Judges 16:6
Thursday, 25th October: Angie and Seb were back on the towpath. The two of them plus Titus. In the distance you could still hear the traffic droning on. But the background sound was unimportant and the silence between them was meaningful. It was colder now. Not cold. Just not hot. The weather was changing. The air was crisp with an expectation of the onslaught that winter would bring. The trees were green. Fall came later hereabouts than in Vermont. But the first brown leaves curled in the dust of the path, a foretaste of the impending autumnal cascade.
Angie shivered a little. Though she was wearing a long skirt, all the colours of fall, and sturdy shoes, she had on no cardigan. A light silk blouse served to separate her from immodesty. That and an inadequate bra. Seb watched her and noticed her shiver. He offered his coat which she ostensibly attempted to refuse whilst at the same time allowing him to place the jacket round her shoulders.
"I don't need it."
"You do."
She smiled at him, a contented smile that showed the edges of her teeth. One of those smiles to die for.
"Things are better with Baxter then?"
"Much. Far better David. Better than I hoped for."
The familiarity startled him. "Only my mother calls me David."
"You mind?"
Seb shook his head as he stooped to pick up a stick. He toyed with it a moment before casting it aside. "No I don't mind." Seb watched her then as they walked side by side. "So you are happy?"
Angie was startled. "Happy?" The question surprised her. She shook her head. "You fall, you pick yourself up." She brushed her blonde hair aside and broke step, pausing, looking up at Seb and searching for his eyes. "Everything is a compromise. Even marriage. There are no big loves, big hates. No, I am not happy. But I am no longer unhappy. I no longer want to kill Baxter." She smiled, then added softly ". . . or myself."
Seb grasped her by the arm, spinning her towards him, his brow furrowed in concern. "You never think that."
Angie looked up at him with a lingering regard that dwelt tenderly on him. Her wonderful, changeful eyes blinked. They were of the tenderest grey immediately about the dark pupils, merging into the deeper translucence of slate like the night sky in the predawn twilight.
She had been over this ground with him before. In her mind she thought, "Aw David, I'm a big girl now." But she said nothing.
He shook her then.
"Suicide is a terrible wrong that hurts those that love you. An infectious sin of the most evil kind. Suicide is murder and murder has been wrong since the day Cain slew Able."
For long seconds they stood there. He held her upper arms in a grip that would do credit to a wrestler. And she watched him, until at last she couldn't help herself. "David you are hurting me," she said.
And embarrassed, he let her go. They fell into step again; David, Angie and Titus; three abreast. They walked on awhile. He felt awkward and self conscious. He looked around at the still verdant late Summer undergrowth - anywhere but at Angie. The woodland was thick with brambles on the up-slope of the towpath.
"How did you get down here from your house?"
She looked obliquely at Seb and grinned impudently. "Want to see?" She took his hand and led him, childlike, along the path. "It's close by here."
The track, when they came to it, was barely visible from the towpath and twisted through the undergrowth. She let go his hand and started to climb, Titus at her heels. She spoke as she climbed. "Before they built the highway, this was the way down to get to the river from the old summerhouse. From there there's a quite decent path to the house."
As they rounded the bend in the steep path there it was ahead of them. The summerhouse was a little pagoda-style building with its two glass doors swung wide open to reveal a small bench. There was a wooden cross to one side on the otherwise bare walls of this small wooden structure, a mute reminder of his calling.
She turned as he caught up with her and doing so she stumbled a little and he frowned and reached a hand to help her. As he did so, she looked at him, her eyes locked on his.
She tried to regain her composure. She knew that she adored this man, priest or no priest. Whether she moved first was hard to tell in remembrance. She was standing apart one moment and the next he was crushing her with his arms, embracing her, kissing her as if the pent up passion of half-a-lifetime could be expiated in that one moment.
Her head fell back as his mouth slid to her throat. And she responded with her body, her breasts, thighs, pressed against him, letting him enfold her, opening herself to him without the semblance of conscious thought, responding at some animal level, all pretence brushed aside in the raw energy of the moment.
Had David Sebastian been rationalising this, as he would later, he'd have been reminded of the way the psalmist speaks, of deep calling to deep. Now he just shuddered as he reacted to the sex of her; crushing her still further to himself, he folded her beneath him, his lips on hers, pushing her backwards between the open doors of the summerhouse, where she crumpled willingly onto the rough weathered wood of the floor. His weight was on her now and, without thought, his hands were everywhere, at her breasts, at her thighs, reaching, not actually undressing her but instead pushing at her clothing, almost tearing it away, until the flesh of her was exposed. The air was almost redolent with the musk of him; he behaved like some rutting stag moving to mount his hind. And from somewhere deep within him, the man that had become this animal cried out to her even as he kissed her full lips and then down as his mouth found her now naked breasts. And as she felt his hands moving to push aside the fabric of her long skirt, she lifted herself, helping him as he wrestled with the last vestiges of her clothing, aching for his hands on her naked flesh. Again she arched her body beneath him, moving by instinct now rather than design, her breasts tingling, her nipples tight.
"This is wrong,'" he was saying as he kissed her, as his hands explored her, as she gasped at the weight of him and the intensity of his frenzied actions.
"Angie, this is so wrong," he said, even as she writhed against him, all conscious thought gone, hearing but not hearing as she spread herself for him, infected by his desire, his lust so vitally acute that she trembled, the instrument that was her body singing in ecstatic response to his movements.
For Seb there was something schizophrenic about this moment. Like once long ago with a high school girl heavy petting in a car, there was a part of him, unwanted but not unnoticed, that said this was beyond the pale, this line that he, now a supposedly celibate priest, was about to cross. And the closer he got to taking the squirming soft exposed prize that was Angie, to consuming every vulnerable lithesome inch of her, and she was totally his now to take, the more that maddening inner alter ego grated and protested like a hockey mom at the PTA.
And he stopped. Puzzled like a dog doused in water, he tore himself from her, aware that in another moment he would be inside her, and wanting that so much that it made his stomach hollow with the ache of the thing. And still he stopped, pulling himself away, stumbling backwards from the near-naked woman, her bruised body exposed raw beneath him, bearing the marks of her victimhood.
He was sorry then and tried to tell her so. "Angie . . ." he said looking down at her, his dark eyes wide, panting as she was.
And she just looked back at him, her mouth open as she gasped for air, her body writhing a little still even now without him. She heard him then. Heard him as he said, "I am so sorry," in a crisp voice for what seemed the hundredth time. Then she watched as his eyes hardened into stony brown discs, and he turned and walked away back down the path by which they had come. Her chest was still moving rapidly with her breathing. She was still not quite certain what had happened or why, still half expected him to turn back to her as she lay on the floor. Which he didn't. He just walked from her, seemingly for ever, and her desolation, her profound humiliation, as she lay there, was absolute.
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