Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

this lifting and looking, and, yes, in Addie, there’s a tingle, a slight uptick of arousal. She looks to him, but he does not look back.

“See how white they are!” he says. “Like driven snow, and this charming little pink bit at the nipple! I must confess, dear, I don’t like them with the large brown circles. May I touch? A little pinch? A bite?”

He takes her silence as permission, and Harlan’s teeth prove sharper than a mink’s! Addie startles, winces.

“Oh!” she says, and still he doesn’t look. He’s like a sailor who’s weighed anchor and is off and gone to other parts, other ports, and the other ports and parts are her. Her body is the sea on which he sails, but after that brief quiver of desire, that single waking tingle, Addie is no longer on the trip.

It’s best to be authoritative, though, thinks Harlan. She doesn’t know the facts of life, of course. How could she? (And, frankly, if she did, what good would Addie be?) Given her age, the fact that she is somewhat past her hour, a certain gratitude is due him. Not that Harlan would ever allude to this in word or deed. That would be indelicate, ungentlemanly, but it would be equally false to pretend that she is au courant. The notion of an older woman, grateful to him, with the seasoning to look squarely at the facts, once presented—all to the good. Harlan has no intention of forgoing pleasure in the bedroom and must therefore set the tone. No horse, after all, welcomes its own breaking, but they’re happier, aren’t they, when it’s done? And as he falls deeper into delectation over Addie’s body, sucking the tender meat on the small bones as though she were a quail in sauce, a memory of Grace Peixotto flits through his head, the great madam, whose brothel on Beresford Street Harlan discovered in his teens. At their first encounter, Grace made him a merry compliment over what she called his “equipage,” which gave him the confidence and barnyard matter-of-factness he’s carried into such encounters ever since. He used to fall asleep on Grace’s ample bosom in those days and paid for the whole night, though his father railed at the expenses he ran up.

And behind this memory surfaces an even older one, of the house in Matanzas, the quinta with its mango avenue, and the maguey hedge, and the red tile roof and glassless windows with their bars, and the smell of melado, thick and sweet, drifting from the batey on days when they were grinding cane. One Sunday—he could not have been more than five—Percival ordered the volante and took them, Harlan and his mother, past fields of cane in violet tassel and others of plantains lined with stones of coral rock on a drive to the Cumbre, the high ridge north of Matanzas, and they ate a picnic of simple country food, jerked fish and plantains, and drank panales, which his mother made for him specially from sugar and the whites of eggs. They stared out at the broad bay of the city with the ships riding at anchor and north to the aqua sea, and south into the beautiful valley of Yumurí, with its sharp peaks and the pea-green color of the cane in the bottomlands through breaks of mist. Harlan lay with his head in his mother’s lap and fell asleep, exhausted from too much sun, and she stroked his hair and sang some old English lullaby he’s long since forgotten, though snatches of it come to him from time to time, as they do now, with…Addie. It takes him a moment to remember where he is, and with whom. And she caught the country fever, his mother, and died that very year, and then there was Paloma, who kept him clothed and fed, who was never harsh with him and always fair, but only fair. It was Jarry, when he came, to whom she sang the night’s last song, who received the soothings and encouragements, the almost sexual confidence a loving mother, with her eyes, puts into a son, while to Harlan she was fair. And so he went to Grace, in the big brick house at number 11 Beresford, and sometimes paid for the whole night, and if Percival railed at the expense, then damn him—his father owed him something, didn’t he? And Harlan remembers, too, hearing them, his father and Paloma, their animal cries and gruntings through the glassless windows with their bars, and he’s waited a long time to be loved again and not to have to pay for it, to see that warm, melting look Paloma reserved for Jarry and his father in some woman’s eyes for him, to be on the receiving end and know that it is meant. And at last his time has come.

He’s fallen to his knees now, to Addie’s great surprise, and is pressing his face into her belly. He kisses, licks, and laps like some hungry animal or like a nursing child. She looks down at the gleam of his bald head and feels the way she remembers feeling as a child, playing with her older cousins, when they ran ahead to get away from her, and Addie wanted to go with them, to be included in their games, but they went on in cruelty or gay indifference, leaving her behind. Being left behind by Harlan now, Addie gently rests her hand atop his head, trying to summon back that tingle of arousal, trying to catch up. She feels the film of oil from the long, hot day outside, like something you might use to oil the mechanism of a watch. Suddenly Harlan touches her, he spreads her open. She feels his tongue touch her in that place. There’s a tingle, but it’s too intense, like tasting some hot food, a single bite of which takes you the balance of the evening to recover from. The sensation has crossed the