I closed my eyes and let the sensation wash over me, the simple bliss of his lips on my skin, my heart racing for more, the autumn air ruffling his hair in the moment that he asked me to move in with him. He released my hands, and I opened my eyes.
His hand rose, and at first I couldn’t imagine why, an exotic choreography in the dance of our relationship. Then his hand was behind my head, fingers wound into my thick hair, and with a slight tug he pulled me forward.
He kissed me.
Gently.
Finally.
My lips found his as easily as the sea finds the shore, as sun reaches earth. Our mouths soft, yet eager within the gentleness. My hands were behind his neck on the soft space beneath his hairline where I had often gazed as he walked ahead of me. I touched his skin. Against me, I felt the outline of a body I’d already memorized. All inside me loosened and untied, a surrender to anything he would want of me.
We lingered there for a few moments under that Selena-full moon.
Some things are more intense in the imagination, and some more powerful in reality. His touch and his lips—I could not have imagined the ecstasy of both. Nothing had ever been as worth waiting for as this.
He withdrew and rested his forehead on mine before kissing the soft spot below my ear. I shivered with the want of more. When he stood apart from me, holding both my hands, he smiled, but it wasn’t a smile I’d seen before. This one, curled at the corners with his eyes on mine, was just ours. Only ours.
“Good night, my dear Joy.” And with that, he was gone.
I felt almost as I had the night when God entered the cracked places of my ego in my sons’ nursery—as if my boundaries had been dissolved, as if all that I was would become one with all that was another. Just as that night, it didn’t fix anything, but it was the beginning of something that could change me, change us.
Pure love, it seemed, was not limited to a singular experience.
For two weeks I thought of little else but his kiss and his touch, yet I attempted to work. My mind spun back to that moment his lips found mine, and I’d discover myself standing stock-still wherever I was, my hand over my heart and my eyes closed. This was a state of longing and expectancy where time opened.
The days were blissful except for the aches in my legs and hips, but even this was colored by growing desire. When Jack broke free of Cambridge for short times, there had been more kisses: soft ones of promise without spoken words. He held my hand on the long walks through Shotover Hill. He slowly drew nearer, closer, as if he needed to court me when already I loved him.
When he was in Oxford, he stayed late with me as he always had, but now rested comfortably against me when we were alone. I hadn’t pushed—waiting so patiently to experience who we would become when we lived together.
Would I move into his room? Did he still want us to hold fast to abstinence? My body would not allow me to think of much other than Jack and his touch.
CHAPTER 49
My friend, if it was sin in you and me That we went fishing for each other in The troubled waters of life
“SONNET XXXII,” JOY DAVIDMAN
October 18, 1956
Only God knows when life will burst open, shattering all self-made plans and expectations as illusory as dreams. For me, it was a Thursday, a regular Thursday by all accounts.
My sons were back at school. Jack’s final Narnian chronicle, The Last Battle, had just been released. Harcourt had published Till We Have Faces with its haunting black cover. We were both as thrilled as if we’d had our first child together, waiting for the reviews and readings.
Life had begun anew for both of us.
Autumn air rustled the birch tree, and songbirds called out to one another outside the open window of the small room where I typed pages for Kay Farrar’s new mystery novel. The imminent move to the Kilns preoccupied me.
Sambo rubbed against my leg, his fur sticking to my flannel pants. I leaned down and tickled him behind the ear. “You happy too, old boy? You’ve adjusted to Oxford, haven’t you?” He purred and walked toward the front door, looking over his shoulder. He wanted out.
I stood. That is all I did—stood and took one step.
And everything changed.
A white-hot, searing pain burst from my left hip. Fire shot down my leg and stripped breath from my lungs as I fell to the ground with a shriek of agony. For the fraction of a second I believed I’d been shot. I expected to see a hole in the wall or window, a thin river of blood trickling across the hardwood floor and seeping into the edges of my knotted rug.
The phone rang from the far side of the house in complete disregard of my agony, as if mocking me. Whoever was on that phone should have been able to hear me scream. I crumpled in on myself, folding into a fetal position with my leg bent at the wrong angle. The pain obliterated all senses but its own, selfish in its flooding anguish to be all I knew. I saw nothing, smelled nothing; the world existed only in the fire that was screaming through my body.