From This Day Forward Page 7

  He traced one finger along her cheek. Infinitely gentle, he bent toward her. “Does this hurt, Ginnie?” His lips touched hers. “Or this?” he whispered, sliding an arm behind her and pulling her closer. “Or this?”

  She moaned against his mouth, powerless under the assault of her feelings as he drew her to him, as his mouth claimed hers, as his hands moved over her with a sureness born of knowledge of her body. Soon she would be lost in him. Even now she fought to keep her hands from creeping around him. Even now she fought to keep from deepening the kiss. Even now she found herself forgetting her pain in the pleasure he could bring her, in the mindless ecstasy of loving him.

  “No!” She pushed away from him. “Can’t you see? This won’t solve anything.”

  He dropped his arms to his sides. “I’ve missed you, Ginnie. This whole long, miserable week, I’ve missed you.”

  There! Wasn’t that what she’d wanted to hear? And yet now it seemed so inadequate. “And I’ve missed you, Neil. These whole, long, miserable months.”

  She ran her hand through her hair, fighting her heart’s demand that she throw herself against his strength. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

  “Christ!” he swore. “What am I supposed to do? Just let you walk in and make your announcement and leave? Without saying anything? Without trying to stop you?”

  She had to do something, something physical. She couldn’t stand rooted to that spot any longer.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” she said. “I think we both can use some.”

  His face hardened as he stepped away from her. She couldn’t bear to look at him any longer. She headed for the kitchen but came to an abrupt stop just inside the door. Order had been restored — it was far from perfection, but Neil had made an effort. Her throat tightened.

  “Too late,” she moaned. “Too late.”

  He came into the kitchen as she finished filling the coffeepot and stood silently watching her. Her hand shook. She couldn’t remember how much coffee she had measured into the basket.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  “What — no.”

  “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

  “What I want is for you to quit messing with that damned coffeepot and tell me what happened in your head today.”

  She leaned her cheek against the cabinet door. “It isn’t just today, Neil. And it isn’t just in my head.”

  She felt his hands on her shoulders, strong hands, kneading at her tension.

  “Please don’t,” she whimpered.

  “Don’t touch you?” he asked. “Don’t care for you? Don’t ask? Don’t what, Ginnie?”

  “Don’t do this now. You’ve shut me out for so long, don’t do this to me now.”

  His hands stilled. “I never meant to shut you out.”

  “But you have. And maybe you won’t mean to, but you will again. There will always be another client, another meeting, another election — that’s what matters to you. You don’t need me, Neil, except...”

  She had been going to say, except in bed, but she couldn’t. That wasn’t true, either. Wouldn’t another woman, someone who could accept this life, perhaps even appreciate it, be better, in bed as well as out of it, for him?

  “You don’t need me, Neil,” she repeated. “Todd doesn’t need me. Charlie doesn’t need me. No one needs me.”

  “You’re what holds it all together. Don’t you see that?”

  “No! I don’t see anything at all like that. What I see is that everything else in your life takes precedence over me. And I need more than that. I need a husband, Neil, not someone I see occasionally, late at night. I need a family, not a child who resents me. I need a home, one that I feel is my home, not one in which I’m merely tolerated.”

  He twisted her around to him. “You have that, Ginnie.”

  “No.” She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his. “I have nothing, except an emptiness that I can’t make go away, an emptiness that only worsens when I catch a glimpse of what our life could be.”

  “And if I could give you what you need?”

  “Don’t. Oh, God, don’t say that. Please don’t say that. Because you can’t. Everything is against it.”

  “And if I could give you what you need?” he repeated.

  Could he? Could he do that? If only he could. Ginnie swayed against him, not in surrender but in the weakness of her need to believe him. He enveloped her, his arms circling her slender body, his presence pervading her soul.

  “Please.” With a whimpered plea, she turned her face to his. Even she didn’t know what she meant. Please don’t hurt me anymore. Please love me. Please make me believe. “Oh, please.”

  He feathered kisses across her eyelids, her forehead, her temples. “Trust me, Ginnie,” he groaned as his mouth claimed hers.

  The kiss held all her desperation, her longing, her need. When he lifted her to hold her against him, she knew her surrender was complete. She couldn’t leave him. Not now. Maybe not ever. Through the riot of sensations flooding through her, she felt silent tears creeping from beneath her tightly closed eyelids. “Oh, please.”

  The shrill chirping of the alarm beckoned Ginnie back to consciousness the next morning. She fought it, as she always fought it, mumbling incoherent protests as Neil disentangled himself from her and turned to the clock, but he only silenced it, moved back to her side and wrapped his arms around her. She murmured a wordless sound of pleasure and snuggled into his warmth.

  When she awoke again, she was alone in the wide bed. She ran her hand over the sheet beside her. Not cold yet, it still bore the lingering traces of Neil’s warmth. Reluctantly she opened her eyes and looked around the empty room. She caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned toward it. Her welcoming smile froze as she realized that Neil was dressed in dark slacks and a cream-colored cable-knit sweater. His dark hair was neatly and correctly in place, and she scented the aroma of freshly applied after-shave lotion.

