He teased her buttons while she took lipfuls of his mouth, nipping gently at his lower lip.
“Memory can't recall what the eyes haven't seen, Karl,” she whispered, braving a hand upon the inside of his knee as he knelt before her.
“But you have worked so hard on your pretty gingham dress. It is a shame it got so little use.” Buttons came open one by breathtaking one.
“It would rather lie peacefully on the floor than get wrinkled and crushed,” she whispered against his lips.
“Would it?” he asked through his kiss.
“You said no questions, Karl.”
“These are not questions, Anna, these are answers.”
Then Karl's hand found the warmth of her breast and followed the valley between her ribs to the warm, low place that hungered for his touch.
Her eyes blinked once, slowly, as the contact of his hand swept the breath from her. Open-eyed again, she moved her hand to cup him, taking her turn at answers.
They leaned into each other's hands. Karl's moved exploringly. Anna's followed suit. They kissed, touching, learning each other, asking questions with only their hands.
“Warm . . .” Karl murmured in her ear.
“Hard . . .” Anna murmured in answer.
“Beautiful . . .” he said, knowing before he saw.
“Beautiful . . .” she answered, knowing, too.
They lost their balance and clung. They regained it and separated, looking deeply into each other's faces by the fire that blazed. And then there were only vivid sensations.
Light and heat accompanying his hands as they moved down the remaining dress buttons, then fell away in invitation as he knelt with knees slightly apart before her. Heat and light on the movement of her fingers as they opened the line of his shirt buttons, then dropped obediently to her sides to wait. Gilded shoulder as he pushed the dress back and the fireplay danced along one side of her body. Golden skin as she answered by taking his shirt in her hands and wresting it from his shrug. Adoring eyes as he took the hem of her shift in both hands and pulled it upward until she raised her arms. Roving glances as they knelt, resplendent in the fire's light, letting the goodness build. Time holding its breath as he slowly plied her last barrier, curving his palms to the shape of her hips as he rustled her naked. Time beating at her breast as he dropped his hands to his thighs again, kneeling before her expectantly, waiting in the gold hue of the burning logs. The force of a long summer's love, moving her to reach out to this man and free him from the last restraint of woven threads.
And then there were only two lovers, kneeling in the glow that limned their bodies in fireshine, that splashed a half of each with orange, that picked the radiance from one pair of eyes and sent it dancing to another, eyes that wandered and worshiped, widened and wondered.
When Karl at last raised his eyes to Anna's, he beheld there a breathless wonder to match his own. Moved by it he forgot himself and spoke to her in Swedish. The lilting mellifluousness fell from his tongue as a song in Anna's ears, although she did not know what he said.
How ever could she have taunted him for this mellow, musical richness? It was, she knew now, a part of Karl she loved as much as his muscled body, his golden face, his patience and inherent goodness. She suddenly wished to understand the songful words he spoke to her in such a reverent tone.
“What did you say, Karl?” she asked, her misty eyes lifting to his.
Running a finger beneath her jaw, down the rim of light that gilded her chin, neck, breast, stomach, thigh and knee, he spoke this time in English. “Anna, you are beautiful.”
“No, say it in Swedish. Teach me to say it in Swedish.”
She watched his lips form the strange sounds. He had beautiful, bowed lips, a little full, very sensual now as he repeated, “Du ar vacker, Anna.”
Touching his lips, searching his face, she repeated, “Du ar vacker, Karl.”
With her fingertips still touching his skin, he said, “Jag älskar dig.” The way his eyes closed when the words were gone, the way he pursed his lips and cupped her palm hard against his mouth, she knew even before he repeated it, what it meant.
“Jag älskar dig, Anna,” he said, the beautiful pronunciation, Onnuh, making her heart dance crazily.
“Jag älskar dig,” Anna said softly, her Swedish sounding Yankee, but the meaning ringing forth, no matter what the language. “What did I say, Karl?” she asked in a whisper.
“You said that you love me.”
She took his face between her hands to kiss it. “Jag älskar dig,” she repeated, “Jag älskar dig, Jag älskar dig, Karl,” planting fevered kisses across his skin until she again forced his eyes closed.
Their warm flesh met. He took her tumbling down and over, until she felt soft fur below, firm flesh above, sandwiched between the two textures.
