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Pemberton felt again what he’d never known with another woman—a sense of being unshackled into some limitless possibility, limitless though at the same time somehow contained within the two of them.
Pemberton would hear their quick breaths and not know which were Serena’s and which his. A kind of annihilation, that was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.
He gazed at her body, into the eyes that had entranced him the first time he’d met her, irises the color of burnished pewter. Hard and dense like pewter too, the gold flecks not so much within the gray as floating motelike on the surface. Eyes that did not close when their flesh came together, pulling him inside her with her gaze as much as her body.
“I toast you as well, Mrs. Pemberton,” Doctor Cheney said. “The nature of the fairer sex is to lack the male’s analytical skills, but, at least in this instance, you have somehow compensated for that weakness.” Serena’s features tightened, but the irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, swept clear from her face like a lock of unruly hair. “My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap,” Serena said to Cheney. “Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more
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That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left—that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting.
Doctor Cheney smiled. “Another of nature’s paradoxes, the most beautiful creatures are so often the most injurious. The tiger, for instance, or black widow spider.” “I would argue that’s part of their beauty,” Serena said.
