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“So you’re ravenous, and you saw me and remembered me?”
“I assumed I’d had you somewhere along the way, and therefore I was cautious until I validated who you actually are.” He watched her with his eyes halfclosed. “How many men have you driven wild since you last did that with me?”
She gasped like a virgin accused of dropping a swimsuit shoulder strap.
She moved inside her body in various ways. She was indignant. She moved her lips and she finally said, “Baloney!” And with the word, she could have just died of embarrassment. She might just as well have said, Golly! or something else equally juvenile.
She grabbed up her bag and started for the door.
He caught her arm. “Don’t be such a chicken.” His voice was so soft, so husky and sweet. His eyes were earnest; his big hand was gentle. He looked soberly into her eyes. She saw as the depths warmed and his crinkles deepened. He had the best mouth.
Since her eyes went to his mouth, he needed to show her why people have mouths, and he kissed her a completely unfair, remarkably sweet, loving kiss. He was really, really good. He really kissed her.
He did.
As he lifted his mouth with all those marvelous little sounds in that silent room, she raised weighty eyelids to look up at him. With some effort she coordinated her vocal cords as her kiss-swollen lips said, “Let’s go swim.”
He regarded her soberly for some time, then his smile started and his eyes twinkled. He replied, “Right.”
He went down to the hotel necessity shop, which sold all sorts of important things like condoms and swimsuits and candy and flowers. They didn’t miss a trick.
Jo was in the pool when Chad came out in his swim trunks. He looked like an American Greek god. He was actually Dutch and Welsh with a touch of Irish thrown in.
He dived into the pool effortlessly and his strokes were lazy and strong. He came to her and said, “Take a breath.”
She remembered that, and she vigorously backpedaled away from him. He laughed and swam, following her so easily. He was so at home in the water.
A surprising number of people don’t believe in swimming in the winter. Pools are generally closed. Yankees are unpredictable. The weather in TEXAS was so nice that it seemed like a Yankee summer day. The two paying guests played together like otters. They lifted themselves from the pool and went down the slide and they used the pool.
Underwater, he touched her here and there. He lifted her and threw her and made her laugh. Men’s muscles are just different. Their strength is awesome. He had no trouble following her in the water, turning her, lifting her. It was easy for him.
He laughed as she splashed him and wiggled and slid away. He could have held her, but if he had, he might have hurt her. He was stronger and had to be careful.
He finally captured her and took her under the water to kiss her.
In all that while, he gave her his entire attention.
How unkind of him.
It was like the time of their courtship, all those years ago, when she was new on campus and he was an assistant professor. But she became his wife. She was a woman of principles and would not go to bed with him without being married to him.
Since she had been married to one of the teaching staff, her schooling was free. She graduated with a degree in business and had taken her masters in business.
When she left him, he had asked if she didn’t want to stay on a little longer and earn her doctorate also. He hadn’t felt she’d used him. He was practical.
She hadn’t used Chad to get her education. It had been boredom that had urged her to take classes. She hadn’t gotten pregnant, although they’d used no barriers. Each month had been a disappointment, another failure, before she’d sadly accepted that she was barren.
While she had had his sexual attention, she hadn’t had his companionship. She’d been so lonely. She’d wanted his attention. He wasn’t around. He would never be around. Eventually, she had understood that and she had left.
So almost four years after their divorce, Jo played as she’d dreamed of playing with Chad all those years ago. At eighteen, at twenty, but at twenty-two the hope had dimmed. During the time she’d been working on her masters, she knew their marriage was doomed.
No miracle happened.
By then, she had faced reality. Her time with Chad would never be any different than it was then.
Looking at Chad soberly, she decided that she might just as well have one last fling with him. Their marriage was water lost over the dam. Why not enjoy the last of the trickle of her time with him? So she laughed, and flung herself into the water and allowed him to chase her.
Their time then was as she’d always thought their marriage could be.
