Under Cover of Daylight Read Online Free PDF Page B

so cool, saying all the syllables, a radio voice, enunciating. It troubled him a little. He wanted her where he was.
    He jumped as her hand touched his arm and lit up a welt of gooseflesh there.
    “You perking, Thorn? You off somewhere?”
    “I’m here,” he said, hanging on, gripping the cypress armrest, his toes curling down for a hold on the porch.
    “We could stay out here.”
    Thorn couldn’t muster more than a nod. She stood up and sat down astraddle him. She crossed her arms in front of her, took hold of the T-shirt, and pulled it off. His face suddenly in the cool hollow between her large breasts. Thin-armed Sarah with heavyweight breasts. You never noticed because of the drapey styles she wore. But there they were. And there was Thorn, wondering who she was, who this beautiful, smart woman was, devoting so much time to him.
    “I’d like to meet your parents sometime,” Thorn said.
    “OK.” Nothing showing in her voice.
    “I mean it,” Thorn said. “I’d like to meet them. I’d like to see where you live. Visit you at work. Take you to lunch, pick you up after work, take you home. Everything.”
    “All right,” she said. “Sometime soon. I’ll give you the grand tour. Show you my turf.” She smiled.
    “Soon would be nice,” Thorn said.
    She massaged his scalp with her fingertips, his neck, a light touch, then a deep rub into the shoulder muscles. Thorn wasn’t feeling seventeen anymore, much younger than that, younger than he’d ever been.
    She drew parallel lines down either side of his spine, then under the wings of his shoulder bones, both hands into his armpits. Coiling the damp underarm hair into a single strand, drawing it into a tight spike, doing one armpit then the other. Thorn cooperated, his hands behind his head, exposing that hair for her. He felt himself reviving, rising into her darkness.
    “I like you,” he said.
    “You should,” she said. “I’m likable.”
    It rose, and neither of them had to guide it into her. She made a small adjustment of hips to let it into the liquid flesh. He watched the channel marker across her shoulder, brought his rhythm closer and closer to it. Syncopation.
    They were kissing. No borders. The channel marker still guiding his beat, even with his eyes closed. They were comfortable chairs. Accepting all the contours of his squirms. Her strong hands held his face, guided his mouth onto hers. Drew him against her mouth, tilted his head to an angle where their lips meshed perfectly. Thorn had never kissed this way before, such a sinking away, such a disappearance. His tongue becoming hers.
    He had always been awake before. Alert behind closed lids. But this, the way her mouth seemed to draw him out of himself, this was kissing. This was why people kissed.
    She was coaxing him deeper, drawing him upward. His hands still gripped behind his neck, holding himself in his own full nelson, her nipples now dragging across his cheeks and mouth, left, then right. A growl rising from him, the biting pain as he asked, and some gland within him grudgingly complied, to release for the third time that evening. And she beginning to whip her hair across her face. Arching back, and he hugged her, hugged his face into that damp hollow between her breasts, holding hard and letting go.
    Afterward she looked down at his head as he buried his face between her breasts. She was not smiling anymore. Nothing in her face at all. She stared into his sun-bleached hair for a few moments, then lifted her eyes to the night sky. Her right arm still hugging him to her, keeping his face hidden against her chest, while she bit at a flake of cuticle on her left hand. Eyes roaming through the bright stars.
    “You could open a practice down here.” Thorn finished lacing his boat shoes. Looked at Sarah sitting at the table, plucking grapes. She’d finished her pan-fried toast already. The dawn was casting a bright wedge across the wood floor.
    “Thorn,” she said, a patient