Exposure by Talitha Stevenson Page B

all. No, it was just ... I dreamt I saw God.' She walked over to his bed and climbed on to it.
    He felt this intimate contact in his own body. 'That—that's pretty full on,' he said.
    She pulled a pillow half-way down the mattress and rested her head on it. But almost immediately she sat up again, drawing her legs under her with a jolt. 'I'll tell you about it if you like. Want to know about God?'
    'Um—OK.'
    'Well, it was the whole "bright light" thing people talk about,' she said. 'You know? On talk-shows or whatever, where people say things like that.'
    He nodded.
    'But it wasn't a nice "bright light". It was this burning, devouring light like a nuclear explosion and I knew if I looked I'd go blind. It was like my skin would
blister
from the exposure. You'd get cancer instantly if you got near it—your cells would all
die.
It was like being killed with light—only I knew I was already dying or I wouldn't be allowed to see it.' She looked at him, horrified. 'It makes no sense,' she said.
    Then she started smiling and shaking her head as if she couldn't believe how silly she was—and then she burst into tears. They were long sobs, painful to listen to. She covered her face and he went over and put his arms round her—instinctively at first, feeling only a desire to stop a girl crying. 'Hey, hey—you're not dying. Nothing's going to kill you,' he said.
    'I just get so
scared ...'
    'I know, I know...' he said. He knew.
    'So incredibly scared.'
    'Yes, I know, I know...
Hey,
I know, I know...'
    But his words quickly became a meaningless repetition, their delicate sincerity heavied out by lust. Moments later he found himself kissing her salty mouth—or was she kissing his?
    Her ribcage jerked with her sharp, convulsive breaths. Again, according to the artist's design, her body was a kind of conundrum. The adult muscular legs were at war with the fragility of her upper body. Physically, Arianne seemed to be rising above herself, leaving the earthly legs behind, becoming less worldly with every inch she grew towards the sky.
    A police car passed under the window, its siren going, and Luke wished it would be quiet, just shut up, in case it broke the spell and she told him to get off. At that very moment she pulled away from him and looked him fiercely in the eye.
    With a plummeting heart, he began to prepare an apology. But the next thing he knew she was undoing her shirt, pushing his fingers softly into her bra and whispering, 'So, are you going to make me feel better, Luke?'
    Perhaps suffering always precedes style, both in its origins within a personality and in each of its subsequent manifestations. Without pain behind it, strength of personality has no depth, no poignant darkness by which it is thrown into luminous relief.
    Luke had never known anyone so desolate or so powerful by turns. Nor had he ever been subject to an aesthetic instinct by which, occasionally, even his own dominance seemed somehow to have been requested. Having raised a sceptical eyebrow at him, Arianne suddenly became a feast of softness and pliancy: she let the strap of her bra submit to his fingers in one joyous burst and he remembered nectarines, which Sophie had picked for them all as a surprise in Portugal. She had come running in from the garden in her sundress, giggling, her skirt full of something, and sent three million nectarines bouncing and rolling all over the lunch table.
    With amazement he looked down at the pile of clothes and then at the hot expanse of femininity, a full-bodied and slightly terrifying responsibility, in his arms.
    Arianne sat up smiling gently and turned him over. Her face lowered towards him until it was all dark and smelt only of her perfume and her sweat and the wine on her breath. She brought about a total eclipse—then she popped his jeans undone with a practised flick. Her hot palms pressed his wrists back into the duvet, and Luke thought quite clearly that this, right now, was all