And he took her back to their room. She was breathless from swimming, or something, and she was shy.
“How many men have you had by now?” Chad teased Jo as he dried his hair with a big towel. His eyes were confident. He asked, “Do you have notches on your bedposts?” He paused. “Add notches for these days with me.” Then his voice was smokily gruff as he told her, “Put my marks on top of the others.”
There were no notches. There had been no other man. She still hadn’t gotten over her love for Chad. She hadn’t even been tempted to try another man.
But she was ready for Chad.
She met him halfway and she loved him.
He had the newly purchased condoms and he was careful of her as he’d always been. He was gentle and kind with his ravening hunger for her. He controlled himself, but his breaths were harsh and his low moans were exquisitely thrilling. He loved her as he always had.
And it was not enough.
They had a night of love. Her hair was like driedout, raveled rope. So was his. Her body was well used. So was his.
She was limp and contented. She had forgotten the pleasure, the ecstasy, the thrill of being with him, of being part of him, of making love with him.
And he groaned, “Why did you leave me?”
Tears welled in her eyes. “You were never there.”
Agonized, he protested earnestly, “I slept with you every night.”
“But the days were long and empty.”
“People live all their lives with other people and see them seldom. Why did you need to be with me all the time?”
“I loved you.”
He frowned at her. “To need constant attention like that isn’t healthy.”
“Probably not.” She looked down at the sheet as she drew it up over her. She felt isolated. Just thinking of it all chilled her. It was past. How could she still be affected by those sad, empty times?
Two
Dallas and Fort Worth are separate big cities and different from one another. Dallas is glitzy and elegant while Fort Worth keeps an iron lock on being Western. There was a time when Fort Worth had been the gathering center for shipping cattle by train. Trucks had changed that.
The building of the shared airport had been a fascinating merger for the cities. Their sprawling populations were reaching out to occupy the area between the cities, and the shared airport was the obvious solution. It had not been easy for Dallas to share it with a “lesser” neighbor who was deliberately lacking in elegance.
Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.
Just as did the meeting between Jo and Chad.
Jo would look at Chad eating breakfast across the table in their room and she was stunned that she was with him again.
What were the chances of running into someone known in an airport? Actually, it wasn’t that unusual. But an ex-husband?
Incredible.
Of course, if one was a film star or multimarried perhaps, but Jo Morris? Ridiculous.
Chad was in the shower when Jo was startled by the discreet knock on their door. A knock? Who could possibly know they were there?
In their shared room, only one bed was rumpled and askew.
But hotels no longer had house detectives who checked on morals.
She squinted at her traveling clock and it was only seven-thirty. Jo inquired as to who was there. With the reply that it was breakfast, she put on her raincoat before she opened the door.
The discreet waiter didn’t even gasp at her dishabille. He conducted himself as if every person in the hotel was barefooted and wearing a raincoat in their room. She’d obviously been in some sort of rain because her hair was a tangled mess.
He said not a word but went straight to his work. He set the small table adroitly and with some skilled flourish.
She gave him a guilty-conscience tip.
He grinned as he thanked her.
She did not make eye contact. Her glances darted around and she blushed scarlet. But she was seriousfaced and silent.
With the size of the tip, he felt he had to tidy up a bit. And he moved chairs, retrieved and plumped night-discarded pillows. Did he emphasize that chore?
Jo moved her hands and said, “Never mind.”
The waiter grinned big and friendly before he reluctantly left.
She knew full well that the waiter thought she was a loose and easy woman. She was there in one of the giveaway rooms that cost outrageously but less than the others. And she’d come from the overloaded airport with a stranger. HARLOT must be written across her forehead in purple on the red blush that suffused her entire face.
Closing the door again, Jo scowled at the torn-up bed with its plumped pillows. Two of the pillows had been taken from the floor. Just as they had some years ago. She and Chad had shared one pillow. That was a clue right there. Then too, the other bed hadn’t been touched. How obvious.
