"Oh," she said, taking a deep breath and giving him a much tighter smile than the enthusiastic ones she'd showered on him before. "Well, congratulations, I guess."
"Thanks, I guess," he said.
"I've just broken my engagement," she said, as though engagements-and maybe even new marriages-were made to be broken.
"Yes, I heard. To Geoffrey Atwell." Tom wasn't sure of the protocol when someone announced their broken engagement without a hint of sorrow. "Too bad. Decent guy, Atwell."
"That's what we've been trying to tell her!" said Dean Gordon.
Charity rolled her eyes at both men, pulling on her black leather gloves and sighing. "Geoffrey Atwell will still be waiting if I change my mind, Daddy. There's no rush."
He doubted Atwell felt the same, but Tom hid his true feelings with a grim smile, turning away from Charity and facing Dean Gordon. "Sir, I'll see you next week."
Neville Gordon smiled at Tom, ushering his daughter out of the office and flicking the lights off before saying, "I meant it about dinner, Tom. New Year's, eh? Come for dinner on New Year's Day, won't you?"
"Yes," agreed Charity with barely concealed machinations narrowing her eyes. "Come for New Year's. And bring the little woman too."
***
While Tom had gone to Kinsey Hall to interview for a job, he'd tasked Eleanora with trying to find an apartment for them somewhere in or around Cornwall. But the small towns around Cornwall-Weston, Sharon, New Preston, Kent and Warren-didn't have many apartments for rent; they had houses. And most of the houses in these quiet little towns were asking almost a thousand dollars per month for rent. The problem with this-aside from the fact that it was highway robbery-was that paying up the first and last months' rent and security deposit would leave Tom only two thousand dollars in savings. Even with her saved eight hundred dollars thrown into the mix, it simply wasn't much to live on.
"What do you think, Mrs. English?" asked the real estate agent, Gladys Hoover, who was kind, but clearly had other things she'd rather be doing two days after Christmas.
"It's lovely," said Eleanora, looking around the living room of a three-bedroom house that was way too big for her and Tom. "But nine-fifty a month is just too much."
Gladys huffed impatiently. "My son's having a holiday do in an hour. I don't suppose we could look at more tomorrow?"
"I promised my husband that I'd-"
"Very well, Mrs. English. We'll go see another. Fair warning, this next one is absurdly small. Still," she flicked a glance over Eleanora's threadbare, out-of-date coat, "maybe it will do."
Eleanora got into Gladys's Cadillac and, grateful that they were all small talked – out, looked out the window at the rolling hills of Connecticut, covered in pristine white.
It was a beautiful place, if somewhat stark, though Tom had assured her as they drove into town that it was peerless in springtime. He'd even recited a poem for her just before they turned into the parking lot of the Howard Johnson's:
So when the earth is alive with gods,
And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod,
And the grass sings in the meadows,
And the flowers smile in the shadows,
Sits my heart at ease,
Hearing the song of the leas,
Singing the songs of the meadows.
"Who wrote that?" she asked, grinning at him with delight. "You?"
"No, sunshine," he'd replied. "Robert Louis Stevenson, though it's sometimes credited to D. H. Lawrence."
"Do I know anything he wrote?"
Tom chuckled softly. "Lawrence? He wrote a very naughty book called Lady Chatterley's Lover."
"How naughty?"
"Very."
"Tell me some of it."
"How about I read you some of it?"
"Tonight?" she'd asked.
"Tomorrow night," he'd bargained. "I'll have to dig through the boxes to find it. And anyway, wife, you need some sleep tonight."
He'd made love to her only once last night in their motel room bed, and the rhythm of their bodies moving together echoed in the squeak of the box spring.
"Well, this is romantic," he commented at one point, and they both started laughing, despite the fact that he was deeply embedded inside her. Somehow their giggles turned to happy kisses to heat to now to more to yes, and suddenly, she didn't heard the squeaks at all. She heard only his breath against her neck, the pounding of her heart in her head, and felt the clenching and writhing and stream of liquid heat on her skin as he pulled out of her at the last moment and came beneath her breasts.
She would never get enough of him. Never.
"Here we are," chirped Gladys. "The smallest house in Weston."
Eleanora looked up at a small white house, neat and tidy, with a front porch big enough for two rockers. An expanse of white fields spread out behind the house, with nothing troubling her view of the Berkshire Hills beyond. Windows flanked a black-painted door, whose brass knocker glistened like gold in the light of the setting sun. The house smiled at her in its own way, and she smiled back, thinking, I'm home.
"We'll take it," she murmured.
"You haven't even seen it yet," protested Gladys.
"How much is it?" asked Eleanora, without glancing away from her house.
"Six hundred a month."
"We'll take it," she said again.
***
Meeting her back at the hotel late that afternoon, after spending some time at the local library, Tom shared the good news that he was the newest faculty member of Kinsey Hall, and Eleanora shared the good news that they now had a six-month lease on a tiny house in nearby Weston.
They celebrated by having dinner in the motel restaurant and splitting a hot fudge sundae before trudging back through the snow to their room. Once inside, Tom turned up the heat, and produced a shabby paperback from his jacket pocket.
"That," said Eleanora, toeing off her boots and hanging her coat in the closet, "looks like a very naughty book."
Tom fairly hummed with anticipation. "It is."
Despite the fact that he'd be bringing home only about a thousand dollars a month after taxes, he felt buoyant tonight-excited, even-as he faced the prospect of a life with Eleanora. She was resourceful and plucky, supportive and enthusiastic, and he would work as hard as he needed to, to keep her happy . . . starting with a memorable fucking orgasm tonight, after introducing her to D. H. Lawrence's insanely erotic novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
"So?" she asked, turning around and giving him a slow, saucy look. "Do you want me to sit on the bed while you read? Or . . .?"
"I was thinking we could read back and forth," he said. "And while one person reads, the other . . . strips."
"Inventive. Strip reading instead of strip poker."
He grinned at her, shrugging out of his overcoat and taking off his boots. "Now we're even."
She sat down on the bed, looking up at him. "Start reading."
Tom opened the old book, turning to one of several dog-eared pages to comply with her demand.
"His body was urgent against her, and she hadn't the heart any more to fight . . . She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way," read Tom, his eyes flicking up near constantly to watch his wife slowly, so slowly, pull her sweater over her blonde hair and drop it on the floor.
She reached out her hand for the book. He handed it to her, pointing to where he'd left off.
"She was giving up . . . she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes . . . He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering," she finished, her voice lower and more gravelly than it had been when she started.
Tom's sweater lay on top of hers.
"Your turn," she said.
He took the book, watching her as he recited from memory, "Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside."
Eleanora's turtleneck shirt joined their sweaters on the floor, and Tom dropped his eyes to her breasts, watching as her nipples puckered, pushing against the material of her bra, straining and hard. His blood surged, and his cock swelled behind his jeans.