Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave

might provide a clue as to what he was thinking, not knowing how to tell him what I desperately wanted to do, looking out through the open gymnasium doors, past the guard towers to the mountains.
    Then I put my hand on his hand. I could feel the heat coming from his skin too, mixed with the smell of my own excitement.
    Carmen, sitting across from me, raised one eyebrow and nodded, and I didn’t need any more encouragement. I got up, quickly, from the table, and pulled Angel to his feet. I flicked my eyes in the direction of the chapel.
    It was everything Angel had promised in his letter: the Day of the Dead committee had jimmied the folding doors and made up a bed for us on a weight-room mat—two green blankets and a pillow, upon which had been placed a yellow rose. I turned the statue of the Blessed Virgin away from us to face the wall, and began to unbutton Angel’s shirt. He didn’t stop me until I got to the hollow place in his chest. It looked as if his heart had been excavated.
    He took my hand, curled it into a fist and placed it in the little hollow. “My mother used to say it would fill up with the tears she would shed for me during her lifetime,” he whispered.
    My mouth felt dry. Then (the smell of him!) he was beside me, kissing me all over my face and head, sniffing my hair along the part line.
    I laid my head back on the pillow as Angel picked apart the rose. I shut my eyes; he placed the creamy petals on my eyelids. He pressed his nose in my armpit, edging one finger under the elastic of my bra. My arm was going to sleep; I shook the petals away and shifted my position.
    Angel put his arms around me, settling his body alongside mine. “You’re not like any woman I’ve ever known,” he said to me.
    I leaned over and kissed him, for a long time. It didn’t matter that on the other side of the folding doors, a few feet from the door of the chapel, there was a world of men and women eating and laughing. We were alone with one another, and nothing could intrude upon this new world of the flesh we were both, at the same time, discovering.
    He took my hand and guided it. Erotic texts from ancient India claim there is a definite relationship between the size of an erect penis and the destiny of its owner. The possessors of thin penises would be very lucky; those with long ones were fated to be poor; those with short ones could become rulers of the land; and males with thick penises were doomed always to be unhappy.
    For now, I would try to make Angel happy. When I looked up at his face, across the nut brown expanse of hisbody, he smiled back, that slow smile. “I’m going to die,” he said.
    Then he pulled me up, so I lay next to him, and reached inside my panties. I nuzzled up to his hand the way a horse’s soft mouth does when you offer it a lump of sugar. I arched my back, spreading my legs wider as he moved down over my body and began licking me, slowly, teasingly, moving in small circles with his lips and tongue, his kisses falling on me, gentle as the scent of rain.
    I didn’t want to come, not yet. I sat up and pulled him down on top of me.
    “I don’t have any protection,” he said.
    There are some exquisite moments from which we are not meant to be protected. I slid him inside me, achingly. I had never had anything so hard inside me. I held my breath as he kept pushing into me; we were both breathing and then not breathing, and I brought his hand up to my mouth to cover it, suppress any sound, and then I began sucking his fingers, one at a time, then two at a time, then three. His fingers tasted of salt, and of my own juices.
    He pushed into me, harder still, as if by trying he could disappear up inside me and escape forever into the orchid darkness of my womb. When he came, his whole body stiffened, as if it hurt him to come so hard. We lay that way, me underneath and he still inside me, until he moved down on me and began licking me again, making me come with his tongue, his lips and his