Page 23 of Prima
He accepts it and takes a sample where her lips have not touched. “Nice,” he says, his voice just perceptibly unsteady.
She sets her left hand at the edge of his stool. “Can I try a bit of yours then?”
Her friends would be astonished at her forwardness—who is this girl, acting with such abandon? Even she only vaguely suspected the existence of this side of herself that he has brought out in full.
“I was going to ask if you would like to,” he says softly.
But instead of taking his pastry—as he did with hers—she takes hold of his hand. With her fingers cupping his, she sinks her teeth into his mooncake. “Oh, jackfruit—my favorite.”
“Eat the rest of it,” he says. “I’ll have yours.”
But she doesn’t care about mooncakes—at least not now. She only cares that he has not pulled his hand away. Taking advantage of his non-resistance, she rises a little on her haunches. Their faces are now only a hand’s width apart. Her gaze slides down to his chiseled lips. She places her left hand on his nape and licks her own lips. A shudder passes beneath his skin, a silent tremor she would not have detected were they not in direct contact.
She rises a little more, until they are nose-to-nose, drops her mooncake back on the plate, takes his out of his hand for the same, then interlaces her fingers with his.
Another ripple of reaction beneath the surface.
At home she has long been considered serious and seriously undersexed—her friends joke that they could each contribute someone to her bed and her total number of lovers would still fall below average. Of course she’s had the relevant experiences—she’d scarcely be considered of age otherwise—but as much as she enjoyed the company of boys in her student days, she’s never been serious about anyone.
She approached this boy with the same playful lack of purpose, the same democratic interest in sampling the goods. But his reactions, unseen but very much felt against her palms and fingertips, provoke in her a similar quiver, a sensation of weight and consequence. Of peril, even. A foreboding that the tranquil river she’s been floating on might suddenly turn into a raging cataract and drag her over its edge.
“I followed you because I couldn’t stop myself,” says the boy, his pupils dilated, his lips close enough to kiss. “I came up with all kinds of reasons and theoretical gains. But I followed you because I saw you smile at the sky and I was transfixed.”
If anyone else said this to her, she would have interpreted it as not only permission but encouragement. But he is granting nothing of the sort. The opposite: He is demanding a steep price for the pleasure of his body, the same kind of naked vulnerability from her as a prerequisite.
She has sensed a hint of darkness to him from their first encounter, an element of danger. And she liked that—he’s more complex and more interesting than the boys at home, boys brought up in peace and relative plenty who only need to worry about whether they can ace their exams and please their lovers.
But now, at last, she sees the ineffable sadness beneath the hint of darkness and the element of danger. He is asking her not to proceed solely for her own gratification, because that would add to his sorrow, perhaps even multiply it.
She shoots to her feet and stumbles back two steps.
He tilts his head back and takes her in. It occurs to her that while she looked forward to their lunch being a prelude to other things and more time together, for him the end of the meal has always marked the last he would see of her.
This mysterious, airless ache in her chest, is that what he is feeling too?
He pushes the untouched porcelain jar of spirits toward her. “Give this to your mother—maybe she’ll blister your hide less.”
And then it’s as if they are at a diplomatic reception, all stock phrases on his part for the lovely food and similar banalities from her for his company. He leaps back onto his boat. She sits down at the edge of her raft, her feet in the water, as he undoes the line that ties their vessels together.
He throws the line to her. “Hurry up and go home.”
She catches it. “Good luck to you.”
His boat is already drifting away—because hers has never stopped advancing toward Dragon Gate. “Thank you. I’ll need it.”
He turns away from her to hoist the sails—he’s not going to stand at the taffrail and gaze hopelessly as she disappears into the distance, is he, this boy? Maybe it’s for the best that they meet as strangers and part as strangers. Maybe?—
Wait. What’s that? She leaps into the sea and he dives in a moment later.
A klick out, his orca circles. Some ninety meters below, a colony of crabs scramble across the ocean floor, churning up tiny clouds of silt. In between, everything feels normal enough: Temperature, pH balance, oxygen content, the number and variety of marine plants and animals.
Then she feels it again, the disturbance that first caught her attention. At the very edge of her perceptive powers, something several times the size of the orca hurtles forward at more than thirty knots. A blue whale can achieve and maintain such a pace for a short while, but the motion of this incoming object is too…linear. No bobbing of the head or side-to-side motion of the tail fin.
It’s a machine, a submarine, and it’s on a collision path with her.
She and the boy surface at nearly the same time.
“It’s a Risshvai sub!” he shouts across the thirty meters that separate them.
