This erotic bit of prose was found folded into a copy of The Sandpiper’s Daughter. It is unknown whether this was about actual events or was an excerpt from a creative work.
My hand on your naked shoulder drinks its warmth. Although it is dark and the night is moonless, I know it is freckled—the memory becomes part of the seduction.
My hand drifts onto your shoulder blade soft and firm then to the middle of your back—it is damp and I feel small imperfections as if it were a Braille message embossed there. Carefully, softly, I decipher each bump, each pimple. I slide my hand over your vertebrae, one by one, larger landforms of your body’s topology become manifest, no less and no more precious than the smaller stipples that I still explore while attending to these new hills and valleys.
I feel you move closer to me. Snuggling. I feel your hand moving over my back matching my motions pulling me closer, pressing us together. My handless arm pulls you tight to me. My lips find your neck. I withdraw my hand from your back for a moment to pull the hair away from your nape. Your hand has reached between the shallow line that rises to meet my lumbar. Your finger runs up and down that separation, promising, teasing. I return the favor. I press against you harder, pulling you in with my spirit hand in a tight embrace. We are on grass like crickets rubbing their legs along their abdomen creating vibrations meant to draw others into this dance. This dance we too find ourselves moving in, ancient rhythms acknowledging the pull and push that drives us forward.
We slide to our knees. Our thighs and pelvises press together. We kneel face to face. A motion of prayer. Of supplication. A strain of longing makes purpose of our inhaled breath, our exhale communicates desire. You half whisper, half sigh—love from deep lung vowels held long. Then need and selfishness takes our quickening breath away. We kiss. Long. Wet. We fall to the side and my arm acts like a pillow for your head and we continue to kiss. Our hands are asking questions, querying, seeking elucidation, seeking signs and wonders. Flesh inquiring after flesh. Hunting among the tender softness of your skin on my skin.
Then.
There it is.
You find it.
My eyes cannot focus and urges, swift and necessary, contract muscles in ways for which I have no conscious control. I am no longer human. I am the cricket, the grass, the coyote that just barked striving, striving, striving forward from a shallow chaos to a deeper one.
Then again.
And again.
We slow and rest pausing as I try to bring you into the primal abandonment. I know you well and I don’t think you will mind if I transmogrify your ears a size larger, and point your nose just a little sharper as you whisper in imagined Latin from Ovid:
Dicite “io Paean!” et “io” bis dicite “Paean!”
Decidit in casses praeda petita meos!1
We are wet. You are resting on me, face in my neck. Buttocks forming a lovely white hill against the low sky, while I, facing the sky trace a satellite with my eyes as it dashes across a black sky splashed with stars.
We arise. You brush off my back—we’ve lain down on a cow pie. Hard to avoid. We laugh because it doesn’t matter. We dress in silence. And walk back to where the others are waiting for us to return from a night walk.