“I do.”
“You don’t,” he said as he kissed her ear and hummed under her hair, taking in the musty smell of crushed flowers, her pale neck skin mixing with the violets wilting at her nape and the scent of the cool pond. “You don’t at all. That’s the problem.”
“You’re the problem,” she said quietly.
He ignored this as she turned and kissed him. Whether she was becoming eager or more confident, he couldn’t tell, and quickly didn’t care. He was lost in sensation.
“Want this,” he said. It was his statement.
She turned again, giving her back to him. She swallowed and nodded, looking straight ahead, not at him. “Yes.” She’d taken it as a question.
He felt her breathing stop as he undid the first glittering button on the back of her dress and placed an openmouthed kiss at the top of her spine. He thought she’d stop him then, as she had before. But she exhaled, shifted against him, and then leaned forward, closing her eyes in surrender, or was it resignation? He undid each of the buttons down to her waist, each time smiling as he revealed more skin and lace. He realized that when no one was looking she’d give him everything. She’d give him the impossible.
“You can stop me,” he said, though he knew she didn’t want him to stop. His hands roamed the silk at her waist. “One word will stop me.”
“I know,” she said, turning around to sit sideways. She kissed him then, her hands in the hair at the nape of his neck, her tongue in his mouth.
“I’ve wanted . . .” he said, but he lost himself in the electricity zinging through his veins.
“What?” she asked, though she knew.
“Just wanted.”
She looked ladylike, sitting sideways in his lap, but also like a siren with the back of her dress open, a new fire in her eye. “Tell me.” She ran her hands down his shirt, across his chest, and started undoing the buttons. “Tell me what you’ve wanted.”
“You. This. Everything,” he said, lying back and taking her with him.
THE POND HOUSE
Nell exits the men’s pond house and throws her cigarette in the water, immediately regretting it and hoping no one will see the butt marring the pristine dark surface. Back in Oregon, she allows herself one cigarette a week, agonizingly rationed. But as she lights a second and makes her way back to the party she thinks, Screw the gum today.
After the meeting yesterday with Louis Morrell, Pansy and Emerson arm-twisted her into staying at the farm for the wake. Nell wishes now that she’d insisted on going to a hotel; at least then she’d have an escape hatch.
At that thought, she veers off the trail to the house and heads for the old stucco tennis pavilion. She tells herself she’s not hiding, tells herself that this is the part of any party she likes best, whether attending or throwing. The sounds of the guests loudly chatting wafts across the field to her, punctuated by bright bursts of laughter as the drinks go down, and the clatter of food prep in the kitchen comes muted but clear from across the lawn.
As a girl back home, upstairs in her bed during her parents’ dinner parties, drifting off to sleep to the murmur of adult conversation below, the yellow light from the front hall would cast a warm, dull glow in her room. She felt encompassed, protected, as if nothing was getting through that group of jolly suburban revelers and up the stairs to her room. Today Nell wishes she could lie down upstairs and listen to this party without having to attend; perhaps she’d feel safe again.
She sits down on an upside-down five-gallon feed bucket, crosses her legs at the knee, and kicks her foot out at nothing as she finishes her toxins. Detox and retox, it’s how she copes when she’s back here.
In the sixties Loulou had let some farm manager convince her to pen sheep on the clay tennis court. An ingenious way to save on fencing, he’d told her. Nell remembers running through the field with Pansy, who’d shown her how to cram tufts of grass through the fence to entice the sheep. Then, mustering all their young bravery, they’d snuck in and cornered one, daring each other to touch its rank woolly fleece.
Now the old clay court was submerged under three feet of petrified sheep shit, well-fed weeds, and blooming wildflowers. Virginia creeper had long ago pulled down the fence.
From the direction of the kitchen she hears Pansy directing the caterers with confidence. “They need more of those little BLT things out there. Please check the ice in the flower room. And where is Nell?”
Nell has just enough time to stub out her cigarette and bury it in a nearby bag of potting soil before Pansy steps out on the lawn and takes the path to the sagging pavilion.
“You really shouldn’t be out here. They’re not sure if the roof’ll hold.” Pansy wrinkles her nose. “Do I smell smoke?”
“It’s the bacon from inside,” Nell says.
“Thought you were sticking to gum,” Pansy says, sniffing again. “Come join us.” Pansy, always the insider. Nell, always in need of an invitation.
Nell shoulders past her cousin, making for the mown path in the grass toward the kitchen.
“Any ghosts out here?” Pansy examines the rafters of the little tennis house. “What. You remember that story Loulou used to tell.”
Nell does remember. Loulou’s favorite story was of a deadly key and forbidden locks. It was outrageously scary for children and told with a certain sadistic glee.
The first night they’d heard the story Pansy had begged their parents to let them sleep in the same room. The adults couldn’t resist her charming request for a cousin slumber party.
Nell had lain awake listening to Pansy breathing, trying to decide if she was asleep or not. In an agony of fright, Nell had finally given in and whispered into the space between the twin beds in the Moorish room, “It can’t be true, right? That story?”
She’d felt relief when Pansy hissed back reassuringly, not even making fun of her, “No way.” She’d heard the rustle of Pansy getting out of bed, the scrape of her narrow twin bed.
Then she said, “Here, push yours.”
Nell rose at once, relieved. They shoved the beds together until only the width of the spindly rails remained between them.
This, of course, brought the warning steps of an adult up the stairs. The heavy tread down the corridor gave them more than enough time to dive under the covers and feign sleep.
“What are you girls doing up here?” Her mother had been the adult sent to check on them. She squinted into the darkness, a glass in her hand. After taking in the scene she said, “Go to sleep now, or we’ll have to separate you.”
She’d closed the door, but turned back with a mother’s instinct and left it ajar so a beam of light fell across the foot of their beds.
“Here,” Pansy had said, reaching her hand toward Nell.