Making the Hook-Up (27 page)

“Yes, but very late in their lives. It was as though they were lost in the sea of stars, flying to and fro, unable to find what they didn't know they were looking for.”

Kira looked at him quizzically.

“Let me explain. Haven't you ever had a feeling you were looking for something vastly important, but you didn't know what it was? Like you knew there was something great for your life, waiting off in the horizon, but you just didn't know exactly what it was?”

Kira's eyes lit up. “Yes, that has happened to me. And
somehow, even though you don't know what it is, you distinctly know when you don't have it.”

“Exactly!” he responded excitedly.

“Please, continue.”

“Well, one day, it happened. And even when it happened, they still didn't really know that that was it. They had found each other. But they still played the silly courting games of the world, not giving in fully to what they both knew.”

“Which was what?”

“They were made for each other and had promised themselves to each other for thousands of years. They knew long ago that they would spend many incarnations together, and vowed always to find each other, no matter how difficult the journey.”

Kira outlined his eyebrows with her finger. They were the most incredible eyebrows she'd ever seen on a man. They were majestic and strong. They regally accented his face. She ran her finger down between his eyebrows to his nose and then across his lips. He opened his mouth to suck her finger. She pulled back swiftly. He grabbed her and placed her finger in his mouth. Then he quickly sat up and took one of her breasts into his mouth.

“How long have they been searching and finding each other?” she asked in pleasured gasps.

He sucked gently, one, then the other, watching her head fall back and her mouth open. “I don't know. But as the story goes, they hope to always find each other, no matter how many ages go by.”

Imbe turned her onto her back, onto the waiting blanket, and cradled himself between her legs. He moved his tongue around her nipples and down to her stomach. As he moved closer to her life force, to the place where villages and worlds were created, her scent became stronger. It made Imbe melt away into a world where they were one. She smelled like coconut water. It was the
strangest thing to him. But it was the distinct smell of coconut water. His desire to drink her essence was overwhelming. He placed his nose on her bright yellow panties. The cotton was sheer. She was ripe and ready to be taken to the moon and beyond. He wanted to go slow, but it had been too long. It had been easily over a thousand years since he'd been with her. He remembered what she couldn't. The memories flooded in one night as the cool breeze from the ocean blew through his home on the beach. On the wind traveled his lifetimes. They were many, all filled with adventure and wonder…all filled with Kira. He saw her just as clearly as he saw the full moon that night. He knew he would not let her get away. There was no denying it any longer. She was the one he had been searching for. She was the one he had lost over the vast expanse of time. He would not let her go. He would hold on to her until their current journey was over and he had to search again. He would never stop searching. Until then, he would not leave her. He belonged to her and he knew it. He liked it that way. She rubbed her hands across his chest and again kissed his neck.

“Kira, do you believe that two people can be made for each other?”

“Yes. “ She closed her eyes and lay back.

He looked at her breasts as the many shadows played across her body. They too wanted to touch her. They knew what he knew. Her soul was beautiful.

“I want to be with you, Imbe.”

He took her skirt between his fingers and pulled it down, brushing her legs as he went. Her body was a work of art. An image of it was not worthy to touch the tainted walls of even the most famous museum. She was filled with the most exquisite flaws that made her all the more flawless. A cut on her right leg. It looked as though something had gone through it and it was
never stitched. Maybe a stick or piece of glass. He kissed it. A scrape on her left shin. Maybe running through the woods as a child she scratched herself on a twig. Or her pet cat, Night, who thought he was only playing with her, took a swing at her. A deep scar next to her navel. A fall maybe. He kissed each one. She was filled with the most beautiful flaws. Each one was a piece of her life. The ones invisible to him, he knew, were the deepest scars. Those were the ones that traversed time and followed her to Cuba. He wanted to know her stories and life while she was away from him.

