Free A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin Page B

hates what I hate.”
    As they bicycled homeward he looked elated, his
smooth skin flushed with sun and pleasure. The slight trembling of his gestures
had vanished.
    The fireflies were so numerous they flew into
their faces.
    “In South America,” said Sabina, “the women
wear fireflies in their hair, but fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep
so now and then the women have to rub the fireflies to keep them awake.”
    John laughed.
    At the door of the cottage where she stayed, he
hesitated.
    He could see it was a rooming house in a
private family’s jurisdiction. She made no movement but fixed her enlarged,
velvet- pupiled eyes on his and held them, as if to
subdue the panic in them.
    He said in a very low voice: “I wish I could
stay with you.” And then bent over to kiss her with a fraternal kiss, missing
her mouth.
    “You can if you wish.”
    “ They will hear me.”
    “You know a great deal about war,” said Sabina,
“but I know a great deal about peace. There’s a way you can come in and they
will never hear you.”
    “Is that true?” But he was not reassured and
she saw that he had merely shifted his mistrust of the critical family to
mistrust of her knowledge of intrigue which made her a redoubtable opponent.
    She was silent and made a gesture of
abdication, starting to run towards the house. It was then he grasped her and
kissed her almost desperately, digging his nervous, lithe fingers into her
shoulders, into her hair, grasping her hair as if he were drowning, to hold her
head against his as if she might escape his grasp.
    “Let me come in with you.”
    “Then take off your shoes,” she whispered.
    He followed her.
    “My room is on the first floor. Keep in step
with me as we go up the stairs; they creak. But it will sound like one person.”
He smiled.
    When they reached her room, and she closed the
door, he examined his surroundings as if to assure himself he had not fallen
into an enemy trap.
    His caresses were so delicate that they were
almost like a teasing, an evanescent challenge which she feared to respond to
as it might vanish. His fingers teased her, and withdrew when they had aroused
her, his mouth teased her and then eluded hers, his face and body came so near,
espoused her every limb and then slid away into the darkness. He would seek
every curve and nook he could exert the pressure of his warm slender body
against and suddenly lie still, leaving her in suspense. When he took her mouth
he moved away from her hands, when she answered the pressure of his thighs, he
ceased to exert it. Nowhere would he allow a long enough fusion, but tasting
every embrace, every area of her body and then deserting it, as if to ignite
only and then elude the final welding. A teasing, warm, trembling, elusive
short circuit of the senses as mobile and restless as he had been all day, and
here at night, with the street lamp revealing their nudity but not his eyes,
she was aroused to an almost unbearable expectation of pleasure. He had made of
her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen, each prepared for
delight.
    So long delayed, so long teased that when
possession came it avenged the waiting by a long, prolonged, deep thrusting
ecstasy.
    The trembling passed into her body. She had
amalgamated his anxieties, she had absorbed his delicate skin, his dazzling
eyes.
    The moment of ecstasy had barely ended when he
moved away and he murmured: Life is flying, flying.
    “This is flying,” said Sabina. But she saw his
body lying there no longer throbbing, and knew she was alone in her feeling,
that this moment contained all the speed, all the altitude, all the space she
wanted.
    Almost immediately he began to talk in the
dark, about burning planes, about going out to find the fragments of the living
ones, to check on the dead.
    “Some die silent,” he said. “You know by the
look in their eyes that they are going to die. Some die yelling, and you have
to turn your face away and not look into their