"Nancy Kress - Stalking Beans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

breath.


Her name is Maria. Seven times I have climbed the
beanstalk, and I've only just learned it. "Why did you need
to know it before?" Maria said lazily. "You're not exactly
carrying my favor into battle." She laughs her mocking
laugh, the low chuckle that says, This is not important, but
it's amusing nonetheless.
I love her laugh.
"If I know your name is Maria," I argue lightheartedly, "I
can call you that when I demand something. I could say, to
give an instance, 'Maria, rub my back.' 'Maria, take off
your shift.' "
"And do you wish me to take off my shift?"
"It's already off," I say, and she laughs and rolls over on
her stomach, her enormous breasts falling forward onto the
rumpled sheets. For once she hasn't fallen asleep. On the
bedside table is a half-eaten orange, the skin dried and
wrinkled as if it had been there several days. Maria yawns
mockingly.
"Shall I put my shift back on so you can take it off
again?"
"Do you want to?"
"I don't mind," she says, which is her answer to almost
anything. She puts a hand on me, and a shudder of
pleasure pierces from groin to brain. Maria laughs.
"What an amorous poppet you are."
"And how good you are to be amorous with, lux vitae,
Maria," I tell her. But even then she doesn't ask me my
other name, just as she has never asked my circumstances.
Does it strike her as odd that a man dressed like a peasant
can flatter her in Latin?
She reaches for her shift, puts it on, and then proceeds
to take it off so slowly, so teasingly, lifting a corner over
one thigh and lowering a strap off one shoulder, bunching
the cloth between her legs, mocking me from under
lowered lashes, that I can barely keep my hands off her
until she's ready. Not even when I was who I was, before,
not even then had I ever known a woman so skilled in
those arts of the body that are really the arts of the mind.
When at long last we are sated again, and she is drifting off
to sleep, I impulsively say to her, "You are extraordinary in
bed. I wish I could take you back down with me."
Immediately a cold paralysis runs over my spine. Now
I've done it. Now will come the start of feminine hope, the
fumblingly hidden gleam of possession, the earnest,
whispered half-promise designed to elicit promises from
me: Oh, do you think someday we actually might be
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