"KW Jeter - Black Nightgown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

KW Peter - Black Nightgown

Everyone knew.
Everyone knows, he murmured to himself. His lips brushed across the white
skin of her neck, the soft region between her throat and ear, when he
spoke aloud, a whisper, her name. His lips brushed across the delicate
strands of hair that trembled with the exhalation of his breath. He
breathed in her scent that wasn't roses but just as sweet. He murmured her
name, he couldn't stop himself, and she shifted in his arms but didn't
wake.
They all knew, but he didn't care. Not here in this world that he wrapped
his arms around and was held by at the same time. A world bound by her
scent and their mingled warmth, caught by the tunnelled sheets and the
white-tasselled covers. Her breasts encircled by his arm . . .
Outside, in that other world, the streetlamp's blue merged with the faint
shadows of the moon. The thin light slid around the edges of the curtain,
made empty shapes of her bedroom dresser and the door that led to the rest
of the empty, silent house. She moved in his embrace, eyes closed, her
mouth parting slightly, her breath a sigh.
"They all know."
Another's whisper. His sweat felt cold upon his naked shoulders. He turned
his face away from hers and looked up at the figure standing beside the
bed.
Her dead husband could see through the drawn curtain and through the walls
of all the houses lining the street, the lights left on in kitchens and
sleeping hallways shining through the red bricks as though through glass.
"Your mother . . . your sisters . . . even your father." The dead man
looked away from the window and everything beyond, turning toward his
sleeping wife. "They all know."
Of course his mother and sisters would know. He brought his face back down
to hers. They had known before any of this had ever come about. He closed
his eyes, lashes brushing the curve of her cheekbone. His father would
never speak of what he knew. He kissed the corner of her mouth.
They all know . . .
And now he did as well. He knew; he knew something.
He held her fast in the night of their small world. Held her, and felt her
dead husband watching them. Watching them in the great night's world.

The women spoke the old world's language. The mothers less than the
grandmothers, and the daughters only a few words. But they all knew, and
understood. The grey-haired poked their tree-root fingers through the
shelled peas, the bowls held in their laps as they sat gossiping to each
other or murmuring to themselves; the youngest turned their dark-eyed gaze
at him as he stepped into the street to pass by their jump ropes slapping
the cracked sidewalk. Whisper into each other's ears, laugh and run away,
their white anklets flashing like the teeth of an ocean's waves.
He asked his father what women talked about.
"Christ in his fucking Heaven -- who knows?" Sweating through his
undershirt as a cleaver snapped free the ribs of a dangling carcass, the
knotted spine turned naked as a row of babies' fists. In the store's