Metamorphoses

By B

She broke away from him, breathless. He leaned back against the white pillows, his arms outstretched in a loose arc, and waited.

She stared at him from across the white expanse, her hand pressed against her lips still warm from his kiss. Her fingers moved delicately along the rosy flesh, tracing the curves of her mouth as if uncertain of its shape, that soft, familiar reality which now burned with his strange and unreal fire. He waited, watching her, his arms reaching out, not imperiously, not avariciously, but in simple, tender longing.

Yet she shrank from him, even though she felt desire burn through her.

For there was a terror in his welcoming embrace.

He seemed to sense her fear and smiled a little, reassuringly as if to say that he understood. But she continued to linger at the foot of the bed, her hand still at her mouth. Her lips had grown cold. She was suddenly, painfully, aware of his body, his heat snaking sinuously across the space between them.
She drew in a startled breath and moved slightly, an infinitesimal shift of her shoulders.

At her movement, she saw his mouth curve higher, smiling a little more surely, and it was then she realized that that slight motion had inclined her closer to him. And she was again sharply aware of the nearness of his body, the heat that smoldered closer and hotter, now, and her cold mouth.

His kiss would warm her, she knew. But if she went to him, if she placed her mouth against his, she -- she didn’t know. Only vaguely, distantly thought:

Turn to him and know despair. Turn to him and be damned to grief.

But her eyes were already turned to him and she could not pull them away. Her mind felt strangely dim with a peculiar lassitude, that same somnolent dullness that came of a blazing summer day. But the heat came not from that noontime star but from the youth sitting across the bed whose face floated out to her in the uncertain twilight, blazing with that same indefinite white intensity. And the white-hot gaze of his eyes and the white glare of his face and the burning white bed bewildered her.

She swayed slightly, gripping the sheets with white-knuckled fists. For a moment, she closed her eyes as if she could somehow right herself, shut out his image and his heat. But he was there in the darkness behind her lids, exploding across that dark horizon in stars of light. His heat seemed to close about her, reaching with hot fingers into those spaces, secret and dim, which seemed to contract and expand beneath their touch. At once a bursting and a closing like a flower springing open to the sun and wilting in its rays.

She opened her eyes with an effort, willing the lids to lift themselves. Through the cloud of desire that filmed her eyes, she dimly saw that the white distance between them had somehow lessened; for in that brief struggle between longing and fear, she had continued to inch toward him in that absolute and inexorable trajectory until she was nearly at his side. Only one degree more, one slight motion, and she would be in his arms.

But once in his arms, she would burn.

She sensed the tension in his body, that taut hope in his limbs, for she felt it reverberating in her own. The sinews like the strings upon a violin stretched to the point of breaking. And the only release, she knew, would be to turn to him and fall in his arms.

But in turning to him, in committing herself to the flames of his fierce, bright desire, it would be more than the satiety of the hunger within them. It is, she thought, an apotheosis. But what new form, she wondered fleetingly, would emerge?

She did not know. So she hung back, mistrustful still of the hot promise in his eyes.

He noted the doubt in her eyes. The confident smile faded a little, muted to something infinitely tender. He lifted his appeal to her once more: another small gesture, an almost unperceivable tremor along his outstretched hands.

---

Only one slight revolution.

So turn.

She fell into his arms.

He held her for a moment before sinking down upon the bed. He looked up at her, his eyes dark with an irresistible and nameless appeal. And she felt her body slowly dip toward him in response, drawn to the heat of his mouth and hands, as surely as the heliotrope follows the dreamy and measured descent of the sun.

He arched up to meet her lips with his. His hot mouth was shaping hers,slowly, tenderly, trailing the same path her fingers had earlier marked. And it was only his mouth that kept her from falling apart, from dissolving completely in his flame.

He reached out, his hot hands twisting into the cool folds of her blouse. The tips of his fingers burned though the fabric. The blouse melted away, fluttering to the floor in a sweep of ash-colored cotton. She shivered a little at the chill air and instinctively folded her arms about her. He gently pulled her arms free, kissing her upturned palms. His mouth lingered for a moment on the center of her palm, a smoldering stamp.

His hands traced the curve of her slender arms, slid over her white shoulders and finally came to rest on her breasts. He caressed them, his light touch scorching her skin. She drew in a shuddering breath, her lids fluttering closed.

She was burning now, she knew. She was too close, too near to him. But she could not turn away. She was doomed to love, to yearn, to burn for his bright face, his hot touch, his searing kiss.

He reached up once more and she dipped toward his waiting mouth. A gasp escaped her lips as she felt his mouth on her breast. She pressed his head closer to her, her fingers tangled in his dark hair. The heat of his mouth seemed to spread, slowly, across the plain of her skin. It seeped down, burning through her flesh to that hidden space within.

---

It has begun.

She reached beneath his clothes, her hands roaming across his skin. She sensed the heat rising, pulsing, with each meeting of her flesh with his. She wanted, suddenly, to feel that heat against her entire body.

She felt his hands fumbling at her waist. She placed her hands upon his, stilling them, and deftly loosed her skirt. Another hungry, clumsy movement, and she knelt above him, exposed. In the darkness of the room, she blazed, white and hot.

---

He whispered her name. She opened her eyes. He was hovering above her, his eyes aflame.

Come, Love’s transfiguration, come.

She curved up her body to meet his. As he sank into her, she cried out, a sound of pain and desire. Her eyes fell shut, as she felt his heat filling her again and again. Soon the fire consumed her, burning away all sensation of self. Her entire body seemed to expand, past the limits of flesh and bone. She knew not where she was.

And then in one final explosion, it was over. For a long while, they lay entangled together, so she could not tell where she began and where he ended. Gradually, slowly, she felt the boundaries of her body once more, flesh and bone cooling and coalescing. But she was not the same. No, she thought, as she nestled closer to him, I am not the same. And this knowledge filled her with a strange freedom . . . and a loss, inchoate and indistinct still.

It was near dawn when she awoke. She rose and looked down at the sleeping form beside her. She smiled softly, pressing her lips against his forehead before slipping out of the bed. She moved clumsily, like an infant beginning to walk on its own, unused as she was to that new form, that unfamiliar abandon. She paused to run her fingertips lightly across her shoulder and along her arm, her eyes gazing with wonderment at the well-known lines, the recognizable shape that had suddenly, inexplicably transformed.

She paused. Her eyes grew wide. She stopped, staring at her palm.

Silently, despairingly, she drew her hand close to her breast and closed her eyes.