ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 65
wanted him to come where she was going. She found sleep again,
but the dreams pounded in. In the next one, he was kissing her and
she wondered if he could hear the terrible sound originating in her
skull - like deeply-rooted weeds being torn from the earth - the
sound of her teeth breaking through the fibrous tissue of her gums,
growing long against his tongue. He pulled back. The protruding
cartilages in his neck rose and fell, and he seemed to be offering.
She startled awake and sucked in air. Their bodies were sprawled
together and his delicate fingers were slowly tracing the top of one
slipper, and then they were probing between the fabric and bones
of her ankle.
“Take them off,” he said.
“I can’t. No!”
“I need this,” he begged. She shook her head and jerked her knees
up to her chest.
“Sweep up the broken glass, is what you need to do!” She shouted.
The shrillness of her voice broke the spell of his lust.
“What glass? What broke?” He asked, dazed. The room was bright
with moonlight. He shook his head and stood up. He was still, except for his eyes, which darted to different depths of focus, like they
did when he took an intense phone call, seeing nothing. Then he set
his sight on her.
“Somebody called you a hurricane. But I didn’t listen.”
Her pupils dilated at the accusation and a hot ringing began in her
ears as she rounded up her thoughts and drafted her defense. Something buckled in her mind to harness the energy that was building.
Her animus arrived and delivered a calm, detached alertness, a
newborn baby fixing its nearsighted gaze on some shiny new thing.
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