“You all laughed, and I happened to look down toward the end of the table. Toward Olive Thorin. And for a moment—only a moment—I thought she was my mother. The expression was the same, you see. The same one I saw on the morning when I opened the wrong door at the wrong time and came upon my mother and her—”

“Stop it!” she cried, pulling back from his hands. Inside her, everything was suddenly in motion, all the mooring-lines and buckles and clamps she’d been using to hold herself together seeming to melt at once. “Stop it, just stop it, I can’t listen to you talk about her!”

She groped out for Pylon, but now the whole world was wet prisms. She began to sob. She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her again, and she did not resist them.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said. “I’m so ashamed and so frightened and I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my father’s face and... and...”

And I’ll never be able to find it again, she wanted to say, but she didn’t have to say anything. He stopped her mouth with his kisses. At first she just let herself be kissed... and then she was kissing him back, kissing him almost furiously. She wiped the wetness from beneath his eyes with soft little sweeps of her thumbs, then slipped her palms up his cheeks as she had longed to do. The feeling was exquisite; even the soft rasp of the stubble close to the skin was exquisite. She slid her arms around his neck, her open mouth on his, holding him and kissing him as hard as she could, kissing him there between the horses, who simply looked at each other and then went back to cropping grass.

9

They were the best kisses of his whole life, and never forgotten: the yielding pliancy of her lips and the strong shape of her teeth under them, urgent and not shy in the least; the fragrance of her breath, the sweet line of her body pressed against his. He slipped a hand up to her left breast, squeezed it gently, and felt her heart speeding under it. His other hand went to her hair and combed along the side of it, silk at her temple. He never forgot its texture.

Then she was standing away from him, her face flaming with blush and passion, one hand going to her lips, which he had kissed until they were swollen. A little trickle of blood ran from the corner of the lower one. Her eyes, wide on his. Her bosom rising and falling as if she had just run a race. And between them a current that was like nothing he had ever felt in his life. It ran like a river and shook like a fever.