'You look very good, Sean.'
'So do you, Seliah.'
'You look like all of heaven squeezed into a man.'
'You I won't even try to describe.'
They leaned toward each other and kissed briefly. Seliah felt the rush of blood in her eardrums.
'Please once more,' she said.
They touched lips again and she inhaled his smells into her when it was over. She saw the bartender glance at them.
'Where's Daisy?'
'In the Rover. In the shade. She can't wait to meet you.'
The bartender brought the wine and Seliah paid for the round with cash. They pivoted their stools to face each other and she could see his whole front side now, his blue eyes and the wrinkles at the edges of them, his lightly freckled cheeks and his good strong chin and neck, the funny slope of the right shoulder he'd had his whole life, even in the boyhood pictures she'd seen. They drank the wine quickly and Seliah could see the wildness coming into her husband's expression, the same thing she'd seen in him two weeks ago. She understood it now. Or at least she knew how it felt to experience it. It was hers now, too, whatever it was. She heard the bartender talking quietly with a customer at the far end of the bar, the air conditioner humming, a mockingbird trilling from a lemon tree outside the building, heard the splashes of the swimmers in the distant pool and even the faraway pop… pop… pop of tennis balls being hit on a court she couldn't see. The sounds blended and separated and merged again as a new sound, melodic and nimble.
'We need to be alone,' he said, taking her hand.
The suite was cool and spacious and the evening sunset pushed orange light through the blinds and fixed it in a soft glow. Daisy nosed her way through the rooms. Seliah used the bathroom but when she was done she couldn't stand to look at her own reflection in the mirror.
In the bedroom Sean was naked to the waist, hanging a spare blanket over the dresser mirror.
'It's weird, Sel. I can't look at myself anymore. Am I that bad?'
'You're beautiful. But I don't like myself, either. You look at me and I'll look at you. How's that?' At sunrise the next morning Seliah lay awake on the sheets beside her husband. He was naked and snoring softly and his hair was a damp, tangled mass on the pillow. Still wet from the shower, she thought. She stared at the ceiling. Her thighs ached and her butt ached and her jaws ached and her mons was sore and her insides were tender. All night. Hours straight. Just a few bathroom breaks and short naps and a shower and a few minutes for drinks and snacks from the minibar, then they'd fall to the bed and he'd be inside her again for another insistent hour and another tremendous climax that would leave him not spent but crazily starved for more.
Seliah timed her husband's breathing against the beat of her heart. For the first few minutes last night she had felt something like she had always felt with him-desire and an urgency slowly building inside. He always loved finding her rhythm and following it and he had found it last night, too. Again and again. After an hour, and five strong orgasms that left her legs trembling and her heart racing, she had felt that familiar sensation of pain and hypersensitivity that had always signaled her full satisfaction and no more now, please, but Sean had gently spread her arms out wide and interlocked his fingers with hers and used his weight and strength to demand more. And she had given more-eight, ten; what did numbers matter? They were pained things, twisting and nerve-sharp, and she gave herself over to where the pain might lead. She had looked over at the bedside clock. It was ten oh five.
After that Sean had made a wobbling raid on the minibar. He brought Seliah a bag of pretzels and a bottle of water and a little bottle of vodka, then took some candy and water and a bottle of gin to his bedside. Daisy begged most of the pretzels from her. Seliah could hardly drink the water but the vodka was good. She sat cross-legged on the floor with a bedsheet over her shoulders and wondered what wonderful/terrible thing was happening to them. At least they were together now, and things seemed possible and at moments, even good. Sean sat on the edge of the bed with a bath towel over his lap, breathing deeply and watching her with the wildness in his eyes. Black eyes, she had thought, eyes I want to climb inside of. While he ate and drank and told her about a nice young couple he'd helped down in Puerto Nuevo, Seliah knelt and brushed away the towel and took his unrested cock in her mouth. After a while she took it out and stroked it, saliva-drenched, in her strong good hand. She thought he could burst. Delicious. Then back into her mouth until her neck and jaws couldn't take any more; then she rose and pushed him back onto the bed and rode him. Later her arms and legs gave out and she lay all of her weight on him but he buoyed her easily and it was like riding a mountain of muscle. She laid her head on his chest and he stroked her hair.
