Her hips moved up to meet him and Axl closed his eyes, feeling for that tiny electric jolt which came as her swollen lips closed around his glans, entrance muscles tightening around him. Pulling slowly back out, Axl slid into her again until he could feel himself fill her completely.
She looked at him then, mouth slack with sex, her eyes distant and unfocussed. What the look meant Axl didn’t know. A memory maybe, or nothing. Because nothing was all Axl had in his head as he dropped his mouth to one swollen breast and tugged at Kate’s nipple like a child.
It was over fast for both of them after that. One second they were ploughing against each other with that sodden slap of urgent sex and then suddenly Kate’s legs twined around the back of his and she ground her hips up into him, mewling like a kitten as her arms locked round his shoulders and he pushed down into her.
There was just time for Axl to suck his right index finger and reach under her buttocks and then Kate’s low broken mewling segued into steady grunts that rose to a triumphant howl. If anyone at Escondido hadn’t already known what Axl and Kate were doing from the frantic creak of her wooden bed, they did now.
‘Well,’ said Kate as she puckered her lips into a mocking kiss. ‘That was a first.’
Axl looked incredulous. ‘Orgasm?’
‘Penis.’
Enough shock wrote itself across Axl’s face to make Kate laugh. ‘It never occurred to me that I was bi…’ Kate sounded more amused than surprised. ‘Always knew I was the other, long before I knew what the other was.’
Axl rolled off her and tucked his legs under him to sit on the edge of her bed.
Kate’s body hair was dark and damp, crushed flat and flecked with pearls of semen and it took effort for Axl to drag his gaze from between her open legs to her face, which waited expectantly for his question. He was ashamed to admit that he was shocked. It had never occurred to Axl that other people might not have tried both.
‘The other ... Is it like a feeling?’
Kate looked at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘you tell me. Is it…’
‘. . . like a feeling?’ Axl glanced at Kate’s full breasts, her mouth, then back to her narrow hips and the darkness between her legs. He nodded, realising that race and sex were immaterial. You fell in love with the person. If you were stupid enough to fall in love at all.
There were no faint scars on Kate’s body, no patches of new skin where a delicate dusting of freckles didn’t quite match. Nothing at all to say she’d had even minor elective surgery. And yet. . . he’d seen younger eyes in old women, in old men too come to that. There was something about this woman that frightened him. Some intensity burning back inside her head just out of reach.
‘Have you ever had a rebuild?’ Axl asked the question without thought, regretting the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Something else he was good at. It was the wrong question.
Axl sighed. He kind of thought it might be.
The only people who looked their age were street people, his people, those who couldn’t afford rebuilds or the free-radical busting, mind-expanding chelated supplements the rest of humanity washed down by the handful without even thinking about it.
‘What does it matter?’ Kate demanded.
‘It doesn’t.’ Axl held up his hands, placating Kate. ‘Really.’ The switch he’d tripped wasn’t one he’d even realised was there. ‘I’m sorry…’
Kate shrugged. ‘You know how absurd this is?’ Without ever quite touching Axl she manoeuvred herself around him and shuffled up to the head of her narrow bed where she wrapped herself in the discarded quilt.
‘I’ve got Axl Borja sitting naked on my bed and he’s saying sorry.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Axl and Kate smiled.
‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ Kate asked finally.
He didn’t want to go there.
‘A couple of years in a freezer,’ Axl told her, sounding impossibly casual even to himself. It wasn’t the worst but he didn’t talk about that. And besides mentioning the time he’d been dead didn’t seem appropriate.
All the same, she still looked suitably shocked.
‘You were in cyro?’
‘Yeah, in Day Effé. It’s a long story.’ Not to mention singularly unpleasant. The kind to rate a same-day repeat and syndication on any daytime confession-fest. Then there was that other gap in his CV, when the street brats in Devil’s Kitchen rose by one member and fell by three. Axl wasn’t packed away in some pod then, but he might as well have been. Time passes like weather on the streets. It’s hot, it’s cold. Rain pisses down or it doesn’t. Occasionally it snows and suddenly even slums clean up for as long as it takes drone salters to turn virginal streets into grey slush.
It could have been only a year he spent on the street, maybe two. Later on, the Cardinal got his New York office to check NYPD precincts, but no one knew how long the kid had been running wild and Axl couldn’t begin to guess. Too much GHB.
He got a name change after that, a PIN number and Mexico City laminate. His own room, educational software, mediCare. Two months later he went through a back window and three guards who tried to get in his way, though he didn’t tell Kate that.
‘That’s it, really,’ said Axl. ‘Not much of a story.’
‘You know the worst thing that happened to me?’
Axl could guess. ‘Your sister being murdered?’
The answer Axl expected was a simple yes and maybe more tears. But he got the truth instead which was far stranger.
‘You still haven’t worked it out, have you?’ Kate said quietly. ‘Joan wasn’t my sister.’ And the well of silence that followed was so deep you could have tossed your entire life into it and never heard the splash.
Inside that silence, Kate clambered off the bed in a jumble of naked limbs hidden inside a thin quilt and walked to the door. For a second Axl thought she was about to stalk out into the corridor wearing only her quilt.
But all Kate did was take a grey shahtoosh off the brass hook attached to the back of the door and wrap its length of fine wool tightly around her. Then she walked back to the bed as if nothing had happened.
‘What was that about?’ Axl asked.
‘Joan,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t sit opposite you and talk about her.’
Which answered his next question.
‘You were lovers, weren’t you?’
‘At fourteen my father died. At fifteen I was Joan’s unofficial private secretary. A year later I was running her whole private office…’
Joan was twenty-eight years older than Kate. And at forty-two, not yet ravaged by lymphatic cancer but already dismissive of the flesh, of physical needs and carnal hunger until she met the pale-skinned, serious Kate. And Kate, her mother already dead and her father only just buried in the churchyard at Castel Gandolfo woke a hunger in Joan that Joan had always believed missing from her psyche.
Those were the words Kate used. The serious language of serious matters remembered. And the naked man sat on Kate’s bed sat and listened as she talked of statues by Bellini, Gobelin tapestries and the one great love of her life.
The artist and craftsmen she mentioned meant no more to him than talk of blow-back, azimuths and lines of fire would have meant to her. But Axl understood the rawness of those emotions that burnt behind her dark pupils, the double edged cutting sharpness of her memories as she slipped tenses from Joan is to Joan was and back again, eyes overfilling with tears.