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Page 4.
Chapter 1
 A blue light came steeply from a clear, starry night sky to laugh with Jon Harney and Merile Doherty, who were making love in a down sleeping bag in the snow on someone’s lawn—stealthily, among pine trees and cypress bushes around silent suburban homes—while unsuspecting folks slept all around them in West Haven, Connecticut.
Jon and Merile snuffled and giggled, writhing in each other’s warm, sweaty arms and legs; rubbing feather-soft bellies together, and ouch, clacking knee caps.
He started to roll over on her but she pushed him back. Her hand brushed along his side as they wriggled inside a downy sleeping bag for two. “Stay a little while longer—I’ve never had so much fun.”
He laughed and held her tightly as they lay side by side, looking out from their evergreen hideaway among white and sleeping houses.
A blue glow of streetlights stole with accessorial civility among the scotch pines. The air smelled sweet (scoured of its salts and sulfides, which lay buried). Sudden breezes runneled over the virgin snow fields, kicking up spiraling whitewater snow crystals, crossing the buried street to clip snow caps off dazed, beached cars. Jon and Merile sputtered and closed their eyes as cold grit blew freshly into their mouths, eyes, and nostrils.
“Whew. This is like riding in a fast motorboat,” said Jon.
“Have you ever done it in a boat?” she whispered.
“No,” he said truthfully, thinking of the nearby Long Island Sound and its Atlantic waters and its summers.
“You’re lying,” she accused, slapping his arm.
He lay back with his arms behind his head. “I wish.”
“I haven’t either,” she confessed. He smiled, but she frowned and cuddled close, running her lips and hand over the hair on his chest. Between her cold fingertips, he felt the heat of her breath. She whispered barely audibly, “Let’s not delay.” They lay hidden in the shadows of pine trees.
He moved in between her long legs, guided by her eager hands; and, rocking on her firm round buttocks, consummated the release of deliciously hoarded energies. Crystal snow enveloped the hair at his neck as his head rose into tingling pine needles and they labored together. Their fingers were intertwined and white. Their groans sounded syncopated and in rapid counterpoint.
After they sank together in exhaustion, she stroked his hair slowly and steadily while he quashed a resting cheek against her shoulder. Sucking in his cheeks thoughtfully, he could see past the horizon of her cheekbone, chiseled and covered with microscopic hairs in bluish light. Her dark, liquid blue eyes, full of calculations, blinked as she looked upward through pine needles. Stars winked high up in the clear sky.
He murmured through a mouthful of inner cheek, “What are you thinking?”
She kept stroking his hair. “We’re stark naked, you know that?”
In an exchange of startled looks, they burst out laughing—softly, of course—rolling about in a pummel and writhe of limbs.
“I’m getting chill,” he said, burrowing deeper into the sleeping bag. With one long arm, he reached down past his fetally raised knees and icy toes. He sought his underpants among the clothing their trampling feet had compressed far down in the bottom of the sleeping bag.
She huddled down, too, while tightly zipping the mouth of the sleeping back around their brushing necks. “I suppose we’ll catch our deaths. What are you reaching for?” She brought her knees up and aside, and added her hand to the search. Their fingertips scrabbled together over the pressed clothing.
“My underpants,” he chattered.
“The primal fig leaf,” she remarked sympathetically. To the changeless night she added, “This had to end.”
“We could do it again,” he muttered, knowing it was impossible. Finding the needed undergarment, he sat up and pulled its one large and two smaller apertures over his numb feet. In so doing, he let in a blast of cold air that raked their backs. With a subdued shriek, she flailed through their mingled clothes. “I’m putting on my shirt first,” she chattered. Thus together they struggled to clothe themselves as quickly as possible.
He sneezed.
“See?” she said.
Their shoes came last; already their nylon ski parkas enclosed their body heats separately. The sleeping bag lay open and its newly exposed innards were becoming lightly fuzzed with blown snow.
With the heat of motion retained by the airtight parka, he hurried under the impeding pine branches to wrap the sleeping bag into a tight ball while she stood beside him, a figure of innocence. She kept her fingers linked over the opacity of blue parka and ski tag veiling her pleased secret. She remarked, “Say, we melted the snow in a circle.”
Wheezing from icy air in his lungs, he swept the downy nylon hull under his arm, feeling it deflate slowly, and looked at the crushed, bare grass which was already covered by platelets of ice.
“Nobody would believe it,” she observed.
He straightened up and looked at her. “Would you?”
In the blue light, her teeth were like china as she smiled. “I’m very happy.” She was a tall, slim blonde with long smooth hair and an elegant sort of long-faced prettiness, ruddy and radiant as if just from the ski slopes.
He was dark-haired, lean, and muscular, with an angular, narrow head of short-clipped dark hair, a strong jaw covered with twice-a-day shadow, and mournful dark eyes.
“We made one mistake,” he said, pointing to the scars their feet had made in the freshly fallen snow. The holes were already filled with snow, but had raised edges like moon craters filled with dust, mysterious in origin.
She shook her head. “It’s going to snow some more very soon now.” She put her hands in her parka pockets and looked around. “Suppose somebody was watching?”
He touched her elbow and drew her back into the shadows. “Come gaze into my eyes one last time.”
“What about the footprints?”
He said, “If anyone comes by, we’ll tell them it was a Yeti and we were chasing it.”
“I have to get going in a few minutes,” she said, staring worriedly at a foot of fresh snow already blanketing the street.
He shrugged. “We’ll manage.” He looked aside. “I think we’ve melted the snow in a circle around us.”
Laughing brightly, she stuck a snowball down his shirt and he in genuine anguish made jerky motions like one who had been shot, falling finally face-first into the down.
Minutes later, he chased her over the glaciers of snow and ice that oozed from among somnolent houses. Disregarding man-made fences and barriers, Jon and Merile capered under tinkling and ice-laden trees while the moon shone gaily, trapped in the suffusive blue haze of the street lights. The night just sort of floated in a sympathy of winking stars as they held hands atop windy orchards and gazed toward the humming highway, near the sea; and toward the unknowable future for each of them.
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