in bed that night, Laura gave up trying to sleep. Her husband, his sling off now, was sitting up, his swollen face turned toward the door of the spare bedroom. It stood open, and the hallway light was on.
“Yeah?”
“I need you.”
“I know, love, I need you, too.” Though his voice quivered with emotion, his eyes didn’t move from the door.
“No, I mean, I need you.”
He’d understand what she was saying.
“Please?” she whispered when he remained silent.
“Laura, I don’t—”
“Please,” she interrupted, infusing more strength into the one word. He had to do this for her. He just had to.
And…she believed that he needed her to do it for him, too.
“I can’t relax, can’t go to sleep,” she told him.
“Did you take one of the sleeping pills they gave you at the hospital?”
“Of course not.” He should know better than that. She rarely even took aspirin. But she had taken the morning-after pill the doctor had given her.
“Maybe you should, just this once.”
Laura lay there looking up at him. He was still talking to the open door.
“Harry, it’s killing me, knowing they were the last ones… I need to feel you inside me. I need you to fill me up. To wipe them out.”
Her voice rose with an intensity that was foreign to her. “Please, Harry. Please do this, for me? I want you there, only you…”
Laura hadn’t even realized she’d started to cry until Harry wiped a tear from her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“Sshh. It’s okay, baby. I’m right here.” He took her into his arms and Laura rubbed his chest with desperation and a kind of frenzied passion, teasing his nipples. That always worked for him.
“Laura…”
“Please, Harry…”
“The doctor said—”
“That I’m perfectly fine.”
“She also said you can expect a period of frigidity.”
Following her finger with her tongue, flicking across the wiry, sparse curls on his chest to his nipple, Laura said, “I’m not frigid.”
Groaning, Harry pulled her face up to his. Kissing her softly, gently, not in the least passionately.
Laura slipped her tongue inside his mouth.
“Laura…”
She slid her hand down his belly and beyond, fondling him into the beginning of an erection. “Please, Harry.” She wouldn’t have to beg much longer. Harry could never resist her seductions.
With one more groan he said, “If you’re sure this is what you want…”
“I am,” she said, her voice quavering, but not with doubt. “Completely sure.”
He kissed her then, fully, passionately, his lips hardly swollen compared to the right side of his face and nose, and she opened her mouth eagerly. The warm possession of his lips always made her lose sight of everything and everyone around her. From Harry’s very first kiss—outside her embryonic plant life class at the University of Arizona—she’d felt that peculiar magic talked about in storybooks and scoffed at by pragmatists. She kissed him back, remembering how it used to feel. Trying to find that feeling again.
“Mmmm,” she moaned against him, her arms clutching his neck, holding him to her with a fervor that scared her.
And then he moved, lying half on top of her, straddling one of her legs with both of his—his weight resting on one elbow. She recognized the position, his touch, told herself how badly she needed his warmth. More from habit than sexual drive, she moved her leg to tease the hardness that should be there.
It wasn’t.
And all her motivating self-talk vanished, Laura froze.
Harry pulled back immediately.
“I was afraid it was too soon,” he said softly, his fingers pushing strands of hair behind her ear. “It’s okay. And understandable. It’s just going to take a little while…”
“It’s not me,” Laura said, although she knew she wasn’t being completely honest about that. Her head welcomed Harry. Her heart did. Her body felt dead. “It’s you,” she told him, rubbing a hand over his crotch. “You don’t want me. I’m dirty now. Used. You saw what they did to me and—”
“Laura!” It was the second time that day Harry had spoken so firmly. The first had been that morning, when she’d caught him loading his gun—a gun that now lay beside them between the bed frame and the mattress.
He slid over, fully covering her, moving his body against hers. In only a moment, he was fully hard.
“Don’t you ever,” he started, his breath coming in spurts as he continued to move, “ever think I don’t want you.” His mouth was an inch from hers and he kissed her hungrily, his tongue leaving her lips wet. “You are the most desirable woman in the world to me,” he said. “Tonight even more so, not because of what I did or did not see, but because you are you—a woman who’s soft and gentle, a peacemaker who’s also a survivor. No matter what. I can’t get enough of you, Laura. If we live to be a hundred and fifty, I will never have enough of you.”
His eyes glistened in the dim light as he stared down at her. She loved him so much. Needed so badly for things to be okay between them.
“Please make love to me,” she whispered, spreading her legs to accommodate him. They were both still dressed, her in shorty pajamas she hadn’t worn in years but had put on because she’d felt too vulnerable in the light cotton gowns she preferred, and him in a pair of cotton pajama bottoms she’d forgotten he owned.
“I want to so badly, Laura,” he said, frowning as he drew back, his face a few inches from hers. “But I’m not sure it’s right. I’m not sure we should….”
Feeling a fire inside her that she’d only known once before, when her parents had tried to forbid her from seeing Harry because he was black, Laura stared into his eyes.
“You are my husband,” she said emphatically. “How could it possibly not be right?”
“I know the doctor said you weren’t physically damaged, but—”
“I’m no more affected, physically, than if you’d had sex with me.” She didn’t think it was her body he was worried about. “Please trust me on this, Harry.” She softened her voice. “I’m not going to fall apart on you, I promise. Not unless you refuse to do this. I feel as if the whole world’s been down there in the past twenty-four hours and you’re the only
