The gentle silence of the old woods did not soothe her.  Nor the country hills, nor the soft song of the tall grasses, hissing blade upon blade. The loss of her husband turned sweetness into something bitter, and then tasteless, and then bitter again, when she least expected it.

She toured the old cabin like a ghost, her naked feet wearing slow tracks in the polished hardwood floors. The windows had no dressings. The floors, no rugs. Everything unfinished, half-imagined. One small couch squatted in the spacious living room—an overstuffed love seat upholstered in butter-soft leather. Golden, like a field of wheat. She’d chosen it specially, like the centerpieces at their wedding. Jonquil and tuberose.

Some days she forgot to change out of her nightgown. She hadn’t packed underwear. Her single suitcase lay open on the bare floor in the master bedroom, its contents a confusion of jumbled garments, toiletries and half-crumpled papers, all of it strung halfway onto the floor like the entrails of some slaughtered beast.

She spent long stretches standing in front of the veranda doors, just inside the bedroom, thinking of how he’d looked in his suit. Neat and crisp, even after a long day. Chocolate hair perfectly combed.

Once she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass: a diaphanous white foam with long dark hair, pale face and glossy black eyes, superimposed on a verdant scene à la The Sound of Music.

Her breasts showed clearly through the fabric.

She thought of the first time he’d touched them. The first time anyone had touched them—besides herself.

How confused she’d been when it hadn’t felt good.

The grasses on the hill outside swayed and bowed to the heavy breeze. Her breasts remembered his hands. Ached. At age fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five. His touch had grown gentler over the years. Less clumsy.

A familiar heat pooled in her sex, surprising her.

How long has it been?

She went to the kitchen and the paper calendar that hung on a nail beside the phone. A picture of a baby sleeping peacefully in a wicker basket, like a fleshy little jelly bean, creased and plump.

May 23rd.

Two months, four days. She looked at the clock. Sixteen hours.

My husband has been dead for two months, four days, and sixteen hours.

She tasted the knowledge carefully, expecting bitterness. Nothing.

She flipped the calendar off the wall and shuffled the pages back.

April. March. February. January. December. Rewind.

My birthday. Number thirty-three.

After a quiet dinner at a moderately fancy downtown restaurant, he’d taken her over the back of the couch. Because she’d asked him to. He’d even left his glasses on. It had lasted eight minutes. She remembered looking at the clock on the DVD player, the bright green digits bouncing up and down.

She flipped back to May and put the calendar back on the wall.

After staring at the picture of the baby for six solid minutes, she reached up, yanked the calendar off its nail, and threw it in the small trash can by the refrigerator.

I wonder how long until I forget what day it is again?

***

Days later, she sat on the wide, empty porch, feet dangling over a carpet of fine wild grass and weeds crowned with tiny white flowers. She’d traded the nightgown for a pair of faded jeans and a plain grey tank top. No bra. She liked the way her breasts felt, standing high against the single layer of cotton. She’d never gone braless outside before. But the closest neighbor was more than a mile away. And it was hot. The air was thick with moisture and the swelling, buzzing song of cicadas.

He’d hated cicadas. And nature. But he’d bought this cabin for her.

Had he said why? It had been such a surprise to her.

Like remembering something from another life, she conjured the conversation.

They’d both forgotten their 10th wedding anniversary. He’d seemed so ashamed about that. It had been strange to her. Usually it was her job to plan their anniversaries. But she’d forgotten. Why should he be ashamed?

And then he’d brought up babies. Didn’t she want to keep trying?

He’d looked worried.

You’ve been distant, he said.

And she felt a spark of anger. You come home late. Should I sleep during the day?

He frowned. I just want you to be happy.

His face was crisp in her memory. So earnest. So sweet.

So fuck me, she’d wanted to say. Or yell at me. Hit me. Hold me.

But she said, I am happy, and the words had tasted so bitter on her tongue.

A week later he showed her pictures of the cabin. I thought you’d like to take a vacation. A little getaway, someplace peaceful. Just the two of us.

And she’d felt tired, so tired.

She looked up at the sky above their cabin getaway and remembered being very small, watching a solar eclipse from the back porch of the house where she grew up.

