Read Online Something Is Out There by Richard Bausch - Free Book Online Page B

long time. He sat there, staring, another evaluative pause, as if the two of them were waiting to recognize each other. His eyes were slate dark, and big. They looked past her own, into her.
    She began to speak, asking if he wanted a cup of coffee, but he was rising, coming toward her, and she opened her arms.
    “Where’s the bedroom,” he said. “Where do we go?”
    She led him into the spare bedroom, and while she pulled the blanket back he got out of his clothes. The speed of this surprised her. She found it awkward, as close as they had been on the telephone. It had been wild on the telephone. She had lain awake nights, replaying it all in the dark, full of yearning. He flopped onto the bed, rolled to his back with his arms at his sides, gazing at her, waiting for her to remove her robe. She let it drop to one hand, and tossed it against the baseboard. She wanted to talk more, to go slowly. “Beautiful,” he murmured, smiling. It was such a good, wide smile. She crawled in next to him and when he put his mouth on her breast she patted the back of his head. “Easy, baby, we’ve got all morning.”
    He looked up. “I’m hungry for you.”
    “Can we talk a little first?”
    He lay over on his back. “Okay. Of course—I’m sorry.”
    “It’s just that it’s so new. I want to enjoy it
all.”
    “Okay.” He smiled and nodded. “Me, too. I want to
savor
it.”
    She leaned up on one elbow and looked at him. “How are you?”
    “I’m on fire.”
    “I’m still so nervous,” she said.
    He pulled her down, and began kissing her. His hands were rough—the skin was rough, callused—and she felt the power in the fingers, moving on her back and shoulders. He rolled with her, and was on top, kissing her neck, muttering words. She couldn’t hear the words, and she tried to push his shoulders, wanted him to support himself a little so she could catch her breath. He did so, came to a kneeling position, straddling her. “I want to look at you.”
    “Yes,” she said. She could feel it now, the excitement, all that she’d ached for and not had, the letting go, utterly.
    “Do me?” he murmured, almost shy, offering himself.
    “Oh,” she said, sitting up, coming to him. “Oh, yes. I will. I will.”
    Afterward, they lay quietly, he with one leg over her abdomen, one hand on the side of her face. “I got married to Warren so young,” she said. “I didn’t know anything.”
    “None of us did, at one time, I guess.”
    “We were babies.”
    “Everybody says just to leave.”
    “Well, I won’t—I can’t. I love him.”
    He stared. “I’m exactly the same about it.”
    “It’s just that you and I need sparks. Right?”
    “That’s us,” he said, and kissed her ear.
    They were quiet, listening to a dog barking in the neighborhood.
    “There’s not much else to say,” he murmured. “But we keep having to say it.”
    “Warren told me before that this—that anything other than, well, the normal thing, you know—that it makes him feel sinful.”
    “You had no trouble talking about all this on the telephone. Missionary position, right?”
    She put her head on his shoulder and sighed.
    “Religion,” Nathan said. “It’s killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and it’s ruined the pleasure of the rest of us.”
    “Let’s not talk about it, now,” she told him.
    “I think it’s a sin for him to deny himself the pleasure you can provide.”
    “That’s sexy.”
    He started kissing her again. She worried about her stomach a little, with the coffee she’d drunk. But she had dreamed of this, of not having to worry or hold back from being curious, the strongest element of herself, wanting to know, to feel it all, and wanting it to go on. As it did go on, and she lost herself in it, reveling in it for the difference from how things had always been. She had known this kind of experience only from books, and from some of the sites she had wandered among on the Internet. He was there