Chapters (14)
Phylida didn’t last much longer. She asked me to take her back to the hotel. We stopped at a pharmacy and she loaded up on drugs and popped them, got some cortisone lotion, and I helped her out of those clothes and under some cool wet towels. Sometime between spreading the lotion all over her body and taking off all my clothes and trying to lie on top of her, I was overcome by her frail beauty, and my mind raced through her troubled world, anything I could think of to help restore her: I said, “I’ll move the bed for you, I’ll find black shades, I’ll buy that sound machine that mimics the rhythm of a mother’s heart.” I tried to think of a way she wouldn’t be disturbed when I got dressed in the morning. She said, “Thank you. You’re sweet.”
I kissed every part of her. I realized that she was exactly what I wanted in a woman: sparkling eyes, springy hindquarters, the ability to save her own life. I felt for her then what I feel now, and knew without thinking anymore that we’d made it. Her nude hip, the most elegant line on earth, was staring me in the face. I touched her unburned parts and she smiled. We struggled to find a way I could hold her, and then suddenly it seemed we both were breathing harder.
I was unclothed and her skin burned against my unclothed body. She turned onto her stomach—I was above her, as careful as I could be—we found this to be the only angle. With her burns and loveliness and all, she pulled me in. I felt like a giant fishhook and I had her on the line and we were both rocking. I was like the Fonz with my dick right then. I tried not to touch anything except her peachy, scrumptious pillowy ass, but we were grinding and eventually I knew I was rubbing against the burned spots. She’d gotten ridden down into the bedspread and it must’ve felt like sandpaper against her burns but she said nothing, making sweet painful noises and laying low and going with it; she fought me while yielding.
Afterward we ate the apples we’d brought for the plane. We found a movie on TV about a princess riding a motorcycle. As the afternoon passed I knew then that I was missing this great event, with no way of predicting who might’ve flown in by now. Bibi Netanyahu? Marlon Brando riding a llama? I didn’t feel like I should be at one place or the other. It didn’t feel like a lateral move. It felt good. We ordered crab sandwiches from town and had them delivered to the room. Sebastian returned with cake on a platter. We had a party.