He leaned close to her, so that she could hear him above the excited chatter of the others. “Ready to get out of here?”
She nodded.
Over by the window, a young executive type raised his voice. “Hey! Hey, everybody! Better look sharp. The TV news people just drove up to the front door.”
“If we get trapped by reporters,” Carol said, “we’ll be here an hour or more.”
They left without saying goodbye to O’Brian. In the hall, as they headed toward a side entrance, they slipped into their raincoats. Outside, Paul opened his umbrella and put one arm around Carol’s waist. They hurried across the slippery macadam parking lot, stepping gingerly around huge puddles. The gusting wind was chilly for early September, and it kept changing direction until it finally got under the umbrella and turned it inside out. The cold, wind-driven rain was falling so hard that it stung Paul’s face. By the time they reached the car, their hair was plastered to their heads, and a lot of water had found its way down the backs of their necks, under the collars of their coats.
Paul half expected the Pontiac to be lightning-damaged, but it was just as they had left it. The engine turned over without protest.
Leaving the parking lot, he started to turn left but put his foot on the brake pedal when he saw that the street was sealed off by police cars and fire trucks just half a block away. The church was still ablaze, in spite of the pouring rain and in defiance of the big streams of water that the firemen directed onto it.
Black smoke billowed into the gray day, and behind the blasted windows, flames spurted and churned.
Clearly, the church was going to be a total loss.
He turned right, instead, and drove home through rain-choked streets. where the gutters overflowed and where every depression in the pavement had been transformed into a treacherous lake that had to be negotiated with utmost caution to avoid drowning the engine and stalling out.
Carol slouched in her seat and huddled against the passenger-side door, hugging herself. Although the heater was on, she was obviously cold.
Paul realized his teeth were chattering.
The trip home took ten minutes. and during that time neither of them said a word. The only sounds were the whispery hiss of the tires on the wet pavement and the metronomic thump of the windshield wipers. The silence was not uncomfortable or strained, but there was a peculiar intensity about it, an aura of tremendous, pent-up energy. Paul had the feeling that if he did speak, the surprise would send Carol straight through the roof of the car.
They lived in a Tudor-style house, which they had painstakingly restored, and as always. the sight of it — the stone walk, the big oak doors framed by carriage lamps, the leaded-glass windows, the gabled roofline — pleased Paul and gave him the warm feeling that this was where he belonged. The automatic garage door rolled up, and he pulled the Pontiac inside, next to Carol’s red Volkswagen Rabbit.
In the house, they maintained their silence.
Paul’s hair was wet, and the legs of his trousers clung damply to him, and the back of his shirt was still soaked. He figured he was going to come down with a nasty cold if he didn’t get into some dry clothes right away. Apparently, Carol had the same thought, and they went straight upstairs to the master bedroom.
She opened the closet doors, and he switched on a bedside lamp. Shivering, they stripped out of their wet clothes.
When they were nearly undressed, they glanced at each other. Their eyes locked.
Still, they didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.
He took her in his arms, and they kissed lightly at first, tenderly. Her mouth was warm and soft and vaguely flavored with whiskey.
She clutched him, pulled him closer, her fingertips digging into the muscles of his back. She pushed her mouth hard against his, scraped his lip with her teeth, thrust her tongue deep, and abruptly their kisses grew hot, demanding.
Something seemed to snap in him, and in her, too, for their desire was suddenly marked by animal urgency. They responded to each other in a hungry, almost frenzied fashion, hastily casting off the last of their clothes, pawing at each other, squeezing, stroking. She nipped his shoulder with her teeth. He gripped her buttocks and kneaded them with uncharacteristic crudity, but she didn’t wince or try to pull away; indeed, she pressed even more insistently against him, rubbing her breasts over his chest and grinding her hips against his. The soft whimpers that escaped from her were not sounds of pain; they clearly expressed her eagerness and need. In bed, his energy was manic, and his staying power amazed him. He was insatiable, and so was she. They thrust and thrashed and flexed and tensed in perfect harmony, as if they were not only joined but fused, as if they were a single organism, shaken by only one set of stimuli instead of two. Every vestige of civilization slipped from them, and for a long while the only noises they made were animal sounds: panting; groaning; throaty grunts of pleasure; short, sharp cries of excitement. At last Carol uttered the first word to pass between them since they had left O’Brian’s office:
“Yes.” And again, arching her slender, graceful body, tossing her head from side to side on the pillow: “Yes, yes!” It was not merely an orgasm to which she was saying yes, for she’d already had a couple of those and had announced them with only ragged breathing and soft mewling. She was saying yes to life, yes to the fact that she still existed and was not just a charred and oozing lump of unanimated flesh, yes to the miraculous fact that they had both survived the lightning and the deadly, splintered branches of the toppling maple tree. Their unrestrained, fiercely passionate coupling was a slap in Death’s face, a not wholly rational but nevertheless satisfying denial of the grim specter’s very existence. Paul repeated the word as if chanting an incantation—”Yes, yes, yes!”—as he emptied himself into her a second time, and it seemed as though his fear of death spurted out of him along with his seed.
Spent, they stretched out on their backs, side by side on the disheveled bed. For a long time they listened to the rain on the roof and to the persistent thunder, which was no longer loud enough to rattle the windows.
Carol lay with her eyes closed, her face completely relaxed. Paul studied her, and, as he had done on countless other occasions during the past four years, he wondered why she had ever consented to marry him. She was beautiful. He was not. Anyone putting together a dictionary could do worse than to use a picture of his face as the sole definition of the word plain. He had once jokingly expressed a similar opinion of his physical appearance, and Carol had been angry with him for talking about himself that way.
But it was true, and it didn’t really matter to him that he was not Burt Reynolds, just so long as Carol didn’t notice the difference. It was not only his plainness of which she seemed unaware; she could not comprehend her own beauty, and she insisted she was actually rather plain, or at least no more than “a little bit pretty, no, not even pretty, just sort of cute, but kind of funny-looking cute.” Her dark hair — even now, when it was matted and curled by rain and sweat — was thick, glossy, lovely. Her skin was flawless, and her cheekbones were so well sculpted that it was difficult to believe the clumsy hand of nature could have done the job. Carol was the kind of woman you saw on the arm of a tall, bronzed Adonis, not with the likes of Paul Tracy. Yet here she was, and he was grateful to have her beside him. He never ceased to be surprised that they were compatible in every respect — mentally, emotionally, physically.
Now, as rain began to beat on the roof and windows with renewed force, Carol sensed that he was staring at her, and she opened her eyes. They were so brown that, from a distance of more than a few inches, they looked black. She smiled. “I love you.”