Read Online Wolf Point by Edward Falco - Free Book Online Page B

stood up as if listening for what would happen next. The fire crackled and filled the room with the smell of wood smoke. He touched her shoulder and she opened her eyes to look up at him. He had the urge to tell her how beautiful she was. “Jenny,” he said. “I believe you.”
    She nodded, acknowledging his effort at kindness and at the same time signaling it had no effect. “You know what I’d like?” she whispered, her voice so drained even the volume was gone. “It was nice when you were holding me. Could you just do that for me, please? Could you just hold me till I fall asleep?”
    T gathered the pillows from the bed and crawled under the quilt with her, holding her as he had before, his arms around her, her head on his bicep, but with a pillow now between her head and his skin. She closed her eyes and then opened themagain to watch the fire a while in silence, then closed them again. Tears seeped out from under her eyelashes, not drops, just a flow, a thick wetness seeping out, spreading to her cheek, pooling between her eye and the bridge of her nose. With a corner of his pillowcase he wiped the tears away, but said nothing and she said nothing.
    He supposed her story could be true, the whole implausible thing. He doubted it, but, really, he didn’t care. He looked down at the young woman wrapped up with him in a quilt and watched her a while with the palpable sense of holding a mystery in his arms. She twisted around, making herself comfortable, snuggling against his chest, and he saw that she was close to sleep, and then he put his own head down on a pillow on the bear’s head, and closed his eyes, and drifted toward darkness thinking of her as a foreign creature in bed with him, her breath against his chest, amazed—though it was a lesson he had already learned well—amazed still at how rapidly at least the outward circumstances of a life could change.
    He woke to Jenny nuzzling blindly into him for warmth, throwing a leg over his thigh and seemingly attempting to glue the front of her body to the front of his. It took him a second to remember where he was. He had no idea of the time, only that the temperature had dropped significantly and the wind had picked up outside. He could hear a loud soughing in the trees. It felt late. It felt like the deepest hours of the night. In the moonlight through the window on the other side of theroom, smoke drifted near the ceiling and moved from side to side with each loud gust of wind. The fire had burned down to quiet embers, and the fiercest gusts of wind were pushing smoke down the flue and into the bedroom. He seemed to remember from fireplaces in the past that this was not a big problem. Still, he thought he should probably open a window an inch or so, and he lifted himself up on one elbow, peeling away from Jenny, who then folded up her body like a child, pulling her knees toward her chest, clamping her legs around her clasped hands, and burrowing down into the layers of rugs.
    In the process of extricating himself from the tangled quilt, he caught a glimpse of Jenny’s body, her breasts framed between her arms, the tight flesh of her stomach, the triangle of her sex where her hands were pushed between her legs. She had shaved herself there in a narrow strip, which he had noticed before, when she had first come into the bedroom from the shower. He had wondered then, as he did again at this moment, why she would shave like that, given it wasn’t the time of year for bikinis. While contemplating her body, he was immensely pleased to feel his own body responding. He unbuttoned his jeans and looked down at a hard and arching erection with a feeling not unlike the pleasure of running unexpectedly into an old friend. It had been a very long time since he had experienced this degree of youthful readiness for sex, and for a moment he seriously considered initiating the act while she was still sleeping, remembering how Brooke had once told him there was nothing she