Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“No,” he said, too dumbfounded to challenge the premise of the question.

“Well,” she said with a flame-lit twinkle in her eyes, “I may not be as agile as some, but I’m not fragile, and everything else is just as you’d expect. I like to touch and be touched,” she said, her fingertips moving, burning a line across his abdomen. “I’ll need to hold on to you or the bed or my bar when I’m on top, or I won’t have any leverage. But we can take that as it comes.”

He reached out and caught her hand, firmly but not harshly. “Malena, this is—I’m afraid you expect too much from me.”

She brought his hand to her mouth and bit the ball of his thumb. Startled, he flinched and pulled his hand free, not in pain, but from the sudden charge of sexual energy, so alien and unfamiliar now.

“Please,” he said, “it has been years—”

“I know,” she said. She reached up for the bar again, and a moment later she was no longer beside him, but astride him, straddling his waist, the sheet still between them like a frail chaperone.

His breath caught, his hands shook. “Malena, please—you are a lovely girl. But how can I—you cannot understand the difficulty—”

Clinging to the bar with one hand for balance, she reached forward and pressed her other hand over his heart. She closed her eyes, as though listening intently, as though taking his measure.

“Let it back into your life,” she said gently, opening her eyes. “You’ve waited long enough, invented enough fears. You don’t have to hold yourself apart, Thomas. You have a right to permit yourself pleasure.”

What door she had thrown open he did not know, but he suddenly felt naked before her, and panic began to rise in his chest. She sensed it in an instant and caught his face in her hands.

“Just be with me,” she said gently, making him meet her eyes. “Just be here and let go of the rest. It will be all right.”

“I don’t know if I can—”

“Of course we can,” she said, touching a finger to his lips and sitting back with a little smile.

Tidwell closed his eyes and sighed away his quailing, then looked up and beheld her in the candlelight. “You are lovely,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said with a hint of a blush. Purposefully, almost theatrically, she slipped the thin straps of her garment off her shoulders, one at a time. A fetching wriggle, and her chemise slid down to bunch about her waist, baring her young breasts, her upturned nipples. Tidwell swallowed his breath as he admired her.

“Do you like them?” she asked softly.

His drawn breath an anticipatory sigh, Tidwell confessed, “Yes.”

Malena leaned forward, propping herself on her hands on either side of his shoulders, and lowered herself down to kiss him. Her lips were soft, yielding, melding, her taste the fresh-sweet peppermint of a too-recent brushing or candy.

“If you touch them, I can enjoy them, too,” she said as she broke away from the kiss.

By then, Tidwell had caught enough of her playfulness that he could take it as an invitation, not a critique. “You did warn me you would expect that,” he said, and reached for her.

Cooing happily as he caressed her nipples, Malena slid her body backward a few inches, until the bulge of his growing erection was trapped beneath her. She rocked her hips, rubbing herself against him, until the thin fabric barrier was velvet-slippery with their wetness, until Tidwell rose up, tore the sheet away, and took Malena to her back in an adolescent rush.

That was the first time: affirmation for her, release for him. The second time, with the knifelike edge of need gone for both of them, was a more leisurely, more playful ballet. Climbing a gentler curve of sensuality, fingers and mouths exploring, they became truly lovers. Her touch was new on his body and knowing on her own, their bodies sweat-slick in the heat, the humid air.

And though a second orgasm was beyond him, a second erection was not. When she straddled and rode him, leaning on his chest with one hand, being close to her and feeling the sensuality radiating from her was like being an old cat soaking up a spring sunbeam. When her body shook and clutched and she cried out her pleasure, his body was indistinguishable from hers, and he was part of what they made together, drawing from it a peace almost as profound as hers.

“You see,” she said, blowing out the candle and snuggling against him, “I knew it would be all right.”

And it was. But it could not last. When the moment was passed, the connection broken, all the thoughts which had been driven away while he lived in that moment, in a world of senses and sensation, returned to him. Joining them was an uncertain flavor of guilt and confusion, the deception which stood between him and the young woman in his arms tainting the contentment he might otherwise have felt.

“You’re still troubled,” she said, disappointed, as they cuddled together, legs entangled, Her cheek on his chest. “I wanted to take that away from you.”

Tidwell smiled in the darkness, wry and sad, as he stroked her hair reassuringly with his aged fingers.

“You took me away from it, at least for a while,” he said. “And even that is more than I would have thought anyone could do.”

Wonders Upstairs, said the sign at street level.

It seemed an outlandish claim for such an unprepossessing structure—a barnlike two-story wood frame building on a commercial street ten blocks from the Rice University campus. Downstairs was the Small Planet Grocery, a busy food and drug co-op which seemed to have an exemption from every licensing law and packaging code. Above, under the gambrel roof, was Wonders.

Daniel Keith recognized on first sight that the three-hundred-seat club was organically one with the co-op below—that is, Spartan, quaint, and inexplicably successful. Everything that wasn’t handmade seemed secondhand. Half the seating was comprised of unpadded wooden benches, the other half of uncomfortable plastic chairs packed too closely together.

Most surprising, the only performance support was a twelve-channel sound system and an autospot. There was no net feed, no audio optimizer, no prompter—to say nothing of such cutting-edge technologies as a SyncScreen or harmonizer. But, as Keith learned when he editorialized aloud, that state of affairs was the result of the owner’s philosophy, not his poverty.

“What fun is it if there’s nineteen layers of insulation between me and the performer?” snorted Bill “Papa” Wonders, he of the great white beard like an Elizabethan ruffled collar. “That’s like putting a tourist in a six-axis harness and a thrill-ride helmet and calling him a gymnast. My musicians work without a net.”

The audience had somewhat better support: A little bar and food counter in a glass-walled annex sold bottled drinks, light polypep, and a smattering of desserts—all of the crunchless variety, out of consideration to the performers.

But it was the music, not the menu, which filled the seats in Wonders at fifteen dollars per, six nights a week. Techjazz, English vocal, electric filk, revival rock, antitonal—everyone agreed that Papa Wonders had eclectic tastes. Most agreed that he also had good taste.

Which is why only Tuesdays were free for sampling new performers, two on a split bill, an hour set each with a break between. Tonight, the poster in Wonders’s narrow stairway read:

Tuesday

December p.m.

CHRISTOPHER McCUTCHEON

Traditional Guitar

+ + +

BONNIE TEVENS AMBIKA

Synth Moods

At a quarter to eight, Keith slipped into the little room that served as the performer’s warm-up room and found Christopher bending over his instrument with surgical concentration.