She fiddled with the zippers of the sleeping bags for a moment, then zipped the two bags together and slipped inside. “You sleep on that side, where you’re farther out of the wind. Your blood is probably still thin from living in the desert.”
Pete sat at the foot of the sleeping bags and looked up at her while he arranged his boots and jacket and put on his hat.
She could feel him staring at her in the darkness, trying to read her mind. She sighed, then said in the kindest voice she could summon, “No, I haven’t.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Changed my mind about … anything. All I want is your body heat. This is the way to sleep if you want to be warm without a fire.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard that somewhere.”
He carefully slipped in beside her, holding himself in a straight, rigid position so far from her that a cold breeze blew under the taut surface of the sleeping bag and chilled her toes. She laughed. “I’ll tell you what. If this is too weird, we’ll each go it on our own. I don’t think we’ll freeze tonight.”
“No, no,” he said. “It just takes a certain mental … what’s the word? Insensitivity.” He nodded sagely. “I can manage that.”
“Good,” she said. After a long silence she said, “But if I wake up with a hand on my ass, I’m going to pinch it. The one who says ‘ouch’ had better be me.”
It worked. She heard him shifting on the bed of boughs and then felt the sleeping bag regain some of its slack and warm her back. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind blowing past above her head and the sounds of trees moving back and forth, whispering like the sea. In a moment she was asleep.
She was not cold anymore. She felt the hot, mild breeze where her skin was exposed to the air, then sank lazily beneath the surface. The warm water supported her, made her feel as though she were flying. She slowly, effortlessly glided above the bottom of the pool, the light resistance of the black water running along her body like a warm touch.
She looked up at the silvery underside of the surface, saw the bright moon wavering above it, and let herself rise up to meet it.
She came to the surface and took in the first dry, sweet breath, then let her muscles relax and floated. She was in suspension now, drifting passively, waiting. She reveled in the knowledge that he was sure to be here, and fretted, teasing herself with the lie that he would not.
She heard the water sloshing somewhere behind her head and looked up at the moon, her body going tense with anticipation and longing. When his big arm slipped around her waist, she let out a gasp that was certitude and joy and laughter at the same time. She let him pull her close. She could feel his chest against her back, his lips softly kissing the back of her neck. She leaned her head back on his shoulder. He was strong and gentle, and warmer than the water. She could feel his hands moving, never leaving her body, instead touching her lovingly everywhere from her scalp to the tips of her toes, the hands returning, lingering on each of the places she would never have let him touch.
He slowly turned her around and she looked into his eyes. There was no question in them, no uncertainty that would force her to speak. They did not have to talk, because they had been through this before, and he had somehow sensed this time that her answer had changed. She had just misspoken, forgotten on that other night that this was all right. The first kiss was slow, their lips drawn together and barely meeting at first, then staying together. She let it go on as long as she could bear it, feeling so safe, being cradled in his arms and cherished.
She slipped the straps of her bathing suit off her shoulders, then took his hand and made him peel it down and off. Pete’s bathing suit came off too, or maybe it was already off. They embraced again in the warm, dark water, and this time it was so much better, with the water tickling the exposed skin to remind her it was bare. She felt so free that she was surprised at how constricted and uncomfortable she must have been before. She and Pete floated weightlessly, and something about the motion of the water seemed to make them drift together.
She let herself savor the moment, the world so dark and quiet around her, but her feelings so bright and hot and clear. She was so glad she had found out that this was allowed. But then she sensed that off in the dark beyond the pool, there was some kind of disturbance. Maybe someone was coming. “No, not yet,” she pleaded. “Just a little longer.” But Pete seemed to lose his solidity, to slip away from her. She reached for him.
Jane felt cold. Why had the water turned cold? She slowly rose toward consciousness to investigate her surroundings and opened her eyes to a terrible sense of loss. Then she was suddenly, abruptly, wide awake. She was shocked—frightened—not by the dream but by the realization that she was the dreamer. It was an enormous relief that it had not happened. She had not committed adultery, thrown her marriage away. She had not betrayed Carey. She had not done anything at all.
She sat up, as careful not to touch Pete as though he were a rattlesnake that had slithered in beside her for warmth, and extricated herself from the sleeping bag. She felt deeply depressed as she slipped her jacket on and walked across the cold stone shelf to retrieve her boots.
The Old People had studied dreams the way they studied every other event that passed before their eyes. When somebody awoke from a dream, he would immediately do his best to interpret it and fulfill whatever command it had brought him. Something was bothering the dreamer, something he had not given sufficient attention to while he was awake. Now that he was conscious again, he had to correct the oversight—overcome the inertia, the fear, or the inhibition that had prevented him from seeing clearly before. If Jane had lived in the Old Time, she would have been required to wake Pete up and demand that he act out the dream with her to set her mind at rest.
As she tied her boots, she looked over at Pete Hatcher. He was lying on his side facing her, his eyes closed and his jaw slack in sleep. He would be one of the seventeen men on the planet who looked good when he was asleep. She fought off the urge to resent him. None of this was his fault. She was just lonely for her husband, and she had been alone with Pete so much that her misguided subconscious mind had somehow drafted him to stand for Man. No, she thought. The dream had been too convincing and too specific for anything so abstract. Pete was an attractive guy who had the morals of a stallion and had made it disconcertingly clear that she was the one he wanted. Some part of her mind obviously had not taken her refusal as final but had been mulling the offer over.
She found her watch in her jacket pocket and consulted it as she strapped it to her wrist. It was only four o’clock, but she wasn’t going to crawl back into that sleeping bag with him right now.
She heard the distant screeching of birds. She cocked her head to listen, but she could not identify their kind. She did sense that they weren’t singing, they were frightened. Something must have come too close to their nesting place. She heard the wings of a flock of them passing overhead in the dark. It was too early for the birds she knew to fly.
“Pete!” she said. “Get up. It’s time to move.”
It was dark and still and cold, and as Jane and Pete rolled their sleeping bags and ponchos and put on their jackets, she could see thick clouds of steam puffing into the air from their nostrils.
Hatcher whispered, “Why are we in such a hurry?”
“Some birds woke me up,” she whispered back. “I think something scared them.”
As Jane gathered the pine boughs and carried them below the trail to hide them, she knew that she was not being foolish. This was unfamiliar country, but she had begun to get used to the sights and sounds, and the birds were behaving strangely. When she had removed every sign of the campsite, she used the last pine bough as a broom to sweep the rock shelf, then all of the footprints that led to it from the trail.