Her mother’s stern warning came back: Never look directly at the sun. Your eyes will be hurt, maybe forever.

In an odd moment of delayed rebellion, she tried, for a moment, to confront that blazing golden ball, and found that she couldn’t. The lingering white mark it left on her retinas was oddly comforting. Everywhere she looked, an echo of the sun drifted along with her, crowning the world with a fuzzy white halo, obscuring anything she tried to look at directly. Each little flower at her feet became a tiny ball of flames growing from a delicate green stem. She crowned the tree just beyond the front path, humming as she did it.

From top to bottom, you’re so bright,

There’s only splendor for the sight!

Later, as the halo began to fade away and the light in the sky went with it, a rare, cool breeze made her breasts come to sharp little points, and she looked down at them, had an unexpected thought—a sudden memory of his head at her breast, his hands and mouth.

He’d touched her there with the same focus that one might apply to eating a particularly good sandwich or sipping a cold drink on a hot day. But she’d never protested, had she? She’d never asked him, Will you touch my breasts with tender hands? Will you worship them?

The bitterness returned, curling at the back of her throat.

In the beginning, his pleasure had been enough. She’d let him think that was all she needed, and he’d never questioned it.

Why would he?

The breeze came back, stronger now, making all the grasses bend towards her, and one of the little flowers stooped just far enough to kiss her foot with its tiny petals.

Suddenly she was sure. He would have done it, if she’d asked him.

He would have tried.

For the first time in two months and seven days, she cried.

***

She woke alone on her bed in the wee hours of the morning to the dark outside and the breeze that wandered in through the open veranda doors. Her nightgown was damp with sweat, so she stripped it away and lay naked on her back, and the breeze came again in a crawling caress that reached the length of her body and curled between her legs.

The veranda doors thumped back gently against the wall in a soft staccato rhythm, punctuated by the chorus of crickets outside and the distant hiss of green things bending to the night sky.

His caress came on the next gust of breath and curled along her body again, fingers gliding with the scent of night-blooming jasmine as his weight settled warmly beside her on the bed.

She rolled slightly towards him, soft and heavy with welcome, and his big body bowed to her, mouth to breast, taking the tip gently against his tongue.

Rising to him on a whisper, a plea, she pulled tight in his arms and felt a deep, wordless murmur of reassurance against her breast, pulling her nipple deeper into his mouth. His hand, broad and hot and slightly callused, enveloped her other breast, taking the flesh in a careful grip and rolling it gently, finger and thumb worrying the tip so that her breath came in rushing fits.

Her hands found his head and skimmed through his hair—thick and soft and smelling of some indescribable masculine scent; a shampoo he’d used for as long as she had known him. The scent aroused her as it had long ago, when she’d first fallen in love with him. With the scent came a visceral memory—the first rush of infatuation. The joy of a girlish fantasy brought impossibly to life by a sweet, lanky boy with broad shoulders and thick chocolate hair.

His name fell from her lips on a gasp as his mouth released one breast and turned to the other. The tip of the breast he’d abandoned stiffened under the cool air and the slippery stroke of his fingers; the wet heat of his mouth on the other made her shake and dig her nails into his arms. He took his time, lingering over the distended tip with delicious languor, pulling and pulling at the other until it stood impossibly tight. And then he switched back and started all over again, the sensations shooting deep into her body, drawing trails of pleasure along her abdomen and into her core.

No—she thought, when he drew back to hold her breasts with both hands and look down at them, his eyes giving off a faint gleam in the darkness—this was better than the girlish fantasy. He pushed her breasts together tightly and bent to them again, slipping his open mouth back and forth across the bundled peaks. No virgin imaginings could conjure the slippery heat of his mouth, the texture of his tongue, the wicked sound of her nipple slipping from the suction of his lips. There was nothing rosy and romantic about the weight of his body against her side—nothing sweet about the rasp of his beard and the scent of his skin as the summer heat beaded on his back. Her hand snuck across his thigh and found him, naked and hot, his erection standing stiffly against his belly. Those sweetly erotic teenage daydreams paled and burned away in the face of something much deeper and more honest.

