Free On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Page B

wedding. In their affection and generosity, they even had the impression that this was precisely what she had done. She had never lied to them, but neither had she set them straight. Thinking of her friends, she felt the peculiar unshared flavor of her own existence: she was alone.
    Edward’s hand did not advance—he may have been unnerved by what he had unleashed—and instead rocked lightly in place, gently kneading her inner thigh. This may have been why the spasm was fading, but she was no longer paying attention. It must have been accidental, because he could not have known that as his hand palpated her leg, the tip of his thumb pushed against the lone hair that curled out free from under her panties, rocking it back and forth, stirring in the root, along the nerve of the follicle, a mere shadow of a sensation, an almost abstract beginning, as infinitely small as a geometric point that grew to a minuscule smooth-edged speck, and continued to swell. She doubted it, denied it, even as she felt herself sink and inwardly fold in its direction. How could the root of a solitary hair drag her whole body in? To the caressing rhythm of his hand, in steady beats, the single point of feeling spread itself across the surface of her skin, across her belly, and in pulses downward to her perineum. The feeling was not entirely unfamiliar—something between an ache and an itch, but smoother, warmer and somehow emptier, a pleasurable aching emptiness emanating from one rhythmically disturbed follicle, extending in concentric waves across her body and now moving deeper into it.
    For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That had always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else. When she was a late-developing fourteen, in despair that all her friends had breasts while she still resembled a giant nine-year-old, she had a similar moment of revelation in front of the mirror the evening she first discerned and probed a novel tight swelling around her nipples. If her mother had not been preparing her Spinoza lecture on the floor below, Florence would have shouted in delight. It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.
    She and Edward still held each other’s eyes. Talking appeared out of the question. She was half pretending that nothing was happening—that his hand was not under her dress, his thumb was not pushing an outlying pubic hair back and forth, and she was not making a momentous sensory discovery. Behind Edward’s head extended a partial view of a distant past—the open door and the dining table by the French window and the debris around their uneaten supper—but she did not let her gaze shift to take it in. Despite the pleasing sensation and her relief, there remained her apprehension, a high wall, not so easily demolished. Nor did she want it to be. For all the novelty, she was not in a state of wild abandonment, nor did she want to be hurried toward one. She wanted to linger in this spacious moment, in these fully clothed conditions, with the soft brown-eyed gaze and the tender caress and the spreading thrill. But she knew that this was impossible, and that, as everyone said, one thing would have to lead to another.

    E dward’s face was still unusually pink, his pupils dilated, his lips still parted, his breathing as before: shallow, irregular, rapid. His week of wedding preparation, of crazed restraint, was bearing down hard on his body’s young chemistry. She was so precious and vivid before him, and he did not quite know what to do. In the falling light, the