She cried out, and here was Dan Currier, professional (obsessional) consoler: a cry was to be heeded, the affliction of pain was to be stopped and existing pain consoled. This is everything I was and everything I meant to be. But now at my first great delving lunge, miraculously made swift and easy, she cried out, and I withdrew almost all the way and lunged again so deep and so hard that it bruised my pubic bone against hers, and again she cried out, louder. Of course there was pain, that shattering drive of flesh into flesh and bone against bone, and my great weight on her and my big arms locked around her so that the cry was forced out as shockingly as it was driven out by whatever was moving her. How, then she could take in enough air to do what she did I can not explain, but she cried out again and again, each cry like a plucked string, sharply appearing and fading, four, five … seven of them, diminishing. And with each cry, that incredible gripping inside, but harder, stronger than I had ever known it, so much so that I could realize, now, that I had not felt those earlier ones, but merely sensed them.
She was silent at last, and drenched with sweat from head to foot. I took my weight off her, raising myself on my elbows and placing my hands on the sides of her face and locking my gaze with hers. In hers I saw only a great wonder—no fear, no pain—and in this and in the strange slack slightly swollen new shape of her lips, such love as I have never known.
I began to move slowly, deeply inside her, and then, like a slow-motion reenactment of that first great drive, withdrew almost all the way and pressed inward again, right to the root. Each time I penetrated to that depth her eyes almost closed, but not quite—not enough to sever the cable of withness that had been woven between her eyes and mine. We had never done this in the light before; we had never seen each other experiencing it; I think that in a deeply important way we had never seen each other.
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