Glimmering

No one cleared the room after the first show. Marz remained half-hidden in her folding seat, but Trip sat bolt upright beside her—that way, he thought, if anyone confronted them it wouldn’t look like they were trying to sneak in without paying. Trip’s amazement at his own obliquity had faded to a sort of stunned bewilderment. He still had a hard-on, but he did none of the things he’d been taught to do in such a terrible circumstance: think of his mother, recite some bit of Scripture, get up and leave the room and wait until he was married to her to touch the girl again. Instead he found himself staring at the white skin above the cleft of her lavender sweater, the way her legs hung over the edge of her seat and her pants bunched up at her crotch. A flush had spread across her cheeks, the skin so fine he could see the cellular array of crimson dots, as though she had been spattered with red ink. Her eyes were closed, her mouth barely parted; she looked as though she were asleep. He thought he would go mad, watching her. He was certain he would come in his pants if he stayed there looking at her, but he no longer cared. Dimly he was aware of the soft drone of music, doors opening, and people entering, another school group from the sound of it. Still he couldn’t wrench his eyes from the girl.

The school group took their seats on the other side of the room. The music paused, then swelled. Overhead the dome grew dark. A panpipe wailed as sheets of green and gold swept across the sky. Without a word Trip grabbed the girl by the shoulders and pulled her toward him.

She was as passive as before, but he didn’t care. He thrust his hands under her loose sweater, kneading roughly at her flesh until he found her breasts, so small he could cup each in a palm, her nipples burning his hands. He kissed her; her mouth moved slightly beneath his, and she moaned. He drew back, gasping, but before he could touch her again she slid from her seat to kneel on the floor in front of him.

“What?” Trip whispered hoarsely, shaking his head. “What? ”

Of course he knew what she was doing—he may have been a virgin, but he wasn’t an idiot—but this was so far beyond anything he had experienced that for one awful moment he was certain that he had gone insane. Then he heard the sound of his fly being unzipped. He felt the girl’s fingers fumbling with the loose fabric, and then the exquisite softness of her hair brushing across his cock as she withdrew it from his shorts. He couldn’t breathe. He sat absolutely rigid, every atom of his body keeping time with his heart, as he stared straight ahead and felt the girl’s small hot mouth close upon him. His hands clenched his knees as her tongue fluttered up and down the length of his cock. He moved his head imperceptibly, gazing down upon the silvery corona of her hair, another star blooming between his legs. For an instant he caught the violet flicker of her eyes as she stared up at him. Then he came, exploding into her mouth as she lowered her head, and her fingers pressed against his groin. He felt as though his heart had burst; he must have cried aloud because suddenly she was back in the seat beside him, making soft shushing noises as she stroked his cheeks and kissed his mouth, silencing him. He pushed her away, gasping for breath, then quickly pulled her back.

“You,” he whispered. Her hair was like water in his hands as he kissed her, the soured sweetness of her tongue and her small teeth clicking against his. He kept his eyes open, because he had never seen anything like this before, could never in his life have imagined this strange girl with the white hair and amethyst eyes, curling into his lap with her delicate fingers flexed against his chest, moving the heavy gold cross aside to feel his heart beat. “You…”

She tilted her head to gaze at him, unsmiling. Her eyes were wide. They caught the reflected shimmer of the constellations processing across the dome: Canes Venatici, Coma Berenices, Virgo. He could see her small front teeth, a spark of saliva glinting upon her lower lip. Her chest moved in time with his and her hands pressed against his belly; but her expression was coldly, almost malevolently, ferine. It should have frightened him. Instead he was getting hard again.

“… most famous are those of the sixteen th-cen tury French medical doctor known to us as Nostradamus. His prediction that ‘in the New City the sky burns at forty-five degrees’ has been interpreted by many as a warning of the destruction of the ozone layer here above Manhattan and of the atmospheric disturbances that followed…”