“You're amazing,” he said as he bent low over her, touching his cheek to her cheek. He touched his lips to her lips. He hovered, his mouth over hers, unmoved. He wanted to breathe with her, breathe for her, let her breathe for him. He wanted her breath of life to move through him and transform him, make him reborn. She exhaled into him, he inhaled her. It was all he could take.

Their bodies intertwined. Their shadows intertwined. They began to move about the walls in syncopated strokes. The bird flew back in. It watched the shadows on the wall move in heat. The walls began to sweat. The shadows moaned and scratched and cried out with joy. Echoes filled the space. The bird chirped. But the shadows did not hear. The echoes threatened to extinguish the candles. The candles threatened to go supernova.

The air was hotter. The shadows began to steam. With each stroke, the shadows echoed a love to stop time. Kira and Imbe were in love. And everything around them knew it. The walls would carry their story for all time.

Their climaxes permeated the air, out through to the beach, into the ocean and across the sea. In a thousand years, they would hear their own voices crying out to them to remember. It would traverse the universe, and at the right moment, they
would each hear their echoes of love. They would stop to listen, think it was a couple down by the beach, but it would be them, reminding each other to wake up, meet again.

Tears ran down Kira's cheeks. She looked at Imbe. Sweat lightly moistened his face. His breathing was heavy. He looked happy.

“Nice to meet you again,” Kira said.

Imbe pulled her close.

“Glad to have finally found you,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

T
his place was nothing like high school. The people were different. They had sex, they drank; some, Sara heard, even had HIV. She walked around in a daze, soaking it all in, looking, she knew, as naïve as she felt with her big eyes and exclamations of “Really?” or “No way.” Her roommate, Raven, sat with her in the cafeteria, elbow pressed to Sara's at the long table in the highceilinged room ripe with the smell of D-grade meatloaf, watery mashed potatoes, and the strangely colored peach cobbler.

Most of the older students walked in then out of the cafeteria, carrying away plastic-wrapped sandwiches and small containers of juice, while the newest ones sat captive to their meal plans and limited social opportunities, staring down at the brown and white mess on the chipped canvas of their dinner plates. To Sara's inexperienced eyes, the older students all looked so sophisticated. Never mind that most wore ragged jeans and oversized flannel shirts, with their hair long and stringy to their waists or blooming around their heads in intimidating Afros.
And that was just the boys. The girls, or women, held Sara in thrall. She couldn't quite look at them, they all seemed too bright, too beautiful, too confident. There was one girl who she did look at, though. Raven said that the girl's name was Merille Thompson. She was a fourth-year physics major with glass green eyes glowing against her cocoa-bean skin and a head full of dark blonde curls.

Now, when Merille caught her staring, Sara quickly looked away but not before she saw the smile and quick wink. She blushed, glad that the girl wouldn't see the color through her teak skin, and looked down at her dinner tray. Beyond the glass doors of the cafeteria, the sun slowly sank behind the trees. From the corner of her eye, Sara could see how the falling sun haloed Merille, making her appear angelic and unattainable.

“Stop being so obvious,” Raven said, looking down at her own tray. Today, her chemically straightened hair was braided back over her scalp like tiny fields of grain. Small wooden beads clacked quietly at the end of each braid just above her shoulders.

She was straight, but fancied herself able to give advice because of the nearly six-month gap in their ages—and the fact that she had a boyfriend in Tampa only fifty miles away who made her the happiest freshman Sara had ever seen.

“Shut up,” Sara said, a helpless whine in her voice. “I'm not being obvious.”

“Then why did she just wink at you?”

“She just had something in her eye.”

Raven snorted then choked on the toxic meatloaf. A piece of it flew out of her nose and bounced off the tray. With a faint coating of slime on it, the meat actually looked more appetizing than the original version on her plate. Sara said as much and they both looked at the piece of meat.

“Gross.”

The girls looked at each other and laughed. They already loved their new school, but not because of the food.

“We'll have more interesting things to eat at the party this weekend.”

