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"Love is the subtlest
form of self-interest."
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The alchemy started quietly, just a tremor at first - slow
silver flames dancing toward the body's surface, without apparent
rhythm or strength or sensual intent. Was it the drum that finally
called them or the pollen spume from the climaxing hills or, more
lovely to contemplate, the scent rising from the moonlight at her
breasts?
Her fingers trembled and listened, but the glow was too pale, too tentative, the source too shadowed beneath the quickening skin to reach out to. Gradually gathering strength it mounted forays. One moment, a delicate throbbing - small bright firefly pulses in the neural vines entwining her rectum. Now, a curving thrill rising from the white, shadowed fold below the spine, cresting through the womb, breaking into hidden rainbows that filled her belly with heat and color. Or, and most often, a slow warm vortex cycling deep within the pelvic cradle. She only knew that somewhere down in secret flesh beneath the umbilical cave, behind the sweat-pearled tangles of maiden hair, she was being touched, tasted, visited. "It's beginning. And I can't..." She tried to continue but when the tonsils flushed and melted with a taste like hazelnut nectar, her tongue deserted the effort, arching back greedily into the sweetness. "I know," she murmured, rising to kiss the rocking shoulders. "Shakti's back in town." She paused to don a black gospel baritone, "an' she be lookin' for trouble!" In the candled mirror she saw the mirth rise in the eyes behind her full seconds before it billowed warm and throaty through her hair. As the laugh leaped between them, her mouth, still awash with the rich honey brine, spewed it forth, setting the altar flames jumping and hissing in the staccato mists. She wiped her lips slowly with the silk bandana knotted at her wrist and felt quite giddy and shy. |
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They still were not completely relaxed together. In some ways
they barely knew each other, barely knew what they were attempting
in the first place. Neither had ever given much credence to the
goddess cult nonsense or militant lesbian spiels on primal sister
power. In fact, the very word 'lesbian' was a threat to the work.
they shared a visceral aversion to the stereotype and exiled it from
thought and conversation as a dangerous distraction. Neither had
ever slept with another woman before this and when it was finished
both doubted they ever would again. They calmly accepted the
enterprise, the whole relationship, as anomalous, outside the bounds
of conventional sense. Their very cells were conspiring at a furious
level of intimacy and yet as people, outside the ritual, they were
just new, awkward friends. Once, trying to verbalize what they
shared they broke into old Mafia parodies - "Nothin' personal now,
Vito baby, dis is strickly business..." Emotionally, though, they
really wanted to keep it there, cool and tough, in the impersonal
intensity of working professionals. It still was not easy. When first introduced at an artist friend's party, both had felt more avoidance than attraction in the encounter, and were surprised to find themselves so open and willing to talk when next they met. Caught unprotected in a squalling May shower, they collided wet and cold on a backstreet corner. Swapping quick bedraggled smiles, she gestured ahead to a sheltering doorway. They sat in the crowded cafe mildly cursing the afternoon rain and offering up details of their lives. They had both dabbled for years in yoga, experienced psychedelics, fallen in love with the body and a lot of hot music. They had difficult families, liked dark wiry men. Both were quasi-religious. One worshipped Lord Buckley. The other's bedroom door rajneeshed in orange: "Everything You Know is Fucked!" Enough in common for easy camaraderie. What they weren't prepared for was the chemistry. After barely an hour of confessional compare and contrast, each found herself helplessly staring at the other's nose. Their nostrils were flaring like a ferret's in a sausage shop. They were sniffing each other, for Christ's sake. Their eyes double-sized in mock (and sincere) horror so quickly that both broke into sputtering, embarrassed laughter. Sobering: "New perfume or something?" The moment passed but neither could forget the quick interrogative inhalations, the molecular inquiries. Each tried to puzzle out what had been asked, what was answered, what they had learned. It was not love at first whiff, they would laugh later. Neither recalled a seductive or even a pleasant fragrance at this time. In fact, neither could remember any smell at all. But somewhere behind the eyes, in the glistening caves where nerve tendrils bloom like dark anemone, quickened synapses licked the air, and tasted power. Hundreds passed the whisper on but most were quickly censored, misrouted, shunted as foolish mistakes. The few that eluded the nets of expectation, though, arrived with enough harmony to be heard. And deep in the turbulence of their genes, the music spread, charming asunder long latent tangles of need. New circuits for light, fresh channels for growth - a chance. "Was it me or her or some of us both that first sparked the alarms?" she wondered once, but quickly decided it was a pointless, male sort of question. What counted was that the sensation seemed mutual, simultaneous. Also, in some infuriatingly vague way, "significant." Something was recognized between them, something more anciently amoral than they could grasp, something that scared them into polite distance for most of the following year.
The moon through the latticework now fell at her back, striping their bodies together with a staff of pale light. She half turned toward her, eyes swimming in tears. "Please don't move, " she whispered. Her fingertips began to play along the reclining flesh, tracing out octaves, searching for chords. As the touch grew attuned and excitation chorused back through the skin, she abandoned intent and let the power take control. "It was like this..." Again it started softly, but kindled now by her lingering fire it spread quickly and deep through the union. Muscles humming to heat, her hands picked up rhythm, urgency. Out beyond art or expertise, they poured through the salt wet skin till she felt her own touch from within the answering thrill. The feedback fused their being, firing her caresses with erotic assurance. Out along the forearms, down the clenching calves, opening lush erogenous meadows in the serest working class tissues. They swept hungrily across her nakedness, teasing and flooding the trickling meridians with torrential expectation. |
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Her body echoing arousal, she drew away and looked down at her:
mouth open, wet with delirium, the fragile animal form liquefied and
heaving with free energy like a storm-lit sea. "Bless this...our body," she breathed and threw the half that she still wore back into the tempest totally now, all attention on the loins. Lips, breasts, prayers and glistening palms poured down through the shadows from her cleft to the womb, soaking the ground, shorting out all control. Out in the thrashing extremities, lambent plasmas felt the drench and cry at the center, and cycloned inward for release. Pulling energy from earth and sky and memory, the first gusts of climax broke over them. Weeping openly and half lost to the ecstasy herself, she struggled to will the final act: "now, god, please...home." Twisting suddenly and sliding up alongside, she wed their breath, lips, life, and with one last involuntary "please," slapped her brilliantly across the ass. The orgasmic focus veered, shattering the whirling formation of the cauldron. All the power erupting outward now flashed back to blind the staring nerves. Then, and only then, the patient magic of the appendix burst forth in answering cascades of fire, detonating the chakras, igniting the spine. Seconds before the rapture struck, their eyes met one last time. They had done it, consummated the intimate solar mystery - breaching repulsion, conjunctive in heat, birthing new light - and all quite "manfully," they might have laughed, had either still been around. But the numen of the firestorm was ascendant now and sang them out of the temple, the moon-dappled night, into love beyond remembering... |