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Show £0© The Swamp to leave us alone, when suddenly I had rushed off. What had been wrong? I flipped out my false tooth and showed her, told her how it had snagged in my cheek, and she shook her head over my stupidity. So did I. "Did you have plans for me?" I leered at her. "I don't know. Sort of maybe. I was sure hard up in those days. l Maybe I just wanted to be kissed by somebody who didn't smell like manure. That damned farmer." "Schoenfals?" "Yeah. I guess I was hard up or why would I marry Mark?" "We could make it up. That night. Now." She smiled, her smile settling in her eyes, a drowning pool. There was so much to make up and oh, those vivid afternoons, black hair on white shoulders.' I had never washed a woman's back and I would kneel beside the tub and slowly wash hers, her head bowed to savor it, her hair pinned up to the white of her neck, and me amazed at the sensual calm of it, my hand upon her neck and over her shoulders and down the slippery smooth trough of her spine. I insisted upon toweling dry all of her, and then I would toss the towel aside and while she stood still and attentive to my adoration,^ would move my hand down the still-damp, unslippery front of her, down the whole lithe line of woman, sliding down from neck over shoulders and her thin round arms, down over her chest, the slope of her breasts, the tuck of her waist, the dent of her navel, the round swell of her belly, her crisp bush, downtf her smoothest skin jujf «i»rc ktY /evtfy f#»f, inside her thigh and on to her ankle, my hand encircling it^ me humbled before her as Aaron Miles had been to paint her. Skin and muscle and bone, lovely clear through. /Mov I concentrated, the better to learn her. Though I didn't go back to school I did hang around the University Players and got a part in the play that summer, Wycherly's The Country Wife. I was lucky, I played Horner. Ah, how I got into that part. I hadn't done badly in the other plays, but in All_ My_ Sons I had on opening night forgotten my |