Allan kept his distance with difficulty; Kate was too much the dynamo, too filled with life and the fire of enterprise. She electrified him even at her arm’s-length remove. She shone with the quality whose loss had impelled him toward an unusually early retirement: the simple joy of dedication, the ecstasy that comes from giving oneself wholeheartedly to work one genuinely wants to do.
She asked for nothing. He had to drag her away from the farm to drive her into the city for clothes, shoes, and grooming items. Her reluctance to allow him to spend on her made it difficult verging on impossible, but he would not relent. He used marketing and Mass as the rationales. If she wanted to sell her produce widely, he told her, she’d have to cultivate recognition and trust as well as her crops, by becoming socially acquainted with more of Onteora than just him. Besides, contemporary mores to the side, it was unseemly to attend church in stained jeans and work boots. She acquiesced, at first reluctantly, then with visibly growing pleasure.
It grew upon him over time that, while he had adjusted to being alone after his divorce from Marie, he had never come to enjoy it. He was not truly a solitary man. He’d been plagued by his sense of unworthiness and his awkwardness with others, and had come to prefer isolation to their torments. Yet in Kate’s company he could feel neither.
One June morning, she woke him by force, shaking him out of a dreamless slumber to the rising light of dawn. He focused with difficulty, blearily wondering what emergency could justify her unprecedented invasion of his bedroom. The clock on his nightstand made it half past five.
She insisted that he don a robe and follow her, and led him to the fields she’d cultivated. To his sleep-hazed vision, all appeared as it had the day before. She scampered a few paces into the field, squatted, and beckoned to him to join her.
The scallions had sprouted. Green shoots about an inch long had penetrated to the air and sunlight. He looked from them to her, and found in her smile a joy that words could not capture. Instead of speaking, he raised her to her feet and offered his hand in congratulations.
She stepped past his hand and wrapped him in an embrace of crushing power. He returned it hesitantly. Twin streams of tears dampened his shoulder.
* * *
That night, Allan teetered on the verge of sleep when a warm intrusion made its presence known against his side. He groped through the darkness and found a cushiony silken mass: a woman’s breast.
“Kate?”
She chuckled. “Unless you’ve got someone else coming over.” A hand landed on his chest and slid caressingly down to his groin. He became erect at once.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
“But—“
“Shut up, Allan.” She reached into his boxers’ fly and took his organ in her hand. “We farm girls aren’t into a lot of conversation at times like this.” Seemingly in one motion, she divested him of his shorts and rolled him on top of her.
She was muscular yet soft and welcoming, a blanket of loving flesh that sought him with an eagerness he’d never encountered even as a teenager. He had to be the one to slow them down, to delay actual coitus and make room for foreplay. As he acquainted himself with her body, kissing, nibbling, and stroking his way along her bounties, she clutched at him repeatedly, as if she were afraid that he might somehow slip away. He reassured her with fingertips, lips, and tongue, using all he remembered of the art of love from his distant days of joy with Marie.
When she was gasping raggedly beneath him, desperate for the ultimate union , he gently parted her labia, started to slide into her, and hit an unexpected barrier. He pulled back at once.
“What’s wrong?” she breathed.
“Are you wearing a tampon?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“Shut up, Allan!” And she slammed herself onto him with irresistible force.
They cried out together from the pain of her deflowering, but in the aftermath it was quickly forgotten. She would not allow their bodies to be separated; she barely allowed him enough latitude to move inside her. It was mere seconds to her first shuddering orgasm, a minute or two to her second one. As she approached the third, the tides in Allan’s groin swelled toward their peak. He could not restrain them. Her fingers dug deeply into his buttocks as he arched and came.
She screamed deafeningly as his seed flowed into her. She refused to let him withdraw even slightly, pulling him against her so powerfully that his pelvis groaned from the stress. His outpouring of semen seemed to go on forever, a torrent no effort of his could stanch. The force and duration of his orgasm left him exhausted, almost too weak to breathe, but still conscious enough to fret.