasm could best be compared to ocean waves breaking against the beach. Wave after wave came from inside me and moved outward to the very limits of my body. It seemed to go on and on and on, pulsating, extending, retreating, at first with urgency but gradually slowing, fading from a brilliant white light to a luminescent glow.

My fingers and toes hurt, as though the waves inside me had stretched them to their limit.

After a while I began to breathe again, and the woman inside me, that goddess who I hadn't known existed, realized she was tired and began to recede. With her went my energy. She also took my anger and my general rage at life. I'd never felt so calm, so peaceful, in my life.

When the man kissed my ear, I smiled sleepily, snuggled against his sweaty skin, then followed the goddess inside me and went to sleep.

Later, when I woke up, still in Kane's arms, his skin next to mine, suddenly I knew I had to share more with him than just the greatest sex ever experienced in the history of the world.

Once when I was one of the judges at the Miss USA pageant, one of the many instructions they gave us was to never give a girl a score lower than 5. They said, and I agreed, that the girls had worked hard and deserved at least a 5 in every category.

The pageant officials had asked local volunteers to stand in for the contestants during rehearsals so we could practice with the computers. Sitting next to me was the famous actor Richard Woodward, and when the first volunteer pirouetted for us, he punched in 2.2. Now, I didn't know this man but I knew these practice scores were going to be shown on a screen, and I didn't think it was very nice of him to give these nice, nervous ladies such a low score, so I told him so.

Richard looked at me and said, “You're a
real
writer, aren't you?”

I was highly flattered by this because, to me,
“real
writer” means Pulitzer Prize. Not sales, but
the
prize. As I was flushing with pleasure at this accolade, Richard said, “Real writers are incurably nosy and cannot keep their mouths shut.”

I laughed so hard that the man who was trying to teach us called me down, and after that, Richard and I were great friends.

Well, I am, in every sense of the word, a
real
writer. I'm nosy and I don't keep my mouth shut. If someone tells me she's just gotten a divorce, I'll say, “So why'd you divorce him?”

Kane and I had been introduced, and we'd shared enough that I guess we were at least on a first-name basis, so I said, “How come you've been p.o.'d since your wife died? Did you hate her or what?” Subtlety is not part of my personality, and besides, I've found that the direct approach earns me either silence or a story.

I could feel Kane hesitate, and a part of me sensed that he'd never told anyone, not anyone on the face of the earth, the truth about his wife. While he was making up his mind whether or not to tell me, I held my breath because I suddenly knew that I wanted to know whatever was inside him. It was at that moment that he became a person to me. Maybe it was the sex, maybe it was his looks, maybe it was the sweetness of his breath, and maybe it was my love of a story from any source, but I don't think so. I think it was a feeling that there was more to him than muscle and sex appeal. I think I knew that a man who could make me feel as he'd just done was not an insensitive clod, that there was a real person inside.

“I have an identical twin brother,” he said.