He responded savagely, imprisoning that firm, milky mound so roughly that she would have cried out in pain had she not already grown accustomed to his all-consuming hunger, his passion when they coupled.
Both of them groaned together as she eased down upon his shaft, descending far too slowly for him.
Her husband suddenly thrust his hips upward against her, seating himself inside her warmth with a feral grunt of pleasure before he began to sway beneath her.
Interlacing her fingers behind his neck, she leaned back to the full length of her arms as he bent forward to bite at one of her breasts through the thin hide of her dress. How she loved to feel the rhythmic bouncing of her breasts as the two of them rocked together, locked as one.
But of a sudden he pulled his head away from the breast and yanked at the dress, shoving it up from her hips and over her shoulders as she stretched her arms to the starlit sky where the fireflies of sparks rose beyond the tops of the cottonwood trees. First to one side, then to the other they leaned, struggling to get her dress off her arms and over her head … until he held the rumpled mass in one hand, and tossed it toward their bedding.
Again she locked her fingers behind his arms as he bent forward to lick at her nipples, first one, then the other. She knew he was lapping at the warm milk that she could sense oozing from them as she neared the peak of her passion. Inside her he was growing even bigger, ready to explode and fill her with his release. He told her how he loved to suckle at her breasts, just enough to taste the milk her body fed their daughter. In little more than a moon since the birth, she had come to know how passionate her husband grew as he nursed on her. How mad it made him as he drove in and out of her with a rising fury.
Then she heard his rapid breathing become ragged, as if the sound caught on something low in his throat—knowing that he was close. And with that realization she suddenly reached her peak, sensing a flood sweep through her just as surely as there would be if he had torn down a high-country dam and what had been a flooded meadow rushed downslope between two narrow banks.
Her quivering thighs.
She felt as if her legs were the banks of that mountain stream suddenly released. Starting somewhere inside her belly where she had carried their daughter, Waits sensed the gushing wave wash downward, down, down over his manhood imprisoned inside her, on down as it swept over them both while their rhythm slowed like the passing of a stampede.
Not the hurtling passage of massive, lumbering, ground-shaking buffalo … but the breathless, fleeting passage of wild horses—their nostrils flaring, their eyes wide with wind-borne lust, their manes and tails blowing free in the wind.
She could tell he had enjoyed it as he pulled back from her and gazed into her eyes. He didn’t have to speak for her to know.
Her husband licked his lips and said, “There is no finer woman than you in all this world. With all I have done wrong, with all the folks I didn’t mean to hurt but ended up hurting anyway over the years … I don’t know how I ever became worthy of your love.”
“The Grandfather Above has smiled on us both,” she whispered against his cheek, closing her eyes and wishing this moment would never end. Then of a sudden she rocked back and smiled at him, saying, “One Above smiled on me a little earlier in my life than he did in yours!”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to die anytime soon, woman.”
Holding his face between her hands as she felt him continue to soften within her, Waits said, “You have lived through so many deaths already, I grow so afraid you won’t live through any more.”
Bass pulled her against him fiercely, kissing her wet, warm mouth. When he could no longer hold his breath, he pulled away, gasping, and said, “I have so much to live for now, I wouldn’t dare go and poke a stick in death’s hornet’s nest, woman.”
Resting her cheek against his shoulder, Waits felt guilty that his words gave her so little relief.
Finally she said, “I will consider those words as your vow to me, husband.”
“You have my promise—till the day we part in death.”
* One-Eyed Dream
2
“Maybe I should catch this strange-looking fish!”
At her giggle Bass turned his head to find his wife standing among the willows on the creekbank. “You already caught your fish, woman. Come in with me—the water feels almost as good as you this morning.”
Before ever worrying about breakfast this morning, he had tagged along with her to a secluded part of the stream where she would have a little privacy to bathe the baby. There he tied off their two horses while Waits-by-the-Water pushed through a gap in the willows to reach the edge of the creek where she found a small strip of open ground covered with grass, shaded by some young cottonwood saplings.
As she began to unwind all the swaddling wrapped around the child, he pulled off his grimy calico shirt, moccasins, and leggings, then dropped his breechclout on the bank before tiptoeing into the cool water. Finding it cold enough that morning to make him shiver with those first few steps, Titus finally eased himself beneath the surface until he sat submerged, water lapping up to his shoulders.
But he was standing now, scrubbing his skinny legs with creek-bottom sand, when she called him an odd-looking fish.
Scratch stopped, peered down, studying himself a moment there in the new day’s light. “You afraid to come in here and swim with this fish you caught?”
“Never did I realize how truly white you are for a white man!” she snorted, putting her fingers over her lips to stifle a giggle.
Looking down at himself again, Titus had to agree. His legs might see the sun only once a year, come his annual rendezvous scrubbing. From his neck up and his wrists down, the man was tanned brown as a twice-smoked Kentucky ham. But the rest of his skinny, scarred, bony body was about as pale as a translucent winter moon.
“Downright stupefying, ain’t I?” he said in English as he worked at scrubbing that second leg before settling back into the stream.
Waits had finished pulling off all the fouled grass and moss she had packed around the baby’s genitals at sundown the night before, and now held the girl just above the surface of the water to gently wash the child’s skin. Finally she laid the infant back on the blankets, patted the child dry, then leaned over to yank up long blades of summer-cured grass from the bank. These clumps of dry stalks she placed under the girl’s bottom, packed them between the child’s legs, then methodically rewrapped the long sections of cloth and, finally, an antelope hide around her daughter’s body.
Once done with that, Waits-by-the-Water returned the bundled child to the open flaps of the small cradleboard as the girl began to fuss. Watching her care for their child there on the bank, Titus smiled, enjoying the round fullness of her rump as it strained against her leather dress, the way her full breasts swayed against the buckskin yoke as she knotted the cradleboard strings.
“You coming, woman?”
Picking up the cradleboard, then settling cross-legged on the bank, Waits pulled aside the loose dress sleeve and partially exposed a breast, guiding it into the girl’s mouth. “As soon as she has eaten some more breakfast.”
“By the stars, woman—that child eats more than … more than—”
“More than you?” she interrupted with a big grin.
He slapped at the water with one hand. “Seems she’s eating most all the time.”
“That’s what babies do, husband. They eat and sleep, and mess their cradleboards too.” She looked at him a long moment, then gazed up- and downstream before she added, “As soon as she is asleep, I’ll join you. If no one will see me, I will come in to swim with you.”