She held out her index finger to show him, and he let her head fall so that he could take her hand. He kissed the wound.
“Poor thing,” he said, and kissed her finger again, and then her wrist.
“Can you believe we’re here?” she said then, her stomach growing warm. Even now, Cal could make her core heat up like she was the center of the earth.
“I can’t,” he said, her finger in his fist.
She moved toward him, and the smell of his sweat hit her. That, and the unfamiliar dust of the Land. She liked the surprise of this new smell; she wanted it. She bit her lip.
Cal pushed her gently onto the bed and breathed into her neck, pushing his body against hers. In moments he had scooted her dress above her waist. The leggings she wore beneath belonged to Fatima, and Frida was afraid he’d say something, but he didn’t, he just grabbed at the elastic waistband with an urgency she hadn’t seen from him in a while. Maybe he liked the unfamiliarity. His eyes were closed; was he imagining someone else’s body beneath his own?
She put a hand on his chest and said his name. He opened his eyes. She pushed him off of her. “Look at me,” she said, and began pulling off his shirt. Despite the strange room, and the awful uncomfortable bed, and the secrets they’d kept from each other, Frida felt her desire for Cal expand and expand.
They didn’t bother with foreplay much anymore, those courtship niceties of kissing and petting before they were totally naked. If Cal was going to kiss her deeply, or put one of her breasts in his mouth, Frida wanted him inside of her as he did so. They were married, they were efficient: they’d done this dance dozens of times before, they both knew the song.
As they moved together, it felt better than it ever had. This, she thought. She wanted to call out, but she bit her wrist instead, her whole body pushing. Cal had kept his eyes open, he was watching her, he was witnessing the pleasure she felt, and she knew he felt it, too.
“My…,” she said, but she couldn’t finish the sentence, whatever it was going to be, she didn’t know.
Cal nodded. “My…,” he whispered back.
He had lifted her hips toward him, and they were right on the edge of the glorious cliff when she closed her eyes, and her mind flashed to the moment the knife cut into the skin of her finger. Maybe it had felt good, the blade breaking the skin the way a boat parts water. Maybe it had been beautiful and clean like that. Cal was pulling her body around his own.
Suddenly she saw them yesterday. Micah was moving from the kitchen into the dining room, their first meal in there, and she couldn’t stop looking at him. That long beard, and that raw patch of scalp on his head she didn’t yet know about. Someone must have rubbed alcohol there first, right, before they sliced that piece of him away?
Her brother was sitting at the table before that bowl of soup and then the knife was cutting through her finger, the blade smooth and sharp, and Cal was now heavy atop her, groaning. He was saying her name, and she felt a pang of pleasure so bright it almost blinded her insides. She saw the coyote, it was standing there in the dining room as they ate quietly, its mouth dripping with viscera, and she shot her eyes open. Look at Cal, she told herself. The pleasure was receding like a tide. She had to bring it back. Cal kissed her, and she held him to her lips, as if he could suck out the images in her mind. But he couldn’t.
“My…,” Cal whispered as he came, but Frida said nothing.
Afterward, still naked, they lay on the bed, breathing hard. After a moment, Cal sat up and began sifting through the bedsheets for his clothes.
“I need my stuff,” he said. This morning he’d had enough of being the Official Pussy Inspector and broke down and asked Sailor (not Micah, Frida noticed) for a shirt. Sailor had actually pulled his own T-shirt over his head and handed it to Cal. “We’ll trade,” he said. Cal had been wearing Sailor’s slightly tight shirt ever since. It puckered at the armpits.
“Why don’t you just let my brother give you some clothes? They’d fit you better.”
“We have to go back home, Frida,” he said, placing a hand on her hip.
“You mean to pick up more of our things?” She felt her body tense beneath his touch.
“For now,” he replied, moving his hand. “But we can’t just not make a decision.”
“They’re the ones voting,” she said.
“But we have a choice, too.”
She was silent.
“Today, in the kitchen,” Cal said, “did you get an idea of where they’re getting all their food from? I mean, did you get to look at their gardens? Where are they storing everything? Did they have any out-of-season fruit or”—his voice tipped—“anything canned?”
“I wasn’t on a recon mission, Cal.” She sat up. “God, could you please just let me have a few days to be here? With other people. With my brother?” She closed her eyes quickly; no doubt Cal had noticed that Micah had left Sailor to take care of them this morning.