"Kate Wilhelm - Julian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

dripping wet, her hair was streaming water. He stared at the glistening pubic
hair, and the little rivulets that ran down her smooth rounded belly. Her
breasts were full and high, pink, with beads of water, one little stream
running crazily down one side, vanishing in the crease below her breast. He
looked at her face, glowing, beautiful, and her hair fluffing out, alive and
soft, just a touch of wave in it, feathery about her face.

He had come then and never saw her again.

She had gone into the shower an old withered woman and had come out a
beautiful girl gleaming with water on her body, in her hair. She had not
dried herself. There had been no towel at all.

"She absorbed it!" he whispered. "She absorbed all the water!"

That was what his twelve-year-old self had rejected knowing. He had
recognized it as impossible, as something grotesque and alien and too
frightening to think about, and had buried it as deeply as he could.

The knowledge had lain in his mind like a snake in a bag, writhing, twisting,
shooting out its venom now and then to poison his life, to bring him
nightmares and make him afraid of girls and water and wet hands and rain on
hair and a million other things that had separated him from everyone else.

He went over it again and again, recalling more details each time. There had
been drops of water in her eyebrows, and he had seen them vanish, and beads
of water on her upper lip... She had been smiling slightly, as if she felt
extraordinarily good...

"Julian? Are you sleeping?"

He started at the voice close to his face and opened his eyes to see Rachel
kneeling on the grass in front of him. Behind her there were two men from his
health class, Kim and Robert.

"Are you okay?" Rachel moved back and held out her hand. "It's raining,
you're getting awfully wet."

He stared at her hand for a long time, then looked at her face, back at her
hand. Water was running off her finger, running along her wrist. He looked at
her hair, cut so short that it was like a shiny black cap on her head; water
ran down it onto her face, collected on her eyelashes. She blinked it away,
watching him, waiting.

Suddenly Julian jumped up and pulled her to her feet also, grabbed her and
swung her around and around, shouting, "It's all right! It's all right now!"

Rachel was laughing with him, gasping for breath, and Kim and Robert stood,
uncomfortable and self-conscious, until Robert mumbled something about a term
paper and they hurried off together with an air of relief.