Mambo by Campbell Armstrong Page B

? She wondered why Garrido’s objectionable question came back to her now. Old men knew how to ask tiresome questions. Old men with ambitions, like Garrido, could be especially taxing. Running out of time, they needed answers in a hurry. All their questions were blunt ones. Do you trust him ?
    She heard the key turn in the lock. She pretended to sleep. It was part of a lover’s game. He would kiss her awake from a sleep he knew wasn’t genuine. He came inside the room very quietly and crossed the floor and she felt the mattress yield as he sat down beside her. He raised her hands to his lips. She felt her pulses jump and her heartbeat rage. He did this to her without fail. The touch of his flesh made her fall apart, a sweet disintegration that was like nothing else she’d ever felt. She lost herself along the way, imploded, turned to fragments. Sometimes she couldn’t remember her own name. Love’s amnesia. She had no patience when it came to him. She took his hand and guided it between her legs. Her short skirt – he liked them short – slipped up her thighs. She wore nothing under the skirt. His hand went directly to the core of her and she gasped because she felt as if he’d penetrated some secret she’d been keeping from the rest of the world. He knew her in the most intimate ways, the deepest ways. She spread her legs, astounded by her own wetness. His finger went inside her and she moaned, biting on her lip because she knew she’d scream if she didn’t keep her mouth closed. She turned slightly, reaching out for him. He was hard and ready and beautiful. Her lover. Her love. She said his name once, twice, lingering over syllables until they became meaninglessly joyful, less like sounds than delicate tastes in her mouth.
    He tugged the skirt from her hips, slid the blouse from her shoulders. He kissed her breasts, her throat, her mouth, and each time his lips touched her skin she felt a delightful giddiness. She was in flight and soaring. She closed the palm of her hand around his cock and stroked it softly, drawing it closer to her own body as she did so. Sheer impatience made her bold and aggressive. She spread her legs as widely as she could and led him inside her, then she locked her heels on his spine, rocking him, hard, then harder, as if she were trying to trap something that couldn’t quite be caught: an essence, an elusive moment.
    Hard, harder still, she held on to him, and the dance grew quicker and simpler and more forcefully intimate until nothing separated her from him. There was only love and this insane freefalling bliss. She bit his shoulder and clawed his back, arching her hips, lifting herself up to intensify the connection, and then she came and kept coming until she was quite drained and he’d gone limp inside her. They collapsed together in silence, both breathless, both very still, paralysed.
    When finally she got up from the bed, her thighs felt weak, her legs distant. She walked to the window and gazed out over the park. A match was struck, a cigarette lit. The room filled with the acrid smell of tobacco. She turned, seeing his face in the pale red glow of his cigarette. She moved back towards the bed. It was always this way; she immediately wanted him again, as if the first encounter had been nothing more than preamble, a surface scratched. There were other levels to reach, other satisfactions to be had. He drew on his cigarette and the reddish glow illuminated his bare chest.
    â€œYour goodies are on the bedside table,” she said.
    She saw him smile. It was a good smile, lively and attractive, open and genuine. She loved his face. If she were blinded she would have known the face by touch alone, its familiar topography. She shivered because the intimacy of all this overwhelmed her. At times, her careless sense of love frightened her. Only if you consider futures, she thought. The trick is to live in the moment. That way you can’t