  He smiled hesitantly and walked to the bed, dropping onto it to sit beside her. He traced a slender finger along her bare arm and then covered her with the sheet, tucking it around her.

  “You don’t have to get up now,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” At least, she thought, he had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  He sighed. “I have to go into the office this morning.”

  She turned from him and lay flat on her back, studying the ceiling. “I see,” she said emotionlessly.

  “No, Ginnie, you don’t see.” He turned her toward him. “I have a trial starting Monday. I have some things I have to do today, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I promise you that.”

  She looked into the depths of his eyes, trying to read in them the answer to a question she had to ask herself if she never spoke the words aloud. Had he meant what he said the night before? If he hadn’t, why had he bothered to lie? She felt a wrenching in the area of her heart. And why was it so desperately necessary for her to believe him?

  “I promise,” he said softly. “We’ll have most of the afternoon, and tonight, I’ll talk to Todd.”

  She reached out to him, tracing her fingers along his jaw. He caught her hand and placed a soft kiss in her palm.

  “Trust me, Ginnie. I’ll find a way.”

  The next week seemed a return to the familiar routine, but with undercurrents of intense differences. Outwardly, their schedules seemed unchanged. Ginnie went to work each morning, Neil to the office, and Todd to school. There were still evening meetings, but Neil cut them short, even managing on one occasion to be home for dinner, and on two others to be home before Todd went to bed. And Todd — Todd seemed different, almost subdued. Ginnie wondered about the talk Neil had had with him. Neil, too, was subdued. No, not subdued, she thought. Preoccupied. And she couldn’t help wondering if he resented the time he was spending at home with her. Several times she became aware of him watching her, but she realized t
hat those occasions were no more often than the times she spent watching him, lost in thought, his heavy eyebrows drawn together with deep lines marring his forehead.

  By unspoken agreement, neither mentioned what had happened, or what had almost happened, the previous Friday. But Ginnie felt the tension growing as the week drew to a close, as another Friday came, and went, as another Saturday morning approached.

  Trust me, he had said, yet she saw no real change, no real reason for her trust except as an exercise in blind futility.

  Ginnie moaned in protest as the alarm chirped its summons. She felt the subtle shift of the bed as Neil turned to silence the clock and then his arms around her as he dragged her into his embrace.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead,” he whispered in her ear. He teased little kisses across her face before catching the corner of her upper lip between his, tugging gently and flicking a teasing caress across her lip.

  She opened one eye and peered at him. “Don’t you have to go to the office?” she asked suspiciously.

  He shook his head and shifted his weight so that he poised balanced above her, propped on an elbow on each side of her, smiling down at her. “No.”

  “Or a meeting with the election committee?”

  “No.”

  She couldn’t believe it. There hadn’t been a Saturday in months when he hadn’t had to run off somewhere. She smiled up at him lazily. “Then why did you set the alarm?”

  He raised himself, freeing one hand to trace lightly down her cheek, her throat, her breast—lower still, along the indentation of her waist, to her thigh, creating quivers of anticipation each place his fingers lingered.

  “It might seem unromantic to set the alarm, but with our schedules the way they are, I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time for this,” he said lightly. “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve spent a morning together?”

  She nodded silently, acutely aware that his hand had stopped its trailing. His mouth hovered a heartbeat away from hers.

  “Kiss me, Ginnie,” he whispered.

  It was all the invitation she needed. She slid her arms around him and raised herself to meet his embrace.

  As absorbed in Neil as she was, she barely heard the click of the door, but the blare of televised cartoons as the door thrust open silenced the clamor within her. She shrank away from Neil as he muttered an oath and, grabbing the sheet, covered himself and rolled over to face the door. Ginnie didn’t look. She knew Todd stood there. What she didn’t know was how much he had seen in that brief moment. She barely recognized Neil’s voice as he spoke with controlled anger.

  “Didn’t you ever hear of knocking and waiting to be told it was all right to enter a room?”

  “Gee, Dad. I’m—I’m sorry.”

  But Ginnie heard no sorrow in those words. She hoped it was her imagination, but what she heard was a sneaky little pleasure in having interrupted what had to be, for Todd, an illicit scene. And then she hated herself for attributing those kinds of motives to a fourteen-year-old boy.

  The door closed, silencing the televised sounds. Neil groaned and rolled onto his back, reaching for her hand.

  “Ginnie, I’m sorry.”

  She withdrew her fingers from his, sat up and fumbled for her robe at the foot of the bed.

  “I guess I should say it’s all right,” she said as she cinched the belt around her waist.

  “No, it isn’t all right.”

  “No, it isn’t, is it?” she said and walked with rigid control into the bathroom.

  When she emerged later, bathed, carefully made-up and dressed protectively in slacks and a sweater, she found Neil dressed similarly, seated on the unmade bed speaking on the telephone. He looked up at her but did not smile as he replaced the receiver. Instead, he stood, went to the closet and pulled a suitcase from the top shelf.

