Shadowfires

if he were a night bird seeking
prey.

----
15 LOVING
    Ben's dreams were dark and full of thunder, blasted by strange lightning that illuminated nothing in a landscape without form, inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was-and yet was not-the Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth, a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as landscapes can be only in dreams.
    Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of
dread, shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the
other bed and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender
touch dispelled the cold and lonely dream. The rhythmic thumping of
her heart seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse
beacon along a fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.
    He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the
comfort that a good friend could provide, though perhaps
unconsciously she brought the greater gift of love and sought it in
return. In the half-awake state following sleep, when his vision
seemed filtered by a semitransparent cloth, when an invisible
thinness of warm silk seemed to interpose itself between his hands
and everything he touched, and while sounds were still dream-muffled,
his perceptions were not sharp enough to determine how and when her
offered comfort became offered-and accepted-love. He only knew that
it happened and that, when he drew her unclothed body to his, he felt
a rightness that he had never felt before in his thirty-seven
years.
    He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was
fresh and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms
and patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect
for them as lovers of a decade might know.
    Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool,
Ben had an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the
windows. The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality
of the harsh land, just as their special moment of tender coupling
was a bubble drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and
minutes.
    Only one opaque window of frosted glass-high in the kitchenette
wall-was not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a
slowly growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a
breeze, filtered the beams of the sun; feathery tropical shadows and
frost-pale light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they
moved.
    Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes
were shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed
more quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous-but
also infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered
more to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for
it was an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their
months together and of his great affection for her. Because she was
so special to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an
immeasurably more gratifying act of love.
    Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his,
and he was electrified by that new degree of contact.
    The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing
hue as well, from frost-pale to lemon-yellow to gold. It imparted
those colors to Rachael's face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing away to other corners of the world.
    In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing
each other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke
nor needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.
    He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even
in the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam,
he had never felt half this fine.
    She slept before Ben did,