Metal Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

bra. She rubbed at the red marks under her breasts, the furrows on her shoulders, then shook her hair free of its bun, feeling it sway silkily against her bare back down to her waist. It had never been cut, not since she was a baby, and this one stricture of her father’s do-it-yourself religion she did not mind. She loved her long, seal-brown hair and wished she could let it swing down her back all the time, instead of for just a few minutes in the evening.
    She put on her nightgown but did not plait her hair in its customary bedtime braids. All day, even more so than usual, she had felt pregnant with desperation. She had decided to take a risk. In the bed Ennis was waiting, and though the nightgown was a cotton sack not fit to excite anyone, her unbound hair would serve as a signal for him.
    In the glow of the hallway night-light she saw his face a moment before she closed the bedroom door. Yes, it was a nice enough face, a farm boy’s face, quiet and rugged and tawny, like winter fields … Her closing the door also was a signal. For sleeping, they kept it open so she could hear if the children cried. But for the other thing they closed it.
    She felt her way to the bed in the dark, found Ennis and kissed him. And yes, yes, this time it was going to be all right. She could tell. He wanted her.
    But afterward, after he had gotten up and found his pajamas in the dark and put them on again, after he had washed himself and come back to bed and settled down to sleep, Angie (once more decently gowned) found that her unrest had increased rather than abated. What she and Ennis had done—it had felt good, it always did, but she wished it had lasted longer.… Want, want, there was always more to want, and what was the use of it? But still she wanted. She wished he would let her leave a light on, just a little light, so that she could see him. She had never seen him with his clothes off, not even on their wedding night, he was too shy, and she wanted to know what he looked like, she wanted to love him that way, she wanted him to look at her and love her—but he would not look at her, and he had never let her so much as see him without his shirt. Even swimming, even in the heat of summer, he wore a shirt. When she was dating him she had dreamed that once they were married Ennis would change, that he would unpin her hair and kiss her, unbutton her prim white blouse and pull off her bra and caress her breasts. She still dreamed that same dream. But it was not going to happen.
    She said softly into the darkness, “Ennis. Don’t you ever feel like you just want to bust loose?”
    â€œFrom what?”
    â€œChurch and things.”
    He considered so long that she thought he had gone to sleep. When finally he rendered his opinion, it came without censure but also utterly without comprehension. “No. Don’t think so. Nope.”
    She slept restlessly and had a dream so stark with longing that it made her moan and awoke her. In her sleep there had been a man, and it had not been Ennis—he was utterly not Ennis. She knew this to her bones, even though she had seen only his back, naked and powerful, his bare, broad, dun-colored shoulders, his scars—on his back were scars as if he had been wounded or tortured, sizable marks harshly pallid on the tan skin. She could not see his face. When would she see his face? His hair hung dark and long; he tossed his head, flinging the hair back from his eyes, and turned—and then in her dream she cried out and hid her eyes with her hands, for it was like meeting a god or an angel.
    When she looked again, he stood on a rooftop, and above him in the sky galloped a white-hat cowboy on a mustang, and the man in the sky stared past her with dead-eyed indifference, but the half-naked god-man on the rooftop looked down at her intently. She saw his face, narrow and strong and beautiful and very strange, saw his deep eyes and dark brows and the dangerous