Asternal
This is the fifteenth and final story in my collection, Various Verbal Illustrations of the Female Form and the Consequentially Sentimental Nature of the Rest of Us. A publication of the collection should be finished within the month.
It's only when the sun comes up, for whatever reasons. Poetic reasons, more than likely. She makes sure that it is raining, or that the light is just so, or that there is a certain song playing, or that it just feels a certain way. And only then, when the sun comes up and the mood is right, will they make love, as the saying goes.
He has one of those conditions where he will blink once in a while with a sort of involuntary spasm - his eyebrows moving not just his eyelids - in a quick forehead dance and trip and fall. Only during sex will he somehow calm his eyes to a fluent waltz, unblinking or closing, but never out of his control. She will calmly sway him and at first he will look as though the motion is making him seasick. She will slow down and his face will turn into something absurdly melancholy. And she will wonder if it's wrong that this look makes her wetter than before but she doesn't dwell. It is attraction either way.
If she's on top she will spread her hand down his chest and fit her fingers into the slot of skin between his ribs. If he's on top he will water his rosepetal fingertips over her once broken collarbone, finding the mended crack. They will search with their hands to find what is skeletal behind skin. She will take his elbow in her mouth and pull at the loose flesh and feel the bone with her teeth. He will raise her breasts and cup his ear to her ribs, let his face run down to her stomach like he had slipped down a ladder. She will push as hard as she can against his hip bones to feel their inviolable stability. He will suck her upper lip and then run his tongue along her teeth. She will kiss his forehead and imagine the skull just beneath. He will mold her toes in the palm of his hand and then pull on them until they crack. She will run her palm along the coarse braille of his chin's stubble until her skin reddens.
There is not much sound except for breath unless she asks him to show he is alive. He will respond with his hips. She will sometimes wince. She feels his heart beating inside her. He feels her pulse through her thighs. Sometimes they will point out these triter things to create a semblance of normalcy to their relationship and their sex, so as not to focus on all the idiosyncrasies that seem to separate them from everyone else. They are only teenagers and worried something is wrong with them.
Everytime she orgasms she cries. Just a sort of trickle passing from sea to stream to creek. He will hold her winded whimpers like a sail. He might cry too. They never question this, it is just accepted. The melodrama makes her feel something poetic or artistic or cinematic, although maybe she won't admit it. He will say sorry, always, right after they finish or in the morning if he manages to find a way to spend the night. So will she. She calls it apologetic sex when she tells her friends and she laughs and she is happy--- happy everything is so picturesque in its overly colorful dolour. Her friends would be jealous if they could understand all the gardens her weeping is watering.
They do normal things but they are right when they worry that they are not normal. They will stare at bridges for hours (instead of stars or sky) because the framework is skeletal, and so are the spiderwebs and the stairs and the old factories. They will tell ghost stories to each other to get in the mood, and when that is not enough they will walk to the town's famous haunted house, and water the nest of caraway flowers there and buy new caraways once those die during the winter, plant them over and over in the snow, perpetuating the haunting in their own way. They are in love with the whites of each other's eyes instead of the color. They are supposedly in love.
Always when they finish sex she makes him close his eyes as she gets dressed. He will of course peek. Her contours will find themselves stuck in his head threaded and needled. The audacity of nudity is never quiet. Especially when you are young. The gentle hair at her middle is the most intimate thing he may ever see in his entire life, even though it is only from a peek. She will hush his eyes with her voice. Stop looking. He doesn't have to, she is only half ashamed of her skin and her hair, secretly happy he wants to see her at all. And he does. He will have her memorized in a week. He will undress her in his mind as he talks to her parents at dinner, or while they watch a movie with friends, or while they are in school glancing at each other under the voice of a lecture. He will smile and look away and keep the knowledge of what is under her clothes to himself. Somehow it will be anything but sexual. It will carry something more like the stark purity of a painting from the Renaissance, an almost ghostly image; if Gabrielle were a girl. Maybe that is why they are always reaching for each other's bones. Everything that seems to matter is under their skin. Naked as ghosts and so young and unknowing and this is as pure as it will ever be, and they have to know that.
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For the melodramatic and sweet Olive.