“We should keep one of these.” She smiled and came back to him, jumping vigorously onto the bed, bouncing him into her.
He pulled her jeans down first, yanking them to the tops of her boots. She wore nothing underneath but her brown skin, paled there into a V, a milky outline. He put his head back where it had been before, when he’d had her on his shoulders. The light seemed to shudder. He kissed her thighs, holding them. She tasted like water from a metal cup, his tongue beneath the brim.
She tried to move her legs, raise her knees, lift herself more into his face, but she was bound by her jeans. She kicked at them, then at his shoulders, pulled off her boots and pants. He tugged her blouse over her head, thrashing most of her hair loose from its clasp. She pulled back, her lips parted. He removed her bra, eased it from her breasts, then kissed gently between them, grazed the stretch of his palms over her.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s right. We have time. We have seven days. Somewhere between now and seven days is right for us, Aaron.”
7.
She held his hips firmly to the bed, hooked her thumbnails. He felt about to slide and skitter over the silvery bedcover, about to be pressed through surface tension. She pushed her hair over to one side as she moved her lips about him, hummed deeply, something he sensed to the base of his spine. Her tongue was rough in the center, soft at the edges. When she scraped her teeth against him, he almost let himself go, but she stopped him by biting down and creating a diverting pain, triggering something else in him. She drew off him, her lips remaining close, keeping him at bay.
He took deep, controlled breaths and tried to see behind the veil of light to the dark ceiling, but it appeared as though only black space loomed beyond. He imagined the two of them as sea creatures encased in white light on the powdery desert floor of the deep. Again she clamped her teeth into him when she sensed him about to lose control, then drew back, tapped him delicately with her fingers, blew a cooling breath. This calmed him for a brief moment. She glared up at him.
He reached down and took gentle hold of her head. He lifted gently and continued rolling her back, holding fistfuls of her hair, his fingers lost in there. He rolled with her, guiding her backward, himself over her. He straightened her leg, held her foot high by curling his fingers behind her toes, then drew his free hand along the back length of her thigh, the cusp behind her knee, the stretch of her calf. He pinched her Achilles, dug his fingernails in behind her toes. She turned her face to the side, into the swell of her hair, her throat stretched.
He eased his face down to her, guiding hands along the insides of her thighs, his thumbs pressing to find her pulse. He tasted her, water from metal again, still cool. He kept trying to do deliberate things with his hands and fingers, his lips and tongue, in order to steady himself. But it felt as though she were somehow still enveloping him. And putting the bridge of his nose against her, his tongue to her, only increased that sensation. He tried thoughts. This is Margarita Antonia Valdez. My colleague. My friend. This only made things more intense, made it real. A kind of distant rushing noise rose about him, as though the motion of their bodies had created a building static. He could feel it on his skin.
He gave up trying to distract himself, let something give at the base of him, a hard, sharp flint of pleasure, and hoped it might stay back a while. He glanced up. Wild tendrils of her hair seemed to be rising on the static, reaching toward the grainy light, probing a current.
Her taste, too, intensified things, fueled that building flinty stab inside him. It was a spark on his teeth, a pearliness on his tongue. He felt her foot brush his ribs, her heel digging back into his armpit. Then her thigh lay heavy over his shoulder as her foot pushed down along his side. He slid his hand along her side. She kneed her way beneath him, her toenails brushing along his belly. With her toes she found him, curled her instep around him, gave a little kick.
She brought her grip light into the bathroom with them and clamped it to a towel rack. This put a sideways glow in the small space. They left the towel draped over the mirror after considering it together with confused expressions. Before getting into the shower with him, she lightly adjusted the toothbrush on the sink counter, considering it with an inquisitive turn.
She pushed the shower curtain aside and stepped into the stall with him.
“Shower curtains,” she said. “You ever see a shower curtain in Mexico?” She shoved it away.
The water hit their shoulders and spattered into the light, shooting high like sparks toward the dark ceiling, filling the little bathroom with glitter.
They cleaned themselves like athletes, not touching one another. She smiled at him as she washed her hair, let him watch her gather and sculpt its mass.
They returned to the bed, and he, reaching, sensing the world beneath him, fastened the grip light again to the overhead fan. While he was up there, he peeled the bit of tape from the end of the fan’s pull-chain.
“Put that back,” she said. “I already have the one.”
This time they were more deliberate about things, their nakedness to the point. She rolled back the bedcovers, tightened the sheet. He reshaped the pillows. From either side of the bed they crawled toward each other. She shook her head when he tried to ease her back. Instead she laid him down straight, tucking his arms, stopping his hands. She stretched her length against him, her form into his. She swam onto him, her skin moving over him like a final, tactile shadow. She blew softly against his brow, smiled down at him, studied the edges of his thoughts.
Her wet hair fell heavily about his eyes, their faces held close together inside the damp black drape as she moved gently over him. This time Klinsman had nothing to struggle against. She felt new, unanticipated, a fragment of a dream yet to be remembered.
8.
They wanted to stay in the room for what was left of the night. The grip light was off, and the room was dark save for the glow of the motel’s sign filtering through the edges of the curtain. They lay beneath the covers, their hands pressed to where the impression of the woman had been.
“You’re worried she’ll come back and find us?” Rita asked.
He fingered the sheet, pulled it up in little ridges between them.
“If she returned, what would she find?” Rita spoke softly, nosing the edge of the sheet, her legs moving beneath the covers, making a pleasant, sleepy sound. Her knee brushed his hip. “She would step into a motel room and find two people in a bed, sleeping, maybe screwing. So? And then of course we’d find her. And she could tell us what’s up with the lightbulbs and the black tape.”
“And the mirrors and the TV,” Klinsman added.
“So we’re good.” She squeezed his hand. “Like this.”
Rita slept deeply. A damp, soft breathing whispered from her lips, with only her chin and mouth discernible beneath the dark spools of her hair. Her shoulder rose and fell in a rhythmic shrug. Klinsman held his palm just above the rise of her shoulder, measuring the exactness of her breathing, the depth and thickness of it.
Klinsman never slept well, and his insomnia would rule this situation, armed with enough thoughts and images to deny sleep for the mere fragment of night remaining before dawn. Rita’s heat bathed his face and neck, the iron-steam smell of her. He imagined her warmth and scent passing through a tear they had just rent in their friendship. He imagined the imprint of the vanished woman writhing gently beneath them, like involuntary movements in tired muscles, fingering his legs and shoulders.
He caught bits of half sleep, momentary dips into the same dream. The dream was a pale worry, an outline of the woman against a deep white, undulating in the color and contour of kelp. Each time he surfaced from this dream, the translucent amber of the kelp became the whiskey-colored clasp in Rita’s hair. He would reach to his lips, imagining