Free Lilith by J. R. Salamanca Page A

and pressed my face, still stained with watery blood, against her waist. “Laura, I want to love you,” I whispered hoarsely. “Please. Please let me love you.”
    She put her hands on my shoulders and twisted her body in my arms. “No. Don’t, Vincent. Don’t.”
    “Please. I want to love you. I have to, Laura. Let me, please.”
    “No. Let me go.”
    I dropped down onto my knees before her on the bathroom floor, my aims locked fiercely about her, burying my face against the cleft of her groin, breathing the buried musk of her body through the crushed cotton of her skirt.
    “No. Don’t, Vincent. Stop. I won’t. It isn’t decent. I won’t ever do that until I’m married. It isn’t decent.”
    She took my wrists in her hands, twisting and wrenching them until she had broken free, and backed away from me against the wall.
    “Why did you have to do that?” she said. “It’s just horrible. I never thought you’d do anything like that.”
    I knelt in front of her, naked from the waist up, my hair still dripping with watery gore, my face flushed with the intensity of shame into which my violent feeling had been suddenly transposed by her revulsion, watching her gather her skirt away from me in very formal, involuntary, clutching movements of her hands, like the oppressed heroines of silent movies. From the end of the hall her father began to call with feeble impatience in his old, trembling voice: “Laura . . . Laura . . .
Laura
. . .” She turned away from me quickly and went out of the bathroom. I snatched up the clean shirt she had brought me and left the house, thrusting my arms into the sleeves as I ran down the stairs and out the front door into the quiet evening.
    I have as much need for dignity as anyone, and I should like to understand better why I was led in such a wanton manner to bring that ugly day to its even uglier conclusion by an act of savage mortification with a woman who was perhaps as old as my grandmother. Because that is what I did. Hardly pausing in my flight from Laura’s house, I set out down the darkening streets toward the house of the Mrs. Hallworth to whom, a week before, I had delivered a box of groceries. I walked quickly, my jaws clenched with bitter resolution.
    The sky had gone scarlet behind the black elms and rooftops of the street when I reached the front walk that led up to the dark veranda of her handsome clapboard house. Behind the glider and the white wicker rocking chairs of the front porch there was lamplight inside the windows of the living room. I went up the walk without pausing, mounted the wide steps to the veranda and tapped with the brass knocker on the paneled white door. The fanlight above the door cast a faint downward glow in which I spread my hands while I stood waiting with a fierce impatience. There was still blood between my fingers. I scrubbed the back of my hand across my thigh and knocked again.
    In a moment the door opened and Mrs. Hallworth, clad in a blue silk negligee that was stained with scattered red spots, peered out at me. She stood unsteadily, her greying hair astray, peering out at me with a look of confusion that changed slowly to one of faintly amused congeniality.
    “Well, my goodness,” she said. “It’s the
grocery
boy! If this isn’t a pleasant surprise.” She smiled at me, lifting her hand to brush back from her forehead the stray strands of her hair. “Now what could bring you here at this time of night? I don’t suppose you’ve got any more
potatoes
for me?”
    “No, ma’am,” I said, my resolution faltering suddenly. “I was wondering—I was wondering if maybe I made a mistake on your order the other day. I was wondering if you still had your order slip.”
    “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you come in, and I’ll see if I can find it somewhere.” She opened the door wider, clutching the knob to steady herself as she held it aside for me to enter. I went into the house and stood in the small