We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed in my cabin. Renee fell asleep before long, with the tomcat curled at her feet. He'd wasted no time in claiming her, and he was giving me looks that plainly urged me to get lost.
She had to be exhausted; she'd never gotten a chance to rest up from the stress and strain of the past days. The silence and the gray light through the windows were soothing, and maybe there'd been a catharsis in the secret she'd finally let out.
I was short on sleep myself, but too wired to drift off. I was entirely content to lie there, however, and I had a new blitz of information to process. In a way it was the most bizarre yet, but somehow it didn't even surprise me-maybe because it dovetailed into what I knew about Astrid. Just as she was a threat to Renee, the reverse was also true, so she had used seduction to establish control, the same as she would have with a man.
Or maybe it didn't surprise me because I was getting harder to surpise.
As Renee described it, the incident had happened during the summer when she was seventeen and visiting her father and Astrid in Helena. At first, the wicked-stepmother syndrome prevailed, but Astrid was shrewd about breaking through that; she treated Renee nonjudgmentally and like an adult, and was candid and amusing about herself. She was alluring, mysterious, exciting-irresistible.
Toward the end of the visit, on a day when Professor Callister was gone, Astrid confided that she loved to shoot. She showed Renee the nine-millimeter pistol and invited her to try it. Just the fact that she owned a gun was a little shocking, and for two women to go out shooting seemed almost improper. Their mood was conspiratorial, girlishly mischievous.
Astrid drove them to a wilderness area a few miles away. They hiked into the woods until they found a suitable clearing, away from any trails.
Then Astrid pressed up against her back. And cupped her breasts. The July afternoon was warm and sultry, Renee remembered. Feeling the voluptuous older woman touch her like that had made her almost dizzy.
She'd kept shooting until the clip was empty, then sagged back into Astrid's embrace. After a moment, Astrid released her. They went home as if nothing had happened and neither of them ever mentioned it again.
"I'm not hung up about the sex part. You know, because I was turned on by a woman," Renee had told me, talking quietly with her cheek on my chest. "I didn't want to be, I didn't not want to be. I just went completely docile-it was like she owned me. That's the problem."
"How so?"
"Because I loved it. It was so intense, so powerful."
"It's kind of supposed to be like that. Especially at that age."
She rose up on an elbow to gaze at me intently. "That's not what I mean. Ever since then, I've been craving somebody who overwhelms me like that-not a good, healthy kind of love where you give and take. I'm an emotional cripple. If somebody loved me, I don't know if I could really love him back."
That wasn't an easy thing to hear.
"What about your fiance?" I said. "Does he know?"
"Not about what happened with Astrid. I've told him the other part-that I don't know if I'll ever feel what I should for him."
"He's okay with that?"
"He thinks I'll get over it. He's so normal, and he assumes that will rub off on me. I guess it has-I've been with him almost two years."
"I don't think there's any such thing as 'normal,'" I said. "Not on that turf, anyway."
"Okay, I'll settle for 'less screwed up.'" She made it clear then that she didn't want to talk about it anymore. After giving me a sweet, lingering kiss that suggested regret, apology, and maybe good-bye, she turned away and drifted into sleep.
As for me, I was left in a bittersweet confusion that was deeper than ever. No way was I the kind of man who might arouse that blind, consuming passion in her. And, taken though I was with her, I wouldn't have wanted that.
Yet again, there was a whisper in my head that said maybe, just maybe, I was seeing this wrong-that Renee knew she could never change in the way her fiance expected her to.
So she was testing me to find out if I would accept her as she was.