Free The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve

each image leading to the other as if by a fine thread, the thread invisible, the connections both supple and labyrinthine. The images were sometimes disturbing and at other times pleasing to her, evidence of a life lived, though some memories attested only to foolishness, appalling naïveté.
    But then an unbidden and unwanted image sneaked in amongst the others almost before she’d realized it, and instantly she tried to ward it off. She felt it dragging her down, but she could not, for the moment, pull away. She heard a muffled sound — a word? No, more a gasp or a whisper, a man’s mouth pressed into the bone of her shoulder, his weight heavy on her thigh. Had he hurt himself, or was this (more likely) yet another utterance in the new language he was teaching her, that strange dialect that had no vocabulary or sentences, but seemed, all the same, full of meaning — full of need and mute pleadings and silent, if extraordinary, gratitude?
    Her dress, pale blue, was dry upon her skin and floated like tissue over the hollow of her belly. The sun was on the daybed and on her face. It would be ten or ten-thirty in the morning.
    The bristles of his short beard were not soft but instead were prickly like the fur of the thistles that grew in the vacant lot at the end of the block. After the first time, when she, dazed as if by the noonday sun, had examined herself in the mirror, she’d seen that his beard had rubbed the thin skin at the base of her collarbone a shiny pink; and that soreness combined with the other, had been a reminder, all that day and the next, of the fearful thing that had happened to her. But she was not afraid. Not of the man, who seemed if not entirely irrelevant, then not what occupied her mind; and not of the event itself, which she had allowed to happen four times. For something within her welcomed — indeed, was almost glad for — these extraordinary attentions.
    She heard another nonword then, also precise in its meaning. He wanted at her chest and was even now fumbling with the buttons of her dress and pushing aside the cloth. He fastened his mouth on her breast, which was new and always changing now. She could not see his face and did not want to — his eyes squeezed shut, the neck wrinkled, the grime caught in the creases. For the thing that they were doing was best done in private, one’s own face turned away, the eyes averted.
    Her body loosened, and there was a fluttering in her belly. She was moist between her legs, fat there as she was not elsewhere. He hitched himself higher up on her body and struggled for a moment with her skirt. The sucking was like being bled, she thought, and she remembered pictures of leeches covered with bell jars, the glass making perfect circular welts on a woman’s back. He pushed a finger inside her, then two, more hurried now, even somewhat frantic. She wondered if it would be like running a finger around the slippery insides of a narrow jar. A fingernail caught on her skin and she flinched, but he seemed not to notice. And now it was not his finger, but the other thing (she had never said the word aloud), and she understood that soon it would be over.
    She craned her neck so that she could see through the window at the head of the daybed. A large bird sat motionless on the roof of the house next door. The man finished, as he always did, with a convulsive shudder and a slight hiccup. And when he pulled away, she felt a bit of the wetness trickle out of her, a small spill of fluid upon her thigh. She watched him as he sat at the end of the bed, white and shocky all about his eyes. He zipped his pants and laced up his shoes.
    She had no tender word from him, nor did she want one. He said only when he stood, “Don’t tell anyone what we did here.”
    As if she would. As if she would.
    ----
    In the pew, Linda began to tremble violently from the memory, not retrieved in years, until words — reassuring and comforting — allowed her to be still. It wasn’t