Everville by Clive Barker

me@' She was starting to gasp.
    "Now?"
    "Till I'm-2'
    "Yeah.
    "Till I'm crazy."
    She fumbled with his belt buckle, but he shoved her hands away and rolled her over, face to the quilt, hoisting up her dress and tearing down her panties. Backside in the air, legs apart, she reached behind her, the words always easier than she'd thought they'd be.
    "Give me your cock."
    And it was in her hands as though she'd summoned it, slick and hot-headed. She pressed it against her pussy. He held back for a few seconds, then slid it all inside, down to the zipper from which it still poked.
    In the tiny committee room above the Chamber of Commerce, Larry Powell watched while Ken Hagenaner went through a full list of the weekend's activities and heard not a word, pre occupied as he was with his return home to Montana the weekend after next. And in the offices below, Erwin Toothaker waited while Dorothy Bullard called around to see if anyone could let the attorney into the old schoolhouse, where the Historical Society kept its collection, because he needed to do some urgent research. And while he waited Erwin eyed the yel lowed tape at the top of the window frames, still holding down an inch of Christmas tinsel, and the faded photographs of the mayor before last with his arms around the Bethany twins on their sixteenth birthdays, and he thought: I hate this place. I never realized till now. I hate it.
    And outside, on Main Street, a youth called Seth Lundy-just turned seventeen and never been kissed-halted in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Pizza Place and listened to a sound he had not heard since Easter Sunday: the din of hammers knocking on the sky from Heaven's side.
    He looked up, straight up above his head, because that was where the cracks usually began, but the blue was flaw less. Puzzled, he studied the sky for maybe fifteen minutes, during which time the meeting in the committee room was brought to a tidy conclusion, and Erwin decided to tell the truth to the largest audience he could find, and somewhere behind closed drapes in a house on the edge of town, Phoebe Cobb began to quietly weep.
    "What's wrong?"
    "Don't stop."
    "You're crying, baby-"
    "It's all right. I'll be all right." She reached behind her; put her hand on his buttocks, pressing him home, and as she did, the three words she'd kept under lock and key escaped.
    "I love you."
    Oh Lord, what had she said? Now he'd leave her. Run away and find some other desperate woman, who didn't tell him she loved him when all he wanted was a fuck in the afternoon. A younger woman; a slimmer woman.
    "I'm sorry," she said.
    "So am I," he replied.
    There! He was going to pull out and leave right now.
    "It's going to cause a lot of trouble, what's happening with you and me."
    He kept fucking her while he talked, not missing a stroke, and it was such bliss she was sure she'd missed the sense of what he'd said. He couldn't have meant
    "I love you back. Oh baby, I love you so much. I can't think straight sometimes. It's like I'm in a daze till I'm here. Right here."
    It would be too cruel of him to lie, and he wasn't cruel, she knew that, which meant he was telling the truth.
    Oh Lord, he loved her, he loved her, and if all the trouble in the world would come down on their heads because Of it, she didn't care.
    She started to turn in his arms so that she could be face to face with him. It was a difficult maneuver, but her body was different in his arms, lusher and more malleable. Now came those kisses she could feel the day after; the kisses that made her lips burn and her tongue ache; the kisses that brought the tremors that had her shaking and hollering as though possessed. Only today there were words between them, promises of his undying devotion. And the tremors, when they came, rose from some place that was not in any anatomy book on the doctor's shelf. An invisible, unnameable place that neither God nor tumors could touch.
    "Oh, I almost forgot-" he said while they were dressing,