by Carmen Amato
Eddo looked at the back of her neck, at the softness of her skin, and couldn’t wait any longer. He stepped behind her and kissed her right where he’d touched her in the mall. “Luz.”
She stopped the water, slowly put down the glass carafe and turned to face him. “Yes,” she said softly, as if he’d asked her a question.
He smiled and kissed her, easy and unrushed. Her mouth was warm. He felt her hands travel up his arms, her touch feather light.
They kissed for a long time in the little kitchen, the heat growing. They pressed together, both of them touching, exploring, gently at first and then with urgency. Eddo pulled her hair loose and untied her scarf.
It went on until Luz made a sound and Eddo realized he’d trapped her between his body and the edge of the countertop. He was hard against her jeans.
Eddo stepped back. “You all right?” he asked.
She didn’t reply, just grabbed the sides of his shirt. Eddo sucked in his breath and the shirt came untucked. Luz pulled it over his head.
Her hands splayed across his bare chest, her touch flooding his senses. Eddo fumbled at the buttons on her blouse, his fingers thick and clumsy.
There was a tug at his waist and a pressure against his groin that was sweet agony. “Your belt,” Luz whispered.
“I’ll get it,” he said, still focused on those little gold buttons and he couldn’t get them unfastened and there was no time so he simply pulled apart the two panels of silk.
The plings of metal bouncing on granite brought Eddo to his senses. He was on an unfamiliar emotional precipice with this woman and acting like a caveman. He swallowed hard; reminding himself to keep his head together.
Luz looked at the blouse on the floor. To Eddo’s surprise she shyly raised her arms. Almost of their own volition his hands reached around and unfastened her bra.
Chapter 18
When Eddo stripped back the white matelasse coverlet to reveal white linen sheets Luz opened her legs for him to do what every other man she’d ever been with did right away. But Eddo came down beside her and said “No rush, no rush,” even though she could see that his body was more than ready for her.
They kissed again and again, their hands slipping over each other, the tension growing, until Luz thought he must want to do it now and she tried to position herself for him. Again he didn’t let her but instead arched her over him so that their bodies crossed.
“I want to know what you like,” Eddo murmured. He gently slid his fingers into her and Luz gasped.
It went on and on, Luz stretched across him, his to play on, and he tightened her like a guitar string. She couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t do anything except feel the tension build and her blood pound. He touched her and kissed her and stroked her until the dam broke and the force of the climax curled her up. Only then did he stop stroking and instead pressed his palm between her legs, pushing so that she could feel her muscles pulse against his hand. Every time he moved his hand another pulse would shake her and she wouldn’t be able to catch her breath. When the last one died out Luz forced her eyes open and saw him watching her, his eyes dark with intensity.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yes.” Luz finally could speak again. “It just . . . wasn’t what I was expecting.” She’d climaxed before during intercourse, but it was never something her partner had deliberately made happen.
“I wanted you to be ready.”
Luz looked at him. He was gorgeous, lithe, erect. “I’m ready.”
Eddo found a condom in the bedside table drawer and slid into her easily, heat radiating out from his body and warming hers. He stayed far above her, taking his weight on outstretched arms and Luz had a near-perfect view of his near-perfect body. She caught his rhythm easily, watching how his abdominal muscles flexed in a pattern as all his taut energy thrummed in and out of her. He looked at her, but didn’t make a noise, didn’t smile, didn’t stop the rhythm until he seemed to thicken inside her. His eyes closed involuntarily and he stopped moving. All the muscles in his neck and chest tensed, the veins and cords bulging in sharp relief. Then the tenseness faded.
Luz waited for there to be more, but there wasn’t.
Eddo opened his eyes and settled onto his elbows and kissed her. Luz put her arms around his neck and relaxed her legs, feeling uncertain without knowing why. He started to slide away.
“Don’t go,” Luz said, not wanting it to be over, wondering if she’d done something wrong.
