She stands. She looks at me. Her eyes are red and raw, the irises like sapphires stuck into bullet wounds. She turns away and walks into the forest.
-
I trail her at a distance, unsure of my welcome but unwilling to lose her again. She pushes ahead with fierce strides, slapping branches out of her face, following a narrow deer path without any concern for where it leads. I think of her mad plunge into the ruins of Detroit. Her brazen defiance of every mortal threat she encounters. Beneath all her passion for humanity lurks an ambivalence toward herself. She tosses her life from hand to hand, not quite throwing it away but daring fate to take it. What will she do now, after all this? Has she ever carried this much weight?
I begin to shrink the distance between us, wondering if she’ll let me near enough to help.
We have entered an older part of the forest. Instead of the squabbling of greedy birds and insects, there is solemn silence. Instead of a tangle of unruly scrub brush, its floor is moss and layered loam. We are surrounded by creatures that have outlived empires. Gnarled oaks and towering redwoods whose inner rings inhaled the last breath of Christ and the smoke of Alexandria. How foolish we must look to them.
I hear a wheeze creeping into her breathing.
“Julie,” I say, only a few feet away now. “Stop.”
She stops. She stands with her back to me in a wide patch of moss. I reach out and touch her arm; she doesn’t turn, but she doesn’t pull away. I wrap my arms around her shoulders and move in close behind her. “I’m sorry,” I murmur into her hair, meaning so many things.
She says nothing. She just stands there, breathing, so I do the same, drinking in the scent that I’ve been chasing for so long. It has always been a mystery to me. I can’t fathom what composes it. The smells one expects from a human body are not pleasant—sweat and bacteria, mucus and sebum, a bitter cocktail of secretions and excretions. So why does Julie smell sweet? Where does the cinnamon come from? This rich blend of vetiver and honeysuckle, that subtle hint of pepper? Can it really be her body producing this perfume? When I inhale the warm air that rises from her head, is it her soul I’m smelling?
“Julie,” I say again, but I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how else to console her. I don’t know any more ways to ask forgiveness or to show her she can trust me. I have never felt so stripped. “Julie, I want to—”
She turns around and grabs my face and kisses me. The wheels in my brain stop spinning. Her arms are around my neck, pulling me down and herself up so we can meet in the middle, and this is no quick peck just to tell me to hold on; this is no calculated signal—this is desire. I’m too startled to match her intensity; her lips crush mine against my teeth; her tongue pins mine to the floor of my mouth. My hands twitch a few inches from her body, unsure where they belong.
She pulls back, just far enough to look me in the eyes. There is more than grief in her gaze. I see a startling joy spreading through her tears. “We deserve to live,” she tells me, and she waits.
I feel wet warmth pooling in my eyes. Slowly, I nod. “We deserve to live.”
I pull her tight against me and we drop to the mossy ground.
With her fingers digging into my back, she claws the tattered remains of my shirt over my head, revealing my desolate landscape of bruises, scratches, scars. I roll her on top of me and she raises her arms and arches her back, an invitation. I slide her filthy tank-top up her stomach and past her ribs and over her breasts, and we pause, watching each other’s ribcages rise and fall. She smiles. She runs her fingers down my chest to the cavity under my sternum where my hearts beats visibly. She bends down and presses her face against it, wipes her tears on my chest, and kisses my pounding pulse.
My body jolts with a kind of electricity I’ve never felt. I see it in my mind as rose-hued lightning, coursing through my flesh and soothing it, healing it and making it strong. None of my memories contain any such power. Sex in my first life was a means to an end—my partners and I tolerated each other, sometimes even respected and appreciated each other, but what drew us together was the experience we could create. Skin was skin. It didn’t much matter who was wearing it.
Watching Julie slide my pants down with a nervous smile, never breaking eye contact, I am overwhelmed by the reality of her. An essence I know so well and crave so badly that her skin is just a veil around it—smooth, voluptuous, and beautiful, but secondary.
Her veil touches mine. The light behind it rushes into me through the wires of our nerves. My muscles go rigid; my limbs spasm; it’s euphoric electrocution. Her mouth wraps around me and brings me into the very center of her self, my most sensitive part surrounded by her eyes, her ears, her brain, caressed by her organs of speech and expression—can anything be more intimate?
Yes. Always yes. There is no limit; the Library has no ceiling. Our clothes are gone and we are naked under the ancient trees. We are dirty and hurt from weeks, months, years of struggle—sweaty and sticky, smudged with mud and blood, and perhaps we smell terrible and should be disgusted, but we are not interested in what we should be. I breathe Julie’s scent and taste the story of her body as I lick her deepest places, and I’m unable to imagine feeling anything but privilege.
Her moans are low and throaty, then high and cracking, exquisitely physical in their smoky timbre, and then she stops me. She grips the sides of my face and pulls it back up to hers. She looks in my eyes and smiles, then bubbles into laughter. It gushes out of her like an overflowing fountain, breathless and ecstatic and distantly incredulous that this is really happening, that we are really here, after all this time and torment, fucking in a forest.
She grabs my absurdly hard, fiercely alive cock, and she welcomes me inside.
I have always found it troubling that pain and pleasure make the same sounds. It seems a red flag for the sanity of our species. Why is our love aurally indistinguishable from violence? Why express euphoria with an anguished wail? Why this need to paint even the most basic human joy with a glaze of suffering?
These are not the sounds Julie and I make. Her gasps are warm, her screams are in a major key, and my groans are unmistakably enthused. When it’s too much to express, we laugh. Not a laugh of nervousness, embarrassment, or distancing irony, but something rapturous and paired with tears, that universal fluid of emotional overflow. What a strange miracle, to merge with another person. To be so fully entwined that every movement is linked in synchrony, every thought understood by subtle signals and murmured words, like two voices in the same head moving the limbs of one body, climbing toward some breathtaking plateau.
And what a strange mutation, to be a man with three lives. To have smashed myself against the rocks of the world and then started over, a newborn with a weathered soul. I have all the technique of a sexual veteran with all the raw wonder of a virgin. I am beginning to understand what my old lives are for. How experience—good and bad—is the cement that fills my gaps and shores up my trembling frame. Without it, I wouldn’t be a person. I wouldn’t know who this woman is or how she fits into the craggy landscape of my life.
I wouldn’t know how much I love her.
The forest fades as we climb. A glow washes it white, not the sun but something like it, blazing down from the remote ceiling of the Library. I sense Julie getting close and I release my control; a flood of hot light rushes up from the depths.
I lock eyes with her as we climax. They are fractal blue spirals of mad, impossible beauty, and I see my astonishment mirrored in them. We have become buoyant; we hurtle up toward the distant reaches of those Higher shelves, each level lovelier than the last, intricate filigree and dizzying arabesques, pearl and silver and teak and gold, and the books—bound in glass, in crystal, in living flesh and light, dousing us with sprays of bright memory, the bliss of a trillion lives, every generation of every creature that could ever feel ecstasy.