[iv]
WHEN ETCETERA FINALLY hit on her, she surprised herself by saying yes.
The three of them had stuck around the B&B long after they’d gotten everything they needed to hit the road. That hadn’t surprised her. They were a good fit. The sarcastic one – he’d kept up the Gizmo von Puddleducks business and everyone called him “Ducky” – was a great storyteller and a fun opponent at board games. Both were highly prized skills in the B&B’s common-room, and he’d become a fixture. The girl joined a survey crew that was chasing up feedstock sites IDed by the drone-flock. She’d come back from a hard day in some ghost-town, grimed and wiry in a tank-top and work-boots, leading a train of walkers that crashed into the stables with their load of textiles, metals, and plastics, the sad remnants of collapsed industry and the people who’d slaved for it.
But Etcetera hadn’t fit in, no matter what he tried. None of the work captivated him. None of the leisure caught his interests. He had no stack of books he’d been meaning to read, no skill he’d planned on practicing, no project he’d put off. He was either a slack loser or a Zen master.
At least he wasn’t a pest. He did chores, got checked out on everything in the Stables and did maintenance, laughed at Ducky’s jokes and went out on crew with the girl – he called her Natalie, though she’d switched from “Stable Strategies” to “Iceweasel.” But he clearly didn’t give a shit about any of it.
One dawn, she went into the onsen and found him there, reclining in an outdoor pool with his nose and mouth above water, plumes of steam rising as he exhaled. She slid into the water next to him, anxious to get her feet off the icy paving stones and into the warmth. He raised his head, cracked an eye, nodded minutely, and sank back. She nodded at his vapor-plume, reclined too. Within moments the fish were on her, nibbling here and there. She closed her eyes and let her face sink beneath the water until only her own mouth and nose stuck out.
A fish brushed against her hand, then did it again. It wasn’t a fish. It was his hand, casually laid alongside hers, pinky-edge against pinky-edge. She checked her own internal instruments and decided she was happy about this. She picked up her hand and set it atop his.
They were still for a long while, fish tickling them. The fish made it weird. She and Etcetera were the main attractions at someone else’s orgy, their own contact saintly in its chastity. Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.
When their hands entwined, it was anticlimactic. Now what? The tentative physical contact beneath the waters had been magic, but they weren’t going to give each other hand jobs in the pool. Oh, Etcetera that was a romantic gesture, but now what?
She got tired of wondering and disentangled her hand and went inside. She wasn’t often up this early, but when she was, she liked to come to the onsen because she had it to herself. It was empty. She stood by the hottest pool, chilled from the walk through the frosty air to the steaming door. The door behind her opened and Etcetera came in with a distracted smile. He dipped a bucketful of near-scalding water and soaked his small towel, then drew it out in a cloud of steam.
She smiled back, liking where this was going. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, giving him a head-tilt invitation. It was enough. He rubbed the near-scalding towel on her back tentatively, and she rocked her weight towards him. He rubbed harder, soaked the towel. He knelt to do her butt and legs, and she turned around when he got to her ankles and he started to work his way back up. As he got back to his feet, she met him with her towel, steaming from the pail, rubbed his chest and arms. They held hands again and stepped into the hottest pool, water so hot that it obliterated all thought except for the hand squeezed in hers. They lowered themselves, hands so tight that their knuckles ground. Hand in hand, they went to the coldest pool, took towels in hand and washed one another down.
Back and forth, his left hand in her right, washing one another down, clinging tight to one another, alone in the onsen and merging into one being of flesh, nerves, heat, and cold. When they were done, they sat at the showers and soaped each other, sprayed each other with the shower wands. They went into the changing room and put their robes on, separating briefly. When they did, she felt the ghost of his hand in hers. When they clasped again, it felt like something missing had returned.
Hand in hand, they walked through the dim corridors. They skirted the common-room and the groggy voices they heard over the gurgle of coffium. They took the stairs slowly, gaits matched, feet rasping on the gritty laminate on the treads. On the first landing, and she used her free hand to ask a touchable surface about empty rooms, located one on the uppermost fourth floor, which had the smallest rooms – coffins, almost.
