Page 23 of Serpentine Valentine
But it wasn’t.
I lost my thready breath to the image she struck the moment I went sliding around the corner of the Antiquities section and found her in a row between D and E in the Ancient Greek texts section.
Before I could think, my camera was raised to my eye, sight trained through the lens, and I was clicking the shutter closed.
The sound didn’t stir her, so, greedy, I took more.
She lay at the base of the wall at the end of the stacks with her torso flat to the floor and her feet perched high on the wall, an L-shaped woman with a plume of heavy black silk hair coiled around her head. Her small skirt had curled over itself like the drying petals of a flower to reveal long golden-hued legs, shapely and punctuated by those twin black snakes curling from the top of her left thigh to mid-calf where their tongues kissed. As I shifted on my feet, I caught a glimpse of the cotton at the apex of her thighs, black and scanty, her flesh paler and soft around its edges.
My throat went dry and tight. I found it impossible to swallow. To move, even, or think.
As I watched, she tipped the book she read higher above her head and used her free hand to slip, skip, and stumble over her bloused torso to that triangle of black fabric. Using her index finger, she slipped a nail under the cotton and adjusted it to lay flatter against her groin.
A noise like a groan rose unbidden from my throat and shivered into the air.
That, she noticed.
Languidly, she tipped her head farther back on the ground andstared at me upside down.
“Luna.” My name in her mouth was a throaty song she stretched into three syllables. “I didn’t take you for a peeping Tom.”
I shook my strange fugue state off like water from my back and tried to respond as flippantly as I could. “You practically gave me permission when you told me to take a photo of you.” I lifted my camera. “These will last longer.”
Her smile was a reluctant curling of the left side of her mouth. “Tacit permission, maybe. But consent is important, don’t you think?”
Why did a conversation about consent feel so…sultry? Like she was teasing me, flirting with me even.
“Yes,” I agreed, shifting my weight because her scrutiny made me feel too hot, too raw and easily read.
“Well, then…?” She trailed off, one of her feet sliding farther down the wall so she was even more exposed. Her skin was so smooth, unmarred by hair or imperfections. It made me wonder if she waxed or shaved, how pale and soft the skin might be under that cotton triangle.
It took me three tries to find my voice. “Yeah?”
She cocked her head at a seemingly impossible angle and smirked at me the way I’d imagined in class. “Are you going to ask for my consent?”
“Um, yes.” I paused, a furious blush scalding my cheeks. “Do I have your permission?”
“To do what, Lux?”
I couldn’t believe the images that simple question triggered. My mouth around the index finger she’d slipped beneath her panties. My fingers tracing that same seam. My tongue against her tongue like the snakes kissing down her thigh.
I blinked, forcing the shameful thoughts away. “To take your picture.”
Her smile flickered, brightening for a second as if she was laughingat me. As if she saw through me like tracing paper.
“Be my guest,” she allowed and then, she turned back to her book.
I felt oddly bereft of her attention even though its intensity had made my skin itch. I rolled my shoulders, trying to ground myself, but my skin still buzzed, and my heart still pounded in that strange, erratic way.
Sucking in a deep breath, I set my mind to the task of photographing the girl with the snake tattoos. The girl who made herself impenetrable to the ridiculing masses.
She wasn’t the same girl here tonight.
In the warm, dark belly of the library, cocooned by books on either side, she seemed softer. The gentle light turned her flesh to pale bronze, made her thin black blouse slightly sheer so the shape of her bra beneath it was a tantalizing shadow. Her face wasn’t so hard, the strong features relaxed as her eyes traced the words on the pages of a translated work of Sappho’s poems. As she sank further into the text, her red mouth began to form the words as she read them.
Oh God, but I was entranced.
It spooked me. As if I was a horse, I felt skittish and irrationally afraid. Something in me—this heated, writhing mess ofsomething—sensed a storm coming.
