Free The Forever Watch by David Ramirez Page B

stuff Cal liked to collect, you know. Like I said, he was into weird things. Stories about beasts in the sewers and maintenance tunnels. Alien conspiracies. Passed on his calling to me, huh? Wonder if he foresaw it.”
    A picture slides out of the folder.
    â€œWhoa.” It is in black and white. A massive blob of light and shadow is in the distance at the end of a shaft. Simian. Irregular. It has two arms and two legs, but they look asymmetric, wrong. It could be a man … maybe. It is actually more disturbing than the clinical image of a Mincemeat victim on an ME’s table. The gore on the slab is abstract, a specimen, but the image of the thing in the darkness pricks the imagination, gets the mind trying to fill in the pieces.
    â€œTunnel Snipe A5. Printout from the memory of some engineer replacing a sewage valve. Lots of them have stories about the weird down there. Maybe it’s the fumes.”
    He stands up one last time to retrieve dessert, which is a single, large bowl of roasted sweet potatoes and syrup.
    â€œMaybe pause on this? It’s not right to have dessert and be talking shop.”
    I do my best half-lidded, smoky-eyed look. I’m sure I’m doing it wrong, but he still smiles and pulls me onto his lap. It’s fair, I guess, since even I’ll admit that his smile looks mostly like a snarl. We lift pieces of the soft, starchy stuff to each other’s lips. We are both licking our fingers at the end of it. Each other’s fingers. I’m blushing and sighing, from the things his off hand is doing. We stopped talking a while ago, and thoughts of killers and myths and coding fade away.
    My body drifts along a river; it curves and curls and there are moments of roars and periods of soft, gurgling sighs. It feels different under the moonlight, even if the moonlight is composed of infinitesimally small pixels on a vast dome outside the window. My lips are swollen with kissing and on my tongue is the thick taste of loving. My skin is a desert and the sand is shifting with each slow breeze, with each fingertip touch.
    His hands are so large, all rocky ridges and plateaus of calluses, in places rough as sandpaper and in others smooth like worn marble. He is unlike any other I have shared this experience with, so much more real and vital than the pretty ones, the slender ones, the ones who seem half-occupied with some distant image of themselves even as we are coupling.
    The night is long, sometimes we sleep and sometimes we wake, and over and over we sail a little farther together on that mysterious waterway.
    Less afraid and more sure each time, we try more in pleasing and being pleased. We both use psychic talents, he to enhance and control his already prodigious stamina, and perhaps the better to take in my responses by smell and touch and taste, and I to guess just where I might reach out and touch with ethereal fingers of the mind and how better to angle this or that, or to guess the many subtle ways I can change the way those soft, yielding other muscles clasp at him.
    I could wonder what we are to each other, he and I. I could think and rethink and overthink what is emotion and what is merely a synthesis of the spurts of hormones and chemicals in the brain.
    There is what is. I try things I’ve never been brave enough to, and he takes me in ways I’ve never before permitted.
    He has seen me at my moment of deepest shame, grimy and befouled and betrayed in an alleyway. I alone have met the other self he keeps inside, the savage hunter, brutal and unrefined, as well as the small boy that has never felt as if he belonged.
    He moves inside of me, and I hold him when he is gentle and the man, and he holds me down when he is It and primal, and these moments come one after the other and sometimes at the same time, and when I am biting his hand bloody so as not to scream, it is in pleasure and with desire. At his slowest and kindest it still brings me to yelps and gasps,