“Forgive me.”
“What’s to forgive?”
“I can’t be without you, Gentle. We belong to each other, like man and wife.”
With her here, so close after such an absence, the idea of marriage didn’t seem so preposterous. Why not claim her now and forever?
“You want to marry me?” he murmured.
“Ask me again another night,” she replied.“I’m asking you now.”
She put her hand back upon that anointing place in the middle of his brow. “Hush,” she said. “What you want now you might not want tomorrow. . ..”
He opened his mouth to disagree, but the thought lost its way between his brain and his tongue, distracted by the small circular motions she was making on his forehead. A calm emanated from the place, moving down through his torso and out to his fingertips. With it, the pain of his bruising faded. He raised his hands above his head, stretching to let bliss run through him freely. Released from aches he’d become accustomed to, his body felt new minted: gleaming invisibly.
“I want to be inside you,” he said.
“How far?”
“All the way.”
He tried to divide the darkness and catch some glimpse of her response, but his sight was a poor explorer and returned from the unknown without news. Only a flicker from the television, reflected in the ^loss of his eye and thrown up against the blank darkness, lent him the illusion of a luster passing through her body, opaline. He started to sit up, seeking her face, but she was already moving down the bed, and moments later he felt her lips on his stomach, and then upon the head of his cock, which she took into her mouth by degrees, her tongue playing on it as she went, until he thought he would lose control. He warned her with a murmur, was released and, a breath later, swallowed again.
The absence of sight lent potency to her touch. He felt every motion of tongue and tooth in play upon him, his prick, particularized by her appetite, becoming vast in his mind’s eye until it was his body’s size: a veiny torso and a blind head lying on the bed of his belly wet from end to end, straining and shuddering, while she, the darkness, swallowed him utterly. He was only sensation now, and she its supplier, his body enslaved by bliss,, unable to remember its making or conceive of its undoing. God, but she knew how he liked to be pleasured, taking care not to stale his nerves with repetition, but cajoling his juice into cells already brimming, until he was ready to come in blood and be murdered by her work, willingly.
Another skitter of light behind his eye broke the hold of sensation, and he was once again entire—his prick its modest length—and she not darkness but a body through which waves of iridescence seemed to pass. Only seemed, he knew. This was his sight-starved eyes’ invention. Yet it came again, a sinuous light, sleeking her, then going out. Invention or not it made him want her more completely, and he put his arms beneath her shoulders, lifting her up and off him. She rolled over to his side, and he reached across to undress her. Now that she was lying against white sheets her form was visible, albeit vaguely. She moved beneath his hand, raising her body to his touch.
“Inside you . . .” he said, rummaging through the damp folds of her clothes.
Her presence beside him had stilled; her breathing lost its irregularity. He bared her breasts, put his tongue to them as his hands went down to the belt of her skirt, to find that she’d changed for the trip and was wearing jeans. Her hands were on the belt, almost as if to deny him. But he wouldn’t be delayed or denied. He pulled the jeans down around her hips, feeling skin so smooth beneath his hands it was almost fluid; her whole body a slow curve, like a wave about to break over him.
For the first time since she’d appeared she said his name, tentatively, as though in this darkness she’d suddenly doubted he was real.