No Fury

Now: Sixty Five

We find a routine over the next weeks.

I fall asleep in Harry's arms; our daughter sleeps through the night just across the room.
After breakfast, James takes Anne out, and Harry and I have the entire morning together.

To talk.
To cook the noon meal side by side.
To return to the shed and make love, or,
simply make love wherever we find ourselves.

And when James returns with Anne, I cuddle her to my breast while Harry sings her sweet, silly songs, and then he takes her to the living room while I cook. There, he builds her a castle made of blocks and she knocks it down.
Again, and again, and again.

Although the truth of Maria's treason weighs on him - as does the reality that he will eventually need to respond - it doesn't extinguish the light in his eyes. He has some distance from it, and a fraction of my heart is grateful for this unexpected erasure of his mind.

It reinforces my choice to not tell him yet about how Anne was born, and where.

But then he gazes at her and tells her he'll ensure she wants for nothing. He watches me feed her and marvels over how fast she grows. He asks about what I did while he was gone at war, and my answer - Nothing, my darling - fails to satisfy him.

My guilt is a sore, festering inside me.

He will need to know the truth. He will need to hear what I suffered, that our daughter was out of my arms for long stretches of time and in those moments I do not know what was done with her. But I can't bear to think of it. How could I ask him to absorb this pain when I know I can hold it in for both of us?

~~

I hear James' footsteps retreating into the woods, mixed with Anne's babbling voice. Their sounds grow smaller and smaller to my right, and I know where they are headed: they will return with a bushel full of blueberries.

Harry comes up behind me as I rinse our cooking pot in the creek beside the cottage. He kneels behind me, thighs bracketing mine, hands coming up to my shoulders before sliding down my body.

And oh. I know this touch.

It is the kind that slides down to my knees, pulling my skirt with him as he roams toward my hips.
It is the kind that comes with his mouth against my neck, sucking at my skin between descriptions of what he wants to do to me.

Urging me to stand, he walks backward, beckoning.

"Leave the pot."

"It will gather ants," I protest halfheartedly.

"Ants will not eat the metal."

"I am nearly finished."

"I will finish it for you later." His smile is impossible to resist. "Come," he says, turning and pulling me along with him. "I want you."

Inside our shed, his mouth is soft and smiling against mine as he capably strips me of my dress.

His body is smooth skin over hard muscle; a torso that goes on for miles. I can never get enough; my hands forget as soon as they have slipped past one curve and moved on to another, and I need to return again, and again, and again as he moves over me.

But he captures my fingers, bringing my arms over my head with a wolfish smile and pinning them there as he slowly rocks.

The position draws forward the memory of those first few times, in his room.
And I am lost to the odd, bittersweet relief of it.

I let my eyes fall closed, and press my lips together against pleasure so good it is nearly pain, stifling my cry as I crest beneath him.

And suddenly, he goes still above me.