“The leaping koi fish?” His hand stroking the inside of my upper arm.
Breaking free.
“The cherry tree shedding its blossoms?” My shoulder, the wafting petals spiraling across my chest.
Impermanence.
“The spider? The hand of Fatima? The vulture?”
Infinity. Protection from evil. Cleansing.
And beneath each one, he found the scar, running his hands over it as he brought me to orgasm again and again.
When at last he had received a response for each tattoo and was satisfied, he untied me and he fucked me, gently, as though I were fragile. My exhausted body wrapped around him, clung to him, and we rocked with the ocean and I came around him again and again until at last he found his release and we fell asleep on the swell and fall of the sea.
Chapter Twelve
Time at sea takes on a new meaning. The hours stretch out into days, and a single night can yawn as wide as a week. The sun comes. The sun goes. The water passes by.
We sailed south.
Malcolm and I joined together again and again, and the sea blurred the edges of our time, until it was hard for me to say if we'd been drifting on the water for a day or a hundred days. We met and coupled constantly, and when we weren't fucking Malcolm tried to capture me in art, searching for the elusive thing I carried within me that he thought would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. And when he grew frustrated, angry, enraged at his own inability to speak without words he would throw his sketch pad away, toss his canvas to the ground, squash the small clay statuette he had been fashioning and launch himself at me, wherever I happened to be, and he would force me down to the ground, up against a wall, into the strangest positions, and we would fuck again until we were sore and raw.
“When am I going to stop falling over?”
“When you get your sea legs. You will become accustomed to the rocking of the ship soon. You will be able to walk on the deck as if it were dry land. You simply need practice.”
“Practice makes perfect, I guess.”
“Not, it seems, when we are talking about pastels.”
“I told you, they are a pain in the ass. Stop trying to use them.”
“But the colors...”
“Color says shit. Work in black and white if you want to tell everyone life is meaningless.”
“Not life. My life. My life is meaningless.”
“Only if you use pastels.”
I wore his clothes, mine having been left behind in our flight. The sun was warm and the boat was heated well, so I wore his underwear. Malcolm had literally fifty pairs of boxers on board, and they mostly fit me due to my ass being roughly twice as huge as my waist. At the very least they didn't immediately fall down. His shirts hung on me like smocks.#p#分页标题#e#
"You have a lot of underwear," I said as I modeled it for him. "What's the deal?"
"I used to have a lot of guests on this boat," he said. "Underwear was often misplaced."
I winced. "Misplaced?"
He smiled at me. In his hands he was slowly shaping a lump of clay into something that might have been my likeness, if my parents had been Ewoks. "When you are on a boat and get lost in the moment, sometimes the sea wind sweeps by and carries your fine silk boxers out to sea. Quite a few guests lost their unmentionables that way, even after I told them it took only a moment to weigh them down." He raised his brows. "Since we are going to be in short supply of everything, I expect you to remember that tidbit."
I cocked a hip and put my hand on it. "Seriously?" I said. "Thanks for the tip, mom."
He didn't smile at that. Instead his face went still as he pushed and pulled at the lump of clay, his brows drawing down into a frown. "My mother wouldn't have thought twice about throwing such expensive things away," he said at last. "She wanted the world to be disposable. I recommend you not be like her."
Touched a nerve. A deep one. "Don't worry," I said. "I once wore a pair of gym shorts as pajamas for five straight years and didn't throw them out until they literally fell apart in the wash.”
That coaxed a little smirk from him. "Oh?" he said.
"They were like Swiss cheese."
Putting the little lump of clay down, he leaned back on the couch and tilted his head, studying me. "I would have liked to see that," he said.
"It was the least sexy thing in the universe," I assured him.
"On you, anything is sexy," he said. I tried to ignore the blush that rampaged across my face at his words. "Come here, Sadie. I like to see you in my clothes."
I swallowed and walked toward him. My bare feet sank into the plush carpet, and when I reached him I crawled onto the couch and straddled his thighs. "Yeah?" I said. "We have the same size butt. That's totally sexy."