excerpt
‘Joe, I want you to do something for me. Don’t be shocked and please don’t refuse me. I want you to make love to me.’
Joe was taken completely by surprise. ‘Nora, what are you asking?’
‘I’m asking you to make love to me, Joe.’
‘But what if Liam comes back?’
‘He won’t. He won’t be back for days yet. He’s in Belfast. His sister …’
‘Your mother told me,’ Joe interrupted. ‘And everyone’s talking about it. Such a horrible tragedy. Puts our own little family tragedy in the shade.’
‘But you must be feeling it, Joe. To lose your father so suddenly.’
‘It wasn’t so sudden, Nora. We’ve been prepared for it for a while now.’
They drew apart. Joe sat down; Nora slid off the rocker and knelt in front of him, her arms on his knees. She looked up at him with sad, pleading eyes.
‘I meant what I said, Joe. I want you to make love to me.’
Joe looked ill at ease. ‘Nora, I … ’
‘Please, Joe. Please. Don’t let me go to my grave without having slept just once with the man I love, the only man I’ll ever love. Please, Joe. I love you so much.’
She raised herself on her knees and kissed him. She threw her arms around his neck and clung to him. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom.
That was Nora’s first experience of the passion and the searing satisfaction of love-making. Joe knew instinctively, or had learned from experience in ways and places Nora did not care to think about, how to prolong foreplay to an ecstatic pitch of almost unbearable anticipation before bringing his partner to a long, lingering, wrenching climax. Liam knew nothing about making love and did not even appear to be aware of a woman’s need for a satisfying sexual relationship. He seemed to think that a twenty-one- year-old woman had no more sexual needs or desires than his forty-three-year-old self. Once a month, like Mr Shandy, but with less dependable regularity, Liam’s slowly mounting libido reached a peak of ardour that drove him early in the evening to his young wife’s bed. There he quickly slaked his carnal thirst and fell asleep, leaving Nora to weep bitterly in the dark silence of the bedroom.
Libros Libertad 