Winter Rain

He not only felt her tightening her legs around him, but he actually sensed her tensing that heated moistness around the rigid flesh he rammed into her with a heated intensity. Losing contact with everything else around him—Jonah became like a man possessed.

Then he forced himself to open his eyes and gazed down into the inky indigo-blue of hers. And slowed his hammering as he noticed that peculiar mix of passion and helplessness and total abandon he saw welling in Gritta’s eyes, swimming there with the tears that began at last to spill down her cheeks.

Jonah stopped, his flesh no less hard, yet at rest inside her moist insistence. Gritta’s legs locked around him, her fingernails still brushing at the small of his back. Like that, they gazed at one another for a long moment, unmoving.

“It … it has been so long, Jonah,” she whispered past the sob threatening to choke off her words.

Gently swiping the hot tears from both of her cheeks, he felt his own eyes smarting, moistening suddenly.

“It won’t happen again, Gritta. Us being apart. I promise you.”

Fighting back his tears, Jonah looked up, finding the room familiar: this place that brought him contentment. “Just look around you, woman. This is our home. I finally brung you home.”

She nodded, biting her lip. Of a sudden unable to speak, she clenched her eyes shut, tears seeping forth beneath the lashes. It moved something within him, something that had too long remained untouched.

“We’re back home, Gritta. Believe it. You must believe it—as surely as you are here. As surely as I can take my hand and place it here … on your soft, sweet breast.”

Jonah encircled her small, perfect breast with one hand, cupping it so that the nipple stood rigid at its center when he bent over it, kissing, licking, sucking on it while Gritta moaned, freeing that animal sound from the far back of her throat, a sound that emanated from the deeper recesses of what she was as a woman in need.

“This breast that has given life to our children, Gritta,” he went on, whispering, his hot breath on the breast, his lips still near the swollen nipple that seemed to quiver as he spoke, yearning for more of his gentle, insistent touch. “Your body, sustaining the life of our babies.”

She sobbed. “Only my dream of you, Jonah … my memory of you—only that sustained me for those years waiting for you to come for me. To find me. To bring me back home.”

“We are home. I never gave up. Lord knows it was your hope and your prayers led me to you.”

“I never gave up waiting for you, Jonah.”

He stroked her wet cheek with his roughened fingers. “Now I brung you home, woman. Here beneath Big Cobbler Mountain. To our Shenandoah Valley. Where we first fell in love and married and began our family. Here is where I had to bring you again before lying with you like this.”

Jonah had built up the fire in the stone fireplace to scare the chill from the place before he had gone to sit beside her on their rope-bed, that old tick emptied and stuffed anew with fresh-cut Virginia grass. Like the young lover she had been their wedding night, Gritta had taken his hand in hers, then slowly laid it over her breast.

“This is what I’ve been waiting for, Jonah,” she had told him there at the side of their wedding bed.

He had said nothing, but had instead covered her mouth with his, his tongue parting her lips fiercely, seeking out hers the way his swelling flesh strained to be free of his britches, yearned to sink inside her. Jonah had pushed her gently down atop the old comforter fattened with down, so fragrant with this sanctuary of their memories. Here in the valley of the Shenandoah, where he had first laid eyes on young Gritta Moser. And been instantly smitten the way only his mother could describe it.

According to Mother Hook, a man was a carnal animal, desirous of but one thing from a woman. So to control that man, to keep him in line and force him to practice his Christian industry, a woman had to portion out her sexual favors a little at a time—never could she truly enjoy that shameful travail she had to undergo in the name of God’s high command to be fruitful and replenish the earth.

Yet right from first jump Gritta had been different. After that first painful, and blessedly short-lived, episode on their wedding night, Gritta had thrown herself into lovemaking with such an abandon that it surprised Jonah, a young man fully expecting no more from a woman than for her to lie there while he did his business and finished, when at last she would pull her nightshirt back down over herself and roll away to fall asleep like her husband.

That’s what he had expected from the tales told him by a stone-faced Mother Hook.