Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“Drive for a while,” she said. He turned left and went east, out into the country. She sat in silence and looked out the window at the dark landscape. There were woods now, and farmhouses.

“Are you thinking about it?” he asked.

“I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m thinking about how to tell you everything that’s in my mind.” She drew in a breath and seemed to try to begin, then let the breath out. “There!” she said. “Pull over up there by that orchard.”

“Where?”

“Beside the fence.”

The car slowed, and then the tires ground on gravel, and the car stopped. “Oh, even better,” she said. “Pull into that drive up there.”

“What are we doing?”

“Just do it.” She cajoled, “I want to show you something. I promise you’ll like it.”

He slowly drove the car through the opening in the fence and up a dirt road into the orchard. The road was pink with blooms that had spilled from the apple trees on both sides. He bumped along deeper into the orchard as Jane stared eagerly out the windshield. “Okay, stop,” she said, opened the door, and stepped out.

She walked to the far edge of the orchard and sidestepped a few paces down a little slope, then stopped. She slipped off her shoes and walked down the hill a short distance, paused at the edge of a thick patch of ankle-high wild plants with round, serrated leaves that covered the lower slope, then turned and looked up at Carey McKinnon. “Come down,” she said. “I knew I could find some.”

He cautiously stepped toward her, looking down to be sure of his footing. When he looked up she was bent over, fiddling with something under the hem of her skirt. Then she pulled off her stockings and handed them to him. “Put these in your pocket for me, will you?” She walked barefoot among the thick, soft plants, then bent over and ran her hands into them, touching here and there in the dark.

Carey stepped closer and she held out her hand. In the palm were a dozen little round shapes no bigger than a half inch across. “What’s that?”

“Dessert,” she said. “Wild strawberries.”

She popped one onto her tongue and squeezed it against the roof of her mouth, then chewed it. “They’re perfect.” She held out her hand again and poured the little strawberries into Carey’s palm.

He tasted one and smiled. “They’re good. Soft, sweet.” But she was already bent over, running her hands quickly among the fuzzy leaves of the little plants.

Carey knelt on the weeds with her and picked strawberries until they had a double handful. Carey gave them to her and then spread his new coat in the weeds and they sat on it, feeling the warm June air and the intense darkness of the new moon and eating strawberries.

They turned to each other and kissed, then slowly and gradually the kisses grew longer and deeper and they leaned back to lie on the coat, the tall weeds now sheltering them on both sides like a nest. Carey’s hand began to move along her body—breast, waist, hip—and the clothes Jane had chosen didn’t need to be tugged up and pulled down tonight. In the darkness they seemed to melt away, and she hoped, knew he had asked her to wear them with this moment in mind. Or maybe his asking and her compliance and this moment were part of the same event, one long act of asking and complying, her wanting him to ask, even turn his eyes in some direction so she could offer before he even formed the desire. The kisses were long and hungry now, and the hands—the long, gentle fingers and the wide, smooth palms moving everywhere, touching and outlining her shape in the darkness, the skin feeling itself traced and caressed so she could see herself with her eyes closed, the smaller, graceful shape and the curves she had somehow forgotten were her until now, when he saw them, touched them, pulled her against him. The embrace defined them both, his body all tense, hard muscles, the skin tickly with hair, but the boundary between them gone.

There was only the smell of the strawberries and the taste of them on her tongue, the warm, dark motionless air that might never change at all, and this heartbeat and this indrawn breath. But there was time because the feelings were growing, moving down to her belly and thighs, too many breaths until it grew into a longing, an ache, and he knew it. Then she was relieved, so much better, happy, actually happy, out of time now entirely, because if this feeling went on forever it would not be enough, but it went on, and she heard her own breaths coming quicker, and her voice coming out with them, and it was going to go on until she was obliterated, burned up like a moth flying into a blast furnace. And in this moment of wanting and having, that seemed just fine to her … better, best. And then time came back because this could not go on, was about to pass, not gasping for breath, but filled with it, and then so light and cool, shivering almost and the word delicious coming into her mind and passing away again because contentment was too lazy and pleased to hold on to it.

They lay naked on the hillside in the little space of flattened weeds, smelling the strawberries again. She opened her eyes to extend the depth of her gaze far up into the night sky.

For the first time in ages, she heard his voice. “Were the strawberries what you wanted to show me?”

“Sort of,” she laughed. “It’s kind of a multidimensional experience. In the old days, they used to court in strawberry patches.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t quite the same.”

“I’ll bet it was,” she said. “See, they would slip out of their longhouses at night and meet in a place like this.”

“I mean they didn’t make love.”

“Of course they did.” She laughed. “That was what they were doing out here in the middle of the night. Maybe right here.”

“I can see why strawberries grow on the way to heaven.” He ran his hand along her hip, smoothing it gently. “Ripe and sweet and perfect and rare.”

She sat up and looked at him with a tiny hint of a wish. “Just the opposite. The reason they were so precious was that they weren’t rare at all. They grew from one end of Iroquois country to the other. No matter what, they came up every May and ripened every June. They were easy—always there, always as many as you wanted, and always just as good as the first one you ever put on your tongue.”

He sat up and looked at her closely, his eyes blue-gray and shining. “That was what you wanted me to know.”

“You’re getting better,” she said. “You have a shot at ‘Most Improved Naked Man.’ ”

“I’d like to think I was already smart enough to appreciate you, and never let myself forget how special you are, even after a few years of getting our strawberries in supermarkets like other people.” His hand moved gently from her shoulder down her side to her hip, thigh, knee, shin, foot. “But I’m glad you took me on the field trip.”

“Me too.”

He said quietly, “It’s not like you to waste all this wisdom on the first naked man you meet in a strawberry patch. To make it worthwhile, you’d almost have to marry me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”

4

The boardroom for Pleasure, Inc., overlooked the Polynesian water slide. Somebody had once joked that the architect’s plans had been folded and the contractor hadn’t noticed. It sounded true because mistakes in Las Vegas were not little slipups that made a few chips fall between the floorboards. They were hideous, gargantuan blunders, like building a billion-dollar casino on ground that was a foot lower than the adjacent square mile of parking lots, so the whole place got inundated with water in a flash flood every five years. But the location of the Pleasure Island boardroom had been no mistake; it had been a suggestion from Calvin Seaver, vice president for security.