His free hand was between her legs, and she hadn’t the wherewithal to wonder how he could touch and suck and touch with such certainty all at once. She gripped his cock in one hand and tried to remember how to touch him, what had made him jerk and tremble. Instead, she only lifted herself to him and whispered, There, and Yes and More, as she never had before, and ran her tongue over the expanse of his naked shoulder where it dropped close to her mouth.

And when his weight and heat came over her, pressing her down into the mattress, she cried Yes! and I missed you so much!—acutely aware that it was both the truth, and a terrible lie—and opened her legs to him, gasping when he slipped down her body to touch and suck at her sex as he had her breasts.

The world broke up into sensations. Broad shoulders pressing her legs wide. Scrape of beard. Wet glide of mouth. Searching fingers. Hot tongue—slick sensations, edged and sharp with the glitter of pleasure.

She pushed against him with a demand she had never before honored, and he answered with a rush of hunger, rising up over her in a black surge. He was nothing but a shadow above her, a familiar silhouette and weight, mounting her with unfamiliar urgency. Urgency that thrilled her and lifted her hungrily to him.

The sound he made as he thrust inside—deep and rusty and utterly animal—was unlike anything she’d ever heard before. That sound struck her like a lightning bolt, sizzling and crackling along every nerve ending.

He felt different inside her, too. A hot stretching presence, fuller and heavier than she remembered. And then the rhythm he took—her thoughts crumbled into buzzing fragments—heavy, measured thrusts; a slow, deliberate glide that lifted her and drove her deep into the mattress at turns, touching her so deeply it woke nerves that had long been sleeping.

This, this was what she’d longed for. She clutched him, rode his rhythm desperately, sucked his mouth and drank his low sounds of pleasure deep into her body.

His thrusts took on a lunging sort of urgency, and the fever-burn went white-hot between them, lifting her up off the bed in a perfect arc of pleasure, orgasm gripping her like a seizure and tearing a voiceless rasp from her throat. He reared up as she came and held her hips so that he could thrust into the spasming grip of her sex, and his cry echoed hers as the orgasm struck him.

***

Later, while she floated in a haze of gratification, just on the edge of sleep, he turned her gently onto her belly and began again, entering her tenderly from behind, holding her breasts in his hands as he gave her the length of his cock with agonizing slowness, kissing and biting her neck, her shoulders, her back. Tears of pleasure and gratitude came stinging to her eyes.

This too, she had wanted, without even knowing it. This teasing tenderness. The banked passion. His thrusts tuned to her pleasure, timed to her body’s rhythm, designed to reawaken desires so recently satisfied.

And when she began to pant against the friction of his body, he changed the angle just so, made it deeper, and let the head of his cock bump gently against her cervix, nudging further, looking for that little bit of extra space, until he surprised her with the final inch of his length, settling deeper into her body than she had ever known it possible. And then he simply rested there, occupying her body in such a way that she could hardly breathe for the intimacy of it—he had never been so totally inside her. And then he withdrew in one long glide and gave her his cock all over again, smoothly, letting her feel the length of him from tip to base, again and again, until she pushed back against him and sobbed in desperation—for what, she didn’t know, because nothing could feel better than this.

This time, when she came, he pushed her down, pinning her against the bed, tilting her hips so that he could give her perfect, focused strokes, rubbing the head of his cock against that spot inside so that she came in a bucking spasm so violent he had to use all his weight to keep her in place for his final thrusts.

When the spasms had passed, he was still there, still hard inside her, thrusting now just for himself, riding her with such power that it took her breath away. When he came, she pulled herself tight around him and held him like that, reveling in the guttural sound he made and the sensation of his cock jerking violently inside her.

***

Afterwards he lay stretched out against her side, kissing her languidly, and for a long, long time. His mouth sliding and sucking and savoring in a way that built slowly to a burn, until she realized her heart was pounding painfully in her chest. He sucked her lips, searched her mouth with his tongue; cherished her like some once-in-a-lifetime delicacy. And when at last she broke away panting, with lips near-raw and burning, he moved down and kissed her throat with equal ardor, trailing across her chest, her shoulders, her breasts.  He kissed her belly and let his fingers wander to the lips of her sex, probing delicately, stroking feather-light and making her tremble, slipping down to the opening and circling it oh-so-tenderly, as though to soothe her. And then he was moving down again, leaning over her thigh to lick across the soft lips, away and then back, dipping down to touch the tip of his tongue to her clit.

