Page 36 of Prima
“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 isteasingher.
“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 enoughnowto 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.