wonderful dance on the desert, the times we kissed ourselves silly. When did it stop? It all seems like fifteen years ago. Like it really was high school."
Something stirred her placid features. Puzzlement in the eyes maybe. Now that Temple no longer wore glasses, Matt could see the true shape of her features. She looked almost stranger-like at times when he glanced at her and noticed a plane of cheek or forehead he had never seen before.
In a way, it intimidated him. In another way, this made her attractive to him as she never had been before, though she had always been attractive to him.
He needed to touch that blurred Impressionist-painting face, to make sure the oils were still wet, that the image might yet change under his fingers.
He touched the black opal cat figure at her throat instead.
"You should wear black more often. It becomes you."
His other hand stretched to test the right side of her face. "The bruises are gone." But he wasn't really playing doctor, he just wanted to feel the subtle hollow beneath her no-longer obscured cheekbone.
Temple kept as still as a rabbit on an endless swath of lawn, suddenly aware of the mixed emotions that were overflowing in him. Uncommitted, waiting, yet completely complicit. Wary and waiting. Anxious. Yet excited.
Matt trembled on the brink of expressing an intimacy he had never dreamed of, so earth-shaking that he avoided her eyes, studying her instead as a disjointed Cubist portrait broken into isolated planes and features: the notched curve above her lip; the hollow of her throat that cradled the black cat charm; her long, white and graceful neck, which he had found himself noticing at the funeral home.
He could still taste the shock of fresh blood in her mouth on New Year's Eve. Maybe it was behavior modification, but he shied away from her mouth. Not for him the traditional lover's kiss. He wanted to touch, to kiss, to taste her neck and throat.
And there was nothing to stop him, except wondering if this was weird. So he did what he felt, swept up by an odd wave of overwhelming desire and . . . reverence.
He leaned forward until his lips touched her skin, and then he placed a phantom circle of kisses around the base of her throat. His lips found the faint, fast pulse of her carotid artery and caressed it. This was the kiss of life far more than the neighborly ritual of greeting in every mass celebrated.
His sense of smell sharpened: he could taste the tang of green apple in her shampoo or soap; her skin was satin-velvet to his lips and fingertips. He wanted to devour it, soothe it, seal every centimeter of it as his; the ridges of her collarbones required tracing with kisses. Her hands suddenly twining in his hair agreed with him. Then there was no stopping him.
His fingers found and fussed with the slippery beads of buttons, releasing them from confining loops and kissing the hidden hard escarpment of her chest bone. How could bone be so sexy, highpoint and hollow? It was. What was he doing? Who was he becoming? Vampire.
Cannibal. Lover. Devourer. Worshiper. What was he making of her? Icon. Object. Aphrodisiac.
Emotion and desire were building to a pitch that vibrated in the very fork of his being, achingly physical yet as correspondingly spiritual as any meditation in which he had striven to penetrate the mystery and touch the face o( God.
The buttons were parting before him like gateways. His lips followed the trail his fingers had forged until his cheek brushed the soft bare swell of what he knew must be breast.
The piercing jolt of pleasure stopped him cold. Primal memory? Or just too many years celibate? Matt pulled his face back, saw the sexy chasm of skin he had exposed between the gaping buttons and loops, the pair of hard hidden buttons beneath the fabric.
Fascinated, he dragged his palms lightly across them.
Her torso surged upward like a body revived by electrical current. Her low moan echoed through his nerves.
A concurrent shock through his own system pulled him back even further, to hover above her and finally dare look at her face.
It was a face he had seen on dozens of billboards around town, the quintessential sexy female face thrust back on an exposed neck above an exposed chest, the eyes mostly closed, the lips parted and slack.
Now he understood the power of the image and also its utter poverty. Its mean, commercial, pornographic parody of the full physical and emotional range of eroticism.
The beauty of her face, the fact that his touch had brought that beauty there, took his breath away, made the demanding vice in his groin tauten further. To see that transformation in a face he loved, to know he could bring it so much pleasure, made him feel omnipotent in an almost blasphemous way. But everything metaphysical was also paradoxical. He had never felt so powerless.
He bent to finally kiss her mouth without fear, tasting nothing but mutual desire and a depth unimaginable.
He was convinced that there was only one sane way to live his life, and that would be doing this with her forever, eternally, in every way imaginable, no food, no sleep, no time, no talk, no stopping, over and over again, amen.
Their touch would never break, their eyes would never open except to look at each other; no serpent, and no punishing god, would ever intrude on their earthly eden, and pleasure would be pure and private forever.
She stirred as if waking from a dream.
The first time she said his name, it was a moan, and thrilled him. The second time was a murmur.
The third time her eyes opened, and tears covered them like crystal cataracts.
Matt watched the serpent slither into his eden within those eyes of dawning regret. Silver-blue eyes, like sunlit water.
She struggled upright a little, then tried to redo a button.
But there were too many and they gaped too wide. It would have been ridiculous to sit there and do up buttons like a Victorian maid after the intense intimacy they'd shared.
Matt watched her with dread, and a reflex of rising shame he hated, and a silly stupefied adoration.
"You're going to be disappointed in me again," she said, her voice thick.
"Never." He sounded besotted and liked it.
"Yes, you will. Matt, I can't."
He didn't need to ask what she couldn't. He started to backtrack, to preserve what had been, at least. He had to salvage some part of this.
"I ... I don't know what came over me," he said quickly. "The stress of the funeral, maybe.
Death makes you want to live. I forced this on you, didn't ask--"
"There are some-things you don't need to ask, and this was one of them."
"Is it. . . always so sudden like this?"
"More or less." She was trying to restore normality, but her voice was shaky. "Usually less."
"I'm... the feeling's incredible. No wonder so many people get in trouble with it."
She smiled, faintly.
"Temple, whatever you're going to say--"
"I'm going to say it right away, before you go any farther in any way, and hate me worse than you will anyway."
"Hate you--"
"I almost told you earlier a couple of times, but it never seemed the right moment. Now it's the really wrong moment, but I've got to do it."
She hugged her arms around herself, creating a subtle swell of cleavage that made him understand why a man "couldn't keep his hands off" a woman.
Whatever she said wouldn't pierce the sensual, doting haze that wreathed him like smoke and mist.
"Max and I are together again."
The words were gibberish; the moving lips that said them were irresistible and he needed to kiss them.
Her head tilted as if to find him inside his emotional and erotic maze. "Matt?"
"Together." His voice sounded slow, drugged.
"Not living together; we can't. But we're trying to rebuild our relationship. See if it stands a chance at being permanent."
"Together. You're sleeping together. You can't be. This wouldn't have happened if you were."