The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell Page A

of her tongue, her hands unbuttoning his shirt: “Into bed. I’m cold, I’m cold.” But she felt as hot as a body on a tropical beach, the heat shimmered from her.
    It warmed the cold sheets. Philip pulled the duvet over them, and they lay pressed into each other’s body in the narrow little bed. The rain began crashing against the window. Suddenly she started to make love to him with a greedy passion. Her fingers dug into his neck, his shoulders, she moved down his body, kissing his flesh, licking him with a curious gasping savour. Bowed over him, arching up the quilt, she swept him with her curtain of hair, teased him with her tongue. Her lips felt tender and rapturous and gentle.
    He gasped, “No!” and then, “No!” because it was too much, it stretched him to explosion point. Behind his head and inside his eyes was a red rolling light. Groaning, he pulled her onto him and entered her—her white body, now streaming with sweat, sinking onto his with a strange quivering rhythm. She held him in a total clutch, holding her breath, then relaxing as she expelled it, drawing breath again, gripping him, releasing herself and him with a final expulsion and a little thin scream.
    Her silver hair draped his shoulders, hanging like the rain he could see falling straight and glittering beyond the glass. He felt a deep, extraordinary, profound satisfaction, as if he had found something he had always been searching for and found it finer than he expected. There were things he thought he ought to say, but all that came to mind was “Thank you, thank you,” and he sensed that to utter this aloud would be wrong. Instead, he took her face in his hand and turned it to his and kissed her mouth long and very gently.
    She hadn’t spoken a word since saying she was cold and they should go to bed. But now she raised her head and laid it on the arm which held her. She took his right hand in her left one, interlocking their fingers. In that high, pure tone of hers she said, “Philip …” She uttered his name reflectively and as if she were listening to the sound of it, as if she were putting it to the test to see if she liked it. “Philip.”
    He smiled at her. Her eyes were close to his, her mouth as close to his face as it could be without their lips touching. He saw every detail of its soft and tender curves, the sweetly tucked-in corners of it.
    “Say my name,” she said.
    “Senta. It’s a beautiful name, Senta.”
    “Listen to me, Philip. When I saw you here this morning, I knew at once that you were the one. I knew you were the only one.” Her tone was deeply solemn. She had raised herself on one elbow. She was looking deeply into his eyes. “I saw you across the room and I knew you were the one for me for always.”
    He was astonished. This was not at all what he had expected from her.
    “I’ve been looking for you for a long long time,” she said, “and now I’ve found you and it’s wonderful.”
    Her intensity had begun, slightly, to embarrass him. He could only handle this awkwardness by speaking lightly, almost facetiously. “It can’t be all that long. How old are you, Senta? Not more than twenty, are you?”
    “I’m twenty-four. You see? I’m going to tell you everything, I’ll keep nothing from you. You can ask me anything.” He didn’t particularly want to ask her things, just to hold her and feel her and have this glorious pleasure. “I’ve been looking for you since I was sixteen. You see, I’ve always known there was just one man in the world for me, and I knew that when I saw him, I’d know.”
    Her lips brushed his shoulder. She turned her face and printed a kiss where the muscle swelled beyond the collar bone. “I believe that souls come in pairs, Philip, but when we’re born, they are split in two and we spend all our lives trying to find our other half. But sometimes people make a mistake and get the wrong one!”
    “This isn’t a mistake. Is it? It wasn’t for me.”
    “This,”