Page 18 of Prima (After the End #8)
He flicks the sand from his fingertips. “I was going to say that I’d more be than happy for you to think of me occasionally—and use me once in a blue moon to win a drinking game. I’m not handing you some precious relic. I was just hoping that what matters to me would also matter to you.”
Her anger condenses into horror. Make you a permanent part of my life in absentia. Devote myself to this sacred memory of ‘us’ day after day, year after year. The words that she threw at him in mockery, except it was not mockery, but fear.
She is afraid she might end up doing just that.
“I’m going to forget you,” she declares.
The ocean caresses the sand, the sound as gentle as a lullaby. The breeze is sweet and pure. And the stars, all those stupid stars, more than she’s ever seen in a single night, shine so gaudily, supremely indifferent to the fate of those they illuminate from half a galaxy away.
In the tranquility of the night, his silence is as loud as a klaxon.
He leans in and cups her face. All the starlight pools in his deep, solemn eyes; he gazes upon her as if she, too, has traveled fifty thousand light-years to reach him.
His hand slides across her cheek. Her skin burns, she barely feels his calluses. He kisses her, not on her lips, but two centimeters to the side, his lips cool against the heat of her cheek. And then he mirrors a kiss to the same spot on the other side of her face.
“You have beautiful dimples.”
She can hear her heart cracking, can see the veins of fissures spreading across its formerly invulnerable surface.
“I’m going to forget you,” she repeats stubbornly.
He runs one hand down her hair, lifts it up, as if to feel its weight, only to lean down and kiss her on her exposed collarbone. She gasps, scalded by that moment of contact.
“When the sun shines on your shoulders, there is a little puddle of shadow here. And here”—he kisses her above her other clavicle—“and here.”
He sets his lips against the dip at the base of her throat.
For a moment her many years of training leap to the fore—he is at her throat. But it’s not her life he imperils, is it?
She grips him by the front of his Coast Watch t-shirt and yanks him up so that they are eye-to-eye. “I’m going to forget you—and you won’t even know the difference.”
He places his hands on her arms and kisses her, lightly, gently, like a breeze brushing across the petals of a flower.
“I’ll do everything in my power to remember you,” he murmurs, “even though that, too, may not make any difference in the end.”
Her much-fractured heart topples into an abyss, along with all her slightly smug plans for an orderly, well-governed future.
She grips his face and smashes her teeth into his, kissing him, bruising him, marking this moment of forever pain.
They tumble onto the blanket. She climbs atop him and slides her hand beneath his t-shirt. He turns completely still, all tense, ridged muscles under her touch. She spread her fingers greedily, loving the suppleness of his skin, the tight strength of his frame.
Hating that every sensation is seared into her mind.
“This is a hate-fuck,” she hisses. “Do you know what that is?”
He sucks in a breath—she has reached lower and wrapped her hand, through the fabric of his trousers, around his erection. “What happened to fun-fucking me?”
What happened? You happened.
Impatiently, she lifts his shirt off and scrapes her too-short nails against his chest. “I should tattoo my name here so you’ll at least wonder what happened to you.”
He runs a hand along her arm, then down the ridge of her spine, his touch warm and light. “You should tell me your name first.”
“What’s the point? You’ll only forget it.”
“So I can say it a thousand times before it escapes me.”
“No.” She does not want to remember him whispering her name over and over again. She doesn’t even want to imagine it.
She grips his waistband.
“You want to tattoo your name there too?” he asks, even as he trembles beneath her touch.
It takes her a moment to realize that he is teasing her.
“And then what? Be thought of as the laughable consequence of a drunken night on the town?”
He bands his arms around her. “Don’t. I may not remember this, but you will. Don’t make this something you won’t want to remember.”
Her anger, like a snowman in spring, cannot hold out against the surety of his embrace. But what will she be left with once she can no longer ward herself off with fury? Her throat tightens. There will be only loss, only devastation.
He wraps a hand around her nape and applies a tentative pressure. She yields to it and lowers her head. He kisses her where her dimples would be if she ever smiled again, and only then on her lips.
At first she is only feeling sorry for herself, but gradually, somehow, she forgets the future. Gradually, there is only this moment, this young man, this deepening kiss that tastes like wind, sea, and starlight.
He rolls her over on her back, braces himself above her, and presses a finger against the highest button of her dress.
The buttons, tiny mother-of-pearl plumerias, run from the top of her sternum to midshin.
Until now she’s thought of them as entirely decorative, but he opens that first button and goes to work on the next.
He does so slowly, with great concentration.
She almost tells him to just push the dress up over her head—it’s how she’s always taken it off—until she realizes it’s not that he can’t disrobe her faster, but that he is, despite everything, trying to commit this night to memory, button by mother-of-pearl button.
When the top of her dress falls apart enough to reveal the valley between her breasts, his fingers tighten on the next button. He licks his lips, but proceeds to the next button, leaving her no choice but to trace her own index finger over the rise of one breast.
He stares at the progress of her fingertip, looks up at her face, and then back down again to where she has pulled the now gaping top of her dress just enough to reveal one starlight-frosted nipple. He swallows.
“Don’t just look. Say something about how pretty my nipple is.”
“I’m—currently incapable of speech,” comes his oxymoronic answer.
She places her hand so that her nipple peeks out from between two fingers. “Is it pretty enough now to inspire a few sweet nothings?”
His reaction is to rip her dress apart. Little mother-of-pearl plumerias land everywhere, on her abdomen, on the blanket, on the sand.
His gaze skims along her naked body, head to toe and back again. He exhales unsteadily. “You may have rendered me permanently mute.”
She expects him to fall upon her, but he does no such thing. Somehow, despite—or perhaps because of—that burst of impatience, he is once again in control of himself. He trails his thumb between her breasts, down to her navel, and then lower, lower.
“May I recover my speech to say something?” he murmurs, his hand drawing dangerously close to the juncture of her thighs. “Ever since I first saw you smile, I’ve wanted to…”
He moves a little higher and kisses her on her navel, drawing a gasp from her.
He kisses a trail up from there. His lips land on her nipple, briefly, too briefly, so briefly that her whimper hasn’t even had time to leave her lips before he does the same to her other nipple.
He comes up farther and touches his forehead to hers. “Please tell me your name.”
She gives up. “Lanzhou, lan, blue, and zhou—”
“Watercraft. So you are the blue vessel I should look for when I’m lost at sea.”
And to whom should she look when she is the one alone and adrift?
“Lanzhou,” he says solemnly, kissing a trail down her torso this time, “ever since I first saw you smile, I’ve wanted to…”
And that’s how she finds herself with her legs wide apart, shuddering as he does deliciously depraved things to her with his lips and tongue.
He is extraordinarily observant; any motion that makes her remotely stiffen he abandons right away, and doubles down on pleasuring her at the exact spot in exactly the right ways to make her moan and writhe and beg him for more.
He gives her more. And more. And more. Until she, half sobbing, both satiated and hungrier than she’s ever been, pushes him back down, climbs atop him, and takes him inside her.
His response is to say “Lanzhou” ad infinitum.
The syllables of her name emerge tattered, broken, uttered with greater and greater effort between gasps and other involuntary sounds of pleasure.
But he persists. He holds her tight, permits her only the smallest motions, and goes on saying her name, as if by doing so, he can insert it into his DNA and make it part of his fundamental structure.
Something immune to the ravages of memory.
Tears well in her eyes even as pleasure overtakes her. She will never forget this. She will never forget him.