• • •
Sax stirred in her arms. She looked at his face. A different face, but still Sax. She had an arm draped over him, and she ran a cold hand down his chest. He woke up, saw who it was, smiled a sleepy little smile. He stretched, turned, pressed his face into her shoulder. Kissed her neck with a little bite. They held on to each other, as they had in the flying boat during the storm. A wild ride. It would be fun to make love in the sky. Not practical in a wind like that. Some other time. She wondered if mattresses were made the same way they used to be. This one was hard. Sax was not as soft as he looked. They hugged and hugged. Sexual congress. He was inside her, moving. She seized him and hugged him, hard, hard.
Now he was kissing her all over, nibbling at her, completely under the covers. Submarining around down there. She could feel it all over her. His teeth, occasionally, but mostly it was the licking of a tonguetip over her skin, like a cat. Lick lick lick. It felt good. He was humming, or mumbling. His chest vibrated with it, it was like purring. “Rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrr.” A peaceful luxurious sound. It too felt good on her skin. Vibration, cat tongue, little licks all over her. She tented the coverlet so she could look down at him.
“Now which feels better?” he murmured. “A?” Kissing her. “Or B.” Kissing a different place.
She had to laugh. “Sax, just shut up and do it.”
“Ah. Okay.”
• • •
They had breakfast with Nadia and Art, and the members of their family that were around. Their daughter Nikki was off on a feral trip into the Hellespontus Mountains, with her husband and three other couples from their co-op. They had left the previous evening in a clatter of excited anticipation, like kids themselves, leaving behind their daughter Francesca, and the friends’ kids as well: Nanao, Boone, and Tati. Francesca and Boone were both five, Nanao three, Tati two; all of them thrilled to be together, and with Francesca’s grandparents. Today they were going to go to the beach. A big adventure. Over breakfast they worked on logistics. Sax was going to stay home with Art, and help him plant some new trees in an olive grove that Art was establishing on the hill behind the house. Sax would also be waiting to meet two visitors he had invited: Nirgal, and a mathematician from Da Vinci, a woman named Bao. Sax was excited to be introducing them, Ann saw. “It’s an experiment,” he confided to her. He was as flushed as the kids.
Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would perhaps get down to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning the kids were to be in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this prospect they couldn’t sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table like young dogs.
So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the kids. Maya could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it, Aunt Ann? She nodded. They would take the tram.
• • •
So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and Francesca and Nanao and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver, with Tati on Ann’s lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat behind. Maya came in this way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and Art’s village, in a detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She went in most days to work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work with her theater group. She was also a habitué of the café scene, and, apparently, these kids’ most regular baby-sitter.
Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two of them groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add to the day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous encounter between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman, the play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the body. Ann and the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such a scene.
“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break, “cat got your tongue?”
Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”
“No,” Ann said.
Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked up at them, some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious flecked eyes, Ann saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more like Art, but not much like either. A beauty.
• • •
They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter and kiosk, a restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading inland, and a broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They got off the tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.