This exact kiss.
Lips. The wonder of lips that could brush or press, part and close, and—parting, closing—catch the other’s lip in the sweetest of bites. Not a true bite. Not teeth. Ah, teeth were still a secret. But the tip of the tongue, well. Hopelessness had little chance against the discovery of the tip of the tongue. And the thing that was almost blinding, unfathomable, was this: Heady as it was—so heady he felt dizzy from it, tipsy—still he sensed that even this was only the threshold to another realm of the unknowable. A door pushed just ajar, and the thinnest sliver of light hinting at radiance beyond.
He felt light and heavy at the same time. Burning, floating. He’d never suspected. He’d been aware of girls, of course, and had all the sorts of thoughts that young men have (the better ones, anyway; better young men and better thoughts) and of course he wasn’t ignorant of the . . . biology of things. But he’d never had any inkling of what he now sensed lay beyond that tantalizing door. It was a radiance that felt rich and deep and huge and close and secret and delirious and . . . sacred.
It was his future with the girl he held in his arms, and whatever he had felt and feared on his walk home from the guard station, now he was certain: There would be a future.
Hope was easy, after all. Here in this place, anyway.
He drew her closer, his arms full around her waist, and lost himself in the marvel of her, of this. He breathed the scent and taste of her, and shivered when her fingers traced up his arms to the nape of his neck. She wove them through his hair and awakened more sensation, a fire of pleasure that radiated down his shoulders and up his scalp, nudging at that tantalizing door with all its luminous secrets. When he broke the kiss, finally, it was to press his face to hers. The ridge of his brow to hers, his cheekbone, rough, against hers, smooth.
“Sarai,” he breathed against her cheek. He felt like a glass filled with splendor and luck. His lips curved into a smile. He whispered, “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” and understood finally what that phrase meant.
Sarai pulled back, just enough that they could look at each other. Her amazement mirrored his own, her gaze the equivalent of a whispered Oh, husky and astonished and awakened.
The laughter reached them first—children’s laughter—and then the color. They broke their gaze to look around, and saw the city no longer holding its breath. There were swallowtail flags snapping on the domes, and the sky was a mosaic of kites. And the market stalls were no longer empty, but coming to life as though opening for the morning, with vendors in long aprons setting out their wares. Flocks of brilliant butterflies moved through like schools of fish, and the upper levels of the amphitheater were espaliered with jeweled fruit trees.
“That’s better,” sighed Sarai. Up in the citadel, her tears dried on her cheeks. The clench of her fists and stomach relaxed.
“Much better,” Lazlo agreed. “Do you think we just did that?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“Well done, us,” he said, then added, with exaggerated nonchalance, “I wonder what would happen if we kept kissing.”
In a similar display of feigned indifference, Sarai shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we could find out.”
They knew they had to talk about the day, and the future, and all the hate and despair and helplessness, but . . . not just yet. That place in their minds that had worked their mahalath transformations was coloring Dreamer’s Weep with their snatched and grabbed happiness. Everything else could wait. “Lazlo,” Sarai whispered, and she asked him a question to which he already knew the answer. “Do you still want me in your mind?”
“Sarai,” he replied. “I want you . . .” His arms were already around her. He drew her even closer. “In my mind.”
“Good.” She bit her lip, and the sight of her fine white teeth bearing down on that decadent, delicate lip planted at least an unconscious thought in his mind regarding the potential of teeth in kissing. “I’m going to go to sleep,” she told him. “I’m already lying in my bed.” She didn’t mean to sound seductive, but in her sudden shyness, her voice sank to a whisper, and Lazlo heard it like a purr.
He swallowed hard. “Do you need to lie down here?” In the dream, he meant, because she had last time.
“I don’t think so. Now that we know it works, I think it’ll be easy.” She touched the tip of her nose to the tip of his. Shaped by fairy tales, she thought, which made it better than every straight nose in the world. “But there is one thing you can do for me.”
“What is it?” asked Lazlo. “Anything.”
“You can kiss me some more,” she said.
And he did.
Up in the citadel, Sarai’s body fell asleep, and as soon as it did, she stopped being the girl lying on the bed, and she stopped being the moth perched on Lazlo’s brow, and became only—and gloriously—the girl in his arms.
Kissing, it turned out, was one of those things that only got better the more of it one did, and became more . . . interesting . . . as one gained confidence. Oh, the ways that lips could know each other, and tongues, how they could tease and tingle. Tongues, how they could lick.
Some things, thought Sarai, were too lovely to devour, while others were too lovely not to.
And together they learned that kissing wasn’t just for mouths. That was a revelation. Well, one mouth was needed, of course. But that mouth might decide to take a small sojourn down to the soft place under the jaw, or the tender, exquisite spot just below the ear. Or the earlobe. Who knew? Or the neck. The entire neck! And here was a cunning quirk of physiology. Sarai found that she could kiss Lazlo’s neck while he kissed hers. Wasn’t that lucky? And it was immensely rewarding to feel his tremors when her lips found a place that felt particularly good. Almost as rewarding as when his found such a place on her. And if not his lips, oh.
His teeth.
Even up in the citadel, the teeth caused her to shiver.
“I never knew about necks,” Sarai whispered between fast, hot kisses.
“Neither did I,” said Lazlo, breathless.
“Or ears.”
“I know. Who could have guessed about ears?”
They were still, all this while, in the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep. Sometime early in the kiss—if one could, with generosity, call it a kiss—a convenient tree grew up from a crack in the cobbles, tall and smooth and canted at just the right angle for leaning when the dizziness became too much. This was never going any farther than leaning. There was, even in their delectation of necks, an innocence born of perfect inexperience combined with . . . politeness. Their hands were hot, but they were hot in safe places, and their bodies were close but chaste.
Well.
What does the body know of chastity? Only what the mind insists upon, and if Lazlo’s and Sarai’s minds insisted, it was not because their bodies failed to present a compelling argument. It was just that it was all so new and so sublime. It might take weeks, after all, just to master necks. Sarai’s fingertips did, at some point in the heedless flow of dream time, find themselves slipping under the hem of Lazlo’s shirt to play ever so lightly over the bare skin of his waist. She felt him shiver and she sensed—and he did, too—how very much remained to be discovered. She tickled him on purpose and the kiss became a laugh. He tickled back, his hands emboldened, and their laughter filled the air.
They were lost inside the dream, no awareness of the real—of rooms or beds or moths or brows. And so it was that in the giddy, sultry world of their embrace, the real Lazlo—fast asleep in the city of Weep—turned over on his pillow, crushed the moth, and broke the dream.
55
Disfaith