“It’ll make a mess,” he said regretfully and slid all the way out, making sure the condom stayed where it was supposed to be. He went into the adjoining bathroom and there was the sound of running water.
Luz sat up. The heat was gone. She felt self-conscious all of a sudden, naked and in this man’s bed.
Eddo reappeared in the bathroom door, minus the condom. “Let me show you why I bought this place.”
An immense oval tub set into a marble platform was filling rapidly. Eddo pressed a button and the water churned into white bubbles.
He helped her in and Luz practically had to swim over to one end. The water frothed around them. Eddo tickled her hip with his toes and she saw that his feet were battered. Several toes had been broken, the heels were calloused, and some nails were missing.
“Fútbol feet,” Luz said.
“Since I was old enough to walk.” Eddo smiled. “When I was little I wanted to grow up and play for Cruz Azul. Now I want to grow up and play for Toluca.”
“I’ll cheer the loudest of anybody for you,” Luz said.
“So what are you doing way over there?” He held out his arms and Luz pushed herself through the bubbles until she was on his end of the tub. He pulled her back against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. The uncertainty faded.
“It’s 1:00 am,” Luz said. There was a small clock on the rim of the tub.
“It’s too late to take you home.” He kissed her neck and slid his hands over her wet breasts.
“I was just wondering how long since we met.” Luz closed her eyes.
“We met, what? About 10:00 am? Fifteen hours ago.”
Fifteen hours. A lifetime ago. Luz shifted to kiss him and as she moved she realized he was hard again. She reached under the bubbles and grasped him gently, feeling how he was made and where it all connected.
“Lift up,” she said softly. She ran her hands along his sides, making him kneel. The bubbles played around his thighs. This time she was going to do to him what he’d done to her.
“The water,” he said as if he could read her mind.
“No matter,” Luz said and slid to her knees, too, like a prayer. She bent and closed her mouth over him, the bubbles playing around her chin. She’d never done such a thing before but somehow she knew what to do.
“Luz,” she heard him say. He turned off the bubbler and the room got very quiet. Luz kept her mouth on him and stroked him at the same time, her right hand squeezing up and down, her left hand touching everything else.
She went on and on, immersed in the sensations of how he tasted and reacted to her touch. He started to tremble. She thought she heard him say “stop” but she wasn’t sure and looked up. He was braced, arms outstretched and holding onto the rim of the tub on either side, head down, staring at her, his face contorted with tension, his breathing hoarse. She slid her left hand between his legs and up the other side while stroking with her right, the skin under her hand hot and silky and taut. As she bent to him again he made a sound, something between a groan and a sob, and white syrup fountained out of him. As her hand kept up the rhythm his body jerked helplessly and he cried out her name.
She kept stroking until he reached down and grabbed her hand and made her stop. “Madre de Dios,” he rasped.
They settled back into the water, Eddo pulling Luz against his chest again. She couldn’t see his face and didn’t know if he was pleased or angry. Neither turned the bubbler back on. The room was moist and silent.
“Why did you do that?” he ask
ed after a long time.
Luz bit her lip. She knew it was not something good Catholic girls did. “You don’t lose control very often, do you?” she asked in return.
“What do you mean?”
“Even before . . . you wanted me to feel wonderful,” Luz said. “And I did. But then you held back. I got the feeling you don’t ever really let go.” She paused but he said nothing. His arms around her rose and fell with her breathing. She went on. “I wanted you to know that you could with me. That it would be all right . . . to just let go. So you could have what you’d given me.”
“Madre de Dios,” Eddo said.
He turned her around and they moved gently against each other, needing reassurance, knowing each other in a way they hadn’t an hour ago. Luz stroked his shoulders, loving the way his body now seemed completely relaxed. Eddo moved his hands into her hair, brushing it away from her face. But then he pulled back and grinned like a fool.
“Madre de Dios, Luz, it’s all over your hair.”
