Raw Silk (9781480463318) Read Online Free Page B

can’t do without. We’re right about each other, and what do we gain by that? This is what we’ve got, take it or leave it. I couldn’t leave it.
    I did some research to make sure I’d have nothing to regret. I visited Jill’s class and saw for myself the regimentation and the boredom. I checked out the nearby day schools, I asked the local council if she could be transferred. Then I told Oliver he’d won, and why, which he more or less understood. I knew the wrench wasn’t done for me. For one thing, Jill was by now outraged at the notion of leaving her school and home—and perhaps Frankie. But I knew that Oliver had been right about that part of it; she could take it. And I figured that once the thing was done, I could settle down myself to have a clearer look round the bramble patch.

3
    A ND THAT WAS PRETTY much the way things stood, when Oliver came to bed last night with a batch of papers. I was sleeping uneasily, with the imminence of Jill’s departure. His scratching pen woke me—single sharp scratches of irritated underlining. When he finished and snapped off the light he rolled straight to me, began nuzzling my shoulder and bent a cold leg across my thighs. The lack of transition annoyed me, and I pretended sleep for longer then could have been credible. It didn’t matter how long I pretended. Once he’s decided to make love, Oliver has every confidence of bringing me round. I’ve heard him dilate with the same confidence on the settlement of strikes: patience and firmness, and always look more willing than the other fellow is. Virginia asked me once what I missed most about being single. Necking, I said. She was worried for me, but I read between the lines from Grosvenor Square that she sees what I mean. So I pretended to be sleepier than I was, and Oliver wrapped his legs around mine and rocked himself patiently and willingly against me until his firmness impressed itself on my thigh. My irritation partly paled; it’s a form of flattery, after all, and I thought: it’ll be good for me, I always enjoy it once I’m started. It occurred to me that it might help me face Miss Meridene in the morning, more relaxed. It occurred to me that Oliver was sorry about Jill’s going. Sorry that he hadn’t made his reasons mine, and that he still believed a father’s reasons had more weight. And I was sorry too, that I couldn’t suit him better, since I’d chosen to live his life. Then he got to my ear and said, “You rangy broad,” and I turned to him, as if waking, with a provocative uvular.
    There’s no discovery left in this process; the frontiers have all been mapped. And—it’s part of coming to terms with us—I no longer see why there should be. Oliver knows exactly how many drinks I must have had before it’s worth his urging fellatio, I know exactly how to make use of my early horseback riding, and we both know—my body takes his angle as familiarly as the mattress—that whereas my right breast is rousable and willing, there’s no use arguing with the left at all. My left breast isn’t on strike, it’s just bone-idle.
    So we plied and stroked each other without error, his tongue freewheeled along my collarbone, and I made moan, not uncontrollably, but for the equally good reason that he likes it. He bit too hard and I jettisoned him, then he won me back with a swift ring of licks around my concave belly button, which has been an object of some wonder to him since he discovered that it would hold twenty-six small southern-French beach pebbles. His shaving scent made me think, as it always does, of the lemon groves in Pasadena Valley, and when he rubbed the nerves at the base of my spine there followed, as there sometimes does, the halo of aspen behind Jay Mellon’s head and the scare of sap in everything. I wondered briefly about Jay, tried to picture him as old as he must be now, and couldn’t, and forgot that, because the muscles of Oliver’s back seemed animal and young. My own