The Typewriter Girl (33 page)

Betsey ran. She turned, she ran, heading for the path that led up the hill, but losing her footing on the dry ground and falling. John grabbed her ankle, tried to rake her back down toward him. She shook her foot, strained her arms in the opposite direction, but he held her ankle fast, then crawled up over her, breathing hard.

“Bless the bleeding Christ! I want you to be easy with me.”

“
What?
”

“I want you to be easy with me, not forever looking at me like—like I’m handing you magic beans, or trying to keep you from getting a good breath. I want—I want you to rest with me, girl, that’s all.”

“You ought have thrown me a little farther, then, or into the deeper water. I’d be as easy as a corpse just now.”

“I know—I frightened you—”

“Get back from me.” She elbowed him, and he rolled onto his back with a sigh. Betsey sat up and drew her knees to her chest, shivering in the warm air as she brushed sandy hands across her knees in a vain attempt to remove the dirt on her drawers.

“John, my God,” she said after a moment, “here I am in the middle of the night wearing nothing but my underclothes. I don’t know that I could be easier.”

He made a noise that advanced from sigh to wheeze to full laughter. He stirred beside her, and she felt his head, cold and wet, at her elbow. Like a contrite puppy, he nudged his way beneath her arm to nuzzle against her stomach and breasts. Well, and who could resist a contrite puppy, she thought, and leaned back again.

She closed her eyes as he pushed up her chemise, surrendering to the warm relief of his face against her damp skin. He lay there with his cheek on her belly.

“I pushed you too much.”

“The water—it’s so . . . big,” she said, and laughed a little, for she sounded like a child.

“Not just the water you feared.”

She watched the stars, as John had wanted her to do in the water, heard the waves thrashing at the shore, and liked the weight of his head on her stomach, how it grounded her, made her conscious of each breath she drew in and released.

“How many times, then? Let’s decide.”

His thumb, broad and crusted with sand, stroked up and down her ribs. “Seven twenty times. Seven seventy times.”

She smiled, thinking they’d be horizontal for months with figures like that. Even seven times, like that poem of his, was too many. How many times could she afford to multiply her heartbreak?

“Three,” she said. “Three.”

A sigh crossed her skin. “Do you always negotiate like this?”

“No.” She answered promptly, before she noticed how that word
always
had stung her.
Always
because of that list, that catalogue of her lovers she’d supplied him the night on the Sultan’s Road, and she hated herself for doing it, hated John for being human enough to remember it.

I’ve never been so wise before.
The comment was curling on her tongue, infused with all the cynical venom at her disposal.

But he spoke first. “Have ever you seen someone in a fever, a fever that takes them away? And they keep asking for things that can’t be—people long dead they want, or places far off, no longer there, or secrets out of their dreams nobody understands. They ask and they ask, but nothing none can do for them but pray for the fever to break.” He lifted his head. “Bless God, that’s what it’s like, Elisabeth, wanting you, how I wake up sometimes—”

“You’re mad,” she said, and drew down his head to her neck, sighing softly as he kissed her there, in all her hollows. “I’m not some aristocrat’s daughter, you know, not any lady or heiress. I’m just a girl, and you invited her for a tryst, and she came.”

He stopped kissing her and looked her full in the eye. For a long time. She grew self-conscious.

“Elisabeth Dobson you are,” he said at last.

“That’s right. That’s all. So come on and fuck me, John.”

It was that or weep, weep for what she thought she heard in his voice, the thing beyond his lust. But he didn’t like it. He didn’t like her saying what they’d come here to do. He continued to stare down at her, something hard in his face now. She’d never seen it before, and her hard words had put it there, which made her want to weep more.

She reached up to stroke his cheek, soften it again. He caught her hand.

She was afraid to say,
I know you care more than that
. She pushed herself up so she could kiss him, pulled him down with her, kissing his mouth and jaw, sand grating between his skin and hers.

Her kisses came back to her, magnified, hungry. His underclothes were sopping and cold, but the fever of his body still reached her. They grappled together with her drawers, and his hand ground sand and tiny pebbles against her skin as it touched her thigh and hip. He was sorry, he said, sorry about this place, all the dirt, he hadn’t thought . . .

He left off without finishing the apology, positioning himself between her legs. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Are you sure I cannot make a babe in you, girl?”

Lizzie, are you quite certain you’re barren?
That was what Avery Nash had asked her the first few times they had coupled. Perhaps he would have continued to ask if she hadn’t tossed his brandy in his face the third time. As John went on in awkward, distracted half sentences, she thought of Avery’s question, and was so disconcerted she could only mumble, “I’m sure.” So disconcerted, she didn’t realize until too late that John was shoving his drawers out of the way, that he intended to enter her right now.

“John,” she said. She needed him to slow down.

He didn’t seem to hear. She gasped in pain as he thrust inside her. She lifted her hips, hoping at first to signal him with a gentler
rhythm, but he took no heed. She tried to match him, desperate to salvage what was going awry. She tried to see his face to confirm this was John, kind and good, but his neck was bent, his face obscured by a wet curtain of hair.

He drove against her, frantic, oblivious, and Betsey didn’t have to wait until he was finished to know: She’d been well and truly fucked.

Do not attempt erasures. Except in rare instances erasures are not allowable.

—How to Become Expert in Type-writing

S
he wanted to wash.

“Turn away,” she told a still-panting John, and when he had, she stood and started to tie her drawers together so she wouldn’t have to walk to the water half-naked. They were cold and sticky and filthy with sand, however, and in disgust, she finally stripped them off again, muttering, “Hell.” She wrapped the garment around her hips as best she could, the skin on the back of her shoulders and arms burning with every movement.

