His madness made him bold. “Just let me.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s just—hoo. Shouldn’t we go back?”
They definitely needed to go back, but he was touching Frances Cottrell’s vagina, a few steps from the spot where he’d entered the world of conscious pleasure, and there was no withstanding it. He’d come too far and waited too long. He opened his own pants.
“Oh, wow, okay.” She looked down at what was pressing against her belly, and then at the hole in the front wall where a window had been. “Maybe this isn’t the best time?”
His voice wasn’t his own; wasn’t under his control. “I can’t wait any more.”
“It’s true. I did make you wait.”
“You tortured me and tortured me.”
She nodded, as if conceding the point, and he tried to take her pants down. She looked around more nervously. “Really?”
“Yes, please.”
“I had no idea you were like this.”
“I am utterly in love with you. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I guess I did wonder.”
When he tried again to get her pants down, she gently pushed him away. “Can we at least be less visible?”
In the time it took him to lead her into what had been the house’s bedroom, remove his coat, and spread it on the floor, the character of his madness changed—became less of the body and more of the head. Now everything centered on the deed and its attendant practicalities. She sat down on the coat and pulled off her shoes and pants. “I’m on the Pill,” she said, “in case you were wondering.”
He wanted to ask if she truly wanted what he wanted, but there was a chance that her assent would lack enthusiasm, a chance that it would start a conversation. The air was still cold enough that she left her hunting jacket on. At the sight of her lying back in it, naked below the waist, he thought he might throw up with excitement. Before she could change her mind—before he could lose the mad determination to do the deed, before he could consider how far from ideal the time and the setting for it were—he tore off his own pants and kneeled between her legs.
“My goodness, Reverend Hildebrandt. You’re rather large.”
If large meant comparatively large, it was a comparison that no one had ever made. The stroke （oh, what a suggestive term Ambrose had coined） made him even larger. To his surprise, he found the largeness to be a difficulty.
“Sorry,” she said. “You’re big, and I’m—tense.”
It couldn’t have been clearer that he was making a mistake. Each passing minute would only add to her tension. But he simply couldn’t wait any more. As if time were a thing he could grasp in his arms and bend to his will, he kissed her and touched her with soothing unhurry. Her responses were ambiguous, speaking possibly of arousal, possibly of tenseness. Gone, either way, was her aggressiveness.
“We can wait,” he admitted.
“No, try it again. Just go slow. I don’t know why I’m so tight.”
How quickly, once clothes had been shed, the wildly unmentionable became the casually discussable. It was like being whisked to a different planet. He felt as if he’d learned more about Frances in an hour than he’d learned in half a year. Thankfully, his heart still recognized her; his reservoir of compassion was still there to be tapped. He loved that a woman so confident of her desirability should have trouble relaxing for him. But alongside her specificity as a person, the sweetly imperfect person in whom he’d invested so much hope and so much longing, was the necessity to be, if only once, inside a woman who wasn’t Marion. How absurd the necessity, and how funny and human the constriction that impeded it, the quarter-inch out for every half-inch farther in, the lump in the sheepskin jacket that was murdering his elbow. In the end, he didn’t make it quite all the way in, and his satisfaction was pinched. But, God help him, he was keeping score, and this absolutely counted. Freed, at long last, from the weight of his inferiority, his heart returned to Frances. He shuddered with gratitude for the woman whose grace had saved him.
“So, number one,” she said, “I need to pee again. Number two, we should definitely go back.”
She gave him a sloppy kiss, the pleasure of it heightened by their union, their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to feel that he’d had, by far, the better half of the experience. He wanted to satisfy her, too. But the desire he’d turned on with his taming of Clyde now seemed to be turned off. She scrambled to her feet and put her pants on. Two minutes later, they were in the truck again.