“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.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I thought you were dead.”
“Wasn’t.”
“After the lightning stopped, I called you, but you didn’t answer for the longest time.”
“I was busy with a call to Chicago,” he said, grinning.
“Seriously.”
“Okay. It was San Francisco.”
“I was scared.”
“I couldn’t answer you right away,” he said soothingly. “In case you’ve forgotten, O’Brian fell on top of me, Knocked the wind right out. He doesn’t look so big, but he’s as solid as a rock. I guess he builds a lot of muscles by picking lint off his suits and shining his shoes nine hours a day.”
“That was a pretty brave thing you did.”
“Making love to you? Think nothing of it.”
Playfully, she slapped his face. “You know what I mean. You save O’Brian’s life.”
“Nope.”
“Yes, you did. He thought so, too.”
“For God’s sake, I didn’t step in front of him and shield him from the tree with mine own precious bod! I just pulled him out of the way. Anyone would have done the same.”
She shook her head. “Wrong. Not everyone thinks as fast as you do.”