The right to hold you ever so tight
And feel in the night
The nearness of you”
He realized Goldie was nowhere to be found.
Twenty-Four
PETER’S PLACE
It was a little past midnight when Goldie awoke in Peter’s bed. He was breathing heavily, tired and satisfied from their lovemaking. He was fit and smooth-skinned with little body hair and a smaller penis than Markie’s, but his experience and knowledge in bed were certainly equal. Not wanting to disturb him, she slowly got out of bed, spotted a dark-green V-neck sweater lying across a chair, and slipped it on. It covered a few cute moles on her stomach and her round bottom and stopped about six inches above her knees. She had a slight case of bedhead, but her unruly dark-brown, long hair looked sexy. With her arms crossed, she looked over her shoulder at her sleeping lover as a naughty new headline popped into her head for the article he’d written about her:
Reporter dips pen in journalist’s inkwell.
She smiled a little, then stepped out of the bedroom.
Peter’s house was built in 1868 but wasn’t one of the larger Victorian-style two-story houses like his parents, or Martha Eggleston’s, or Jason Shirk’s. It was a single-story miner’s cottage, and the town still had about a dozen of them standing. Most had been washed away during the dam collapse and flood of 1884. The cottage was about 900 square feet and consisted of a living room with a fireplace, a small kitchen in the back, an added-on bathroom with a shower but no tub, and a bedroom. The living room had once been divided into a living room and a second bedroom for children, but this second bedroom had been removed to expand the living room. Peter told Goldie that once upon a time, a family of five used to live in the small house. But now, half of the living room had a sofa facing the fireplace where pine logs still glowed with subtle orange heat, while the other half had been converted into an office with a desk, chair, telephone, radio, typewriter, and a bookcase filled with books. Between the books at his office and home, it was very obvious that Peter was a voracious reader.
Goldie looked at the fire for a moment and decided to add another log from the brick hearth. She wandered around the living room, trying to get a better sense of Peter’s life. Her knees and bare feet were a little cold on this December night, but her curiosity about the man she had just had sex with superseded the chill. She noticed he had no Christmas decorations up but made no judgment about that. She wandered into the kitchen, figuring he probably had some liquor somewhere. After turning on a light and opening a couple of cabinets, she found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and made herself a whiskey on the rocks. After that, she left the lights on in the kitchen, went back into the living room, and, just as she had at his office, began to examine some of the books on his shelves.
A couple of Manila folders were sitting on top of the books. She picked one up, set her drink down on the desk, and then sat in the chair behind it. She reached over and pulled the chain of a small desk lamp for light. Opening the folder, she looked inside. It was apparently the beginning of either a short story or a novel Peter was writing. Interested, she picked up her drink and started to sip and read while the fire on the other side of the room began to crackle back to life.
About thirty minutes later, Peter awoke, realized he was alone, and rolled out of bed. He went to his closet and slipped on a blue robe, then emerged from the bedroom to see Goldie standing with her back to him in the living room. The room was now dark except for the light from the fire, and she was staring out at the night from one of his two living room windows on either side of the front door. The evening was still and frozen with the snow occasionally sparkling from a waning moon that peeked in and out of clouds. He saw that the fire had been resurrected and that there was an empty glass sitting on a small table at the end of the sofa. Then he glanced over at his desk. The desk light was off, and everything was as he had left it.
“Hey,” he said warmly. “What’re you doing?”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Just watchin’ the night. It’s so peaceful and there’s a few snowflakes floatin’ around here and there; romantic and forbiddin’ all at once. It’s like we’re the only two people in the whole world.”
He came up behind her while she continued to look out the window and cupped her breasts with his hands, then noticed she was wearing his sweater, which really appealed to him.
“You were absolutely incredible tonight,” he said softly, kissing her neck. “You took my breath away.”
“Did I?” she asked with uncertainty. “I haven’t been with another man except my former boyfriend for a long time. I don’t know what you must think of me now.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, still holding her close.
“I don’t know about the morality of this—” she was going to say “time,” but paused and changed it to “town.”
“It’s pretty much like anywhere else,” he replied softly. “There are liberal views and conservative views. The norms of society might say that a ‘good girl’ waits until marriage to be intimate with a man, but that doesn’t always happen. Especially with a war on. It certainly doesn’t mean the good girl is anything less. It just means she’s human.”
“You’re a gentleman to say it.” She patted his hands, still holding her breasts, but wanted to move away, so he let go.
“I have no idea if I’m a good girl or not,” she continued, “but I certainly needed tonight. There’s been a lot of weird things happenin’ in my life and I—well—it was nice just to be desired and held for a while.”
“Oh, you were definitely desired,” he affirmed.
She looked toward the bedroom. “I’ve gotta get dressed. You’ve gotta get me back to the hotel.”
“What? No. Stay the night.”
“I can’t. People are already goin’ to talk about how late I returned to my room. I don’t even know if the front doors at the hotel are still open this late.”
“I think somebody is usually at the front desk all night,” he said.
“Then, I need to get back.”
“Well, wait a minute,” he implored. “Can’t we talk about a few things first?”
