Love and Night: Unknown Stories by Cornell Woolrich

Author:Cornell Woolrich [Woolrich, Cornell]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Perfect Crime Books
Published: 2013-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

• • •

The sleepy-eyed clerk in the little upstate hotel pushed the register toward them at three in the morning, and Eddinger turned to her and kissed her before he signed it. A recklessly happy kiss, an exulting kiss at having outwitted death one more time. The clerk had never seen two people with such shining eyes; he wondered disapprovingly if they’d been drinking. Mr. and Mrs. Smith the book recorded.

“The best you’ve got,” he told the clerk, and carelessly tossed a crumpled bill on the desk.

“You don’t have to pay your bill until you leave,” said the clerk. Eddinger looked at Ivy and they both laughed, as though they shared some private joke between them.

“You’d better take it now,” he said. “There’s no telling—” When the door upstairs had closed upon them and they were alone, they flew into each other’s arms like two wild birds in a storm. Stolen time! Every moment was stolen time. Every minute might be the last. That perhaps saved the situation from cheapness, tawdriness; that made it more than just a one-night stand in a country hotel with Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the register. Though she was inexperienced as far as those things went, Ivy somehow knew the difference just as any woman would have. He wasn’t just playing with her; whatever his past had been, he was as sincere tonight as she was. No one could have feigned the real admiration, the basic respect, that showed amidst all the wildness of his kisses. The broken inchoate murmurs he poured into her ears came from the heart; they lacked the smoothness of hypocrisy.

“My kind of a girl, found my kind of a girl at last! You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“No—all my life I’ve been waiting—you don’t know what this means, do you? If you put your head on my shoulder tonight in this room, it means forever, for always. If not, say so now.”

“From now on is the word,” he said. “It may end in five minutes—it may last for fifty years.”

“With this kiss,” she breathed, “I thee wed.” Darkness suddenly flooded the room. Strangest of wedding-nights, a revolver in a holster slung across the foot of their marriage bed, neither of them daring to undress, every footfall in the corridor past their door a sudden menace.

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