  “Mrs. Stemmons is coming over for the weekend,” he said as he began rummaging through the closet. “And we’re doing something we should have done long ago. If you want to,” he added as she continued to stand there silently.

  She smiled, hesitantly at first, and then in genuine pleasure. “Just the two of us?”

  He nodded wordlessly.

  She didn’t even ask where they were going. She didn’t care, so long as the two of them could be alone together.

  They drove north, following the interstate until it veered westward, only then stopping for breakfast. Ginnie felt strangely shy as she sat across the booth from Neil, and a little guilty for feeling so free from mundane responsibilities. Two days, she thought. Two whole days with no one but Neil.

  When they returned to the car, she scooted across the seat to his side without waiting for his invitation. He draped his arm over her shoulder and hugged her close. This was how it should be, she thought as she sighed contentedly against him, and he headed the car north, into the mountains.

  The road climbed steadily, past pines encroaching on the edge of the well-kept highway shoulders, slicing through rock ledges, with occasional gaps in the trees affording a view of the mountains surrounding them and in the distance. They weren’t the Rockies, of course. Nothing so spectacular. The Ozarks were neither high enough, nor harsh enough, ever to be mistaken for the Rockies, but they had a rugged splendor of their own—blue and violet—hazed in the distance, green and untamed on either side of the road, reminiscent of her childhood yet much more imposing than the hills where she had grown up.

  The river valley was far behind them, until they crested a hill and were in another river valley, a high one. A green and white highway sign announced their location: Pleasant Gap, Arkansas. Population 2,107.

  Another green and white sign, this one with an arrow, marked the route to the business district. Neil grinned at her as he slowed the car then turned off the highway onto the narrow road leading to the town. But even this road did not lead through the center of town. A still narrower street did that, cutting through rows of neat, small, freshly painted buildings in a hodgepodge of architecture, all old, to a tiny square.

  Neil pulled the car into a parking place, the only empty one Ginnie could see, and turned off the ignition. Ginnie glanced at him, puzzled but delighted, as he pocketed the keys.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. “I don’t think it will take long to see it all.”

  She smiled and nodded, eager to explore this miniature town. A red stone courthouse dominated the middle of the square. It was by far the largest building in town, but even it was no larger than—no more than—a dream, Ginnie thought. The courthouse lawn, at the widest only six feet, neatly trimmed, led out to a narrow sidewalk banding it. A slender monument, the inevitable commemoration to the Confederate army, stood at an angle in one corner. On the opposite corner, one tree, bare now, stood guard over one wooden bench. Streets that would never accommodate the width of two cars led one-way traffic around the square. One each side, brick buildings in various colors, all narrow, all tall, faced equally narrow sidewalks. Even the crosswalks were miniature, she noted, barely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side.

  The stores bustled with activity. Saturday-morning shoppers crowded the square, and traffic moved unceasingly around it. Somehow she was surprised to see that the people on the sidewalks with them were normal-size people.

  “I keep looking for the Yellow Brick Road,” she said, grinning.

  Neil glanced down at her, puzzled, before the meaning of her words brought a laugh from his throat.

  “This has to be Munchkinland from the Land of Oz,” she said. “I only hope that if we meet up with a witch, it’s the Good Witch of the East.”

  Neil kept her arm tightly tucked within the confines of his own and, as leisurely as they could with the crush of people about them, they window-shopped their way around the square, to a drugstore on the opposite side of the courthouse from where they had parked the car. Through the window, Ginnie saw a long counter and booths lining one wall. She glanced a question at Neil, and he led her inside the
store, to an empty booth, seated her and returned a few moments later with two cups of coffee.

  Ginnie noticed glances in their direction, people obviously trying to place them, and realized quite happily that no one could. The chance of running into one of Neil’s clients or political associates were almost nonexistent.

  “I love this place,” she said as he sat down beside her. “How on earth did you find it?”

  He took a long drink from his coffee. “I think it found me, Ginnie, while I was looking for something else.” He toyed with his cup before speaking. “Do you think you could be happy here?”

  She paused with her cup midway to her lips. “Why?” she asked breathlessly.

  He reached across the table, took the cup from her hands and then took her hands in his. “Harve Perkins, the circuit judge for this district, had a heart attack last month. He’s retiring because of it. Someone will have to be appointed to fill out his unexpired term. I’ve already been told that I can have the job if I want it.”

  “But—but—the election?”

  Neil shook his head. “I’ve withdrawn from the race.”

  “Neil—” Ginnie noticed the curious stares of those around them and lowered her voice. “Neil, this election was the chance of a lifetime for you. You can’t give up something like that.”

  “I already have,” he said. “What I can’t give up is my marriage, you and my son. I never had a home when I was growing up, Ginnie. My mother died giving birth to me, and my father never remarried. He made the law his whole life, what life he really had. I don’t want that for myself, and I don’t want that for us. Right now you’re more important to me than anything I might be able to do for the state of Arkansas or anything I might be able to do for the country.”

  “And your law practice? Do you have to give that up, too?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  They found a park on the outskirts of town, deserted except for one squirrel who scurried down a tree and chided them raucously for not having brought him any food.