Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

Cori had no way of imagining a velvet people who spoke through balletic motions and muscle spasms, arced arms and bent necks. A nation that consisted of beings who were physically similar to humans but biologically distinct. A people who thrived on human nectar.

MalKai did not wait for the ancestors to confirm that he had found his last seduction. When Cori’s motions fully saturated MalKai’s consciousness, his hands flew through the air in a gesture of relief. That he had some nectar to collect before he could return home, seemed a mere formality. MalKai had plans, plans that did not include a lengthy chase. Under the crushing pressure of his homesickness he made no provision for elongated discussions that could discern the safety of his assignment. He did not care to proceed carefully. By whatever renegade tactics he had to employ, MalKai was getting the nectar he came for, completing his last assignment, and going home.

Cori began the seduction. Only he did it in ignorance. Didn’t understand he was parading his openness when he turned to face MalKai and offered up a weak, uncertain smile. Didn’t realize he was making it easy for his seducer when he sat quietly under the shade of the next tree (an oak), close enough to make pursuit unnecessary. Was too ignorant to know it was on when MalKai appeared in front of him with a huge grin plastered across that velvet face. The grin should have told Cori something. It was all teeth, without calculation or hesitation.

It was MalKai whose voice rode the wind first. Cori’s tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth to wet his lips in nervous preparation. He looked over his shoulder, scanning the area that surrounded the oak tree. His search for intruding eyes revealed his anxiety, but it was an unnecessary revelation. His anxiety was visible, he was suffocating in it, and his worried eyes were pounding out an S.O.S. on MalKai’s face. Those paranoid gestures were like spoken confessions. MalKai kneeled and skimmed his fingers over the back of Cori’s hand. Cori glanced up in confusion and found himself caught in MalKai’s brown eyes.

Cori could no longer feel the breeze. MalKai flipped Cori’s hand over and traced a slow circle on the skin of Cori’s palm. When MalKai pushed on Cori’s palm, Cori felt something wrap around him and squeeze out his secrets. He found himself releasing thoughts that had never before crossed his lips. Then somewhere, a little girl screamed, her mother cursed, and Cori blinked. With that blink Cori regained something like consciousness and jerked away. Heart first, then hand flying away from its resting place in MalKai’s firm grasp. Cori looked down at his hand, eyes clouded with disbelief. He could almost make out a trail of wildfire where the kiss of MalKai’s finger had seared his flesh.

The second his hand was free, Cori’s mind started buzzing. His mind buzzed all the way through chatty introductions, appraising glances, and MalKai’s smooth descent into a seated position beside him. The buzzing of Cori’s mind was nothing like the buzzing that MalKai had sent to sit in Cori’s ears. Cori’s buzzing was visual. It was composed of images of large square men tottering on tiny angular spiked heels. A television clip of a pedophilic priest and jagged pages from porno magazines displasying studs in ripped overalls.

The blood vessels in Cori’s hands were so strained he felt they would burst. He stared at his shaking palm, and his fluttering life line gave way to images of his and his cousin’s blurred bodies as his cousin chased him though his adult-empty house, of their nude bodies pressing together in his parents’ big empty bed, of their tingling bodies working together to achieve that sweet, sweet release. MalKai’s fingers crossed Cori’s fluttering life line and obliterated Cori’s memories . I did not come to earth to encourage the reminiscing of reluctant assignments , his fingers insisted.

In this last seduction MalKai was tugging on needs Cori didn’t know existed and answering questions Cori didn’t ask. He was leading Cori down an invisible orchid-lined path, heavy with the scent of déjà vu and lust.

Amidst the heady chain of events, Cori’s mind had become a blackboard upon which complex theorems were frantically being worked out. Spurred by velvet touches and hinging on fear, Cori nervously built the type of mathematical sentences he had learned could prove any geometric fact. “If someone sees me, then the whole world will perceive me as abnormal.” “If I do this, then everything I have done up until this day will be called into question.” “If I enjoy this interaction, then what am I?”

The chalk snapped in Cori’s mind and left him solutionless. Math abandoned, Cori offered a shaky-fingered reply to MalKai’s advances. Their hands began to dance. First teasing palm-stroking with fingers, then fingertips rubbing against each other. MalKai’s fingers were no longer alone in their advances. Cori’s fingers ceased their trembling. Both hands mirrored the intimate joining of lovers. The undulations of their hands fascinated Cori. He sighed in wonder at how such simple movements could shake him to his core.

MalKai’s fingers soon grew tired of palm stroking. They began to wander to Cori’s wrist, up his arm to Cori’s shoulder, and to the nape of his neck. They lingered there for a second. Long enough for MalKai to contemplate the next move…

…and also for Cori to contemplate his. Cori wanted to believe the dancing hands were the climax of this daring adventure. Thought that hand-fucking with a total stranger was risqué enough to merit a life-long memory. He didn’t realize that the film had just started, the theme music was playing, the opening credits were rolling, and he was the leading lady. Anyone peeping from afar, watching the seduction play out as if on the silver screen, knew where Cori would be in scene two:

Naked, fingers in mouth, chest heaving, lips moist from nervous licking, lowered eyes, staccato breath, belly trembling, body spread across bedsheets… or grass… flared nostrils.

Cori kept replaying how he had gotten to this point. How was it that he had landed under an oak tree in the web of a velvety hand-fucker whose motions, intent on turning him out in plain view of the entire world, had him pressing through the fly of his new silk boxers. Cori’s eyes closed involuntarily when he felt MalKai’s hand on his chest. A muscle he didn’t know existed, twitched in his groin. His ears were burning with embarrassment. Could anyone see him?

The seducer stares ahead toward the end of the road, with his head cocked at a devious angle, calculating how long it will take to get there. The seduced looks behind at the beginning of the road and, with his brow creased in concern, wonders how it slipped so far away. Cori’s entire life, it could be argued, was an attempt to avoid any event such as this one. For years, he discretely avoided eye contact with men who wore their privacy in public like an expensive coat of chinchilla. Didn’t want to rub shoulders with those who stood outside their closets, for fear of contamination. Purposely refused his hand’s desire to linger on the shoulder of an especially intriguing friend. Newspaper clips announcing trysts in the park left a bitter taste in his mouth. That he could be so caught up as to release control out in the open and let down his guard unnerved him.

This was a propless seduction. There was no sensual wailing floating in the air, no liquid intoxicant on ice, and no satin sheets beneath Cori’s back. In fact there was nothing Cori could blame his transgression on. He was resting against the dirty bark of an old tree atop a hill covered with dying grass. Nothing short of a miracle could have brought Cori to this point—and the miracle was a touch so utterly sensual, an understanding so undeniably sexual, that it could not be ignored. Every refusal Cori had forced his body to accept in the past decade, delivered him here—a willing participant—in MalKai’s lap. Each little impulse he had previously suppressed quietly collected itself into an explosive mass, and now, two clasped palms had coaxed the explosion.