There is nothing like a guilty conscience to rattle a seemingly free woman.
She straightened. She would never see the waiter again. She would leave this place. She would go back to her life and this would be a forgotten incident.
Chad came out of the bathroom, gloriously naked, drying his hair with a rough towel. He grinned at her and said, “I’m clean. Let’s roll around so that I can smell you instead of just me.”
She looked back at him in appalled shock.
He noted she was wearing a raincoat, over nothing, and he lifted his eyebrows a trifle as he smiled. “It’s raining inside?”
“That could be what the waiter thought.”
He then noted the set table. He said, “Great. We can eat first.”
She replied stiffly. “I believe I shall shower.”
“No. Don’t. You have such a wonderful woman smell.”
“I…smell?”
And he made savoring sounds as he tried to hold her. He rooted his nose around her throat and tried to loosen the tightly tied coat belt. He inquired, “Going out?”
“I had to put something on to open the door.”
“Good thinking.”
“He thinks I’m a harlot.”
Chad lifted his head back and looked at her. “He said that?”
“No. He smiled in that way.”
“What way?”
“As if he knew what we’d been doing.”
Chad looked at the one messed-up bed and then he looked back at his ex-wife. “A logical conclusion. The pillows are back where they belong.”
“He did that.”
Chad tried not to grin too widely. “Tonight we’ll mess up the other bed first.”
“I am embarrassed.”
He was surprised by her. “We’re married!”
“We are not. We are divorced!”
“Ah, that doesn’t mean anything to a couple. It’s just a technicality. We’re legal.”
“I believe you are tilted in your thinking.”
He laughed in a good throat chuckle. “You’ve always tilted me, one way or another. I had to leave the house so that you could get some rest.”
“You gave all your attention to the college, you just used my body now and then.”
“You’re lucky I had the distraction of a commitment to the college, or you would have never gotten out of bed at all!”
She dismissed him. “You say that after I’ve been gone for four years—”
“Just over three years.”
She confronted the stickler and corrected him. “It is almost four. I’m twenty-eight.”
He slid a salacious glance down her body. “You’ve held together quite well.”
She leveled a look at him that showed him her adult maturity and tolerance.
She went to her suitcase, removed a pair of slacks and underwear, then chose a blouse.
“We’ll swim after we’ve breakfasted and read the paper.”
She looked up at him. She did want to swim. She took out pajamas and went to the bath, ignoring his very earnest protests.
She returned wearing the green silk pajamas for the first time, and was additionally wrapped in a cover-up of dark blue. She had a towel around her head.
He put down the paper and served her breakfast from the insulated pots.
There was hot cereal, fruit, remarkably sinful iced muffins, milk, tea and sugar mints. He had coffee. He hadn’t forgotten any of her needs.
She put the fruit on the cereal, butter and jam on the muffins, and she ate every bite.
When she sat back, he put down his paper and smiled. “Feeling better?”
She regarded the husband she had discarded, and she knew this was her chance to use him as she’d always wanted. He would not change, but this was an opportunity to live out her dream of a relationship.
If she could have him now, she could get him out of her system and then go on her way, freed of him. That was what this unexpected opportunity offered.
She smiled at him.
He laughed. He reached over and cupped her chin in his hand as he leaned to kiss her mouth. Then he lifted his head. His eyelashes almost covered his eyes and the crinkles at the corners deepened. “What a miracle to’ve found you again.”
She didn’t again say baloney to him. She just looked at him critically, searching for his flaws. As she’d always thought, he had no physical flaw. His flaws were limited to that of cohabitation.
Neglect of a chattel.
But he was trapped there, with her, and he had no escape. No other person could take his attention from her. She could wallow in his concentrated regard. Perhaps then he would know what he had missed in their marriage. And this time, it would be he who was abandoned, to stand alone, bereft, on the plain of nothingness.
Was she taking revenge?
