wanted to be sucked down into the explosive heart of it â but he set the candle back on the table and lowered his face toward her stomach. She felt his lips on her skin, his breath in her navel, and she caught his head between her hands, pushing him lower, down into herself, down into the secrets that were no longer secrets to him, but places so familiar he might have drawn maps of them from memory alone.
As if she were blind, robbed all at once of a sense, she guided his face between her legs, felt his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. It was free fall now, that loss of will and wisdom, balances upset, awareness no more than a series of fierce jolts to her nervous system. She drew herself up, her eyes still shut, and then she kneeled, pressing her face down into his groin, her fingers moving quickly, it was all haste, everything was grounded in the possibilities of the moment. Making a soft funnel of her tongue, she took him inside her mouth before he brought her face up with a mildly persistent gesture.
He gazed at the fine hair of her eyebrows, then he undid the buttons of her blouse more slowly than she liked, so she hurried him, helped him, then the room was shimmering away out of control, tilting on an unlikely axis, a contrary turning of the world outside her senses.
She felt him at the edge of entrance, that second before penetration. She heard herself say something, but the voice that emerged from her mouth wasnât her own, she was speaking as if for somebody else, a distinct entity that existed outside of who she was. She was a disconnected sequence of impulses and thrills, a thing fragmented like stained glass struck by a shotgun. She felt him enter her. A dark scented breeze blew through her mind.
She hung to him, held him, rocked furiously against him. She clawed his spine, dug, wanted him deeper inside her, to feel him in her womb. Indifferent to anything around her, she had the feeling she might suddenly rise and go on rising from the bed, uplifted by an enigmatic current of air. She spoke his name aloud, hearing the syllables break inside her mouth, listening to the crazy collision of vowels and consonants. But passion had no grammar, no logic, no meaning beyond itself. She drifted out over a dark promontory, a place of madness. The fall was long and heartbreaking and when it was over she lay in the kind of silence that might be the aftermath of a dream, the juncture where waking thoughts trespass on the constructs of sleep.
She didnât move for a long time. She was aware of Barron staring at her. She edged slightly away from him now, dismayed by the disarray of her clothes, by the sight of his cock glistening against his thigh, the dark crown of hair in his groin. Her appetites devoured her; she had no escape from the boundaries of herself.
She gazed at Barron, then looked into the flame of the candle. She ran her fingers through her hair. She hated that look of content on Barronâs impossible face. That satisfaction. It was as if sheâd given him a gift she never intended. Rather, it was more like heâd plundered it, seized it from her.
âWhy do you make me behave like this?â she asked.
He said, âIâve never made you do anything you didnât want to do.â
She got up from the bed. âYou have a hold over me and I donât understand it. But it makes me despise myself.â
âWhat hold? Youâre a free agent,â he said. âI donât own you.â
She laughed at this one. A free agent. âAll I am, Barron, is your dirty little secret. The woman who comes and goes after dark.â
He picked a flake of wax from his fingertip and said nothing.
âWe never walk together in the daylight. We donât go to restaurants. Theatres. What the hell. I donât think I give a shit. Not in the long run. You want to be the hot-shot. You like to have people kissing your feet.â
Barron said, âYouâre back in that weird