Your Heart Belongs to Me Read Free

himself,
No fear,
which was the only way to live.

    All morning, into the afternoon, the swells were monoliths. The offshore breeze strengthened, blowing liquid smoke off the lips of the waves.
    The beach blanket was not a place to tan. It was for rehab, for massaging the quivers out of overtaxed muscles, for draining sinuses flooded with seawater, for combing bits of kelp and crusted salt out of your hair, for psyching each other into the next session.
    Usually, Ryan would want to stay until late afternoon, when the offshore breeze died and the waves stopped hollowing out, when the yearning for eternity—which the ocean represented—became a yearning for burritos and tacos.
    By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep….
    As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: “Ryan?”
    “Hmmmm?”
    “Were you asleep?”
    He felt as though he were
still
asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.
    “You
were
asleep,” Samantha said.
    “Too much big surf. I’m quashed.”
    “You? When have you ever been quashed?”
    Sitting up on the blanket, he said, “Had to be a first time.”
    “You really want to pack out?”
    “I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch.”
    “There’s chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler.”
    “Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me.”
    They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in back.
    Still sodden with sunshine and loose-limbed from being so long in the water, Ryan almost asked Samantha to drive.
    More than once, however, she glanced at him speculatively, as if she sensed that his brief nap on the beach blanket was related to the episode at the beginning of the day, when he floated like a mallard in the lineup, his heart exploding. He didn‘t want to worry her. Besides, there was no reason to worry.
    Earlier, he’d had an anxiety attack. But if truth were known, most people probably had them these days, considering the events and the pessimistic predictions that constituted the evening news.
    Instead of passing the car keys to Sam, Ryan drove the two blocks to her apartment.

    Samantha showered first while Ryan brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea and sliced two lemons to marinate in it.
    Her cozy kitchen had a single large window beyond which stood a massive California pepper tree. The elegant limbs, festooned with weeping fernlike leaves divided into many glossy leaflets, appeared to fill the entire world, creating the illusion that her apartment was a tree house.
    The pleasant weariness that had flooded through Ryan on the beach now drained away, and a new vitality welled in him.
    He began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.
    Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.
    If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.
    For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.
    A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.
    Ryan happily accepted