Excerpt from "Transit of Venus" from Transit of Venus
© 1993 Mark Seymour

Transit of Venus

He watched her emerge out of the tepid surf, glistening hips swaying on either side of the vertical stripe of her yellow tanga, tiny nipples poking corundum hard against the thin horizontal band. She walked toward him, tossing her long, wave-slicked hair back over her slim shoulders. She was everything his wife wasn't: young, curved, and tan.

She also wasn't dying of cancer.

He closed his eyes. Against the sun reflecting off the gleaming water and the pale sand. Against her beauty. Against his betrayal. When her shadow fell across him, dropping his skin temperature twenty degrees in the sudden shade, his shiver wasn't all from the cold. Twenty-five long years since high school, yet he'd never once actually ached with lust. Even his teeth hurt with a fierce desire to bite into her taut flesh, to devour the juicy, warm, soft, aliveness of her.

Opening his eyes, he watched the book he'd dropped in his lap when she'd risen, long-haired and dripping, but not Botticelli's virgin, oh god no, not virginal at all, from the blue-green sea rise as well, forced up by the snake in his groin, its blunt head aimed toward her. Smiling, she stepped lightly over him, her legs bifurcated directly above the swelling, her feet pressing against his hips on either side. The salt water ran down her body and fell, transparent silver in the morning sun, hot and wet as the slick tightness inside her, onto his pale thighs, his pale belly.

Thank god for SPF30, or he'd have boiled in this sun, a lobster's agony. Lobsters were fine when they stayed in their dark homes. They got into trouble only when they ventured into hot water, and this Boston boy was far from the cold winds of home, far from the chill waters of chemotherapy. Far away in the heat, amid the impossibly vivid colors and the fever of Carnival. But the annual celebration of life was shadowed by a dark northern horizon, where the winter sun still glinted off death's sickle, bright and bitter sharp, still dripping with her blood, the fucking doctor coming down the hall with the blood still spattered on the front of his pale green smock, her goddamn blood...

"You are enjoying your book?"

Watching her soft lips move, he scarcely remembered the title. "Yeah, great stuff."

"You will read it to me, Moriarty?"

He glanced down, squinting against the glare off the slick cover, struggling to read the upside down words: The Dynamics of an Asteroid. "Sure." He looked up into the dark pools of her earnest eyes, into her quivering smile. He couldn't tell if the uncertainty there was from her ability to read English, or her ability to read at all. Dear god, how far from home, from their quiet paneled study with her art books lining two walls, his science texts covering the rest. What was he doing here?

"You will read to me in bed, yes?"

He remembered the heat of the night. The taste of her, bittersweet in his mouth. The snail's trail of her excitement smeared warm and sticky across his face. The rhythmic tug in his hair as her hands pulled him into her liquid center. The cool breeze whispering of distant revelry through the swaying lace in the window. The thumping of his heart and the exquisite pain of her nails tattooing down his back as he came inside her. He remembered why. "Sure. All night."

"I would like that." Her tongue flicked across her lips.

He'd read, alright. He'd read her taut flesh, his fingers tracing paragraphs, no, chapters of desire, deciphering the braille texts written in her tiny crimson nipples, her slick clitoris tucked deep between her tawny thighs. A veritable encyclopedia of lust, in soft cover.