He clasped her, caressed her, kissing, learning what pleasured her when she smiled and nuzzled, then arched and moaned. With hands and tongue he brought her to a precipice where she trembled, waiting for the plunge that would carry her over. But the low sounds from her throat told him then to play her more slowly, extending the pleasure they found, each in the other.
He rolled over onto his back and stretched, taking every touch she gave, savoring the feel of her hands and lips becoming intimate with his honed body.
And then Anna slipped down and lay atop him, pressing warm and firm against him with breasts, belly, hips. Her braids had fallen down, the strands of her hair like filaments of the fire itself, surrounding her girlish face. He found a loose end, his fingers working it looser while she lay above him, kissing his neck and chest, meandering downward, downward. Soon he forgot her braids.
The two of them curled their bodies together, changed directions, kissing, tasting, trying to get enough, unable to. They gave each part of themselves freely, letting their senses expand beneath the joy. And when they hovered near their climaxes, righted again, shivering with anticipation, he made her say it one more time to compound his joy.
“Tell me again, Anna,” he uttered fiercely, one hand twined in her hair, the other touching her depths as she moved rhythmically against it. “Tell me you love me like I love you.”
“Jag älskar dig. I love you, Karl,” she said, almost savagely, underlining the meaning of this act they now shared.
Once again they found the remembered magnificence from their first time, the grace in the blending of their bodies as he entered her, the litheness of movement as they flowed into a rhythm of mutual thrust and ebb.
They passed the bounds of language, creating a new one of their own, built of lovesounds—wordless murmurs, racked breathing, throbbing silences, pleasured moans. When their strength and suppleness brought them to the limits of fulfillment, they spoke the universal language: the deep, masculine shudder and groan, the strangled female response. Then together they collapsed, spent, in sated silence, with only the pop and titter of the fire sharing their communion.
He rested in her, at peace after all this time. She stroked the damp hair at the nape of his neck. His shoulders were drying now, beneath the touch of her fingers and the fire. His mouth rested in the depth of her neck.
When they had rested so for a long time, she spoke to the ceiling where the shadows danced. “Karl, do you know what you are like?”
He spoke to her neck. “What am I like?”
She wondered if she dared tell him, yet it was there on her mind, had been there since she first touched him, since before she had first touched him.
“You're like your axe handle when you have just laid it down.”
He braced himself up to look into her face. “Like my axe handle?” he asked, puzzled.
“Smooth, warm, long, hard, curved . . . and like you once said, springy.”
“Not any more, I am not,” he said smiling.
“I knew you would tease me if I told you.”
“Yes,” he said, kissing her nose. “From now on I shall tease my Anna so she will never forget the f
eel of an axe handle.”
“Oh, Karl . . .” But her laugh came splashing.
“How I have missed that laugh,” he said.
“How I've missed your teasing.”
They smiled into each other's faces.
“Oh, Anna, you are something,” he said, gloriously happy. He let his eyes wander all over her face and hair.
“What am I?” she probed.
But he could not liken her to anything he knew. Nothing else was as good as she. “I do not know what you are. I only know what you are not. You are not Swedish, and so you must not put these awful braids in that Irish hair of yours ever again. I tried to get them out, but I have only made them worse.” Then seeing her concern, soothed it. “No, not now, Anna. You are a tempting little mess, so just leave it. And you are not fat and you are not the best cook and you are not the best gardener, but I do not care, Anna. I want you just as you are.”
“All right, Karl,” she said, looping her arms about his neck. “I promise I won't ever change.”
“Good,” he said.
“But, Karl?”
“Ya?”
“If you're going to the trouble of teaching me to read and write this winter, you might as well teach me in both languages, right off the bat.”
He could only laugh and kiss her again, saying, “Oh, Anna, you are something.”
When the night sounds were hushed and even the nocturnal creatures seemed abed, Anna and Karl joined them.
“Put the latchstring out for the boy, Anna,” Karl said, while he lifted the heavy buffalo robe and took it to their rope bed in the corner.
Anna opened the door and stood gazing out at the night for a moment. “Karl, I really never felt what you did about this place and all its plenty until I thought I had lost you. But I know now. I really know.”
“Come to bed, Anna.”
She smiled over her shoulder, then closed the door and padded across the newly hewn boards of the floor to the candlelight at their bedside.
Karl stood waiting there for her.
And in the center of the bed, between their two pillows, lay a single shaft of sweet clover, plucked from the bouquet that had graced their dinner table, where lingonberry jam now dried on two forgotten plates.
LaVyrle Spencer, The Endearment
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