Read Online Fatal Flaw by William Lashner - Free Book Online Page B

smoke. I tell her it will be all right, even though I don’t know what is troubling her and I suspect it will turn out badly. I tell her it will be all right, and I touch my lips to the top of her head in a brotherly kiss.
    “I’m so bad.”
    “No you’re not.”
    A brotherly kiss to the soft of her temple.
    “I am. You don’t know.”
    “I know what I need to know.”
    A brotherly kiss to the soft ridge beneath her eye, and I taste the salt of a tear.
    I pull away. She lifts her face to me. Her eyes are wet, her nose red, her mouth quivering. She is the picture of desolation, and I can’t help myself. I don’t want to help myself. Something has happened between her and Guy and that now is enough for me. I take her biceps in my hands and squeeze, even as I kiss her gently. Even as our lips barely touch. There is no mashing, no gnashing, just the gentlest touch. The gentlest touch. A saving touch, I think, I hope. Our mouths open slightly, the touch of our lips staying just as gentle, and nothing slips between them, no tongue, no moisture, nothing, but not nothing, because there is a commingling of spaces, a creation of something new, and in the enclosure formed between our gently touching mouths I feel an emptiness flowing and growing, hers, mine, ours.
     
    I WANT it to be slow.
    I had fantasized about the two of us together, often, incessantly, it had been my nighttime preoccupation since our first meeting, and it had always been hard, rough, full of laughter and grabbing, she seemed that kind of lover, but in the presence of her overwhelming sadness I want this now to be slow, as gentle as our first kiss.
    I brush my lips again upon her temple, upon her cheek, take her lips gently in my teeth. We are naked now, kneeling on the bed, our hands gently brushing each other’s arms, sides, backs, thighs.
    She is thinner than ever I thought, so thin and fragile and, without her glasses, so seemingly vulnerable, so in need of protection. And that is what I want to do, to protect her.
    The afternoon light slices in through the blinds, her smell of smoke and jasmine is charged by the sharp edge of musk.
    I slide closer. I am pressed up against the flat of her belly.
    I glide my hand around the contour of her breast. I lift its weight in my palm.
    I kiss her shoulder, I kiss the line of jaw, her neck. A tremor rises from her throat and with it a sound soft as a spring drizzle. I kissthe bone of her clavicle, I kiss the hollow beneath the bone, the first swell of her chest, the soft skin, the excited pink areola. The sound rises, stretches, widens to fill every inch of space.
    I want it to be slow, but suddenly there is a presence in the room other than the two of us. A hunger, a need. Something foreign and relentless, primordial, with a rhythm of its own, a breath hot and dank, a power, and I don’t know from whence it came. Is it mine, hers, is it an entity of its own invading our lives? I don’t recognize it, I don’t understand it, I’ve never felt anything like it before, this hunger, this need. It is brutal and violent and immortal, and before I know what has happened, it has taken control.
    I want it to be slow, but what I want no longer matters.
    And when it is over, she lies on her side, covered in sweat and sheets and I lie behind her, in a shocked silence, sore and uncertain, my arms wrapping her like a stole.
    “That was insane,” I say.
    “It always is.” There is a twang in her voice, a slight shift west and south into the hillocks of her West Virginia home, as if whatever it was that roared through us took her back into her past.
    “No, it was a like freight train was in the room with us.”
    “That’s what I meant.”
    “So you felt it, too?”
    “Shhhhhh.”
    “What was it?”
    “A vestige.”
    My chest is pressed into her back, my hips are pressed into her thighs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t understand what has happened. I hold her tight and feel the sadness and hold