Before he could decide, Meli said, “And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t want my children scientifically implanted, either. I want them implanted naturally… But dammit, Birch, I love you.”
Before he could respond in kind, their lips touched and they were clinging together like bathers in a swift stream. Before it could register that Meli wasn’t resisting him (or was he not resisting her?)—that she was participating—they had dropped their respective pants and opened their respective shirts to press flesh to flesh. Birch noted that Meli didn’t wear a bra and Meli noted that Birch had furry buttocks. But that was the last thing either of them noted because rational observations have a way of swamping in strong emotion.
With a bedroll of pants and shirts covering the cool, sandy floor, the Asbury-Bocamps coupled with abandon right before the basalt eyes of Queen Hariti and her royal husband and their entire stone brood. The Happy Couples graced them with knowing, painted smiles and the soft lights warmed them, if only slightly. They generated quite enough heat on their own.
It was entirely glorious, if gritty, and was brought to an unceremonious end by noises outside the cave.
“Oh my God,” Birch gasped, “someone’s coming,” and intended no pun.
“They’ll catch us!” Meli cut short her own paroxysms and wriggled after her shirt. She couldn’t bear the thought of being discovered by Cari or Clay—caught flat on her back in flagrant and aberrant delicti.
They broke speed records scrambling into their clothes—socks wadded into one pocket, underwear into another. In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm; only a delinquent pack mule who would not have cared that a man and his wife were coupling in a Buddhist love shrine. They laughed at the mule, then again at themselves when they realized they had gotten each other’s pants by mistake. His ankles were bare, her feet were invisible.
They strolled back to the camp housing arm in arm, feeling at once guilty and giddy and relieved.
“Are we awful?” Meli asked.
“Probably.” Birch was silent for a measure of steps. “You really do look like the princess in Cave One. I imagined you did.”
“You imagined? You thought about it? About me? Like that?”
“I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to, but I want you, Meli. Do you… do you feel degraded by that? Because if you do, I can try to behave like—”
“No. No, I don’t feel degraded by it. I feel…” She grinned, wicked. But in a very nice way.”
Birch sighed, relieved. “I was beginning to wish I was Catholic. I had all these horribly conflicted, unnatural feelings about you and I’d no one to confess them to.”
“You must confess them to me, my son,” Meli said, and delighted in another wicked tingle. “Every aberrant thought.”
They’d reached their cottage and Birch held open the door. “We’ll have to be very careful. No one must find out about us. Especially not Clay and Cari. They’d never understand.”
“No, never.” Meli smiled. “They’d think we were mad.”