Free Good Faith by Jane Smiley

closed them. The room had seven more windows and a door, and she went around to each one and did the same, until we were in semidarkness. She locked the door and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED . Then she went into the back closet and rummaged around. She came out with a parka, two raincoats, and an exercise mat, and laid them out in the middle of the floor, between Bobby’s desk and mine. Then she sat down on the arrangement she made and began to untie the ribbons of her espadrilles. This took maybe two or three minutes, but I watched it like a kind of performance: her pale shirt and shorts and long legs, made longer by the wedge sole of the espadrilles. She had Gordon’s grace of movement, long arms, long fingers, such dramatic hair. I pushed back my desk chair and went over to her.
    She looked up at me, smiling. She said, “I was going to go have my hair cut, you know—my hairdresser is right in this mall—but then I got into your aura or something; maybe it’s your bodily fragrance, but it has this effect on me. I start looking at your face, and the way your eyes are so bright and your eyelids are kind of droopy, and then your eyebrows have this wing sort of shape, and then I start looking at your nose, which is very smoothly big and beaky, and pretty soon your hand is there too, and I love your hands, you have these long knuckly fingers.”
    By now she had pulled me down onto the clothes and was stroking my face with her own two hands, touching each feature as she named it. She lowered her voice, not so that others wouldn’t hear, but so that I would hear more clearly, and went on.
    “And then there’s the bonus of your personal apparatus. Well. I can’t say I knew what I would find there, but I am very appreciative of—what shall I call it?—its objective aesthetic charms: you know, size and shape and texture.” She inhaled slowly. “There. Now feel that.” I did. She was running her thumb and forefinger very lightly up either side of the shaft of my cock. “That is just not like anything else on earth, so silky and delicate.” She licked her lips. “Mmm. Just so nice.”
    I put my hand in her hair and began kissing her while she arranged herself, pressing her stomach against me, then unbuttoning my shirt and hers, pressing her breasts against my chest. Soon enough we were naked; the room was cool from the air-conditioning, but Felicity was warm. When she kissed me, when she put her arms around my shoulders and her legs around my hips, I was contained in a delicious embracing glow. I went deep inside her and she squeezed me, decidedly and rhythmically, all up and down the shaft. Then she angled her hips slightly to the left, then to the right, all the time murmuring, “Ahhh, ahhh.” I opened my eyes. The room was brighter. Her eyes were closed. She spread her hands over the cheeks of my ass and pressed. I closed my eyes. We kissed and made love in this way for a long time, but the only way that I knew time was passing was that I began to feel my heart pumping faster. Her fingers slipped up and down my back, to either side of my spine. Suddenly she started trembling violently, gripping me hard into her and pressing her mouth into mine. When her trembling stopped, I felt myself swept into coming—not a buildup like I was accustomed to, something aimed for and cultivated, but a much more sudden and overwhelming sensation that seemed to empty me out. She pressed her head against mine.
    A moment later, she said, “Oh, honey, you were screaming.”
    “I was?”
    “What will they say next door?”
    “I don’t know. Were
you
screaming?”
    “I was calling you God.”
    “I suppose they’ll say Joe’s been saved at last, then.”
    We caught our breath. I handed her my shirt to wipe off the sweat we had made. I laughed again when she sat up and started with her toes. Everything about her delighted me.
    After a moment, we lay back on the clothes. She rolled into the crook of my arm and I pushed her hair