Free Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg Page B

to drink. They knew they wanted wakefulness, even if neither might have admitted that she knew what for.
    The kitchen can in its way be the place for kisses. It is the heart of a home. (Even of a cramped and somewhat neglected fourth-floor apartment.) Flannery did not yet know Anne cooked, but she could see that Anne’s body was looser in here than when they’d moved around the bedroom. She seemed to feel freer in this room with the food. The kitchen is, after all, the place of heat and eating; the place of treats for the palate; the place a person comes to first thing in the morning, to read, and wake up, and taste the day.
    It was the night they tasted. And each other. Starting slow, and slowly faster, their mouths met: first polite and refined; then affectionate, curious; and finally, as their tongues wandered and hungered, their mouths became wide and their desires wider, and they began to find each other with an urgency that brought to mind the word “devouring.” Hands moved through hair coppery and fair, and gradually their bodies drew closer, a chair was moved, the table pushed back. Yet still there was a kind of demureness, almost, a riding sidesaddle, with their legs adjacent, until finally Flannery just climbed off her own chair and straddled Anne on hers, leaning into her, gripping her with her thighs and feeling through their two pairs of jeans the heat now, and wetness.
    They kissed like that, through clothes and shudderings, in a light bright enough to capture the startled lust on each other’s faces, to watch each other grow mussed and wild, and finally to see, clearly, that they were going to have to go somewhere else, away from the kitchen, where their skins could touch.

PART TWO
     

I t was a lake-blue sky through the window, filled only with the low sound of lovebirds.
    Sweet husky calls, a cooing almost, a pleasure-chuckle, some creatures’ shared mutual delight. And it wasn’t their sounds now. (It might have been, earlier: it would be again, later.) Flannery watched the empty, colored air through the rectangular pane and savored this sung-over spell by herself, the figure lying next to her still heavy with sleep, now quiet, her gifts dormant, her sweet mouth slightly open, exhaling dreams. Flannery watched this sky alone for a minute, seeing for the first time how the world changed after a passionate night. The light, the taste on the tongue, the speed of her mind: all different.
    She was not now and would never again be the same Flannery. These unearthly noises from overhead seemed themselves a kind of rechristening, a way of calling her by another name. She was changed, and they told her so.
    “I used to think it was the neighbors,” said a sleepy voice near her. Flannery shivered in her new skin with surprise. It was the voice of her lover.
    “You’re awake.” Flannery felt suddenly a vast and overwhelming shyness—a panic almost, that she was here, exposed, with this woman she hardly knew, with a woman whose delicious body she had explored, certainly, thrillingly, in the dark, but whom she hardly knew. She was here half-naked with a stranger, Flannery was, with this woman, with a woman.
    “I thought it was a couple I sometimes see in the elevator when I stay here,” Anne went on. “My friend Jennifer calls them the Same Family, because they always wear the same clothes as each other, and they have the same glasses and get similar haircuts. A man and a woman—it’s a little strange.”
    She seemed so awake, though her cheeks were pillow-crumpled and her hair all over. But she told this story as though they were old friends, and Flannery, who had been so startled by the wakened sight of Anne, moved closer now, to listen.
    “I always thought that sound was them making love in the morning, every morning, it seemed, with these same cries. I thought, How like the Same Family, to have the same love cries as each other. It’s perverse. Finally I mentioned it to Jennifer—just the other