She considered that. But she could not see how he could be harmed. He hadn’t changed. His marriage to her had not been important to him.
When they were married, he’d had the opportunity to cherish her or even just to include her in his life. He had not. He would not be harmed by an interlude with her.
It was only now that his clever tongue said things about disliking the word “divorce,” but his saying it didn’t mean anything. He’d had a long, long time to figure her out. And almost four years ago, he’d agreed to an amicable parting.
Her leaving hadn’t upset him or saddened him. He had only inquired if she wouldn’t like to stay long enough for her to earn her doctorate. At the time, such a polite question had sundered any lingering hope Jo might have had for their marriage.
Jo looked at her ex-husband and he was as she remembered him, as she’d dreamed of him. She watched him smile at her.
And she smiled back.
He laughed softly in his male throat and coaxed, “Come sit on my lap. I’ve not held a woman on my lap in too long.”
Her body got up and just wiggled right on over and sat itself down on his interested lap.
It was, of course, a part of her plan. She would get all of this kind of foolishness out of her system.
His hands were familiar. He found a mole he’d missed. “I’d wondered if you’d be so foolish as to have this removed. I love this mole. It proves you’re human.”
“Moleless people are inhuman?”
“Most goddesses don’t have moles. Only those who are partly human can contrive to have a mole or so. That fools human males and they believe they are dealing with real women instead of magic ones who can get away. How many other men have you lured?”
“Just you.”
He hugged her gently to him and groaned. “I’ve missed you.”
“How can you claim you’ve missed me?”
“I’ve felt vacant without you.”
“Come on, Chad, you were never around enough to even get acquainted with me. What you missed was the handy sex.”
“We did it by hand!”
In an adult way, she explained, “I was available.”
“You were the most important thing in my life. Are you finished running around being a single woman? Are you ready to come home? It’s time you did, you know. There’s a limit to what a good husband will tolerate in a flighty woman who wants to try her wings.”
Sitting on his lap, she asked, “Do you actually believe I left you in order to be on my own? I was already. I didn’t need to physically leave you. You were gone.”
“I was always there.”
He said that! He actually said it quite as if he thought he’d always been around!
She instructed, “Other men go home to be with their wives and mow their yards and help.”
“They do?”
“You never noticed?” She frowned at him.
“When we lived together, you were looking at other men?” In shock, he leaned back so that he could see her face.
“I wanted only to see you! I loved you. I wanted to be around you. You weren’t anywhere around. You were always busy.”
“I made our living.”
She exclaimed, “Twenty-four hours a day?”
“I wasn’t gone all the time.”
“You were gone most of the time.”
“Being a new assistant professor at Butler University is somewhat demanding, of time, if your students are to be taught what they should know.”
“A wife has none of the professor’s time.”
He said, “I slept with you every night.”
“You’ve mentioned that. You said it at the time. Sleeping isn’t one of those chatting times when a couple becomes acquainted and learns what the other person thinks or feels.”
“I felt around on you all night long, just about.”
She agreed, “Here and there.”
He looked at her body. “What did I miss? I thought I’d felt around everywhere.”
Jo corrected herself, “Now and then.”
“You’re still peeved.”
“No,” she replied. “I’ve adjusted. I’m going to enjoy this hiatus. When we say goodbye this time, we’ll do it better.”
“How can leaving me be. better?”
“I’ll know why it didn’t work the first time. Why it’s impossible. I won’t yearn for you.”
Quite soberly, he asked, “Did you? Did you.yearn for me after you’d left?”
She didn’t reply but slowly got off his lap. She removed the towel wrapped around her head and slowly began to rub her hair. Finally she said with some irony, “Chad, I yearned for you while I lived with you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She stopped and turned her face to him in disbelief. She just looked at him.
“You did tell me.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Jo.”
“It’s past. Let’s go swim.”
He sat and watched her. “I’ve missed you so terribly. I knew you were there to come home to. After you left, I dreamed of your sweet face and your voice. I missed your body in my bed. I remembered how it was to make love with you. Did you remember that?”
