Chapter 25 — One More Time.147 #2
I got my shirt over my head. Behind me I heard the towel hit the floor, and when I turned she was working my old shirt up off herself and got it caught on her arms for a second, and she laughed, and I laughed, and then neither of us was laughing, because there she was and there I was and the air in that little room had gone tight as a drumhead.
I looked at her. Really looked, the way three weeks of curtains and called depths and someone always circling to correct our form had never once let me.
Short and sexy and built the way the algorithm hoards for itself, all of it close together and generous with no apology in it anywhere, the heavy breasts I had spent three weeks dutifully not looking at, the soft curve of her belly, the flare of her hips, the dark between her thighs.
She stood there in the bad lamplight with nothing on and nothing to hide behind and let me look my fill, and I got harder just from the sight of her, hard enough that precum was already beading at the tip of my cock before she had laid a single finger on me.
She pressed me back onto the ugly spread, gentle and official, like a coach setting up a drill.
“First we attune,” she said.
And God help us both, we did the rite.
There was no oil, because we owned nothing, so she went into the bathroom and came back with the little bottle of lotion from the tray by the sink, the free one, the size of a thumb, and she warmed it between her palms exactly the way Naia had drilled into the whole cohort, with that same unhurried sacramental patience, and it was the funniest and the least funny thing I have ever watched a person do.
A crowned Diver of the Tidewell Order performing a holy resonance with two-dollar motel lotion in a room with a Bible in the drawer. Neither of us laughed. Somewhere between the bottle and her hands it stopped being a joke.
She put her hands on me the rite’s way. The flat reverent palms, the long slow passes the cult called attunement, my shoulders and my chest and down my stomach, not grabbing, never grabbing, the whole exquisite discipline of the Merging, which was to worship the body and never once take it.
I lay there and let her run the rite over me and felt every nerve I owned stand up and report for duty, and when I reached for her she caught my wrists.
“Ah, the tide is raised by another,” she murmured, serene as Coral herself, and set them back down at my sides.
I have never in my life been closer to losing my mind.
“You’re holding your tide,” she said, grave as a coach, somewhere down by my hip.
“I’m not holding anything.”
“You’re rigid with stagnant water. Coral would weep.” She dragged her slick palms slow back up the length of me and watched my face do whatever it did. “Better. Surrender to the current, Squid.”
“I am going to end you.”
“That is not at all flow of you.”
Then it was my turn, because the rite is nothing if not fair.
I put her down where I had been and I did to her what three weeks of curtained stalls had taught my hands, the slow oiled worshipping passes, and there was no Coral to grade it now and no cohort breathing around us and no earthly reason to hold the discipline except that holding it was unbearable and we were both, still, only just, pretending that we would.
My hands over her like that, slick, her breasts under my palms and her stomach and the give of her and her thighs, everywhere except the one place the rite forbids, and she arched up off the spread chasing the touch I was keeping from her because the rite said keep it.
“Squid,” she said through her teeth, half a laugh and half a prayer.
That almost finished the whole charade on the spot.
“You’re meant to be attuning,” I said. “Hold still.”
And to hold still, I gave her the cruelest part of the discipline, the part that does the actual holding.
I brought myself down against her and moved, slow, the length of my cock sliding along her and never once into her, riding her slick and open and right at the edge of the one inch the rite forbids, giving her everything except the thing itself.
“I can’t, you’re, that is not, oh my God, that is not in any rite.” She got a fist in the spread. “Do that again.”
We made it as far as the cult ever let us, which is to the very edge of the thing and not one inch past. The reverent passes became hands that grabbed.
The discipline frayed and then it tore through.
I had her under me oiled and shaking and saying things that are in no liturgy, her legs came up around me, and we were running the exact choreography the Merging ends on, the one Coral had killed at the last possible second with a hundred people watching, the brink the cult marches you to and then takes back, and we hit it, and we hung there.
And there was nobody to call the rite complete.
