‘Satan has a thousand snares,’ Scott told her. ‘A thousand masks to wear.’
‘Right.’
He hesitated, looking at her. ‘Are you his,’ he tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. ‘His handmaiden?’
‘Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.’
He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.
‘You are. So worthy of it,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’ll be filled with light.’
Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.
He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.
‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.
She gestured at the ceiling. ‘He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.’
‘No, it’s —’ Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. ‘It’s a, a sin, Carmen.’
He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe – he’d wonder about it afterwards – maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.
‘Carmen,’ he pleaded. ‘We can’t be sinners. Not now. Not here. It’s wrong.’
But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the moulded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the inner surface of each cup. She looked up again and smiled at him.
‘How can it be?’ she asked simply. ‘Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself. Don’t you feel it?’
And he did.
It had been a very long time.
He was not a virgin, not since the eleventh grade and Janey Wilkins, and Janey hadn’t exactly been the only one before he left for the Rim either, though he tried not to take pride in that because he knew pride in it was wrong. But the girls had always come to him, no way to deny it. Scott took after his mother, was tall and long-legged, and he’d hardened his upper body in early teenage, putting in all the part-time hours he could get stringing fences and river security for the big Bitterroot land parcels so later he’d be able to pay his own way through tenth to twelfth grade and not be a burden or have to sign up for a youth stint with the marines if he wanted to finish out his education. And then, for all his muscle and length of limb, he was still soft-spoken and kind, and it seemed from what Janey told him that that didn’t hurt too much either when a girl was looking.
But in the Rim, something happened to him.
Maybe it was the fact that sex was suddenly everywhere – perfectly toned and tampered-with bodies, impossible to know if they were real flesh or generated v-format interfaces, but there they were, twining round each other on the big LCLS billboards, on shop frontage display screens, on those high-end pixelated shopping bags the women carried in fistfuls like a harvest of some big, brightly coloured oblong fruit held up by the stalks and vines. There was flesh and liquid moaning on every non-faith channel he had viewing access to, in every ad-tagged piece of mail he opened, on the waste bins, for God’s sake, and even, once, when he was down in the Freeport, sketched holographically across the sky and booming out of massive speakers along Venice beach. Maybe it was that, the unending barrage, the overload of it all, or maybe it was just that he was heartsick for what he’d left behind. Whatever it was, by the end of the first year, the gentle confidence he’d enjoyed back home had gone wisping off him like steam off a morning coffee left out on the porch. Had left him lonely and cold.
Carmen Ren burned through his loneliness like a falling star. Months of half-denied fantasy boiled up inside him. Her flesh where he touched it, where she guided his hands, was warm and smooth, and her tongue in his mouth tasted of some dark, unfamiliar spice. She peeled one of the profiler cups for him, dropped the jellied weight of the breast beneath into his hand. It seemed to fit there as if made for him to hold, as if intended that way. Her hands went back to his belt, loosened it and slipped inside. He went rigid as she slid fingers around the shaft of his erection, he squeezed hard at her breast in reflex. She moaned into his mouth.
They worked each other out of the clothes piecemeal, stopping to kiss and touch until finally she lay back on the bedroll naked, brushed her own hands down her flanks and opened her thighs for him. He shifted on elbows and hands, a little awkward with lack of custom, and then gasped as he slipped into her. The evening air was cool and breezy against his skin and Carmen Ren was heated and wet inside. She smiled, shifted sideways lazily, did something with her vaginal muscles. He felt himself gripped along the length of his cock, a slippery, tugging intimacy and then she pulled him down on top of her, lifted her thighs and clamped them to his sides – they burned like branding in the cool – and he came, sudden and rushing unstoppable, jolting like there was current through him off some badly insulated cable.
He hung his head, stayed propped on his elbows.
‘I’m sorry.’
She smiled up at him again, wiggled a little and tensed her muscles around his fading hardness. ‘Don’t be. You know how it makes me feel, seeing you lose control like that?’
‘It’s just.’ He could feel himself flushing. ‘Been a long time, you know.’
‘Yeah, I guessed that. It doesn’t matter, Scott. We’ve got time. I like you inside me. We’ll go again when you’re ready.’ Another twitch of that coiled muscle, and a sudden widening of her eyes. ‘Oh. In fact.’
He didn’t know if it was the way she talked, casual as she lay there under him, as if they were sitting in a breakfast diner together, or maybe just the fact that he had her here, the culmination of so many damp, hopeless daydreams when he went home from Ward Biosupply alone. Or maybe it was that word, handmaiden, drumming around in his head, still on his lips like the dark spice taste of her. He didn’t know, truth be told didn’t much care either. He knew, because Janey had once told him, that he was uncommonly fast back in the saddle, but even for him this was something else. He felt himself hardening right there inside her, swelling against that thing she did with those muscles, and he knew this time it was going to be all right, was going to be a long, sweet ride.
Afterwards, they lay in a tangle of limbs on the bedroll, backs to the peeling wall, partially draped with the sleeping bag and Ren’s jacket, gazing at the slice of evening sky just visible through the empty doorway that led outside. Scott thought the stars had never looked so bright and kind as they did tonight, not even back home. They seemed like sentinels, vibrating gently in the soft blue black, wishing well. He told her that, and she chuckled deep in her chest.
‘Post-coital astronomy,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, letting her have her joke, but firm despite it. ‘This is special, Carmen. We’re blessed tonight.’
She made a small, noncommittal noise and stretched a little.
‘You know,’ she told him, a little later. ‘It could be for a long time, this hiding. It’s going to be tough.’