Sara looked up at the low, resonant words and almost died. Merille stood quietly next to their table, her long brown hand extended. A piece of paper, bright pink with black ink scrawled across it, dangled from her hand announcing a party later that week. When Sara didn't lift her hand to take the flyer, the older girl slid it onto the table next to her tray. Sara blinked when the clear gaze caught hers. There was destruction in those eyes, she thought stupidly. And a chance to be reborn.

“Hi, I'm Rille,” she said. “Both of you are invited to come.”

Her voice was a husky rasp. Somehow Sara hadn't thought anything else could possibly make the girl more appealing. Obviously, she was wrong. Sara swallowed.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

Rille smiled. “You're welcome. I hope to see you there.”

“Are you going?” Raven asked after Rille went back to her table of friends and out of earshot.

Sara swallowed again, still staring at the paper.

“Of course you're going.” Raven rolled her eyes, realizing she'd just asked the most ridiculous question on earth. “Be careful.”

The party was in three days in a part of the campus where Sara hadn't been, Third Court, ruling place of third and fourth years and a few giddy second years. Would she be the only first year at this party? Sara didn't know what she wanted to do first—hyperventilate at her ridiculous luck, or back out, not bothering to show up at that party with Rille and her friends. She wasn't quite sure if she was ready to play with the big girls.

“I don't think there's anything to be careful of,” she said, trying to convince herself.

Already she'd heard the fantastical rumors about all sorts of things that the upperclassmen indulged in on the campus. Vreeland College was what many called a “hippie school,” a place of free love, drug experimentation, and a reckless disregard for consequences. Sara, fresh from her parents' house and a high school she gleefully abandoned with her virginity intact, wasn't sure if she was ready for any of this freedom. She folded up the neon invitation and dropped it in her pocket.

The days between the issued invitation and the party crawled slowly past. Sara sat in her philosophy class—the first one she'd ever taken in her life—and thought about the abstraction of Rille, the certainty of her presence at that party on Friday night, and the shiver down her spine at the thought of what would happen there.

All five windows of the room were open to let in the fresh burn of the early morning Florida sunshine. Light reflected off the bald head of Professor D. J. Holloran as he perched on the desk in front of the room, looking more like a TV version of an Irish thug than a philosopher.

“If you can't think logically, this isn't the class for you.” His mouth twisted into a charming smile that invited the class to share some conspiracy. “I see nineteen people in here. No offense taken if some of you walk out of here right now. I don't mind you wasting my time today, it's the first week of classes, but don't come here next week if you don't want to be challenged.” He waited to see if anyone would leave. When the entire class seemed bent on staying put, he hopped off the desk and went to the chalkboard. “Great, now let's take a look at our reading list.”

Sara studied the syllabus and the list of unfamiliar names—Voltaire, Kant, De Beauvoir, Fanon—and wondered dimly how
they would prepare her for the world here at Vreeland College, for the world beyond its terra-cotta walls, or even for Rille. But maybe she was asking too much of one class.

 

“So what are you going to wear?”

Despite her boyfriend's eagerness to see her, Raven stayed in school past her last class on Thursday morning to prep Sara for her first college party.

“I don't know,” Sara said. “Jeans. Nothing serious.”

“What do you mean? You need to wear something fun and sexy so she can't miss you.”

“I thought you wanted her to miss me, pass me altogether in favor of other young virgins to debauch?”

“Don't be a smartass.” Raven propped an elbow on her duffle bag—already packed for her weekly booty call to Tampa—and looked Sara over carefully. “You should wear something pretty. Maybe some velvet?”

“What?”

But in the end, Sara took Raven's advice and wore red velvet, a quintessential party dress, with spaghetti straps and a bodice fitted over her breasts and belly then flared out in an A-line to make the most of her thick hips and thighs. Sara arranged her straight-permed hair into a French twist, fastening it with red-beaded crystal clips and slipped on black high-heeled pumps she'd had for years but never had an occasion to wear.