‘Me. I’m broken.’
Kate’s lips twisted and she smiled. They kissed then, her arms up around his neck until Kate broke free and stood at the window. ‘Do you see what I see?’ Kate asked him over her shoulder. ‘Do we look at the world through the same eyes?’
She stood with her back to him, her body visible like a shadow through the thin cotton of her white nightdress until Axl moved in close and wrapped his arms tight around her. It was a small step from there to letting his fingers stray to one full breast, the memory of her nipple coming erect staying with him as his fingers touched her throat and Kate’s head went back, eyes closing.
He could kill her, or not. He could admit this was the first woman he’d really loved, or he could just go. Leaving was always an option. Axl was good at that.
‘What would it take to make you stay?’ Kate asked softly, then froze when she felt the sudden tension in his body. Only by now Axl knew her well enough to know that if she was cross it wasn’t with him.
She didn’t protest when he kissed her neck, just below her left ear. Letting his hand smooth its way back down her body, brushing once more over her nipple.
‘Again,’ she said and so he did, fingers tracing a soft circle around the fullness of her breast, spiralling in until his fingertips just brushed the puckered flesh around her nipple, then closed in, tugging gently.
Kate sighed.
Somewhere around the age of twenty-three Axl gave up notching. Partly it just felt too childish, but mostly it was because he couldn’t decide if his tally wasn’t enough or was way too many. Plus around then his quality control got fucked over by 4-MDA, not to mention crystalMeth. And once ruffioes and zidifel got jacked into the mix, it was keep it up all night, crash out come dawn and wake not remembering whether or not you’d just had the fuck of a lifetime.
But now…
Very slowly, so slowly that at first Axl thought he imagined it, Kate pushed back against him, softly rocking her hips so the muscles of her buttocks tensed and relaxed as he pushed against her.
She said nothing when Axl reached round to undo the pearl buttons on the front of her nightdress, not touching her body as he slipped the light cotton over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. And as Axl slid his fingers softly down her bare stomach, Kate kept silent, only raising her right leg slightly to let his hand twist into her silken body hair and gently trap the hood of her clit, softly closing on the tiny fold of skin and the swollen bud beneath.
There’d been a kid back in Alphabet City who used to take her knickers off, and not just for Axl. T-shirt too, if you could afford it. That was where he’d learnt how to touch and where. Fifty cents let him stand at the end of a foam slab as she wanked herself with glistening fingers. A dollar bought viewing space between her open knees.
It didn’t matter that her nails were rimmed with half moons of dirt and her wrists decorated with dark slashes of scar tissue, those were never what Axl was looking at. She’d been thirteen, maybe fourteen, certainly older than him. He couldn’t remember her name now, but then Axl wasn’t sure she’d ever told him.
Part of Axl could have stood like that forever, with Kate’s head rested back against his shoulder as she bit at her bottom lip, not quite muffling the sigh that rose to a gentle moan. But that part of him didn’t win. It never did.
‘Kate ...?’
She opened her eyes, then closed them again as Axl’s fingers slid free and smoothed between wet and swollen lips.
Between her simple wooden bed and the window was five steps, and with each step Axl kept waiting for her to tell him to stop, to protest, to do anything but let him walk her across to the white cotton sheets and the thrown-back quilt.
But Kate didn’t say stop and she didn’t object when he pushed her gently back onto the narrow bed and poised himself over her. Instead she pulled up her legs and opened her knees to rest her heels on the edge of the mattress. With her eyes wide open and her long hair spread around her head like a fan, she looked more vulnerable, more naked than any woman he’d ever seen. So naked, it was hard for Axl to remember that she’d been head of intelligent resources, VP and deputy CEO of one of the world’s biggest metaNationals.
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.