Malcolm stood with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t even wave. God, I love him, I told myself, and started up the stairs into the cockpit. God, I’ve never loved anybody that much in all my life. God, I hope he loves me. God, I hope to God I’m good enough for him.

This ice-cold Georgia aristocrat with his fierce libido. I know something now no twenty-year-old girl could have known. He could feel emotion but he couldn’t let it show. Actions speak louder than words, a wiser, older lover would one day tell me and I would remember Malcolm and wish I had known that then.

This passion and that dead body in that coffin ended any debate I may have had about education or art or going to the big world. I wanted only one thing now. To be rolled up in Malcolm’s arms. Whatever light I followed took me straight to where the only defeat of death we know of lies.

“When I’m with him I think I will never die,” I told Charles William when I got him on the phone to tell him about the weekend. “When he’s with me I forget the bad things. If he touches me I’m not afraid. It’s all I think about. I don’t think of anything but him.”

“Then go be with him this summer. You can talk them into it. Ariane is scared to death of you.”

“Do you think he loves me?”

“He had a fight over that teddy bear. You didn’t know that? He didn’t tell you? Someone said something about that bear and he almost killed them.”

“You should have seen his aunt lying there dead. I can’t forget it. That’s where we’re going, Charles William. Sooner or later we will be there too.”

“But not this summer, Dee. This summer I’ll be at Taliesin and you’ll be in Atlanta. We’ll be talking and breathing and the earth will be in orbit if we’re lucky.”

“Oh, God, Charles William. I love you so much. Why can’t I love someone like you?”

“We love each other, Dee. It’s just a different kind of love.”

“I have to be with him. I don’t care what I have to do.”

“Then go to Atlanta. Make them let you go.”

Chapter

15