Luz reached up and felt her hair, sticky and already getting crispy in a couple of places. She started to redden and caught his eye. He looked absurdly proud. She laughed and so did he.
“I’ll have to wash it out,” Luz said. There was only soap on the tub rim. “Do you have any shampoo?”
“Let me check.” He leaned halfway out of the tub. As Luz admired the sight of wet loins, he opened the cabinet under the sink and took out a dusty box of Klorane herbal shampoo. It was the kind Señora Vega bought for 140 pesos at the pharmacy.
“You use this?” Luz asked.
“It was a gift,” Eddo said, sinking back into the tub. He took a bottle out of the box.
“Oh,” said Luz. Of course. It was a woman’s product, a gift from a girlfriend. He had a girlfriend. She suddenly couldn’t look at him. “Never mind. She didn’t mean for you to give it away.”
“It’s not what you think,” Eddo said, taking Luz’s chin in his hand and making her look up. “I was with some journalist but it ended last spring. I’ve got nothing to hide on that score.”
“Okay.” His eyes were too honest to doubt.
“I’ll tell you something, Luz.” Eddo smiled. “After a year she didn’t know me half as well as you know me after one day.”
He lathered her hair as Luz sat blissfully in the middle of the giant tub with her arms around her knees. The touch of his wet hands on her head was achingly intimate. He kissed her as he rinsed her hair and told her she looked like la sirena--a mermaid.
“There,” he said. “Squeaky clean.” He helped her out of the tub and enveloped her in a big bath sheet.
“What about you?” Luz pulled the towel around him as well, wrapping him in her body heat. His response was immediate.
It was so much more this time, the sharpest, sweetest thing Luz had ever known. Eddo stretched over her, skin-to-skin, no distance between them at all and Luz forgot where she ended and he began. There was rapture as he pulsed deep inside her. But then he stopped moving and said, “I just need to look at you.” With their heads close together his eyes searched her face and Luz slid her hand over the line of his jaw. She arched against him and he started thrusting again.
When he said hoarsely, “It’s coming, Luz. Like a freight train,” she lifted her legs and locked her ankles behind his shoulder blades. He rocked even deeper inside her, the angle had changed, and as they stroked together, the rhythm got quicker and his shoulders grew rigid under her hands. Luz stopped breathing as the tightness broke and the climax roared through her body, making the muscles deep inside her clench around him. She was shaking as his rhythm grew jerky and uncontrolled. As his body juddered between her legs he cried out. Luz held onto him as hard as she could, never wanting the moment to stop, letting him let go as long as he could.
'
They made jokes afterwards, lying on the bed and touching each other possessively, until Luz’s stomach growled and Eddo insisted on finding her something to eat. He rolled off the bed and tacked unsteadily down the hall. Luz found her pink panties and put them on. It seemed like the right thing to do. She didn’t really know the protocol--she’d never spent the night in a man’s house before.
Eddo came back with a plate of cut up apples. “This is how Adam and Eve got started.”
“That’s right.” Luz burrowed into his pillows and crunched a wedge. “But they had to leave Eden. I liked your story about Rodrigo and Jimena better. They ended up in Valencia.”
“Of course, I doubt Jimena ever looked this good.” Eddo ran a finger over the silky pink fabric of her panties. “She probably wore big linen bloomers.”
Luz laughed. “And I heard Rodrigo needed a haircut.”
Eddo stretched up to kiss her and they smiled as they kissed because they both tasted like apples. He stayed there against the pillows, suddenly quiet and intense.
“What?” Luz could tell his mood had shifted; he wasn’t joking or being funny anymore.
“In El Cid, people are always saying to him, ‘You were knighted in a fortunate time.’”
“A fortunate time,” Luz echoed. “Is this a fortunate time, Eduardo Cortez Castillo?”
“I didn’t think so until today,” he said slowly. “It’s not fortunate to be in a place where there isn’t ever any stillness. But you’re the sort of person who carries stillness with her, Luz.”
