I got up and peeled off her pants, yanking her legs open so I could see her *. She tried to close them, and I pulled her legs open again, bending the knees.
“Don’t move.” Standing over her, I got my pants off. I was going to fuck her so hard that we were one person, to touch that sameness between us so I could understand it.
Two fingers in her, and she was soaked. She bucked against the thin mattress, and when I ran my wet fingers over her clit, she cried out. I wanted to taste her, to tease her, to spend hours swimming in our heat. I wanted to fuck her hard and fast. Plant myself inside her and drive to the finish. I wanted to fuck her mouth, her ass, her cunt, her very being. I didn’t know how to do all the things I wanted to do to her.
I got on my knees quickly, pulled her seam apart until everything was exposed, and I ran my tongue over her. She dug her fingers into my hair as I fucked her with my tongue and hands. Two fingers in her ass. A thumb in her *. My mouth sucking her clit. Other hand squeezing her nipple tight to hold her still. When she came, all of Mexico heard.
I didn’t wait until she breathed. I had to have her. My spit had to be on her cunt when I fucked it, the last of my fingers in her ass still. She was so wet, so soft when I fucked her, and her mouth was open, unfucked. Unacceptable. I rolled her over so she was on top. I pressed her tongue down with three fingers and took her face too. I was everywhere inside her. Ass and mouth and *. All mine. All of it.
And still, a few hours later, in the dark of night, with her breathing next to me, touching every part of her as if committing to a sacrament, I didn’t know what we were. But I knew I’d have to leave her alone on the earth. One way or the other, they would get me. Going in or going out. I was a dead man and something else. I was the man who would prepare her for his death.
two.
THE NEXT MORNING
theresa
onathan had tried to kill himself when he was sixteen. It had been over a girl, my friend Rachel. At the time, I’d thought it was because they split up, but it had been much, much more complicated. He’d suffered, and I hadn’t been there for him, not in the way I should have been. I was beating myself to a pulp over it in the hostel, brushing my thumb over Antonio’s arm. I would be there this time, and as stressful as it was to go back to Los Angeles, reestablishing that balance released a different source of tension.
“This has a texture,” I said, running my fingers over the volcano tattoo inside his left wrist.
He’d just brought me to orgasm twice, and I was on my stomach, getting my brain reorganized. Once I’d stopped screaming in ecstasy, he’d opened the windows. Children played in the street two stories down, and we spoke softly as if they could hear us.
“It’s not a tattoo. Not really.” He got up on his elbows and held out his wrists. “The shape is cut with a knife, and they rub ink from a pen on it.”
I looked closely. Every line was a bump. “Blue pen?”
“I asked for the blue. I liked it.”
“Did it hurt?” I stroked the lines of Vesuvius.
“Yes.”
“It’s dangerous to cut the inside of the wrist. Did it bleed a lot?”
“Are you going to ask me if I cried?”
“I know you did.”
He took me in his arms and kissed my face. “Like a baby.”
I looked at the ceiling for a second as his hand trailed up and down my body like a boat on still water, leaving widening wakes of sensation.
I rolled over. The window faced north, so the morning sun was cool and soft. “We have a few hours before the passports come.”
“I have plans for you.”
“More of the same?”
“No, I’m sorry to say,” he said, sitting straight up. “I’ve left you vulnerable. We are going back as civilians, but that doesn’t mean we go back stupid.”