“Yes.”
He was sure. “We had a good marriage.”
“You had a good convenience.”
He watched her. “I love you.”
“Of course. Let’s go swim.”
He considered her, her mood, and he mentioned, “You just washed your hair.”
She shook her head. “It was so stale from being so sweaty that I would have polluted the pool.”
“You always were a stickler. There would be no way that you’d pollute a swimming pool.” Then he asked slyly, “Why did you sweat that way?”
She tilted up her chin and replied with some verve, “I haven’t a clue.”
Chad loved it. He laughed in the way men have when they’re flirting with a woman who pleases them.
That time there were other people swimming. But they were earnest lappers and took up only one side. On the other side, the two lovers played. He had his hands on her one way or another all the time. She smiled and flirted and taunted him.
They went back to their room to shower and dress, then they went out to investigate the highlights of Old Fort Worth. They saw the old cattle yards, and they checked out the railroad stations and the old saloons.
They had genuine TEXAS barbecue for lunch, but it wasn’t. It was meat with a hot sauce. They drank Pearl Beer and learned to roll the warmed tortillas so that the hot butter wouldn’t run out.
And they went to a theatre, which showed the old, early silent cowboy shorts with accompanying piano music.
One short featured a train engine. The heroine was tied to the train rails. She was rescued by the mancovered engine from a set fire that engulfed the forest. The camera people made it appear the heroine took off fifty petticoats so the men could beat out the roaring blaze.
There were other, similar film shorts, and the viewers loved every one. They could read the text out loud and laugh and chat and not bother the reception of the films. It was fun.
While the pair was casually dressed, they were welcomed to a marvelously elite place for dinner. And they talked as they relished perfect food served precisely. The presentation was an art.
When they returned to the hotel, they found a note saying they could make connections for their flights the next day. They should call.
In their room, the ex-marrieds considered each other quite seriously. And they decided they weren’t in that much hurry. So they canceled their reservations at the airport.
Chad called the delay to his college, and Jo reported in to her computer firm in Chicago.
Sharing the cost, they rented a car the next day and drove south to Austin. It is the state capitol. There, they snooped around to hear some great blues and country groups. They viewed the Guadalupe River and picnicked there along that wonderful, lazy waterway, which at one point meandered over a lumpy, white rock bed.
They found out why it’s said that the sunshine spends the winter in TEXAS. Of course, San Antonio brags that the winter sun stays only in their area.
The divorced couple walked all over downtown Austin and viewed the red granite state capitol building. They noted the TEXAS trees, and the fact that they are different from those in the north.
They saw the hundreds-of-years-old oak some person had tried to kill with chemicals. The tree was saved, they say, by putting crystals around it to counter the poison. A baffling act.
But along with the crystals, the state resource used countering chemicals. The money spent in saving the oak would have planted a hundred other trees.
There is no other vista like that of TEXAS. The visitors lounged and talked and laughed and looked. They then drove on down to San Antonio, and it was just like the features shown on TV. How amazing to see it actually.
And the Alamo.
A visitor’s skin still shivers with the intensity of the emotion still locked in that ground.
The travelers went to Fredricksburg and over to Bandera because someone said they should see the towns. And those different places were worth the trip. The two sightseers used up Chad’s entire leave. And it was special.
Unfortunately for Jo, their sojourn was exactly the way she’d expected to share time with Chad. How could he be so perfect? How could he not have shared such time with her during the six years they’d been married?
She felt more cheated than before when she’d only hoped for such a companionship. He was so knowledgeable. That was no surprise. She knew he was curious and erudite. But he was so companionable. How dare he be as magical as she’d always wanted? It made her mourn the lost years.
And it made her wary.
He said, “Quit your job and come home.”
He said that.
Not only could she just quit her job, which she loved and which kept her very well indeed, but he called his house and him…home.