Wordless, breathing heavily, they ascended, hearing the building waking around them: a baby crying, someone peeing, a shower. One more floor, a few deft turns through the twisty little maze of the fourth floor, he put his hand on the doorplate and it rolled aside. The lights came on, revealing the bare cell whose loft-bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets. Beneath it was a desk and chair and some homey touches – a few books, a handful of sculptural prints of mathematical solids. Some part of Limpopo’s brain remembered putting them there, because this was one of the rooms she’d finished. She hadn’t been to it in more than a year, and she was pleased the B&B had kept it up. Either its tenants had been conscientious, or the B&B noticed the room getting moopy and had it on the chore list, and someone had taken care of it.
Now they were in the room, and the door was rolling shut behind them and clicking. He reached out to dim the lights but she cranked them back to full. She found she liked looking at his face in full light. Staring straight at a relative stranger’s face in full light, without pretending to be looking at something else, while that stranger looked back at you – it was something she hardly ever got to do. It was as intimate, in its own way, as anything physical.
He had a confused smile. She liked the curve of his lip.
“Is this okay? I mean—”
“I just want to get a good look.” She was pleased at how quickly he grasped this, how thoroughly he reciprocated, pupils shiny as his eyes saccaded over her face, gaze roaming in a frank way that reminded her of their firm grip.
This was what she loved about being a walkaway. She’d seduced and been seduced in default, but there’d always been a sense of time slipping away. We’d better stop this romantic stuff, get fucking because there’s a meeting, a job, a protest, a meal to cook or a chore. Even at the B&B, it was hard to escape that feeling. But now she reveled in its absence, infinite time. She recalled Etcetera’s unwillingness to commit to a routine in the B&B, his inability to naturally fall into a role or job. It meant that he was hers for as long as they wanted.
She inserted her thumbs between his robe and flesh and ran them slowly down, pushing the robe open one agonizing millimeter at a time, marveling at how the skin that she had seen and touched in the onsen could be so private when partially clothed. He put his hands on her robe and pulled it apart and it slid over her breasts as they popped free, one and two. In default, she’d fussed about them, they weren’t the right size or shape. Her critical eye wanted more from her imperfect flesh. Walkaway had liberated her from inchoate anxiety, but more, the burn had ended it, fully occupying her self-consciousness.
Her robe parted over the burn. His hand grazed the scar. She jolted and he jerked his hand back. He said “sorry” as she took hold of his hand and put it on the scar. The scar didn’t hurt, exactly, but it pulled and when she did yoga she felt her torso’s skin distorting around its gravity. For the longest time she hadn’t been able to touch the alien thing where her skin had been – only washing it with a sponge. Her hand went to it in her sleep, and she’d wake with its snake-segments of collagen beneath her fingertips. She’d come to détente, no longer feeling it was alien.
His hands were on the scar now, its rises and depressions. His eyes were distant, his breath shallow. She panted, too; their breath was mingling in their mouths, they were that close. They hadn’t kissed yet. She pulled his robe off of his shoulders and forced his hands off her while she yanked it down. His hands went back to her. The movement brought them close enough he could reach around and touch her shoulder-blades, her spine, the satellites of her burn, like the debris field of a meteor impact. He was close enough that his erection bobbed insistently at her thigh, warm elastic touch that made her smile. He smiled back and she knew he knew what she was smiling about.
His palms reached her butt. She put her hands in the same place and reeled him in, his erection sandwiched between them, her breasts crushed against his chest. Her lips formed into a kiss and found his collarbone. She worried at the bone with her teeth, then nipped his skin. He gasped, crushed her harder. He rolled his head and bared his throat to her and she darted kisses on it, loving his stubble on her lips, that boy-skin feeling. Her lips rested on the artery in his throat and she relished his pulse, and sucked insistently, daring him to push her off before she gave him a hickey, but he hissed and his trapped penis throbbed in time with his pulse against her stomach.
He ground his hips against her. She let his thigh slide between hers, nestle against her vulva. She ground against the muscle of his leg, hairs pulling, everything too dry at first, and then, moment by delicious moment, wetter. Her nostrils flared. She breathed the sex from their armpits and groins. She sucked at the vulnerable place where his jaw and throat and ear met.