The dark water felt doubly cold now, the waves seemed more violent, but she ventured to water that came to her waist and kept her back to the shore. She unfurled her drawers, trying to clean them, then removed her chemise and rinsed it out as well. Both were ruined, she feared, streaked with dirt she’d never scrub away. The loss made her furious.

Her hair was knotted and filled with grit, and though she hated the thought of being underwater again, she took a deep breath and sank, clutching her clothes in her fist. And somehow the fear was less now, the pull of the waves not so terrifying. She surfaced and slipped down again to hang in the dark muffle of peace.

No longer does she lock away the payment owed—

The payment owed to—

Love.
That was the word in the poem John hadn’t forgotten, only hadn’t wanted to say.

The realization shot her up above the surface.

Or almost. She’d drifted, and now found she could barely scrape the seafloor with her toes. Afraid, she pumped her legs and arms the way John had taught her, pumped and pumped as air fought to get out and come in at once through her throat.

“John.” The word limped out pitifully in the wrong direction, out to the wide dark sea.

Nevertheless, he heard her. He was there already, right behind her, sweeping her toward him, towing her back to safety. Her arms and legs wrapped around him, relieved for his solid strength.

“I didn’t like it, you out here alone.”

She slackened her hold, gritting through a sudden fall of pain on her shoulders. She must have a thousand tiny cuts from the coarse sand, every one of them filled with salt water now. “I was managing.”

“Were you? Perhaps you’d best paddle out and fetch your underthings, then.”

“Oh!” She twitched around in dismay, catching sight of the ghostly puddle of white that had already drifted far from them. Her best things, and the loan from her brother-in-law that had paid for them still over her head. “Hell and hell. Can’t you get them?”

“Half to America they will be by the time I see you safe and then swim out again. But here—” He gripped her in one arm, while the other disappeared under the water. In a moment, he produced his own drawers and tossed them in the direction of hers.

“Wasteful,” she chided, but couldn’t help smiling at the sight of their underclothes floating off to America together.

•   •   •

John tried not to notice his disappointment when Betsey asked him to bring her clothes to her. He told himself the cold had become too much for her, and left her in the surf while he returned to their piles of clothing.

Up by the path, he quickly dried himself with his shirt and tugged on his trousers, then collected her corset and stockings and uniform and all the white garments he could find, and carried them down to the surf. She hesitated, crouched with the water up to her neck.

“Come, you,” he said.

She didn’t. “Turn away. Please.”

He gave his back to her and held out to his side an arm draped with the rather surprising weight of her attire, but he couldn’t ignore how it rankled, this shyness from her. They’d been flesh to flesh tonight. And . . .

And plenty of other men had seen her out of her clothes. That rankled, too, and not least because it made him a cur to think of it. He stood looking at the dark path to the road, unable to dismiss the ugly sensation that this modesty in Betsey was something false. She was no maiden, she’d reminded him tonight. She was already ruined, God damn him for thinking it.

He turned. She had put on all her petticoats and had her hand inside her corset, adjusting her breasts, which were nothing like balls of yarn or any other such workaday article. She felt him watching her and looked up with her brows aslant, a shy and wary hellion whose sweet loveliness would never cease taking him by surprise.

He dragged the backs of his fingers along her forehead and cheek. He wanted to say something, apologize, maybe, for slandering her in his thoughts, or ask,
Did I break my vow this night? Somehow is it still intact?

He pulled her to him for a deep kiss. Briefly, she leaned into him but then pushed away, taking her boots from him and going to the edge of the surf again. All night, this pushing and pulling.

Her petticoats gathered in her arms, she tried to finagle washing the sand from her foot and then getting foot to stocking minus sand and water. She came close to pitching herself into the surf.

“You’ll have your boots full of water.” He went and scooped her up in his arms, throwing her over his shoulder.

She struggled. “I don’t need—”

“Hush, you.” He tapped her behind.

He carried her to the rocks near the path and set her down. He fumbled with her stocking—his fingers were full of nerves, touching the thing—and she told him to never mind, she would just have her boots, and she could put them on herself.

John lifted her leg anyway, as certain he could right things as he was they’d gone wrong somewhere along. Her petticoat slipped back past her knee, exposing a long, long length of white flesh. He swallowed and held her boot for her.

“All that cycling,” he said as she wiggled her foot into it. “’Elisabeth’s firm flesh’ was an apt expression.”

“One true thing in that poem, I suppose.”

His hand drifted over the laces, making him think of her sitting on Sarah Elliot’s step, making every crisscross a flat, straight X. Rather than try to imitate such precision, he bypassed the laces altogether and let his fingers graze the skin of her calf, then over her knee and to the inside of her thigh. Betsey’s face turned up to the sky, eyes shut, bottom lip between her teeth. She was lithe and lovely, and he hadn’t touched her nearly enough before.

“I want to take you to my bed. You in my bed, girl, the night entire.”

“And in the morning?”

He felt her quiver under his touch. It turned his brain like a top, that twitch of her muscles, that hitch in her breathing. “Fine as well. Betsey in my bed, morning, noon, and night.”

“You know that isn’t what I mean.” She moved his hand away and leaned over to lace her boots. “I suppose it oughtn’t happen again, anyway.”

He said nothing while she tidied each X. The task took quite a while.

“Why tonight, then?”

“I wanted it.”

“But you don’t now.”

“No.” Standing, she reached for her skirt and tossed it over her head. She adjusted it and fastened the tapes, sure and hard, like a sailor securing the mainsail. “You should be glad.”