Free The Lover From an Icy Sea by Alexandra S Sophia Page B

thought she was). He’d seen pictures, even video, of the famous tattoo: the Kanji-and-flowers body art that sashayed across her lower back each time she’d flex first one, then the other buttock—teasing but also mocking the conventions of the modeling world. Yeah, nice gluteals—and rounder than those of most of the gamin-hipped models he’d photographed. It was a good gig, all expenses paid. A couple of hours in the studio, then free time. No doubt she’d offer him a blowjob—California lite fare—but he wouldn’t be interested. What he wanted was elsewhere—a five- or six-hour sunrise before his own. A sun that rose three hours after that—even if on a nicely rounded ass attached at the other end to puckered lips—was of no particular interest.
     
     

Chapter 12
     
    He flew to California as scheduled, did the shoot, saw the famous tattoo. So much Japanese hullabaloo about nothing. So typically Californian.
    They finished up before noon, local time—no time, as far as Kit was concerned. His time was Eastern Standard. And just now, also Greenwich Mean. He took his rental car and drove north. He had the rest of the day to kill before his red-eye back home. ‘Might as well shoot something worthwhile,' he thought—and the Redwoods were, to his way of thinking, worthwhile.
    Just outside of Sebastopol, he found them. But with them, he also found trailers, junk-heaps, the refuse of a civilization run amuck. Thousand-year-old Redwoods—living shrines as far as he was concerned—and in their midst, Bubba and his collection of heap, his rusted-out Camaro on blocks, his out-of-control dogs. What a fucked-up state!
    He spotted a clearing and braked. Almost storybook. Trunks like giants’ thighs. Moss-covered turf beneath like so many montis veneris covered in emerald pubic hair. Here was something he couldn’t find back east—not anywhere, not anyhow, not in the thousand years or more it would take to replicate it. Here was a small piece of paradise.
    He pulled over to the shoulder, parked, grabbed his camera and got out. Nothing but silence, the Redwoods and the moss. He walked in reverently, as if approaching a shrine, found the angle, and shot. Light and shadow. Green upon green upon green.
    This is perfection, he thought. He could never sell it. Sell it? Fuck! He could never even begin to convey to anyone else—back East, out West, anywhere in between—what it was all about. These shots were for him alone, or maybe for his grandchildren. Scrapbook material—when, most likely, Redwoods would already be a thing of memory.
    He moved in close to the base of one in particular—moss and mushrooms making quiet music—and then he looked up. A swath of lichen caught the bit of sunlight able to penetrate the heavy shoulders of Redwood boughs and push on through. It reflected back the stubborn light like a pale lover’s plea—weak, plaintive, yet persistent.
    Kit dropped his camera and looked at the lichen. This is it! This was the thing he could bring back to her. This was the one thing that would mean—at least to him—what words couldn’t possibly convey.
    “ Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” was a jingle he knew well enough—as was “diamonds are forever.” But to Kit, diamonds were just old, dead things. And far from being ‘forever,’ they frequently found their way into the dusty jaws of jewelry boxes; through the last-prayer doors of pawn shops; down without grace into toilet bowls; out and down, thoroughly down, to the bottom-muck of some indifferent river where ‘forever’ meant truly forever.
    Lichens, on the other hand, were both old—ancient, really—and alive. To give a woman a lichen was to give her the promise of forever and life. This was what a lichen meant to Kit: “love for as long as the two of us are alive.” And when they were no longer, the lichen would still continue on in someone else’s life as a reminder.
    He peeled off the piece of bark with its lichen blanket and