A few minutes later she had eased into a strange dreamlike state in which she felt physical sensation somehow after the fact, and she felt emotions not quite when she thought she should feel them, her whole being tilted off its axis. It wasn't a bad thing. She drifted in and out, aware of everything but focused on nothing. Vivid memories of girlhood, the Rockies and the rivers and her beautiful Boulder home, brother Scott and brother Jake, all of the several Labs they'd always had as family dogs coming back to her in singular detail. Friends. Relatives. Trips. School. College and swim team. On and on. It felt like a hallucination of some kind, but it was a factual hallucination-nothing invented, nothing changed. Like floating on a cloud of your own life, she had thought, on the cloud of your history.
Suddenly she had free-fallen back to this earth, this room, this bed, and she renewed her full devotion to the man surrounding her, straining deep into her with a need for something she badly wanted him to find. My gift to you, husband. From me. Here. Oh. My. God. She had pulled his face down and kissed him as she came, as her pain inverted and blossomed into a pleasure that she had never had before, one so large and consuming that she knew she was getting only a small part of it. Sean, too. He growled and began to quake and he shuddered and shuddered more and he was like a man discharging electricity. How long could it go on? Finally he collapsed onto her and Seliah stroked his hot wet hair and said, I love you so much, so much, and she saw the clock said eleven twenty- two and then he was in her again, driving powerfully, yearning and unsated, searching for her rhythm once more. Seliah searched, too. Gradually she found it and led him to it, a spark of pleasure waiting for her at the end of each long, slow stroke. Our love, she thought. Our journey.
'Give me a child, Sean.'
'Soon. When I'm finally home with you. He will be perfect. She will be perfect.'
Seliah was regular with her pills but out of motherlike speculation she had noted the moments of possible conception. Which one was best? The twelve forty-eight? The two oh five? The three twelve? The four forty? Now she looked over at him sleeping and she ran her hand over the sheet and felt his hardness and took her hand away. What was this? What had happened? She touched herself, and beneath the surface pain she felt the ache of unsatisfied desire.
She slipped from the bed and into the bathroom. She brushed her teeth without water and looked at her reflection and wondered why it had been impossible to behold the night before. It didn't seem so bad now. She ran a cool shower. The sight of water unsettled her. It took some willpower to let it have her but she was exhausted and finally she tilted her head back and let the jets beat against her scalp and run down her straight white hair. Her eyes were closed but she could sense the bathroom door being opened and shut, and feel a cool gust of air as Sean came into the shower behind her and ran his hands down the length of her hair as the water rushed down. She moved back into him. He told her about how great it was to fly Betty again, and how much he looked forward to taking her up, and they could make a nice little spot for Daisy behind the seats, though she would probably be a little bit miffed when Seliah deposed her. He wondered if they could get her an aviator's scarf. He was thinking maybe Colorado was in their future, back closer to her roots. Seliah heard him take the shampoo off the rack and she felt the cool puddle that dropped to the crown of her head; then she felt his big strong fingers spreading it over her hair. When it was spread he began kneading it in, working up the lather. It smelled of grapefruit, lovely and light. He massaged her hair and scalp and neck and shoulders. Indescribable pleasure in this. He bent her head back for a long, cool rinse, rubbing firmly at her temples, then gently tilted her face forward to rinse the other way. He parted her legs and slowly entered, cupping his hands under her butt and lifting her to her tiptoes. She braced herself on the shower wall, the tile cool on her palms and her cheek, and let the water come down.
'Don't stop.'
'Can't.'
'Don't ever.'
An hour later they finished together, an ecstasy she could hardly stand, but not quite get enough of. She