They still hadn’t kissed.
He pulled her ass harder, his hands strong. She remembered the way his hand had squeezed hers. He lifted her to her tiptoes, crushing her pussy against his leg. She found his quadriceps and mashed her clit against them, let go and leaned back, feeling his quads jump out as he braced to support her. She bent until her hands reached the wall and she pushed back, and they played with muscle and gravity, and he hauled her back and staggered.
Back on her feet, she bulled him to the bedside, put one foot on the ladder and hoisted herself up. He leapt in behind her.
And still, they hadn’t kissed. She twisted, caught his ankle, popped his little toe in her mouth, biting down when he tried to pull away. She dug her fingernails into the arch of his foot and reached blindly and caught his erection, making a fist and squeezing just hard enough to feel that pulse again. His hips bucked and she held, then let go and reversed herself, sliding up his body and pinioning his torso beneath hers. Her hands caught his and she used her hard-won construction muscles to yank his wrists over his head and push them into the mattress. His armpits smelled of clean sweat. His breath was on her face. Her breath was on his.
She made a kiss of her lips again and poised, pulling her face back when he tried to kiss. She wanted this to last. She let one lip brush his, then both. Then some tongue. His mouth parted. His face strained toward hers and she pulled back, started over. He got the message. He lay there, let her control him, choose how the kiss would unfold. She made it very slow.
It was wonderful.
It didn’t stop.
Mouths locked, he reached for her ass, and she pressed it into his hands, willing him to knead, incidentally mashing his cock into her scar, which had never happened before. She noted it absently and groaned into his mouth. He groaned back.
She ground on his leg again, crushed his cock between them. His fingers worked around her ass to where the hair was slick. He rhythmically kneaded the length of her groin, explored her opening. She moaned into his mouth. Shivers chased up her back and stomach. The explosive feeling built and she bucked, urging him to dig deeper, move faster, and he ground in return. She hadn’t been with a man in more than a year. This one stirred up nostalgic eroticism, calling to mind all the men before, every shiver, every screaming orgasm. These images played through her mind as she moved. The familiar flush spread up her neck.
He surprised her by coming from the friction. The sudden heat between them set her off into convulsions that culminated with the kinds of loud noises that had once embarrassed her.
She rolled half off him – making him oof as she inadvertently drove an arm into his solar plexus – grabbed his robe off the desk beneath them and used it to wipe up.
“Whew,” she said.
“More.”
She looked down, incredulous. “Already?”
He licked his lips.
He was a good lover. It shone through the heart-thumping roar of a long-frustrated fuck. She couldn’t put her finger on it – metaphorically, anyway – but as she came again, clamping her thighs around his ears, she realized it: the lack of hurry. Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste.
Etcetera sliced his time thick. He’d slide along her body to her breasts and rest his face on them for an unmeasured pause before nibbling. It went on longer than she expected. It was better than nice. Her own body-clock synchronized, metronome tick slowing to a languorous heartbeat that felt like there was all the time in the world. It was more decadent than the sticky juices on her fingers, livid hickey on her left breast, the turgid boy-nipple she was rolling between her fingers.
When they were done, she had no idea how late it was. It might be sunset, or later, though they’d come upstairs at daybreak. She wiped interface surface on the wall and brought up a clock, was surprised to see it was only mid-day. Not hurrying all the time had not meant not losing all the time. The difference between glorious languor and endless hustle was an hour or two. It felt like she’d just been given a day.
She kissed him at the junction of throat and earlobe and worked her way around to his lips. He embraced her in that unhurried way, enfolding her in the robe he’d donned.
“That was very nice,” she said.
“It was very nice over here, too.”
They twined fingers. She opened the linen hatch and they stripped the bed and put new sheets on, wiped the surfaces and turned on the air-scrubbers. A green check-mark glowed on the back of the door as the room acknowledged that it had been adequately reset. They left, hands twined and dirty linens in their free arms. These went down a laundry chute by the stairs, and they went to the stables to make some new clothes.