Prelude

I wouldn't be surprised if you rejected me, she said, willing him to challenge her jet-black hair, her frozen blue eyes, two pastel ice cubes flashing ominously.  I wouldn't be surprised if I did either, he retorted, arching his back in a feline manner, dovetailing his spine toward a middle ground, this delicate sparring a perfect respite from his stresses. I smelled you happily into the evening, he said, And I hope to smell you well into the dawn.  Her scent, a mix of sand and mountain moss, was as fresh to him as the day he first found his olfactory limitations, the scent of women being the entirety of his talent, and therefore his weakness.  She smelled like trouble, but she smelled clean, a candle still waxy, not burned through, still relatively untouched by the wellspring imaginations of teenage fingertip fantasies.

If I dissembled myself before you, I doubt you'd say that, she offered.

He turned away, without an answer, and ran his eyes around the darkly paletted room.  He recognized Van Gogh then, the sublime painting of the cafe at night, juxtaposing light and darkness as if these two could only be appreciated if the other stood watch.  His eyes lit upon her, her soft milk-white flesh stretching time backwards to his childhood, to primal sensations that would undo him if he lived them again.  He thought about his first kiss, in a square lit by fairy lights, strong smells of cinnamon and eucalyptus, a cool breeze; speaking one moment and then, as if by a knockout punch, the world exploding in tiny light particles before his closed eyes, and all he could think was, Is this it?

She saw a far-off look come into his eyes then, the corners of his mouth rounding slightly to enjoy this film about ghosts.  He was wandering away from her to a happy place, but she liked that.  She enjoyed seeing this private moment that often occurs right before sleep, or in her case, when she bathed weekly, sloughing the dead skin of city air down the drain and remaking herself.  She dreamed then of men who made her palms sweaty, who found the place below her jawline where sensation meant she had to close her eyes, who loved her for these tender chinks in her well-made armor.  She glanced down at her hands then, found them rising to his jaw, caressing its definition.  He returned to her.

She kissed him tentatively on the lips, her skin brushing his courtly stubble, sensing the pheromone awakenings drifting between them as they breathed.  He was startled, a little taken aback by the proximity of body to body, of slight fabric tensings, as if he were on a bicycle riding past a fence where she swam naked and he caught a film-slide glimpse of her through the thin wooden slats.  Glorious moments have time signatures all their own and this was languid, glistening, like Miles Davis at midnight.  She caught her breath, the vocal folds loosening enough to emit a throaty warble from the depth of her abdomen.  Her eyes closed, lengthening the moment with their ignorance.  Trembling like washed children air-drying in the twilight, they exhaled and found they were clutching each other, demanding a crutch's responsibility from their opposite, their own supports failing them.

It came then, all at once: a realization that this would be different, that this was a flood the stilts and barred windows they built could not withstand and for better or worse, they were tied together by a sense of the other as part of their own skin.  Soon waking together would become a necessity, just as eating, breathing, making love.  Their futures twined in that moment like DNA.   A cab was called, the drinks were paid, he held the door as she exited and her body pulled him to her in the doorway of her building, desperate already again for that first moment, the anticipation, the fetal groping for ground after being deposited firmly into a new life.