Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Suddenly, Raven's standing in front of her. He's wearing different clothes, wet slippery clothing made out of animal skins or something. His face is red and wet from being outside.

"You get your job all done?"

"Sort of," Raven says. "I did enough."

"What do you mean, enough?"

"I mean I don't like being called out of a date to do bullshit work," Raven says. "So I got things in order out there and my attitude is, let his gnomes worry about the details."

"Well, I've been having a great time here."

"Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.

"Let's go to the Core," he says, once they get into the cool air above deck.

"What's there?"

"Everything," he says. "The people who run this whole place. Most of these people" - he waves his hand out over the Raft - "can't go there. I can. Want to see it?"

"Sure, why not," she says, hating herself for sounding like such a sap. But what else is she going to say?

He starts leading her down a long moonlit series of gangplanks, in toward the big ships in the middle of the Raft. You could almost skate here, but you'd have to be really good.

"Why are you different from the other people?" Y.T. says. She kind of blurts it out without doing a whole lot of thinking first. But it seems like a good question.

He laughs. "I'm an Aleut. I'm different in a lot of ways - "

"No. I mean your brain works in a different way," Y.T. says. "You're not wacked out. You know what I mean? You haven't mentioned the Word all night."

"We have a thing we do in kayaks. It's like surfing," Raven says.

"Really? I surf, too - in traffic," Y.T. says.

"We don't do this for fun," Raven says. "It's part of how we live. We get from island to island by surfing on waves."

"Same here," Y.T. says, "except we go from one franchulate to the next by surfing on cars."

"See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says.

"Right. I'm totally hip to what you're saying."

"That's what I'm doing with the Orthos. I agree with some of their religion. But not all of it. But their movement has a lot of power. They have a lot of people and money and ships."

"And you're surfing on it."

"Yeah."

"That's cool, I can relate. What are you trying to do? I mean, what's your real goal?"

They're crossing a big broad platform. Suddenly he's right behind her, his arms are around her body, and he draws her back into him. Her toes are just barely touching the ground. She can feel his cool nose against her temple and his hot breath coming into one ear. It sends a tingle straight down to her toes.

"Short-term goal or long-term goal?" Raven whispers.

"Um - long term."

"I used to have this plan - I was going to nuke America."

"Oh. Well, that'd be kind of harsh," she says.

"Maybe. Depends on what kind of a mood I'm in. Other than that, no long-term goals." Every time he whispers something, another breath tickles her ear.

"How about medium-term then?"

"In a few hours, the Raft comes apart," Raven says. "We're headed for California. Looking for a decent place to live. Some people might try to stop us. It's my job to help the people make it safe and sound up onto the shore. So you might say I'm going to war."

"Oh, that's a shame," she mumbles.

"So it's hard to think of anything besides the here and now."

"Yeah, I know."

"I rented a nice room to spend my last night in," Raven says. "It's got clean sheets."

Not for long, she thinks.

She had thought that his lips would be cold and stiff, like a fish. But she's shocked at how warm they are. Every part of his body feels hot, like that's his only way of keeping warm up in the Arctic.

About thirty seconds into the kiss, he bends down, wraps his great thigh-sized forearms around her waist, cinches her up into the air, lifting her feet up off the deck.

She was afraid he would take her to some horrible place, but it turns out he rented a whole shipping container, stacked way up high on one of the containerships in the Core. The place is like a luxury hotel for big Core wheels.

She's trying to decide what to do with her legs, which are now dangling uselessly. She's not quite ready to wrap them around him, not this early in the date. Then she feels them spreading apart - way, way apart - Raven's thighs must be bigger around than his waist. He has lifted one leg up into her crotch and put the foot up on a chair so she's straddling his thigh, and with his arms he's holding her body up against him, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, so that she's helplessly rocking back and forth, all her weight on her crotch. Some huge muscle, the upmost part of his quadricep, angles up where it attaches to the bone in his pelvis, and as he rocks her in closer and tighter she ends up straddling that, shoved against it so tight that she can feel the seams in the crotch of her coverall, feel the coins in the key pocket of Raven's black jeans. When he slides his hands downward, still pressing her inward, and squeezes her butt in both hands, so big it must be like squeezing an apricot, fingers so long they wrap around and push up into her crack and she rocks forward to get away from it but there's nowhere to go except into his body, her face breaking away from the kiss and sliding against the perspiration of his broad, smooth, whiskerless neck. She can't help letting out a yelp that turns into a moan, and then she knows he's got her. Because she never makes noises during sex, but this time she can't help it.

And once she's decided that, she's impatient to get on with it. She can move her arms, she can move her legs, but the middle part of her body is pinned in place, it's not going to move until Raven moves it. And he's not going to move it until she makes him want to. So she goes to work on his ear. That usually does it.

He tries to get away from her. Raven, trying to run away from something. She likes that idea. She has arms that are as strong as a man's, strong from hanging on to that poon on the freeway, so she wraps them around his head like a vise and presses her forehead against the side of his head and starts orbiting the tip of her tongue around the little folded-over rim of his outer ear.

He stands paralyzed for a couple of minutes, breathing shallowly, while she works her way inward, and when she finally shoves her tongue into his ear canal, he bucks and grunts like he's just been harpooned, lifts her up off his leg, kicks the chair across the room so hard it cracks against the steel wall of the shipping container. She feels herself falling backward toward the futon, thinks for a moment she's about to get crushed beneath him, but he catches all the weight on his elbows, except for his lower body, which slams into hers all at once, sending another electric shot of pleasure up her back and down her legs. Her thighs and calves have turned solid and tight, like they've been pumped full of juice, she can't relax them. He leans up on one elbow, separating their bodies for a moment, plants his mouth on hers to maintain the contact, fills her mouth with his tongue, holds her there with it while he one-hands the fastener at the collar of her coverall and yanks the zipper all the way down to the crotch. It's open now, exposing a broad V of skin converging from her shoulders. He rolls back onto her, grabs the top of the coverall with both hands and pulls it down behind her, forcing her arms down and to her sides, stuffing the mass of fabric and pads down underneath the small of her back so she stays arched up toward him. Then he's in between her tight thighs, all those skating muscles strained to the limit, and his hands come back inside to squeeze her butt again, this time his hot skin against hers, it's like sitting on a warm buttered griddle, makes the whole body feel warmer.