All That's Left to Tell(19)

After that he stopped talking for what seemed a long time, and she had a light dream of him as a sleek, brown dog, wagging his tail as he searched in the shallows of a lake for small fish.

Then she felt his lips on her mouth, lingering there, and she sat bolt upright.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t ever do that.”

“I was just kissing you.”

“I know. Just—not that way. Not when I’m not expecting it.”

“Sorry. Most of the time I tend to forget I’m a stranger.”

“It’s not that. It’s not that you’re strange.”

“Well, maybe. I guess it’s an intimate thing to be kissed when you’re sleeping. More intimate than sex, in some ways.”

“It’s not that, either.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

She turned over on her side with her back facing him.

“I’d rather hear your stories. You’re better at telling them,” she said, though she’d always thought she might have many she would tell if she had found the right listener.

And then she felt his sanded fingertip, cool and light, along the length of the scar where the knife had entered. She let out a slight gasp.

“There’s a story here, too, isn’t there?”

Her skin tingled along the length of her spine.

“Did you notice it right off? Most men do, but pretend they don’t.”

“I noticed it. It’s not something you ask about right off the bat. But it doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“No, not at all.”

“You seem more ashamed about the kiss.”

“I’m not ashamed of anything,” she said.

Her back still facing him, she felt him lean close, and he exhaled deliberately with his mouth inches from her spine, and then with closed lips moved his mouth over the scar, stopping every quarter inch to leave a light kiss. Finally, she moaned, and he reached around her shoulder and pulled her back to the bed, and then kissed in the same way the slightly shorter scar that rose above her left breast. She felt a current run through her, and she arched her feet.

“God, it must have hurt,” he said, but she was still feeling her body respond to him.

“Did you fight back?” he asked.

“Of course I did,” she said, her breath thick. For a moment, that other dark room loomed, and she swept the image away. “Why would you think I wouldn’t?”

“I don’t think that,” he said. “I can tell by the way kissing it brings you alive.”

And at this she pushed him away, pushed his chest hard so he lay flat and so she could mount him, and even with him deep inside her she still could see his eyes moving over her body, fixed briefly on the scar, and then trailing down over her breasts and belly, as if it ran the whole length.

Afterward, she collapsed onto him, her head on his shoulder, and with the same measured, light pressure, he touched each vertebra in her backbone as her breathing eased.

She put her mouth to his ear, flicked her tongue at the peak of it, and whispered, “Do you still dream of opening a little hotel someplace where we can love the beautiful summers?”

He shifted away from her to get a better look at her face.

“We’ve had just this one night.”

“So?”

*

She had passed into Nevada, remembering. They hadn’t moved from Nebraska as quickly as she wanted; she’d had to work double shifts at the diner to raise the money, and he was reluctant to leave home, to shake the hands of friends and farmers whom he’d known most of his life who wouldn’t say so, but thought he was crazy. And then they’d driven this very highway west, and they’d stayed in the motel they eventually bought because the proprietor had said to them at the front desk, “You just made it under the wire. We’re closing next week,” and they’d decided the coincidence was too profound, and why not here, anyway, though there was no beautiful lake or even mountains closer than half a day’s drive away. And then she’d become a manager, an accountant, and a maid; she was nothing she had ever been, and was grateful. And Jack had become a handyman who repaired the motel’s plumbing and tacked up new paneling and worked odd jobs in the evening to make ends meet. And then she’d become a mother, and Lucy looked like Jack, she had to admit, even those mornings when they sat in the little kitchen closed off from the motel lobby and drank coffee, and she thought sometimes that she loved Jack like a brother, which was good enough, and at other times she’d stare at him and think, I hardly know you. Why am I running this dilapidated dump with you? After everything, you’re still a stranger to me who is not at all strange, by which she realized she meant uninteresting.

But that was unkind, and Jack was never unkind. She had never told him about her father’s kiss. And, like most other elements of her past, it wasn’t a memory that lingered. Neither she nor her father had mentioned it again, except for one phone call, in that dark time. She had never probed the meaning, but the kiss had marked the end of her perception of him as her father first, and a man second. At the time, he had said something about her beauty, that that was somehow a reason, and even though she hadn’t felt at all beautiful, she knew that her father, who was almost forty, was looking at her as a woman rather than his daughter, that a forty-year-old man kissing a sleeping fourteen-year-old was an amplification of the scope and depth of men in the world that she did not want to meet. And yet, after that was precisely when she had begun to meet them.