“Thank you,” she said, surprised at the poetry in his words.
“I’ve been waiting a long time to feel this way with anyone.”
“Me, too,” Luz murmured.
They finished the apples in silence, bare feet touching.
Eddo slid off the bed, went into the bathroom, and emerged with a new toothbrush still in the wrapper. “For you, Jimena.”
When Luz came out of the bathroom Eddo was clad in boxers and had put a CD into the small stereo on the dresser. His keys and cell phone and wallet were on a little tray next to it. “How about some Miguel Bosé?” he asked. “It’s good music to help you fall asleep.”
It was cool enough to need the matelasse coverlet. The white night sky glowed behind the shades and Luz could just make out Eddo’s face as they laced their fingers together. Miguel Bosé sang softly.
“Luz, do you believe in fate?” Eddo asked.
“Sometimes.”
“This is one of those times.” His fingers tightened around hers.
Luz closed her eyes and nestled a fraction closer.
Chapter 19
The title of the article in the norteamericano newspaper was “Betancourt’s Embarrassment” and Lorena breathed fire as she read it. She was referred to as a “political pet poodle” in a long commentary full of snide comments about her “barely competent” speech in Guadalajara and the “inane” interview in HOLA!. The article predicted that she wouldn’t be able to hold her own against Romero for the party nomination, much less win anything but a rigged election if by some miracle she did manage to be the party’s candidate. Her background was examined and torn apart; the legacy of wealth from her grandfather’s mining business, meeting Fernando when she was a graduate student and he was a professor, and his divorce and remarriage to her. The article belittled her degree in literature, harping on how she should have studied foreign relations or law or economics. It went on at length about the fact she’d never held a paying job. There was hardly any mention of her charitable work or how she’d supported Fernando’s career.
She threw the newspaper to the floor. One of Max’s flunkies prepared a morning brief for her every day so she could see what the press was saying and plan her next campaign event. Not everything was favorable; of course, a seasoned politician like herself had to expect that. But this was too much. Fernando would have to do something. Sue the newspaper. Arrest that yanqui reporter for libel or treason or threats to a foreign government.
Lorena finished dressing, putting on a beaded brocade suit for the day’s visit to a children’s center, then charged down to Fernando’s office. She ignored a warni
ng look from gatekeeper Ernesto Silvio in the antechamber and threw open the ornately carved door. “Fernando, you must--,” she started but stopped short when she realized there was someone else in the office with her husband.
An extremely attractive man, with the short hair and stiff bearing of a military officer, was sitting with Fernando at the round table on the far side of the room. They’d obviously been breakfasting together, but there were also papers next to their plates. The attractive man swept all the papers into a blue folder before both men stood up to acknowledge her.
“I didn’t know you had company,” Lorena said. She smiled warmly at the attractive man and waited to be introduced.
“Lorena,” Fernando said. “This is business. I’ll be with you shortly.”
“I don’t mind.” Lorena came over to the table and took a roll from the basket. Up close the man was absolutely delicious. He had on a perfectly draping suit and expensive cologne.
“Lorena.” Fernando adjusted his metal spectacles. His tie was loose, his suit jacket was off and he looked surprisingly rumpled for so early in the morning. There was a glisten of sweat on his forehead below the receding hairline. “We will discuss whatever it is later.”
“It will only take a minute, Fernando,” Lorena purred. “I need you to do something right now. I’m sure your guest won’t mind.”
She stood close enough to bump the attractive man’s arm, still expecting to be introduced. The man’s mouth flickered with the faintest of smiles but otherwise he had no reaction. It wasn’t the usual way men responded to her and Lorena was intrigued. She kept her gaze on him and let her tongue touch her upper lip. The attractive man’s expression didn’t change.
To Lorena’s surprise, Fernando plucked the roll out of her hand, grabbed her elbow and propelled her across the room. “We’ll speak later, my dear.” His voice was strained.
