Toby Olson - Seaview

“Snake trail,” she murmured, an edge of her smile twisting.

She reached the other nipple and circled it, then brought her thumb up and squeezed it. Her right hand moved to the bathrobe, along his leg. The needle was in at the front of her elbow, and she had little play, had to keep the arm from bending, but her hand could move from the wrist. She got it under the robe, flipping the fold off his leg, and ran her fingers inside his knee and just above it. He lowered his right arm slowly, leaving the bottle in the air, elevated, held in his left hand and dripping, and put his hand on the knot of her robe and disengaged it. His hand went under her robe; he lay it flat, his fingers spread on her lower belly in the deep hollow, the heel just touching the hair at the rise of her pubis. He gathered his fingers a little, holding and squeezing a span of her loose flesh. She shuddered fully, but with a shallowness that was indicative of her profound weakness, and he was at the dull edge of despair for a moment, but as she shuddered her fingers hit spasmodically at the tip of his nipple, and he was aroused away from it.

“Snake bite,” she whispered, and pushed her hips up into the heel of his hand. He moved the whole hand down, and she parted her legs a little, and he pushed up into the hair. She took the flesh on the inside of his thigh for support, keeping herself where she was. Her left hand slid from his chest to his crotch; she traced another snake line in the soft flesh above his penis.

She brought her hand out from under his robe, crossing her own body, allowing her left shoulder to settle into the bed, and arranged her arm in an L, her hand open and palm up on the pillow beside her head.

“Do it,” she said, and he looked up at his left hand in the air, holding the bottle, and checked the drip; it was regular and steady. And the rain outside was regular and steady, and the steady drops bit against the glass doors. He had not pulled the heavy curtains across them, and some of the drops sat there, and others made abbreviated snake trails in the glass. The sky was dark and cloud covered, and he could see the suggested outline of the car beyond the glass doors, but he could see nothing else.

He put two of his fingers into her and moved them from side to side; she was wet and healthy there, and he pushed deeply into her, and she opened her legs wider and tucked her chin down to see his hand on and in her, but the effort was too much for her, and she let her head fall back on the pillow and pushed into his hand, her eyes closing, then opening, and looking into his eyes. He smiled and took a third finger and touched her clitoris and brought his thumb to it and squeezed and rolled it. “Snake bite,” he said, and she growled, and ground a little against him.

And then she was rising. She squeezed harder into his right thigh, keeping her arm with the needle in it as straight as she could. She moved in a small space, did not flail or kick out; she shuddered and rose and shuddered. The back of her left hand moved back and forth beside her head on the pillow. Once she moved the hand to her mouth and sucked at her fingers and bit them. When she came, she came long and delicately, and before she could reach the peak of it, she was tired from it, but she was able to begin to relax near it, and her sighs were strange and ethereal. They were a mixture of passion and giving in to the failed effort of passion at the same time. They hurt her, and they hurt him. His hurt was the hurt of loss impending made into an emblem from the future as he felt and heard her coming. Hers was the hurt of fulfillment coming from the diminished quota of fulfillments. She felt another one going as it went. She wanted to rise up to it completely, to say good-by to it, but she could not make it. It went above and beyond her, and when it was almost gone she slipped back from it into the tiredness that had, almost insidiously, its own reward. For a while she would not have to struggle against the cancer, to win the small holding-action battles that gave her the little moments that were left to her, if she wanted to fight for them. And she did fight for them, always; they were living, and she felt very alive. But they were hard won, and she was tired, and the guilt-free and long resting after such times with him had their own value; they renewed her a little.

He checked the bottle. It was half empty, his arm was tired, but he could hold it there. She was relaxing now; her breath was returning. The last thing she released was the flesh inside his thigh. When her hand went loose the drip quickened a little, the pressure she had given her veins, their blood pushing against the Laetrile, diminished, allowing the fluid in. He was still hard above her hand, but he began to fall, and when the head of his penis hit the tips of her fingers, he lurched up and became hard again. She looked up at him out of her half-closed eyes. They both knew that there was not much left that she could manage, maybe nothing. He needed more, but he knew the trip and the time at the pool, the snake dinner, and now the rain had taken a lot out of her. She looked wasted and on the edge of a kind of sleep.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You go to sleep; I’ll unhook you when the bottle’s empty.”

She sighed and settled deeper. Her left arm moved from the L down to her body, her hand coining slowly to rest on her stomach. Her legs came together, and he reached to her and adjusted her robe, covering her breasts and legs. When he tucked the collar of her robe at her throat, she said “No,” and she reached her hand up and pulled her robe back from her breasts, tucking it around them, so that they stood free and accentuated, very white and brown tipped against the green of the robe’s fabric. She reached up a little and took him in her right hand and ran her fingers over his penis; she shifted slowly, and her breasts moved a little, swaying. She smiled faintly below her lids, looking at his face he thought, but he could not see her eyes. “Let me see it,” she said, and that aroused him further, and he moved closer to her and half stood, one knee on the bed. As he moved, the clamp on the tubing hit with a light click against the bottle as he lowered it to get to her, and he glanced up and elevated it again.

When he looked back he found he cast a shadow cutting into the light and that her right breast was now darkened, the left the more prominent in contrast. He caught his breath to hide his response from her, though she was occupied and would not have noticed. The fear of mastectomy, and the odd wish for it, hit into his stomach briefly. There had been a biopsy and some time of dazed fear in waiting before the call came. And he remembered it and how they had looked not quite at each other, neither able to incorporate the idea of it. And now he saw that negative image on the right. It was like a boy’s chest. There was a place below her breast, just under it, where he liked to put his hand flat against her ribs while she was on her back, with arms on the pillow above her head, her breasts pulled up. To move his hand down the ribs to her waist and back up again, to the edge of her breast on that side. And in this light, he could imagine the breast gone, could almost see it that way, but without the scar tissue, and could think of the way her boy’s chest would feel on that side, his hand moving to touch ribs all the way up, stopping and changing the fingering of bone only when it reached her clavicle and the cup’s indentation above it before it reached her chin and cheek. He would take her head then, his palm holding her lower mandible, and would be rising up himself, beginning to lift and turn her face toward him. He would want her eyes in his eyes before he kissed her, and he would be looking at her face up until the final moment before his lips touched her lips. Their flat, bare chests would touch against each other as they embraced; there would be no protuberance to keep them apart.