Separate Beds (38 page)

Into her hair he spoke weakly, “Ah, Cat, it was good for me.”

“For me too.”

He lay his palm on her stomach, then ran it lower, let it rest peacefully upon her body, then just barely inside it. She could feel his jaw move in the hollow of her shoulder as he spoke.

“Cat, remember in the hospital when the nurse showed us the way the contractions build up?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she murmured, toying sleepily with his hair.

“It felt the same way inside you a minute ago.”

“It did?”

“It made me think of how close pleasure and pain are. It even seems as if the same things happen in your body during the moments of your greatest pleasure and your greatest pain. Isn't that odd?”

“I never thought about it before, but then I never—”

He raised up, leaned on an elbow and looked down into her face. He touched a lock of hair, easing it back from her forehead.

“Was that your first time, Cat?”

Suddenly timid, she surrounded him, hugged him too close for him to see her face.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Hey.” Gently he removed her tight grip so he could look at her again. “After all that we've been through, are you getting modest on me?”

“How could I possibly claim modesty now?”

“Just don't ever be afraid to talk to me about anything, okay? If you don't trust me with the things that bother you, how can I help you? All that business about the past and your feelings for Herb, do you see that we seem to have conquered that already, together?”

“Ah, Clay.” She sighed and leaned against him, promising herself she'd never withhold her feelings from him again. A short time later she said, “Did you know that I started falling in love with you while you were courting me at Horizons?”

“That long ago?”

“Oh, Clay, how could I help it? All those girls panting after you and telling me how perfect you were, and you coming by in your sexy little Corvette, with your sexy clothes and that sexy smile and all those sterling good manners of yours to offset all that sexiness. God, you drove me crazy.”

“Idiot girl,” he laughed. “Do you know how much time you could have saved if you'd just once let on what you were feeling?”

“But I was so scared. What if you didn't feel the same way about me? I'd have been shattered.”

“Yet every time I made advances I felt like you couldn't stand me.”

“Clay, I told you that first night that my dad made me come to your house—marriage had to be for love only. Please, let's always be this way, like we are tonight. Let's be good to each other and promise all those things that we never really promised in that trumped-up marriage ceremony.”

Lying naked, with their limbs entwined, secure in each other's love, they sealed those vows at last.

“I promise them, Cat.”

“I do, too, Clay.”

On Christmas morning Melissa woke them up, babbling and thumping her heels on the crib. Clay came awake groggily, stretched and felt bare skin on the other side of the bed. He turned to study the woman who lay on her stomach, sleeping beneath a swirl of blond hair.

He started to creep from bed noiselessly.

“Where you going?” came a voice from under the hair.

“To get Melissa and bring her in with us, okay?”

“Okay, but don't be gone long, huh?”

They came back together, the one in aqua-blue footed pajamas, the other one in nothing. When Catherine rolled over, Clay plopped Melissa down beside her, then got in too.

“Hi, Lissy-girl. Got a kiss for Mommy?”

Melissa leaned over and sucked her mother's chin, her version of a kiss.

Clay watched with a glad expression on his face.

Catherine looked at his tousled blond hair, his smiling gray eyes and asked, “Hi, Clay-boy, got a kiss for Mommy?”

“More than one,” he said, smiling. “This is one child who's going to learn early the value of touching.”

He leaned across the baby then, to give his wife what she wanted.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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