ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 61
he undressed and climbed into bed next to her. They passed out,
but he woke to a sharp, myoclonic kick in his side. In the light that
came through the crack in the curtains from the street, he could see
her eyelids fluttering over the rolling spheres beneath, her hands
jerking slightly, pawing like a dog dreaming of escape. In her dream
she was trying to catch a flock of sea birds, whose loose gullets
were wriggling with prey. She was trying to catch them with a net
because she thought they had human faces - faces she knew well.
She gave up the fight with sleep as the beam of streetlamp light
dissolved into the light of dawn. She could tell he was awake before
she turned over to face him. His eyes looked tired and his brow
was wrinkled in concern. She rubbed the lines out of his forehead
with the flat of her palm and nuzzled the scruff of his cheeks with
her lips. She ran her hand along his flank, her fingers tracing the
shadowed valleys aside the ridges of his muscles. Her tongue found
his dark nipple and it stiffened as she lapped at it. She climbed on
top of him and slid onto his hardness, arching so she could see them
moving together in the wall mirror. Her legs were bent sharply like
hangers, ending in the white slippers that never came off. He had
accepted this eccentricity of hers, but it had bred an unfamiliar
preoccupation and lust in him. Her long black hair slithered down
her back as she writhed. He watched himself rise up into her, and
his eyes followed the fluid waves her torso made, and then up to
her pale face. Her eyes looked different, like the streaked irises had
obscured her pupils and a hint of despair passed through him as
he noticed the shade they cast, even as his legs shook. They moved
faster, and their limbs looked smooth and blurred and tangled in
the mirror. She fell forward, her hair and arms making a cave, and
in the privacy of it, she stifled his sounds with her feverish mouth.
A shudder began in her middle, coursing down to her slippers
and back up and he felt a fine sweat break out over her body. The
shudder rumbled away like the wake of a sound wave and then the
only movement was their chests heaving against each other’s as the
panting slowed. She rolled off. Her mind was still and it would be for
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