They did not speak words again until later when they were down at the river both naked then—after he’d come those few steps forward from the Ford—forever after not able to recall how he traveled that distance and their mouths struck together so their teeth broke through their bloodied lips as they suckled and fed upon the other’s mouth before he picked her up and carried her into the house, the two of them already a one-formed creature lumbering through the kitchen knocking over a chair and down the hall to the bedroom where he threw her down upon the bed, driving the wind from her lungs as a hole in her his soul might fill, she lifting her legs and skirts toward her chest as he knelt and tore the knickers from her and there was language there in the room but no words. After that first brief wild spiral when she rolled him off of her and stood without looking at him and removed the fragments of her clothes, her breasts already bruised and raw from his lips and teeth, bending over to take him in her mouth until he was full and strained again and then over him in a hard wild flail that had him arched from the bed in a beaded bright pain far beyond his command or desire to stop, he helpless before her driving, even his vision swept red and he could not tell in that not-darkness where he left off and she began; a liquid-gripped pair of fists connected them and the sea of red over his eyes pulsed with the blood of both of them, driven each time in perfect time with the cries breaking from her mouth hot against his face.

And still not speaking as they lay apart on the bed gathering their wind back and each benumbed and someway still joined and already each alone, the afternoon light through the windows where the sun fell over the floor, the room hot and still enough to hear the settle of the other’s limbs against the mangled sheets. They lay a time like that, on their backs, just not touching, neither willing nor wanting to speak, and then he stood off the bed and she followed him and they went back through the house and she gathered up towels spread over the backs of kitchen chairs to dry from days before and they went one beside the other along the path they’d made through the thick boles of the widely spaced evergreens, across the sheep meadow and over the fence, down along the river to the bend where they always came. She sat up on the ledge of rock and watched him swim and then came in after him so they both came out of the river at the same time, hair slicked back and bodies tingling and for just a moment shining with heat and water like spun honey before the air began to dry them and even then they were still silent but lay back on the towels spread on the boulder.