She shuddered, heart jumping in anticipation.

He pushed her legs apart, pulling one thigh over his shoulder, rotating her hips towards his face. His tongue came again, much deeper this time, rasping over flesh still swollen and sensitive from her most recent orgasm. She gasped a little, and he latched on with sudden hunger, sucking the folds into his mouth, using his tongue like a cup to draw at her clit. Her pelvis rotated towards him of its own accord, and he burrowed into her, holding the suction with his lips and rolling the flat of his tongue to the top of her slit, pulling and dragging at her clit with such focus that she cried out raggedly and clutched his hair, struggling not to grind against his mouth.

A moment later he reared up again, pulling her hips with him, holding her so that only her shoulders still made contact with the bed, legs dangling helplessly over his shoulders. She began to whimper in breathless exultation as he returned to that rasping, sucking rhythm, tongue rolling, scraping and bussing her with his face so that it seemed only the inner channel of her sex lacked stimulation. She was rocking against him now, bracing her heels against his back, but he’d chosen the position well. He could control the angle and the contact, so the suction never faltered. Her inner walls clenched wetly against the desire to feel him there again.

As if he’d read her mind, his right hand abandoned her hip, and his fingers slipped inside her, curling and searching until she rasped a guttural sound of gratitude and an orgasm began to coalesce somewhere between the tips of his fingers and the place where his tongue worried at her clit.

Tears of joy stung her throat. She bucked against his face, against his hand. He began to make a deep, rumbling, animal sound that touched her someplace primal, calling forth a sort of primal excitation, tinged with fear. His teeth scraped her clit once, and she cried I’m coming! but his mouth was suddenly gone, his hand gone, and cold air struck her sex.

With a cry of denial, she looked down, but he was already pushing inside, folding her legs back against her body and pinning her with his weight. The orgasm rose again instantly—driven by the length of his cock as it wedged inside her—rose and ignited as he began to pump himself straight to the hilt with incredible ferocity, striking a bolt of lightning right at the mouth of her womb.

She came, bucking and fighting blindly for some kind of leverage, clawing his shoulders and jamming her hips against him while he gripped her with both hands and rode her with pure, animal focus.

His orgasm came seconds later, and he made a sound for which she could find no word—a groan and a growl and roar all at once—and the sensation of his cock spasming inside her brought her again, sobbing and sinking her teeth into his arm where he braced it beside her on the mattress.

Moments later, lying limp and thoughtless beneath him, as she began falling gently away from the world and into a deep, dreamless sleep, his whisper came after her, drifting along the edge of oblivion.

I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

***

When she thought of it in the crisp and sober light of day, she would not be sure that he had really been there.

She awakened to an empty bed, an aching body, and the familiar scent of man on her skin—and to the knowledge that her husband was dead three months.

She looked at the open veranda doors. Imagined a strange man walking by in the night, looking in. Seeing her naked on the sweat-stained sheets.

It gave her a shocking, delicious sort of thrill.

But then she thought of his hands and the taste of his mouth. The scent of his shampoo. The texture of his hair.

Perhaps she’d dreamed it.

The grasses on the hill beyond the cabin bent and rippled in the breeze like water. The trees beyond stood starkly against the open sky, jagged teeth in a wide open maw.

I loved him, she thought, with gentle finality.

The truth of it struck her in a slow wave--pain, regret, guilt.

Relief.

A bird swooped low over the hill outside. Skimmed the grass and rushed towards the house, darting upward just before it reached the open doors, wings flaring.

A bluebird.

She looked down at her open hands and laughed.

I loved him, and now he’s gone.

And she cried. At last, in a great, sobbing torrent--laughing again at her own bitterness as it bled away, at the disintegrating sense of imprisonment. Shackles crumbling from her spirit as though formed of dust.

Self-made illusions.

And when she walked the cabin’s halls and stood on the empty porch, the song of the grass and the forest moved her as it never had before. Like a child, she ran, naked, with the grass slapping her thighs, breathing the green smells and the musk of the earth, and knowing that she was alive.

End.