That was the whole thing, in the end. We got to the line the island had stopped us at, the line the Merging is built to walk you up to and never over, and we hung on the edge of it like two good students at the top of the rubric, and the curtain did not twitch, and no serene voice said let the tide recede, loves, and no hand came down on any master switch.
There was the roar of the air conditioner and her breath and mine and the seventy-nine dollar room and the whole open undefended rest of our lives.
“Sean,” she said. Not Squid. Not now. She had her hand in my hair and her eyes open and she had stopped pretending anything at all. “This is so wrong.”
“I know.”
“We have to be... careful.” She pulled me down until her mouth was at my ear. “Nobody is going to stop us this time.”
“Nobody?” I said.
It came out as a real question, the realest one I had in me, and she did not answer it with words.
She went still underneath me with her eyes up on mine and she watched my face, waiting, the way you wait to see whether a person is actually going to do a thing or only talk about doing it.
She had put it in my hands. The whole of it, the last wall and the taking down of it, handed to me, and now she lay there quiet and watched to see what I would do with it.
So I lined myself up against her, and there was one last second, a real one, where the old machinery tried to fire, where some Tidewell ghost in the back of my skull recited you cannot raise your own tide and almost made me laugh and almost made me stop.
I did not stop. But I did not give it to her all at once either. I sank into her about an inch, just the start of it, just past the line the rite had kept shut for three weeks, and I watched her mouth fall open.
“You’re inside me,” she said, and shuddered around me, openmouthed. “Oh god. Oh fuck. You’re inside me.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “The way you’re sucking me in. You feel so good. So tight.”
And I drew back out anyway, slow, and went right back to the rite, sliding along her slick and denied, the two of us returned to the edge with nothing crossed at all.
“Sean.” It was not a warning. It was the exact opposite of a warning.
So I did it again. A little further this time, an inch and then another into the thing that was never allowed, far enough that her whole body locked and a sound came out of her with no liturgy within a mile of it, and then I drew back out, slow, back to sliding her, back to the discipline, and left her there empty and shaking and swearing at me.
I gave us the rite a few more cruel times than that, because we had earned cruel, three weeks of it, and because watching her unravel waiting on the next inch was the best thing the surface world had ever offered me.
In, a little deeper, the brink crossed. Out, back to the edge.
In. Out. Each pass further into the forbidden and each one ending before either of us was allowed to fall, the whole engine of the Merging run with nobody at the master switch but me.
Except she would not stay teased. She started lifting her hips to meet me, taking each shallow slip deeper than I had given it, stealing back the inches I kept trying to hold, rising into me every time I drew away, both her hands fisted in my hair.
“Oh, Sean,” she breathed. “That’s so bad. That is so bad. Don’t you dare stop.”
And the feel of her coming up off the bed to take what I kept pretending to hold back was more than I had any way left to control.
So I gave it to her. I pushed all the way into her, slow, all of it, the one thing the rite had always forbidden and the cult had screwed a ceiling over for three weeks and Coral had slammed shut at the final second, the thing she had pulled back from on the night of the Merging in something close to horror.
There was no rite now for it to not be. There was only this.
She dropped her forehead to mine and shook and breathed my real name into my mouth like the answer to a question she had been asking the whole three weeks.
We held there a second at the bottom of it, both of us wrecked, both of us finally on the wrong and only side of the line.
And then she moved, and I moved with her, and the careful three weeks came off us in a rush.
She got a hand flat on my chest and rolled us over, and came up astride me with me still inside her.
It was nothing like the rite. It was nothing like the thing they had spent three weeks teaching our bodies to perform.
It was greedy and clumsy and graceless and loud, the headboard knocking the wall, the ugly spread sliding off onto the carpet, the air conditioner roaring over the top of both of us.
Three weeks of being graded on our stillness came off in the exact opposite of stillness.
She set the pace, because she has set every pace of my whole life, and she rode it out of me until I could not stand to let her run it one second longer, and I turned her under me and took it back, and she liked that, she liked it enough to tell me so, out loud, in the kind of plain unsacred words the cult kept a hundred serene euphemisms for and that she had clearly been saving up for three weeks.